Zoho Desk Launched by Zoho Corp: SaaS for Collaborative, Intuitive Customer Support

Context and collaboration are two key imports from Zoho's recent launch event at Tenkasi, a village in Tamil Nadu, some six hundred kilometres adrift from capital city Chennai. Zoho's newest product Zoho Desk is the first software Made in rural India. Zoho Desk is a help desk software thoughtfully crafted with due consideration to challenges to support workforce and its implications on to the consumers of the business.

Zoho Desk makes the task for support teams easier and interactions for customers/stakeholders more amicable by intuitively categorizing, prioritising and controlling support queries received from across various channels including Chat support and social media. This eases the process of resolving support tickets by presenting information in a manner which is easy to perceive for the support agent. Quick understanding of the customers' problems translates to a quick and convincing solution. Zoho, thus markets this as context-aware helpdesk interface which eliminates beating-around-the-bush responses.

The software is beneficial tool for integrating credibility, giving positive, resolute responses to customers. The responses can be tuned for automated replies based on analysis of Customers' previous interactions with the service providers using Zoho Desk. Desk, like any other other offering from Zoho is a cloud-based SaaS application, which allows decentralised data so the agents need not dig up through silos of information. This also allows easy access to redundant transaction data or history.

Zoho extends support for Zoho Desk for various CRM (Customer Relation Management) software including Zoho's own CRM, and popular ones of the like of Salesforce, Oracle CRM and SAP. Zoho provides support for integrating these with Zoho Desk. Citing raging security issues for cloud-based services, Zoho has a dedicated team which hawks possible security breakouts.

The key aspects of Zoho Desk include:

Work Modes — which prioritize interactions with the customers in a real-time scenario, based on response due-time, priority, and customer type. This aids the support agents in identifying support tickets which require immediate attention.

Unified Response Editor — Within the newly conceived ticket, Zoho Desk provides intuitive customer information from Zoho CRM, past interactions with the customer, and suggests on pragmatic solutions for the issues at hand, helping with effective and obliging responses.

Headquarters — This feature allows Customer Service Managers to broadly gauge and analyse trends like volumes of interactions and customer happiness ratings, along with fine-tuned details such as long interaction threads and recent negative feedback, all from a single screen.

Agent Scorecard — Agent Scorecard is a dashboard monitor which presents each agent with their own average response and resolution times, number of active and closed tickets, and happiness ratings earned. This contributes to the creation of a culture of self-management in the customer support teams.

Team Feed — Users can mention colleagues across departments in a style resembling to social networks feeds, within the tickets to leverage an elaborate context of the issue raised and collaborate with them for a quick resolution. They can also follow specific tickets or customers to get real-time updates on both the web or on their mobile phones.

Zoho Desk offers a collaborative space for a delighting experience to the customers. Further, several tasks can be customised and triggered, escalations automated as per need, thereby eliminating bottleneck in decision making. This could help companies collating data in a channelized way to enhance UX (User Experience) as well as productivity and sales turnovers. A new Product pitching is most beneficial when the customer is happy and content with the existing services.

Zoho is currently employing it to leverage support to users, and has other key industry players like Tech Mahindra. Zoho offers integration with analytics tools like Zoho Reports, as well as other software offerings from Zoho. With the speculations about GST, Zoho Desk can be a useful tool to migrate towards a digitized and accurate business book-keeping.

CEO of Zoho Corp., Sridhar Vembu proudly comments on enabling local talent pool via Zoho University, and using a significant fraction of them in developing first software Made in Rural India, here at the beautiful village of Tenkasi in Tamil Nadu, as he remarks that Zoho Desk is built in a valley, just not the Silicon valley.