Episode 2 of the ZohoDay24 Development Stories series
This episode, hosted by Jason Bloomberg, features Sean Rivers, Director of Technology, at Relay. Relay standardized on Zoho One from the very beginning as the tasks of managing its customers became more complex, demanding an all-encompassing approach that delivered 360-degree view of its sales operations.
Relay is a B2B company selling panic buttons and a cellular walkie-talkie device for large stadiums, hospitality, construction and other industries to facilitate communication between frontline workers. Relay uses many apps in Zoho One to facilitate sales, marketing, support, collaboration, and analytics, and has scaled from from 30 customers to around 5,000 in about 4 years on Zoho, and it is listed on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500™.
Read the whole transcript below:
Jason: Hi, this is Jason Bloomberg, Managing Director of Intellyx. I’m here with Sean Rivers from Relay. So welcome, Sean. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So why don’t you start us off with sort of telling us about Relay, broadly speaking, what does Relay do?
Sean Rivers: So Relay is a SaaS company that makes devices that basically use cellular and WiFi to replace typically, walkie talkies, workforce management.
So we do things like for businesses. So this is a B-to-B product that allows companies to use walkie talkies, but in a more smart way so they can communicate. They can do incident management. Panic management, a lot of different kinds of capabilities, and we can do things like in indoor location tracking, outdoor location tracking.
So we typically work with hotels, golf courses, large facilities, hospitals, places like that.
Jason: That’s fascinating. Tell us a bit about the Zoho story. What, what are you doing with Zoho? So
Sean Rivers: We’ve been using Zoho pretty much since we started this part of our business. And since we started the B2B side of our relay product, we launched and needed some way for us to kind of manage all of our customer information for us to be able to have a sales department.
We weren’t used to that. Mostly we were sold online when we were selling to consumers before, but we needed a way to manage all of that to handle mundane things like orders and signing and all that kind of stuff. So we use. Zoho, we decided that that was a good platform for us. We didn’t know what we wanted.
We didn’t know what we needed. And having a platform like Zoho One gave us the ability to have all of these tools, right at our fingertips, surveying tools and forms and integration tools and support. We had nothing, we literally had nothing. So we needed to put all this together and Zoho One really gave that to us.
And that’s why we brought them in and we’ve had them now for four years. So pretty good
Jason: So this is a bit unusual most organizations start with a single Zoho app off in CRM But could be another one and then sort of add more apps as they go Is that what happened at relay or did you just jump into Zoho one with a bunch of apps all at once?
Sean Rivers: We’re never normal. We’re never the standard. That’s for sure. But it’s because we our team’s been together Through many iterations. So we’ve been together as an organization with a company called Bandwidth Inc, which was what kind of brought us all together. We moved on, split off from them when they went public and founded a cellular company which got us our cellular.
Learnings and how we could build a cellular device or build cellular service. and then we started actually really started as a Children’s product. So we started as like a screenless communicator for Children. And so we didn’t have a CRM. We didn’t have a lot of these tools at all in place for a B-to-B environment.
So we while we didn’t do everything. How you would think we have used tools in the past, so we had an idea generally of what we were looking for. We knew we needed some way to sign. So originally, all we did was we used, Zoho CRM. We use Zoho desk for support and we use Zoho sign on. We used, sales IQ because we needed to put chat on our website and we used, I think we used, Zoho forms so that people could fill out a form on our site.
It was really utilitarian and how we launched it. And then we started, started to go into other things. We needed an intranet. So we did Connect. We needed a lot of different kinds of things. And they’ve grown over time. We needed a, a marketing communications application. And that became Zoho WorkDrive for us.
Jason: Oh, very good. yeah, it’s interesting that you mentioned Zoho Sign. That’s a product that we use as well at, at Intellyx. But it’s rarely on people’s list. Because it’s just sort of a basic utilitarian product, right? But it’s an alternative to, DocuSign that is just like better than DocuSign in so many ways.
And, speaking for personal experience. How did Zoho Sign end up being on the short list that you began?
Sean Rivers: Well, the great thing about Zoho One is there wasn’t a list. It allowed us, we, we said we’re getting Zoho One. It has all of this stuff. What do we need to use? And, and, and we needed a way to digitally sign.
