What is Zoho Connect and How Is It Different from Zoho Cliq?

One of the most important and fundamental tenets of doing a business is seamless team collaboration. It is only with effective team collaboration that getting the best out of two or more individuals becomes possible. In addition to keeping the team members safe from facing any burden of work, team collaboration ensures that the work gets distributed evenly.

For this reason, team collaboration software proves to be extremely useful. The implementation of a team collaboration software solution enables a team to work together and solve challenging situations. This also leads to innovation, success, better communication, and efficiency.

Both Zoho Connect and Zoho Cliq are team collaboration software applications in essence. That still, they still differ from each other in terms of the functions they solve.

Zoho Cliq is a business messaging tool that enables teams to communicate in real-time. The team members of an organization that uses Zoho Cliq can create channels for specific projects or teams while making audio and video calls that help in being more productive.

On the other hand, Zoho Connect is more like a private social network for enterprises. It is social intranet software that helps the team members to share ideas and updates, take part in discussions, share important files, create a detailed knowledge base, and automate internal processes.

In this blog, we will see what Zoho Connect is and how it is different from Zoho Cliq in complete detail so that we understand the team collaboration benefits that both of these software applications can offer.

What is Zoho Connect?

Zoho Connect is team collaboration software that is used for unifying the team members, resources, and applications that a team needs. With the implementation of Zoho Connect, the team members can share ideas, hold real-time discussions, contact each other, create their own applications, build the knowledge base, manage work plans, and access applications that are created to make teamwork easy.

Therefore, Zoho Connect can be used when someone wants to keep everything in the loop and understand more about what might be happening in an organization. It has a social network-themed feed that helps the team members with ideation and detailed planning. You can also set up a knowledge base and file repository that the members can refer to anytime when needed.

Features of Zoho Connect

1. Effective Collaboration: Within Zoho Connect, custom groups can be formed based on the completion of some project parameters. Without any lag or formality of an email or team collaboration, the project completion becomes much more practical with the use of Zoho Connect.

Once the team is selected and finalized upon, it becomes a way more effective collaboration with the same group again for the completion of future projects.

2. Real-time Communication: With so many features that the customers use in their lives already, Zoho Connect uses the capabilities like live feeds so that the teams can stay up to date and familiar with projects, share great ideas with each other, and partner on projects for streamlining completion.

With this casual approach to project management, the team members are more than likely more willing to approach the project because the communication turns friendly and teammate-like as opposed to the formality of email communication.

3. Consolidating Project Features: Regardless of how the project development has been taking place, it is more than likely that there has been some kind of shared documentation that is needed to finally bring the project to completion.

With the use of a social intranet software such as Zoho Connect, it becomes easy for the team members to get everything in just one place so that access becomes easy and quick. This further helps in delivering the project at the right time and successfully.

4. Chatting Easily: One of the best and most amazing benefits of living and working in the digitally forward time is the capability to connect with other people in real-time without getting the workflow to be disrupted.

Although phone calls and emails are effective communication tools, it becomes very hard to tend to updates in the same form in case you are caught up in a meeting or trying to arrive at an immediate answer. Zoho Connect helps you in getting a quick answer without disrupting your productivity or even delaying timing on any other projects.

5. Automation Saves Time: On a very frequent basis, we spend a considerable amount of time performing taxing things or investing valuable energy in the completion of tasks that do not require a lot of brain activity.

Fortunately, Zoho Connect has automation workflows that can be easily established so that the team members are not spending valuable time and energy on the tasks while using their time on innovation and collaboration for new ideas.

With useful forms that are customizable to fit a team’s needs, the team can have all the important resources in one place for getting the job done quickly and effectively.

6. Assigning Tasks: A project development can include multiple stakeholders and so, it can often feel pretty overwhelming while managing every person’s expectations can be a task in and of itself.

With the implementation of Zoho Connect, you are able to assign some steps in the processes that should be designated to the team members so that they know what needs to be done. This also helps in eliminating small follow-up emails or a de-motivating work environment between the team members.

7. Mobile-Friendly: The simple ability to connect with another person through a mobile device changes the way in which we can communicate and relate to someone. Zoho Connect is very easily available on mobile devices

The team members can actually reach out as and when the inspiration strikes, in between different meetings, or even to check-in and ensure that the processes are going well and everyone has what they need. This connection offered by the product provides optimal collaboration and teamwork.

