Meeting the many different needs of your customers can be trying. What do they want, exactly, and why do their wants seem to differ? Their requests may even seem contrary at times—high quality with low prices, new yet familiar, more choices but easy to buy. Even so, a business must aim to win their hearts and keep them happy, no matter what.

What is happiness, anyway? Happiness is subjective. One way to look at it would be, it is the ability to do what you want, when you want and how you want, irrespective of the route you take. Businesses need to be able to give customers what they want, when they want and how they want.

Customers like to feel in control and they want things to be easy. That’s the reason many of us pay more to order takeout from apps instead of picking up food ourselves. Customers are waiting to be wowed by the brands they engage with and are placing a higher premium on happiness. Consider this: 56% of customers are willing to pay more for better customer service. Every business aims to deliver customer happiness, but it's easier said than done. Why? Because the world has evolved. Businesses have evolved, and customer expectations have evolved too. And as part of this process of evolution, we bring you the all-new Zoho Desk.

With our new release, we hope to deliver happiness to you, your team, and your customers on three important fronts, which we consider the cornerstones of building superior customer service.

1) Taking omnichannel experiences to the next level.

2) Building self-service options to strengthen customer-business relationships.  

3) Enhancing our user interface to provide an enriching experience for customer service agents.

Read on to learn about everything we’ve been up to.

Instant messaging

We're thrilled to unveil a new way of interacting with your customers in Zoho Desk. The Instant Messaging (IM) platform for Zoho Desk enables customers to reach your business through WhatsApp, Telegram, LINE, WeChat, Instagram (coming soon), and Facebook Messenger (coming soon). Since most of your customers are already using these platforms for communication, it only makes sense to meet them there. We've combined all the tools you already know with our comprehensive IM module, along with some new features designed to maximize productivity.

Zoho Desk notifies you of incoming chats in real time so you can easily connect with customers from the interface you already use and love. While there, you can:

• Track customer contact info, ticket info, cross-channel conversation history, and attachment details within the customer chat window for immediate context.

• Access and attach Knowledge Base articles right from the input section, use canned responses for prompt resolutions, and add emojis for extra personalization.

• Participate in multiple chats simultaneously across channels without switching tabs.

• Assign conversations and transfer chats to your teammates.

• Convert conversations into tickets for easy tracking until resolution.

What about automation? You got it! Automation, such as workflows, Blueprints, assignment rules, and SLAs that are available to tickets created from other channels are available to tickets created from your instant messaging channels. In addition, you can set auto-responses to acknowledge messages when you are flooded with tickets, when you are out of office, or when your customers choose to message at irregular hours.

From the IM dashboard, customer-facing teams can view all conversations, track incoming and outgoing messages, get a bird's eye view of important metrics with CSAT indicators, and supervise the team's efforts.

You can make it easy for customers to contact you by installing QR codes at physical outlets or embedding our easy-to-implement "Message Us" button on your website. They can even reach you through direct business search on the IM platform like Telegram.

Guided Conversations

We're especially excited to introduce Guided Conversations (GC), which is the result of our product team's commitment to bringing you the best self-service options.

As a customer support professional, you know that most questions don't have simple answers. They often require follow-up questions, and plenty of context, before a solution emerges. That's where GC steps in. It is a proactive, low-code, self-service platform that simplifies the path to answers for common customers' questions. A GC flow systematically leads customers to the best possible solutions. You can build GC with functionalities specific to your audience. Plus, at any point during the conversation, you can direct your customers to human interaction, and then switch back, if necessary.

Guided Conversations can be used during a variety of situations, such as bookings, placing orders, requesting a return, or gathering information for official purposes. The possibilities are endless.

Low code GUI builder

You don't need to be a coder to build a GC flow. With the flow builder, you can choose from a variety of blocks to build a conversation, including different response formats (text, images, currency, date and time, slider, choice, skip, or start over), message cards, images, and other information. By adding variables, dynamic placeholders, and connecting paths, you can determine the sequence of events based on customer's choice at each engagement stage. You can even pick flows from our pre-defined templates.

