Zoho Corporation, a global tech company, launched new tools for Zoho Desk, the anchor application in the firm’s customer service platform to help customer service teams evolve with the changing needs of customers and meet heightened business expectations.
What do the new tools mean for brands?
Zoho Desk, which has achieved 45% year-over-year (YoY) revenue growth for the past five years, now serves more than 100,000 businesses globally. The new capabilities include Blended Conversations, a seamless combination of human-driven and bot-powered conversational service experiences, as well as several refinements to the user interface.
These latest developments enable customer service agents to improve engagement and deliver higher-value customer experiences, removing the guesswork for agents and drastically minimising friction that often results in bad customer experiences.
“Brands trying to scale conversational service face challenges like complexity in bot design and integration, inability of bots and humans to serve the customer in parallel, and switching across channels. All of those result in poor customer experiences, which leads to frustration and strained brand-customer interaction,” said Mani Vembu, Chief Operating Officer, Zoho.
“A smooth conversational experience for customers requires human agents and bot agents to work in tandem to bring the best of both to the customer’s experience. Blended Conversations is the next step in Zoho’s journey to build pioneering technology in a simplified platform that brings stakeholders together to deliver great customer experiences at scale.”
What is the product offering of the new tools?
Blended Conversations for Zoho Desk allows customer service agents to deliver the best experience 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 securely manage their relationship with the organisation. It offers service teams tighter collaboration with other Zoho marketing apps at no extra cost, including Zoho’s CX Platform and Zoho CRM Plus.
Zoho also announced a technological overhaul of the user interface to make it simpler, faster, and more accessible to users with a wide spectrum of different needs — the firm’s biggest steps towards improving digital accessibility to date. Updates include options to support: cognitive and dyslexia challenges; visual impairments including astigmatism; animation reduction for those with seizure disorders; customisation capabilities for colour-blindness.
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 firms 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. Clients, in turn, have better overall end-to-end experiences with the brand, which ultimately drives loyalty and trust.
How integral is Zoho Desk to businesses?
“As a business that is centred around stellar customer service, Zoho Desk has transformed the way we do things and the services that we offer. The app allows us to be error proof and has helped us attain a customer happiness rating of 96%, according to a rating widget it offers,” Stoewie van den Bulk, Co-founder of View Retreats, Aussie luxury travel company.
“We’re continuously receiving excellent feedback about how much our customers appreciate our short response time, helping to ease the worry that comes with booking a holiday.”
“Internally, our team is more motivated to achieve success at work. Gone are the laborious days of manual work processes. The easy integration with other Zoho apps that we are already using also means that there is consistency in the data that we acquire. This unified system within the Zoho apps is not only cost efficient, but gives businesses like us a peace of mind that our data is safe and that our operations will continue to run smoothly.”