Sales orders that we would send off the customers or quotes or anything like that, that we would need to sign. It was already there. It was already easy to integrate. It was already integrated in the CRM, so just made it a whole lot easier for us. So there was really no decision process.
We already had hello sign in her in our company, but that was just for our people services, our H.R. team to use. And we were like, why should we extend that one? It’s extremely expensive.
Jason: And you’re right. The capabilities of Zoho Sign are quite broad and quite capable. I mean, they keep adding new things that make it really, really nice. So we started using that. And it’s been it’s been really good to this day.
It’s been but it is one of the things that has to it. The Kleenex problem, right. ’cause everybody just calls it a DocuSign. Right? Right. Yeah. They don’t just say, e-sign. What’s your e-sign tool? They, they just say DocuSign. But in our world, Zoho sign has been every bit as good. and we haven’t even thought, that hasn’t even been a thought about changing, from that platform.
Yeah. So you mentioned integration, and that’s one of the Zoho one’s strengths as the apps are integrated together. But tell us a bit about how Relay is using the integration among the different apps.
Sean Rivers: So we do integration among those apps, but we also have other apps that we have to integrate with. You can try and do everything in Zoho, but sometimes they are a new sales manager may come in, or a new leader in some position, and they have an idea of what they want to use, and they’ll have tools.
And, and we have to make accommodations for them. So if they come in and they want to use Calendly for calendaring, then we used Zoho Flow in order to build that. Integration, even though there were some third parties that had built an integration, we wanted a certain amount of control.
We used Zoho Forms on our site, somebody fills out a form on our site and you can just immediately create a lead from it. What we found is that we wanted to have something a little bit more meaningful, so we actually used, Zoho Flow to actually take the form field fill outs and go into Zoho flow and say this person who filled out this lead request.
Are they already in the system? Are they currently working with a sales rep on a deal? Are they currently working with an SDR on a lead? Are they a current customer? Because sometimes we have customers come in and they’ll just fill out the demo form, and what we end up doing instead of creating a lead and creating this extra work for SDRs, we actually can recognize who it is, and then what we’ll do is we’ll send a notification off to their success manager or the current rep and say, hey, they filled out a lead form.
Go and check on them. So we don’t have to create a new lead for them.
Jason: So essentially custom business logic that you built in using Zoho flow so that the form logic was more, more sophisticated, more custom to you.
Sean Rivers: Absolutely. And maybe sometimes it can get too complicated sometimes when you do that. But our goal was we had a lot of it and it was slowing down our SDRs from doing what we want them to do, which is take people who are interested in being and becoming customers, reaching out to them, qualifying to see if we’re a good fit for them and then getting them to an A.
So they can do a demo that was slowing them down. So we took that off their plate and we probably get 10 to 15 a day of people that are either current customers or people that are current deals or they just don’t realize that they filled it out or they’ll fill it out. Twice because they didn’t realize it went through or something like that.
Jason: So yeah it’s 2024. So I have to ask this question. What is the AI story? Are you using any of Zoho’s AI capabilities?
Sean Rivers: Sparingly, the AI that connects to open AI. We have to be very careful with that. We have a lot of very large customers. And we have a lot of rules there about using something like that from a security standpoint, but we do use it for, a bunch of things, and creating blog posts, right?
I think, people who write blog posts, there’s not a lot of them anymore, so a lot of these blog posts are getting written. The themes are there and, and the ideas are there, but we are trying to get blog posts out. I think the other things would be social posts. So anything that would already be public that we’re going to write, a lot of times they’ll use it for writing prompts and stuff like that.
And there’s AI hidden behind everything. So there’s AI hidden behind when we’re doing stuff in Writer and it gives us an understanding of how we should write things better. A lot of that’s AI stuff, but we’re not connecting that to OpenAI. We use some AI from them in Zoho Analytics.
But that’s very sparing, and then we, we trust Zia on a few things that are inside the CRM to let us know best time to contact somebody and things like that. As a product, we use it a lot, but from our product perspective, but that’s not inside of Zoho. From a product perspective, we have three. Data scientists and two AI engineers, and they’re doing that work in our product as we develop AI solutions because we’re a voice activated device on.
That’s the key use of it. I mean, you really have to use machine learning and AI in order to make those kinds of solutions work.
Jason: It definitely makes sense. So you mentioned analytics. Tell us a bit about how you’re using Zoho Analytics.
