Zoho Launches Blended Conversations for Zoho Desk

Unifies Human-Driven and Bot-Powered Customer Service Capabilities for Exceptional Omnichannel Support and Better Informed Agent Interactions

Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, today launched new tools for Zoho Desk, the anchor application in the company’s customer service platform, to help customer service teams evolve with the changing needs of customers and meet heightened business expectations. Zoho Desk, which has achieved 40% year-over-year revenue growth for the past five years in South Africa and 45% globally, now serves more than 100K businesses around the world. The platform has also witnessed a phenomenal adoption across the MEA region, achieving 580% CAGR over the past five years.

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). Zoho Desk also includes integration with Goldtel PBX, enabling South African businesses to call their customers directly from the product interface, get contextual information about the customer they are calling, and gather analytics.

“During these challenging economic times, the best companies are doubling down on customer retention while simultaneously trying to do more with less,” said Andrew Bourne, Regional Manager, Zoho Africa. “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.”

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 an Express Edition.

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 organizations 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 organization. It offers service teams tighter collaboration and integration with other Zoho marketing apps at no extra cost, including Zoho’s CX Platform and 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.

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. Specifically, 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.

Staff writer