James Saunders, IT Admin, CIC
Zoho Analytics has the most incredibly helpful customer support staff, compared to many other software companies I have worked with so far, by a large, large margin. Amazing service. No one else goes to such lengths as Zoho to assist their customers.
Organization
Children in Christ (Children of Character - COC) is a grassroot NGO that teaches life skills to over 250,000 children per week, in 21 African countries, with over 19,000 indigenous volunteers. James Saunders is the person in charge of data collection and management. He also takes care of the other IT systems.
Challenge
With more than 300 sales representatives across the south-east of The United States and business increasing, Southern States recognized it needed to improve efficiency if it was to keep its promises to its customers.
We had no visibility into what our reps were doing before, until they came back in and handed over their paperwork.
Southern States was looking for a paperless solution that would eliminate the cumbersome and lengthy process of documenting sales visit reports and other documents by its sales representatives filling in forms and reentering data into their back-office. Southern States also wanted to save the time its staff spent daily calling with price exception needs and other requirements.
We had previously used a broad range of local server and desktop based software from Microsoft Access all the way up to Oracle and everything in between, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, etc. We needed to establish our data systems in such a way where we could be as free as possible from IT infrastructure maintenance.
Solution
CIC was looking for a cost effective way to manage and analyze the huge amount of data collected by them. Zoho Analytics fit their need perfectly.
It had everything we needed - zero infrastructure maintenance, a full SQL relational structure, flexible yet incredibly powerful data import abilities, ability to save and catalog numerous queries, an easy to use data access API and so much more.
Benefits & Results
By deciding to go with Zoho Analytics, Saunders claims that CIC is saving thousands of dollars and hundreds of man-hours per year by:
- Reducing their database server maintenance cost
- Providing a user - friendly interface for analysing data
- Providing data 24/7 - accessible from anywhere, at anytime - to their staff (in 21 African nations)
- Helping them to understand and make timely decisions on the vast amounts of data they collect monthly
CIC discovered Zoho Analytics back in 2009, and are continuing to implement the various features provided by Zoho Analytics in running their organization.
One of the most powerful things we do with Zoho Analytics is output data via the Zoho API to dynamically populate Google Spreadsheets that enable us to present the data in “easy-to-use and understand” reports. Additionally Zoho Analytics and Zoho Creator enable us to have a high degree of automation in the form of query based email alerts.
Children in Christ using Zoho Analytics