Sean Rivers: Zoho Analytics. We actually have a multi-level analytics environment, so we look at each application. Zoho actually has their own reporting and analytics dashboards, and those are really great for like the front front line agents in our desk application and aid and sales reps and front line like customer success people that are working inside the CRM, and that’s great, and they can use that, and they can make some of their own reporting and things like that.
That makes their life easier, but their managers. We don’t feel that they should be doing that, doing their more substantive work inside the CRM. So they go to Zoho Analytics, and that’s where they can see their team’s performance, how, the team’s working, look at more over time, get an idea of summarize, you know, summarize, but be able to drill down.
And a lot of times we then we give them training, and they can go and use Zoho Analytics as a great interface for them to be able to build the kind of dashboards and the kind of reporting that they want. Then we push through on that up to our, data scientists, and we will push together information from our products and stuff like that.
So how many of our customers have gone into the application? How many messages are being sent? A lot of analytics stuff that goes on there, and we put that together in a different platform. But it’s all coming through from all these different sources into Zoho Analytics and then from Zoho Analytics out.
As one of the sources to bring together. Hey, if a customer is happy, you know, can we match up how they’re using the system? A customer is unhappy. Can we see trends and how they’re using our platform? So those are some ways that we use analytics. But Zoho Analytics is mainly for that middle manager or upper end manager.
We’re getting ready for, you know, board meetings and stuff like that.
Jason: Yeah, very good. So give us a summary overall of the business benefits you’ve gotten from Zoho.
Sean Rivers: I mean, understanding, I’ll give an analogy, a really good one. We had an outside company that early on when we were trying to figure out who we were and what we were selling.
I mean, when we started, we really didn’t know what was going to be the industries that wanted Relay.We didn’t know — there were a lot of unknowns and we got an outside company. To call and do and set up demos. So we had our sales reps, we had this company out there calling outside companies that try and get them into demos and what we found, through analytics kind of started pointing out to us, they’re not showing up for these meetings, so they were booking a ton of meetings.
We were paying them for these meetings, and they were doing a good job. They were doing what they’re supposed to do calling, but they were just so good at it. being really good at it doesn’t necessarily mean that those people are going to that they were actually interested and that they wanted to show up at a meeting.
So what was happening? We were getting 7-9 meetings a day per sales rep to do an hour-long demo. That’s a long day, and it was very hard for them because they get in and sit for 15 minutes waiting for a person to show up. So it really helped us in that. And it also helps us to find, as we’re working our day.
So everybody who comes in our first goal. Of the CRM in the system that we have is everybody comes in and they should be able to work their day uninterrupted, right? Come in, do your job. And if we do a good enough job at putting it all together, then that data is gonna be clean. We’re gonna have pretty clean data so that we can then come up with any level of reporting that we would need to have, and a lot of that is an everyday thing. And then we have odd things that come in like trade shows and stuff like that. And those are individual projects of, of discovery to find out, did we do okay or not.
Jason: Very good. So final question. What is the future? What’s next with your relationship with Zoho?
Sean Rivers: Marketing. The only thing we really haven’t brought in Zoho for yet is marketing automation. So marketing automation 2.0 is what we wanted. It’s got a lot of features we wanted and capabilities. They’re just now making it available in Zoho 1. We would have to use 1.0 and we were really hoping for the features in, in Zoho, in marketing automation 2.
So we’ll actually, that’ll be the next thing. Hopefully over the next few weeks we’ll start moving in that direction. And we really hadn’t had a huge need for it, but we would be more efficient if we started nurturing and handling emails, more efficiently and then starting to do some of the other things, like understanding why people multiple times coming to our site, really good scoring of the leads that come in.
So that’s really the next. Frontier for us.
Jason: Well, it’s good timing then that the version two is coming out around now.
Sean Rivers: Absolutely. Well, we’ve been waiting We would have liked it to come out last year, but you know, hey, what can you do working is more important than anything
Jason: Very good. Well, that’s all the questions I have.
So thank you very much. This has been a Conversation with Sean Rivers from Relay and I’m Jason Bloomberg with Intellyx.
Watch the whole video on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/5-MMQdjG-sw
©2024, Intellyx B.V. Intellyx retains editorial control over this story. At the time of writing, Zoho is an Intellyx subscriber.
