This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Microsoft Kaizala Blog articles.
Today’s workplace extends well beyond organizational boundaries, and there is an increasing need to connect your entire business value chain, including your Firstline workers, vendors, partners, suppliers, and customers. A disconnected value chain hinders productivity, slows down decision making, prevents the ability for insights to surface from the field, and creates potential for customer dissatisfaction. Today, consumer messaging apps are often used between people across the value chain, but this poses security, privacy and compliance risks to company data. Microsoft Kaizala aims to solve a lot of these challenges, especially in mobile-first, developing markets.
Microsoft Kaizala is a simple and secure mobile app, with easy sign-up using just a phone number. It enables networks of people to connect and coordinate work across their roles, spanning Firstline workers, vendors, partners, suppliers, customers, and citizens. Many organizations are already doing amazing things with Kaizala.
Kaizala delivers on four key promises:
1. Communicate across dynamic networks: Kaizala supports diverse group types such as hub and spoke, hierarchies, and public groups – which model the communication needs of your organization. Use it to connect with your customers and partners or your Firstline workers. Temporal and geo-fenced groups make the set-up and discovery of groups easy, and large group size of up to 1 million users enables scenarios such as government-to-citizen communication
2. Coordinate work and gather field insights: Across every business, there is valuable data that originates at the front lines and out in the field, from sales metrics, to customer experience and operational insights. The problem is that much of it is either still paper-based or not getting recorded at all. Kaizala makes it easy to quickly gather field insights in mobile-first, dynamic environments using built-in actions such as surveys, polls, jobs and more. Integrations with Office 365 services such as Power BI and Microsoft Flow allow you to quickly build customizable business workflows and make them available using Kaizala’s chat interface. The built-in reports on the management portal let you visualize and analyze the data – giving you real-time insights into your business and helping drive day to day efficiencies.
3. Digitize business processes: Kaizala allows you to integrate with existing applications and systems so you can connect your business end-to-end and digitize manual, paper-based procedures. You can also build custom cards to support your line of business tasks using Kaizala aggregation service.
4. Manage and secure your data: Kaizala is served from the hyperscale global network of Azure data centers, and data is encrypted at rest and in-transit. Advanced IT administration capabilities with the Kaizala management portal allow business owners to view reports, create and manage groups, define group policies etc. Kaizala supports key compliance standards such as ISO 27001, SOC2, HIPAA, GDPR and more.
Enable Kaizala for your tenant:
Anyone can download the Kaizala mobile app for free from both Google Play Store and App Store. Users and groups can be managed at the organization level with Kaizala Pro, which also provides access to Microsoft Kaizala APIs, advanced reporting and analytics, enterprise security and compliance and more. Kaizala Pro is already available as part of Office 365 commercial plans, or as a standalone purchase, in 28 markets around the world. We will be adding Kaizala Pro to Office 365 commercial plans worldwide over time.
If your organization is licensed for Kaizala Pro, IT administrators can enable Kaizala by following these steps. Once Kaizala is enabled for the tenant, Office 365 users can sign in to the Kaizala management portal to create groups, add users, assign group policies, and access other Pro capabilities.
Learn more about Kaizala, and start using it today.