fbpx
Image Image Image Image Image Image Image Image Image
Select a Page

Vacation Labs x Zoho One

Seen the Vacation Labs x Zoho One case study and looking for more details? We’ve written this page to share more details on how we’re using 11 different Zoho tools at Vacation Labs. Hope this helps folks who are planning to do something similar. We’d be happy to exchange ideas if you give us a shout-out →
It’s a long page, keep scrolling to read all of it. Also, not everything is roses & sunshine. No software is perfect, and so is the case with Zoho One. We do touch upon a few areas where the sailing is not as smooth as it can be (as of November, 2024).

Zoho CRM x Vacation Labs

At Vacation Labs, we now use Zoho CRM extensively along with a lot of advanced features:

All sales leads are managed in Zoho CRM along with trial signups (which are created in the Vacation Labs platform first, and pushed to Zoho CRM via their API)
Custom layouts & custom fields have been configured to capture data over & above the standard CRM fields
Blueprints (workflows) and have been implemented to guide the sales team through a standard workflow.
Custom validations have been implemented to ensure that appropriate fields are captured as a lead progresses through various stages in the workflow
Custom “contact scoring rules” have been implemented to help the sales team prioritize leads which are closer to making their purchase decision. These scoring rules look at various factors, such as activity during the free trial, pages visited on our marketing site, responsiveness of the lead/contact, etc.

Need help with Zoho tools in your business?

Intrigued by our experience with Zoho One? Need help with your Zoho One rollout, especially for a travel business? Let’s chat! Book a quick call, and we can share ideas.

Or keep scrolling to read more our experience with the Zoho One suite.

Book a meeting →

Zoho Subscriptions (now Zoho Billing) x Vacation Labs

Vacation Labs subscription billing happens completely on Zoho Subscriptions, and it is tighly integrated with our platform.
On the basis of the state of a customer’s subscription in Zoho Subscriptions, the platform automatically configures the access to the customer’s account on the Vacation Labs platform.
This is achieved by the platform listening (and reacting) to various webhooks emitted by Zoho Subscriptions as a subscription (or invoice, or customer) progresses through various stages in the billing lifecycle, such as “subscription renewed”, “invoice paid”, “invoice not paid”, “subscription upgraded”, and so on.
We have even used produdct-level custom fields to track & automated access to optional platform-level features a customer has paid and activated.
Invoice reminder / follow-up emails have been automated using Zoho Subscription’s in-built features.

Zoho Books x Vacation Labs

All financial accounting of Vacation Labs happens on Zoho Books. Our tax compliance (TDS, GST, Advance Tax, etc) also happens based on reports taken directly from Zoho Books.
Apart from creating entries manually in Zoho Books, we use the Zoho Books APIs extensively to automatically create invoices, journals, vendor payments, and customer payments. Our platform generates a lot of transaction data electronically, and all of this is recorded in Zoho Books via custom API integrations.
Two caveats though:
  1. while Zoho Subscriptions has an in-built integration with Zoho Books, we aren’t using it. This is because the way an invoice and a payment (specially an online payment) is automatically recorded in Zoho Books is not what has been advised by our accountant. Nevertheless, invoices and payments are uploaded to Zoho Books using CSV bulk imports without too much manual effort.
  2. the reports provided by Zoho Books leave a lot to be desired. The UX of the reporting interface is clunky and does not show critical information up-front. For example, there is no way to view a report which lists the narration of entries as a column – you have to hover on an icon or click through to see the entire journal/invoice/payment to view the narration. However, we have been able to work around it by syncing all Zoho Books data to Zoho Anlaytics, and building custom reports there instead.

