Introducing Compact Mode, Ticket Peek, and Snippets

Last November, we introduced Zoho Desk to help customer service teams take advantage of context to improve the quality of their support. Part of that release included Work Modes, our intuitive solution to organize tickets and direct agent attention to the most important conversations.

We've since received a lot of praise from customers. We've been rated as a Category Leader by GetApp and G2Crowd, and selected for PC Mag's Editors' Choice Award.

Building on that positive feedback, we've designed even more tools to help agents spend their time where it counts. Today, we're happy to announce the first set of new features we've put together with that in mind.

Compact Ticket Mode:

For teams that deal with a large volume of tickets every day, the ability to view more tickets on the same screen is essential. So inspired by the classic ticket list, we've created a new, more efficient way to see your tickets: Compact Mode.

Compact Mode offers all the functionality of the classic ticket list, except it shows you nearly twice as many tickets per screen. This makes it easier to quickly scan your ticket list before clicking on the one you need.

Zoho Desk already saves your agents up to two hours a day. Compact Mode shaves off another several minutes, meaning your team will close even more tickets every day.

Ticket Peek:

When new tickets are assigned, Zoho Desk shows your agents all the contextual information they need on a single screen: past support interactions are pulled automatically from Desk; the customer's purchase history is pulled automatically from Zoho CRM; and contextually appropriate solutions are pulled automatically from your knowledge base. With all of this information together in one place, your agents will have more direct, effective, and meaningful conversations with customers.

But what about every subsequent response? Agents get most of the context they need by the first or second interaction. After that, they only need incremental context from that particular customer response. Navigating to the Response Editor screen for every single response is like using a fire hose to wash your hands. Agents need something simple for incremental responses, and Ticket Peek gives them just that.

Ticket Peek is a lightweight screen that helps agents respond to support requests more quickly. When an agent 'peeks' into a ticket, they can see every interaction the support team has had with the customer, as well as the ticket's properties and any related solutions from your knowledge base. Ticket Peek also provides collision detection notifications to prevent two agents from responding to or editing the same ticket at the same time.

While scrolling through tickets in a filtered view, Ticket Peek makes it convenient to quickly spot the exact ticket they're looking for. From there, an agent can move to the Response Editor screen with a single click, if necessary.

Ticket Peek is still in beta. We will be improving it further based on customer feedback, so please feel free to let us know what you think.

Snippets:

We're in 2017. When agents can see more tickets, scroll through them quickly, and start a response right away, what's the point in typing out that whole response from scratch?! Meh!

Zoho Desk already offers response templates and suggests solution articles from your knowledge base. Well, today, we're announcing the next big convenience: the ability to use 'shorthand' in responses. We're calling it Snippets.

Snippets are shortcuts that insert pre-written phrases into a response. For example, if you type "Thanks" and hit Tab, Zoho Desk automatically inserts "Thanks for reaching out to us!" into the editor. In addition to Zoho Desk's default Snippets, agents can create their own personal Snippets based on the phrases they use most often.

Snippets help agents get past the pleasantries and jump directly to solving the customer's problem. Before the public launch, Zoho's own support team has been using Snippets. Our agents report that they save as much as ten minutes on every response. This helps them solve more problems in less time. For step-by-step instructions on how to use Snippets, you can visit this user education page.

Overworked agents can't be expected to provide top-tier customer support. When agents rush, tickets slip through the cracks, mistakes get made, and customer relationships suffer. Together, Compact Mode, Ticket Peek and Snippets will save your agents a lot of time so they can focus on providing comprehensive and timely support.

Try out these features for yourself and let us know what you think. As usual, there's even more interesting stuff coming your way soon!