Zoho Corporation, the Chennai-headquartered global technology company, today launched new tools forZoho Desk, the company’s flagship customer service platform, to help customer service teams evolve with the changing needs of customers and meet heightened business expectations. Zoho Desk, launched in 2016, was built at the company’s rural office in Tenkasi. The platform has achieved CAGR of 57% in India and 45% globally in terms of revenue over the past five years, and now serves over 1,00,000 businesses around the world.
New capabilities in Zoho Desk include Blended Conversations—a seamless combination of human-driven and bot-powered conversational service experiences—as well as several refinements to the user interface to make it simpler, faster, and more accessible to users with a wide spectrum of different needs. These additions enable customer service agents to improve engagement and deliver higher-value customer experiences (CX).
“During these challenging economic times, the best companies are doubling down on customer retention while simultaneously trying to do more with less,” said Mani Vembu, Chief Operating Officer, Zoho Corp. “Great service experiences address this by forming the bedrock of sustainability through economic downturns. Blended Conversations in Zoho Desk addresses exactly this outcome by cleverly combining human and bot agents while also reducing friction, frustration, and costs-to-serve.”
Blended Conversations for Zoho Desk allows customer service agents to deliver the best experience in the moment by delegating the majority of manual and transactional tasks to bots, while remaining in control of the overall service experience. With fast and easy deployment that does not require external help, Zoho Desk allows brands to scale their conversational service experiences through higher agent productivity without compromising on the quality of CX. This experience is a culmination of Zoho’s Instant Messaging (IM) Framework and Guided Conversations, a low-code builder for self-service experiences.
The IM Framework allows organisations to integrate any messaging service they use with Zoho Desk, and comes pre-integrated with services like WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, WeChat, Messenger, and Instagram. Guided Conversations for Zoho Desk allows business users to build powerful self-service flows that are useful throughout the customer journey, and help customers quickly and securely manage their relationship with the organisation. It offers service teams tighter collaboration and integration with other Zoho apps at no extra cost, including Zoho’s CX Platform, Zoho CRM Plus, for example.
Zoho also announced a technological overhaul of the user interface to include options to support: cognitive and dyslexia challenges; visual impairments including astigmatism; animation reduction for those with seizure disorders; customization capabilities for colour-blindness. This is the company’s biggest step towards improving digital accessibility to date.
“Able Aura is an ecosystem for persons with disabilities (PwD) where they can avail healthcare, education, sports, travel, tourism, social life and more,” said Bala Siva, Founder & Chief Enabler, Able Aura. “We are a small group, with 25% of our colleagues being PwD. We wanted an enterprise software that could be used by both our employees and our customers. We chose Zoho. No enterprise software is completely accessible for all PwD. However, the Zoho Desk team took our feedback and built a beta version that enables visually impaired people to work as customer service agents. We look forward to continuing our journey with Zoho, and helping make enterprise software accessible to PwD.”
Zoho continues to build a system of experiences that focuses on every aspect of the customer journey, giving every stakeholder greater ability to add value to CX, from planning and creating diverse customer experiences to delivering and evolving them for the future. Zoho’s CX offerings help organisations of all sizes enable employee productivity, improve stakeholder collaboration, and increase customer success.
Zoho Desk’s integrated omnichannel approach supports entire service teams to connect with customers and with one another. On the business side, it enables high-quality consistency and reliability. Customers, in turn, have better overall end-to-end experiences with the brand, which ultimately drives loyalty and trust. This has led to adoption from mid-market and enterprise businesses, including public sector organisations.
Additionally, to help small and micro businesses transform their customer service operations by empowering them with an easy, and value-rich helpdesk solution at an affordable price point, Zoho Desk has launched Express Edition. Zoho Desk’s growth in India was led by IT hardware and IT related services, financial services, education, manufacturing and retail verticals.