8. Integration With Other Zoho Apps: Zoho Connect is an important part of the Zoho family. It is a platform that can be integrated with other products that a company might be using to grow a business. From the email marketing tools to the productivity platforms such as emails and calendars.

Zoho Connect helps in complete communication with other Zoho apps so that all the updates are in one platform and can be reflected in the rest that you are choosing to sync together. This way, you will not only save time and effort, but you will also enable your team to trust the important information that they have as being accurate and updated at all times.

What is Zoho Cliq?

Zoho Cliq is a business messaging tool that helps in real-time messaging and file sharing between the team members of an organization.  Most teams use Zoho Cliq when they wish to collaborate in real-time for completing specific tasks with the team members.

In addition, one can also work remotely with their teams by sharing the screen, making audio and video calls, or even by starting a video broadcast. There are chatbots in Cliq that help in communicating data across other applications that a person uses. This makes Zoho Cliq ideal for sharing important information and executing other tasks.

Features of Zoho Cliq

1. Group Chats: One of the most important functions of Zoho Cliq is that it helps in creating an easy space for facilitating group chats between the team members. The team members can create accounts, set up channels, and also invite more and more people to join in. These channels are a way to open up to any member of an account and help in easily inviting or joining someone. Almost every channel can get represented by a name and a description.

In addition to the channel feature, Zoho Cliq also offers a team chat app that supports direct messages with people and groups. An important aspect of Zoho Cliq is the columnar design that it comes with. As an increasing number of channels start joining and messaging, each chat opens its panel or column.

The more chats you end up opening more will be the columns that can fill the screen. This layout is simple and pretty organized because it enables you to open more than just one chat window at a specific time. You can also refer to any conversation while replying to another. All in all, this makes team communication very easy.

2. Video Calls and Screen Sharing: In addition to all the features offered by Zoho Cliq, there is one other feature and that is video calling screen sharing. This makes connecting with your team members much easier and interactive. You can talk to a team member sitting across the world thinking that he/she is sitting right in front of you.

All you need is a stable internet connection and you will be able to make video calls, audio calls, and share your screen effectively with your peers. This can also be done with group chats.

3. Monitoring Conversations: A very common problem with messaging applications is solving all the conversations that can happen between the team members. When a person asks a question or starts a conversation in a channel and in case that might get delayed in the way that the person does not reply at the right time then the conversational flow is disturbed.

Another scenario is that there are multiple prompts in one conversation that may lead to missing out on questions asked by some team members. When your Zoho partner implements Zoho Cliq for you, one of the best features that you will discover is no ignored conversation. When a post that asks for additional follow-up separates from the rest of the channel, it can be forked to a private message.

This forked conversation appears as an independent selection in the list of channels and direct messages that are there on the left with an annotation of being Forked. This is a useful benefit for people who work in different time zones and may feel the need to catch up with everyday conversations in just one go.

4. Extensions: With the team collaboration software of Zoho Cliq, you can be sure about downloading a variety of extensions from the Zoho Marketplace. You can also connect your Google Drive, other Zoho applications, Dropbox, etc. with the integration of relevant extensions. In addition, you can also download extensions such as the meme extension that allows you to post interactive memes in your chat quickly.

An entire list of the extensions that can be integrated is easily accessed on the website of the Zoho marketplace. Zoho makes sure that the extensions are published and created to the Cliq Marketplace.

5. Easy Access: Zoho Cliq offers a distinct ability to be accessed in different ways. The team members of an organization can access it through desktop applications, tablets, mobile devices, or browsers. In addition, if someone is working with different Zoho applications, they are likely to find the Cliq bar on the bottom of a browser so that communication with other applications becomes easy.

In fact, a conversation that was started on a mobile can be shifted to a tablet and then be finished on the desktop. This way, you will not lose any chats and you will also not have any hassle downloading the chats because you will be able to see all your chats instantly.

Unlike other applications, adding a new user to the Zoho Cliq channels means that the new user is eligible to access old chats before the time when they were added. All that a user has to do is a scroll in the upwards direction and it becomes easy to access the chat history. This also means that finding the messages is relatively simple.

Conclusion:

To conclude, Zoho Cliq is a team communication and collaboration solution that helps the team with private channels, video conferencing, searchable chat histories, file sharing, and more. On the other hand, Zoho Connect is a team collaboration application that unifies people, resources, and applications they need.

Both these software applications are excellent for team collaboration and pay off really well in seamless working. If you want to implement either of the two, feel free to get in touch with Encaptechno who can become your Zoho partner.