Zoho Desk x Vacation Labs

Zoho Desk is where all customer support is centralized. In fact, everyone in our team has multiple Zoho Desk tabs open at any given point in time (and this is even mentioned in the video!)
Tickets are assigned using a round-robin assignment, with tickets related to specific areas being assigned directly to the internal expert.
We use internal comments and tagging to discuss customer queries extensively.
We use blueprints to ensure that tickets are taken through various stages in a standardized workflow
On top of that, we use SLAs to ensure that proper follow-ups are done every few days (depending upon which stage a ticket is in).
Our official WhatsApp number is also integrated as a support channel into Zoho Desk. Having said that, we feel that UX of the WhatsApp integration (within Zoho Desk) could use some work.

Need help with Zoho tools in your business?

Intrigued by our experience with Zoho One? Need help with your Zoho One rollout, especially for a travel business? Let’s chat! Book a quick call, and we can share ideas.

Or keep scrolling to read more our experience with the Zoho One suite.

Book a meeting →

Zoho SalesIQ x Vacation Labs

Earlier we used to use Zoho SalesIQ extensively and even had dedicated team members to provide chat support for immediate / smaller support queries. However, based on customer feedback and preferences, over time we’ve transition towards WhatsApp (integrated with Zoho Desk), for immediate/smaller queries and email (via Zoho Desk) for everything else.

Zoho Sign x Vacation Labs

We use Zoho Sign extensively in our sales process, where a standard contract is sent out to customers to e-sign and finalize their purchase. This signed contract is the (manually) uploaded to Zoho Subscriptions before activating their Vacation Labs subscription.

Zoho Analytics x Vacation Labs

We primarily use Zoho Analytics for two purposes:

  1. Building dashboards on top of Zoho CRM data
  2. Building reports on top of Zoho books data

In both cases, Zoho Analytics gives a far richer reporting and dashboarding interface than what the original tool gives.

Zoho Mail

Adopting Zoho Mail was a long-drawn process due to many years of email history accumulated with our previous email provider. After purchasing Zoho One, there was no reason for us to use another email hosting provider when we already had access to Zoho Mail bundled in our subscription. While Zoho did have a plugin to migrate emails from other email providers, it didn’t work very well for us. So, we had to depend on an open source tool call `imapsync` that gave us greater control and flexibility during the email migration process.

Zoho Mail does have a few good tricks up its sleeves, like sharing (not forwarding) emails with other members of your team, giving you the ability to discuss an email using private commments. Another would be to add an email as a task with a reminder, or add an email as a task for someone else on your team.

On the other hand, our biggest pet-peeve with Zoho Mail has been the search functionality where other email providers offer far better, and relevant, search results when you’re trying to locate an older email thread.

Need help with Zoho tools in your business?

Intrigued by our experience with Zoho One? Need help with your Zoho One rollout, especially for a travel business? Let’s chat! Book a quick call, and we can share ideas.

Or keep scrolling to read more our experience with the Zoho One suite.

Book a meeting →

Zoho People/Payroll x Vacation Labs

All our HR processes are handled using a combination of Zoho Payroll & Zoho People, such as on-boarding new team members, leave management, payroll, exit management, etc. It works well enough, although we’ve discovered a bunch of UX and design snafus while using it.

Zoho Projects

We have recently begun using Zoho Projects for managing two things:

  1. test scenarios for QA of our platform before every feature release and bugfix
  2. monthly recurring tasks for accounting (we use task-list templates for this purpose)

It works reasonably well, except that we’ve not been able to get commenting / collaboration to work via email. You receive an email notification from Zoho Projects, but you can’t reply to it — you have to physically go to Zoho Projects and comment via the web interface.

Zoho WorkDrive x Vacation Labs

Zoho WorkDrive is used extensively as shared storage between team members and also with our customers (to share website content and images during the onboarding process). Similarly, Zoho Docs and Zoho Sheets are used extensively within our team, specially if collaboration is required.

Need help with Zoho tools in your business?

Intrigued by our experience with Zoho One? Need help with your Zoho One rollout, especially for a travel business? Let’s chat! Book a quick call, and we can share ideas.

Or keep scrolling to read more our experience with the Zoho One suite.

Book a meeting →