Announcing AI, Process Management, Marketplace for Zoho Desk

Service management has become much harder for enterprise companies in the past decade, owing to a rise in the number of touchpoints throughout the customer journey. A few years ago, we saw context awareness as a critical enabler for customer service teams and introduced the industry's first context-aware help desk software in 2016. Since then, Zoho Desk has seen a surge in adoption worldwide, registering growth of about 150% year-over-year in new business. In fact, clients with greater than 50 users have been the fastest-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 further catalyze enterprise and mid-market adoption, today we are introducing 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.

Reply Assistant: 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. Agents can add these suggestions to a response with a single click and send the same to the customer.

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 affected 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.