Webhooks for seamless integration

By configuring Webhook blocks, you can build your conversation flow to interact with Zoho Desk processes, other Zoho services, or third-party applications. For instance, If the user is already your contact, the Webhook block will retrieve their information directly from your CRM, rather than asking them to provide it each time.

Embed GC widget anywhere

Preview your final GC flow and implement it by embedding it as a chat widget in your website, as an iFrame in your blog posts, or in your own mobile SDKs. They can also be associated with the ASAP widget in case that chat should end with a transfer to agents.

We cannot wait to see the unique flows you create using Zoho Desk's Guided Conversations!

Enhanced experience

You might have already noticed the "Try New Version" option in Zoho Desk and even tried our revamped user interface (UI), which we introduced earlier this year. This is part of our effort to make Zoho Desk more logical and visually appealing to give you the best working experience—because we know a complicated help desk can make eight hours feel like 20.

So, what changed?

Cleaner UI, more context, and easier navigation

We believe that well-designed software needs little to no instructions. With this in mind, we have crafted a more attractive, cohesive, and comprehensible user interface. It does a better job of presenting data, gives more context, and is easier to navigate.

The importance of customer support teams having quick access to relevant information cannot be overstated. We've optimized our UI, and made navigating through different screens to locate the right information easier. We've also given some screens a makeover to provide you with a holistic picture of your customers and tickets on a single interface. Remember how much we love giving you context? Check out our new look in:

• Latest Headquarters View with a refined data arrangement and revamped overall look.

• Detailed Ticket View with color-coded threads for easier navigation between conversations and comments.

• Detailed Contact View with quick-add buttons, a Pending Tickets section, and Ticket Insights overview.

• Ticket Queue View with drop-down status options, so you can give quick updates without opening Ticket Detail View.

• A new mark as read/unread option in the Ticket List View, and a consolidated Work Modes drop-down implemented throughout the Tickets Module.

New user personalization options

Personalization has become such a common part of our daily lives that we tend to expect it in most of our product interactions.

In Zoho Desk you can already customize layouts, fields, roles, templates, and your help center. Now, you can also customize the look of your portal so you feel more connected with your help desk. Here's what's new:

• Dark Mode/Night Mode for a comfortable viewing and reading experience in low-light conditions.

• New themes for viewing Desk in your favorite color, or in colors that represent your brand.

• Display Layouts allow you to choose how your content is presented to you.

• Display Font Types and Sizes so your display text matches your exact preferences.

• Default Editor Font Types and Sizes for your email descriptions and reply editors.

• Personalize Reply Button to select the reply actions you want the button to display by default.

Accessibility controls

It’s always been our mission to empower all users to access our products easily, and with our new accessibility controls, we’re getting closer. We have added multiple controls to support your vision, physical and motor, and learning needs.

• Screen Reader renders the content (text, buttons, images, and links) on your screen into speech or braille.

• Highlight Critical Information displays key information, like ticket ID, ticket owner, and contact details in a striking color.

• Underline Links increases the visibility of clickable links.

• Emphasize Focus Area adds a border around your area of focus to indicate the extent and clickability.

• Animation controls optimize animations and transitions across your help desk.

• Reading Mask eliminates distractions by masking text you aren't currently reading.

• Zoom Level lets you zoom in and out until the page is easy to view.

• Keyboard Focus Navigation helps navigate between screens, switch tabs, and perform tasks using only keyboard keys.

That’s a wrap!

Thanks for dropping by. We’d love to be a part of your journey in building happy agents and happier customers as you take up new challenges in 2023. With our new release, we hope we were able to bring the features and enhancements that you were looking for.

Now, we could not write a blog on customer happiness without asking for any feedback ourselves! We would love to know your thoughts; please share in the comments below or on social media. 

New to Zoho Desk? sign up for a free trial here.