Zoho extends its technology platform and support to government bodies, hospitals and NGOs for Covid relief work

Zoho has extended its technology platform to government bodies, hospitals and NGOs in India providing Covid relief, in order to help them streamline and manage their operations more efficiently. The company has also set up a dedicated helpline and a team to assist those who want to utilise Zoho’s platform to build a customised solution. These solutions can help them be better prepared for future challenges as well.

As part of this initiative, Zoho has worked with a few NGOs as well as government departments, including Tamil Nadu State Covid War Room, to develop tech solutions for managing their relief work. The company has also urged other technology providers to offer their expertise in helping frontline workers.

Based on the requirement of the organisation or individuals, Zoho’s dedicated team can build customised solutions using any of the company’s 50+ apps, which will be made available for free for this purpose. Some of the areas where Zoho can provide assistance include:

• Fund collection: Zoho Checkout can be used to accept online payments or donations and send receipts to the donors. Zoho Invoice can be used to accept offline donations, send receipts, track billable expenses and raise invoices.
• Inventory management: Zoho Inventory can be used to track the inventory of PPE kits, medical supplies, etc., and provide alerts when restocking is required. NGOs can connect to multiple selling channels, shippers, and track the delivery.
• Volunteer and contact management: Zoho CRM can be used to capture donor, volunteer, or patient details, and get real-time visibility into the operation.
• Data collection: Zoho Forms can be used to create web forms for collecting and managing registrations, payments, subscriptions, requests and contact forms.
• Helpdesk and IVR solutions: Zoho Desk can help in addressing public issues and requests through a robust multichannel ticketing system, and deliver contextual service in real time.
• Live chat and chatbots: Zoho SalesIQ can help provide immediate virtual assistance through live chat, automate routine tasks, and resolve queries with chatbots.
• Social media response management: Zoho Social can help users publish unlimited outreach campaigns on social media, respond to people, and monitor SOS messages.
• Video conferencing: Zoho Meeting can help doctors provide clinical services to people online, while other users can conduct training webinars, or hold conference calls with volunteers and other stakeholders.
• Data reporting and analysis:  Zoho Analytics can help users transform large amounts of medical, financial, and operational data into actionable insights.
• Custom low-code applications: For custom needs, apps can be easily created on Zoho’s low-code platform, Zoho Creator.

“We have been working with Zoho to create a solution for us, using Zoho CRM, to streamline our efforts to combat Covid. Zoho’s app is being used by volunteers at the Tamil Nadu Covid War Room to address Covid-related requests and issues coming in through the 104 helpline. When people require hospitalisation, the volunteers use the app to find the nearest hospital where a bed is available and issue a token that can be used to get the bed. The app is also being used to manage requests for oxygen, medicines and food. Even burial and cremation requests, and grief counselling is being managed using the app. It’s being deployed in phases to our 50,000 volunteers. Based on the requirement, we will scale the operation to 2 lakh volunteers. The use of technology will help us in quickly responding to patients needing critical care, efficiently managing and allocating available resources, and monitoring the situation closely as we will have real-time visibility into the operation,” said Dr Viduthalai Virumbi B,  Health Officer, Tamil Nadu State Covid War Room.

“Covid Citizens is a community-driven collective which verifies and crowd-sources pan-India information on critical Covid resources such as medicines, oxygen cylinders, beds, blood tests, meal services, plasma, ambulances, and more. Zoho supports Covid Citizens through their tool for social media outreach,” said Utkarsh Roy, Co-Founder, IntroBot, and Core Team Member of Covid Citizens.

“A group of volunteers from multiple NGOs had gotten together to help a patient in Chennai find a hospital bed. The team was using Google Sheets and WhatsApp to run their operations. This was proving to be difficult and also had issues with duplication of effort. This is when we decided to build an application to streamline the entire process. We were able to quickly build and launch the app using Zoho Creator in 48 hours. We also found Zoho Creator easy to use. Today, more than 120 volunteers are helping 100+ patients find hospital beds everyday using the system,” said Shyam Sundar Nagarajan, Founder, GoFloaters.