Zoho and Zoho Flow Integration

Sailing your Business on Automatic Waves With Zoho Flow

Many humans dream of a time when they’ll be free from the stress that characterizes day-to-day life. Something around passive income, touring the world, and long vacations to exotic destinations. To highlight how desirable such a lifestyle is, some humans even wish to spend the afterlife in a similar way. A life spent doing the things that really matter while some mechanism takes care of those things that are trivial.

With innovation, this lifestyle that seemed dreamy and elusive is now a possibility that doesn’t necessarily have to wait till the later days of our life or the end of it. The secret passcode to this lies in automation.

Owning a business comes with a lot of expectations. There are tons of tasks tugging at the hem of your clothes begging for your attention. Businesses that can afford to hire people to man these tasks have it easier but regardless, they’ll also have to deal with coordination and organization.
Whether you are a one-man business or you work with teams, optimizing the workflow around your business with automation will take a lot of burden off your back. One of the impressive tools out there that get the job of automation done for you without hassles is Zoho Flow.

What is Zoho Flow?

Zoho Flow is one of the digital tools in the Zoho pack. It’s designed to help integrate your operations on multiple platforms into one. Rather than have your finger in many different pies, Zoho Flow bakes all the variety of pies into one.

To bring home the picture: as a business owner, you’ll have to use different apps for different tasks. You’ll sure have a preferred platform for email marketing. Another platform could be handling your invoice generation. Your web pages will also be hosted on a platform that is totally unrelated to the previously mentioned two. Zoho Flow saves you the trouble of having to manually copy contacts from web pages to the email marketing platform or having to manually generate an invoice for every sale you make. A wise decision will be to connect these platforms together such that they’re glued together like one functional system. But just how does Zoho Flow achieve these?

Elements of Zoho Flow

To deliver on the seamless transmission of information between the various apps that Zoho Flow connects, there are some key elements that you should know.

Triggers

In every scenario of communication, two parties are always involved: the sender and the receiver. Since Zoho Flow can be compared to some sort of communication channel, there are always these two parties as well. The event that occurs on one platform which can be called an originating platform causes a subsequent event to occur on the other platform. This causative is called the trigger. So, if you want Zoho Flow to notify every member of your team on Slack each time a prospect signs up for your

Actions

The event that occurs due to another pre-determine event is called an action. Using the above example again, the action is to send a notification to all members of your team. One thing to note is that while we can have one trigger, actions can be more than one. In the same example, we can set up our flow to undergo a 30-minute delay before the notification is sent to Slack. These are two actions: a 30-minute delay, and also a notification

Flow

This is the combination of a trigger and one or more actions. It can be referred to as the single unit of automation on Zoho Flow. You set up flows to achieve specific workflow automation. A flow can also be used to achieve a sequence of actions. Apart from the example given above, you can modify the flow to follow conditional instances like sending a notification when a particular threshold is reached.

Connections

These are applications that can be accessed through Zoho Flow. You can integrate over 400 applications on the Zoho Flow platform. These vary from payment gateways, to email marketing platforms, to Customer Relationship Management tools to other apps that rely on cloud computing.

Why You Should Use Zoho Flow

No-coding knowledge is required

Many digital tools exist out there, but they’re only within the reach of those that have highly technical knowledge to operate them. With Zoho Flow, this is taken care of by the simple interface that lets you drag and drop your triggers and your actions. This is not to say the application does not rely on lines of code, but they have been organized into chunks that you can access with a few clicks and short drags.

Availability of diverse templates

In a bid to make setting up your workflow even easier, Zoho Flow has inbuilt templates that you can choose from. This removes the hurdle of having to think hard about the arrangement of your flows.

You can simply choose from a list of flows that have popular apps with actions and triggers pre-designed. If these don’t exactly suit your needs, you can as well edit the flow or modify it.

Comprehensive Dashboard

The usage of Zoho Flow is not limited to the creation of automation alone. The application also goes further by providing you with a means of monitoring your flows.

On the dashboard, you can easily get a summary of all the flows you have executed. This will provide you with insightful information on the performance of each of the flows. You can easily see their success rate, the applications they are connected to, and the flows that are not working. This will give you the opportunity to modify the flows that are not working.

Improved productivity

Time is one resource that is always in limited supply. For businesses that are run by a single individual, time is usually lost when moving data from one tool to another. For businesses that have multiple teams, time is lost during inevitable communication gaps between the teams.

Automation will save you this wastage because, unlike humans, flows don’t forget; they don’t have mood swings and they can’t come down with the flu. Zoho Flow will provide you with a reliable system that conveys all essential information from one point to another automatically.

Zoho Flow is easy to operate and you will start feeling the impact on your business in no time as you get to spend less time on redundant tasks.

However, like every new tool, Zoho Flow has its own learning curve and a good way to cut through this curve is to consult professionals. This will prevent you from making newbie mistakes that might drag your growth back. Contact our team of Zoho experts via the link below to get started on how you can use Zoho Flow to your favor.