PLEASANTON, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Zoho announced today that Zoho Desk, its customer service help desk application, has added a slew of enterprise-focused features along with a new developer platform, while witnessing 150% growth in new business over the last year.
"AI can drastically raise the quality of customer service in the enterprise, especially when it draws from rich customer context. Zia for customer service is our first big step in that direction. Zoho Desk, which we launched in November 2016, was the industry's first context-aware customer service product. It has since seen a surge in adoption worldwide," said Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist. "Zoho Desk, which was first introduced in November 2016, registered a growth of over 100% year-on-year in tickets processed and that greater-than-50-users has been the highest growing segment for the product. We are pleased to be the service management platform of choice for customer-centric brands such as Daimler and The Warehouse Group."
To accelerate Zoho Desk's enterprise momentum, the company introduced these new industry-first capabilities that allow businesses to elevate agent productivity, manage cross-functional service processes, and contextually integrate customer service with other business functions:
Artificial Intelligence - Zia
Voice and Chat Assistant: Zia helps reduce the load on customer service teams. Through Zia Voice, customers can speak or chat with Zia to receive answers from a knowledge base. Agents can also speak or chat with Zia to receive response suggestions while helping customers. Zia suggests specific sections of a knowledge-base article rather than the entire article.
Anomaly Reporting: Based on an understanding of historical data, Zia detects anomalies in common service metrics like the volumes of incoming tickets from customers and of outgoing responses from the service team. Through notifications, Zia alerts service agents and managers of these anomalies.
Sentiment Analysis and Triaging: Right next to a ticket, agents can now see the sentiment of the latest customer response. Within a ticket, Zia predicts the sentiment of every incoming response along with the terms that led to that particular sentiment. The sentiment and keywords from each customer response can be used in workflow automation to proactively route conversations with a negative sentiment to senior agents and avoid bad customer experiences.
Context Tagging: Zia processes the content of a ticket and associates topic tags to it automatically. While reporting anomalies, Zia also indicates the ticket tags that customers spoke the most about. This helps decision-makers see the topics that customers often talk about and helps highlight areas where improvement is necessary.
Predictions Dashboard: Zia brings together predictions across anomalies, sentiment, trending ticket tags, and more into a common dashboard for decision-makers to consume. They can drill down further into the details from the same dashboard to investigate further.
Skill Building: Organizations can create "skills" to integrate Zia with other tools like their CRM or order management system. Through these skills, their customers can speak or chat with Zia to perform actions like placing an order, modifying an existing order, or checking the status of an order.
Contextual Availability: Using the ASAP plugin for Zoho Desk, brands can ensure that contextual help is always available by adding Zia and other self-service tools to their website, SaaS Product, and mobile apps.
Service Process Automation - Blueprint:
Blueprint helps managers create service processes that can then be followed by their teams. Incoming tickets can be put through these processes based on certain criteria. Each department can have its own set of processes, where other departments also participate when applicable.
Creating Efficiency: Through a drag-and-drop process builder, Blueprints can be created in minutes and deployed. Agents see only the actions applicable to them, so they can respond quickly. Tickets progress systematically through the process, leading to faster and reliable service for customers.
Enabling Proactiveness: Service managers can see how their processes are performing and which stages of a process have bottlenecks, in order to address them proactively.
Mobile Apps For Supervisors & Managers - Radar:
Radar, a mobile app for iOS and Android, helps supervisors, managers, and other decision-makers look at their customer support operation from a performance standpoint. Leaders can see important customer service metrics like first response time, response time, resolution time, and customer happiness ratings, and drill down to see the specific context and conversations that led to any rise or fall in these metrics. Radar also receives push notifications from Zoho Desk relating to any sudden change in these metrics, so leaders can step in when there are exceptions, and keep an eye on things broadly as well.
Platform for Contextual Integrations - Zoho Marketplace:
Enterprise service terms often need to draw customer information from various sources and perform follow-up actions on other tools. Zoho Desk can now be extended and customized to specific needs like that. Extensions in Zoho Desk can bring in data from sources like CRM or ERP systems, and allow agents to perform actions in these systems without leaving the ticket. Several pre-built extensions can be quickly installed from Zoho Marketplace.
Based on the vertical, organizations might also adopt different means using which customers can reach them. Zoho Desk's new multichannel framework allows organizations to integrate channels like messaging apps, review platforms, and niche communities, through their APIs, to manage conversations from these channels.
This announcement was released in conjunction with the introduction of Zoho's new Customer Experience Platform, a unified suite that allows Sales, Marketing, Support and Operations to work as one team on one interface. Powered by Analytics and Zia, this platform sets a new standard for omni-channel customer engagement and real-time insight across departments to keep customers satisfied throughout their experience.
Pricing and Availability
Zoho Desk is available starting at $15 per employee per month.
Zia for Zoho Desk is currently available as a private beta and works best with English (US). Zia will be rolled out to all users gradually. Blueprint, Radar, and the Integration Platform are available immediately.
Resources
Zia for Zoho Desk: https://www.zoho.com/desk/zia.html
Blueprint: https://www.zoho.com/desk/blueprint.html
ASAP: https://www.zoho.com/desk/asap.html
Radar: https://www.zoho.com/desk/radar.html
Marketplace: https://marketplace.zoho.com/desk
About Zoho
Zoho is the operating system for business—a single online platform capable of running an entire business. With apps in nearly every major business category, including sales, marketing, customer support, accounting and back office operations, and an array of productivity and collaboration tools, Zoho is one of the world's most prolific software companies. In 2017, Zoho introduced the revolutionary Zoho One, an integrated suite of applications for the entire business.
Zoho respects user privacy and does not have an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, including its free products. More than 40 million users around the world, across hundreds of thousands of companies, rely on Zoho every day to run their businesses, including Zoho itself. Zoho Corporation is privately held and profitable with more than 6,000 employees. Zoho is headquartered in Pleasanton, California, with international headquarters in Chennai, India. Additional offices are in Austin (US), Utrecht (The Netherlands), Singapore, Dubai (UAE), Yokohama (Japan), and Beijing (China). For more information, please visit www.zoho.com.
