Norman saves substantial time and money using Zoho Analytics

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    15Users
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    1000s of hours and dollars saved
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    2Data Sources

"Zoho Analytics has saved us thousands of hours per year, as we no longer have to spend time making manual reports through Excel. It has also saved us thousands of dollars, as it has extended our current software reporting capabilities without us having to make any further investments into our current software, such as Xero and Aircall"

Giorgia English
Business Analyst & CRM Specialist, Norman

The Company

With almost half a century of experience crafting fine window furnishings, Norman’s quality has made it famous. Norman provides high-quality, custom window furnishing and is home to the world's best-selling shutter. It is a subsidiary of Nien Made, one of the largest manufacturers of window coverings, which is based in Taiwan with 11,000 employees. Nien Made's production bases are primarily located in China and Cambodia, and the headquarters is located in Taichung, Taiwan.

Challenges: Sizable data

Giorgia English, business analyst and CRM specialist at Norman, wanted to unify the data collected from the company's CRM, financing software (Xero), and built-in company software. Her main objective for doing this was to categorize the sales data by retail partners and state.

Norman manages sales and marketing in Australia, and has about 500 retailers around the country. As the number of retailers grew, blending all the data became increasingly strenuous.

As a marketing and sales office, English and her team had to work on a fair amount of reports, like sales pipeline reports, sales funnel analysis reports, and weekly, monthly, and quarterly sales reports. Since Norman does a substantial amount of marketing on behalf of retailers, they create and analyze reports on sales leads too. Norman uses Aircall, cloud-based call center software, and also needed a way to analyze support calls received on the platform.

For a while, English used Microsoft Excel for this purpose. It was a tedious task and required extensive manual work. For reports related to finance, her team was dependent on Xero, but it did not meet their requirements. When it came to support call reports, Aircall required an expensive subscription to enable analytics.

Norman wanted a solution that could:

  • Blend data and enable quick creation of reports
  • Provide actionable insights through dashboards
  • Enable collaborative analysis on sales data for management

"Xero’s reporting capabilities were not advanced enough to create the financial reports we required. And Aircall's plan did not provide us with analytics without upgrading to a more expensive subscription."

Giorgia English
Business Analyst & CRM Specialist, Norman

Solution: Zoho Analytics

Norman was already a customer of Zoho One, which made Zoho Analytics an ideal solution.

Before Zoho Analytics, English had to import data from multiple sources, like a custom online ordering portal, Zoho CRM, Aircall, and Xero, to create reports in Excel. But now, she could integrate Aircall with Zoho CRM, and with Zoho Analytics' data connectivity options, she was able to seamlessly integrate data from Zoho CRM, Xero and create reports swiftly.

English was particularly impressed by the data visualization and features offered by Zoho Analytics. The pivot table and connectors, which facilitate daily data auto-updates, made her life much easier. She was also happy to take advantage of the query table.

Norman uses Zoho Analytics for:

  • Order vs budget analytics: To analyze actual orders against forecasted orders
  • KPI analytics: To track and analyze the effectiveness of certain sales activities to optimize sales performance
  • Sales analytics: To help business development managers breakdown sales by customers and products, analyze sales leads, and more.

"I found a way to pull the data into Zoho Analytics through Zoho CRM. That has allowed us to create advanced analytics on the data without having to pay for a more expensive Aircall plan. I am also looking to create a dashboard in the future that combines data from our CRM and social media platforms. That way, we can better track our marketing data and investments"

The key benefit that Norman has experienced using Zoho Analytics is that it saved thousands of manual hours per year creating reports. It saved them thousands of dollars too, as it enabled unified business analytics, pulling data from multiple apps, without requiring any further investments in Xero or Aircall.

With Zoho Analytics, Norman created an Orders vs Budgets Dashboard, and a KPI Dashboard. This helps the business development managers and the management team keep track of how the business is performing, and how customers are responding.

Norman's dashboards and reports are now shared with 15 users and with user-based permissions to the customers.

Impressed by the results so far, English is now planning to integrate Norman's social media platform accounts with Zoho Analytics.

Benefits & results

  • Norman saves thousands of hours per year by using Zoho Analytics.
  • Saves thousands of dollars through unified business analytics.
  • Creates insightful reports and dashboards
  • Seamlessly sharing of dashboards and reports