Announcing Zoho Support: Web-based Help Desk Software, Ticket Management and Self-Service Portal

Zoho Support is a web-based help desk software that allows organizations to easily manage and respond to an ever growing number of customer support inquiries that arrive via different channels (phone, e-mail, web). In the era of real-time communication and instant-everything, customers expect a prompt answer to their questions. With its innovative web interface, Zoho Support allows technicians to prioritize customer tickets, quickly find the appropriate response and get back to the customer as soon as possible.

Sometimes, the quickest way for customers to get support is through the self-service route. Zoho Support includes features that allow members of the support organization to easily publish solutions to known issues in a customer portal, so customers will solve their issue even before they contact your staff. In the customer portal, customers are also able to submit and track tickets.

In a nutshell, Zoho Support consists of the following modules (or tabs):

• Requests

  . The requests tab helps technicians prioritize the support requests that are coming in from customers. There are multiple ways in which the support request can be sliced & diced - for example: those requests that are assigned to me, or those requests that are unread. A support manager might want to see which requests are overdue and need to be addressed immediately. Sometimes it's impossible to programmatically determine (i.e. through an e-mail or a form) if a request is high-priority or who it should be assigned to. The requests module also helps organizations triage these support requests so they can be quickly routed to the appropriate team for solution.

• Accounts & Contacts

  . Accounts and contacts provide a view into the support operation through a customer perspective. Most importantly, organizations can define, track and enforce specific SLAs (service level agreements) they may have agreed to with their customers. No two support requests are even created equal, even two that look exactly the same could have a different priority depending on the SLA that was promised to each individual customer. 

• Reports & Dashboards

  . Reports and dashboards provide a quick view into how your support organization is doing. You can quickly get a wealth of data that will allow you to take the best decisions for your business and your customers. For example - what products are getting the most support requests? What incidents are happening the most often? What support group (or rep) has the slowest response time? 

• Tasks

  . The task module provides simplified view into what a support rep needs to do - either external activities (like get back to a customer with a particular solution or diagnosis) or even an internal one (like research or try a new approach). These allows everyone in the support team to keep their work organized and allows the support manager to get a quick glance into what everyone on his team is working on.

• Solutions Database

  . The solutions module allows support reps to create and publish (either internally or externally) solutions to the most common customer problems, so that next time they get a similar case, the don't have to re-invent the wheel. When a solution is published externally, it is automatically available in the customer portal, so that customers are able to find it easily.

• Workflow, API and much more.

   Automate tasks, assignments, alerts with the workflow rules; integrate with your other systems via the API; maintain details of your catalog (skus, release dates, support windows). E-mail reply templates... and there's more. There's a lot of good stuff in here.

And, as you would expect, Zoho Support is already integrated with

Zoho CRM

. So you can go from selling to supporting easily and smoothly. We also integrate

Zoho Chat

- so your support agents can quickly find the answer they're looking for, not only in the solutions database, but also from their colleagues over IM while they are on the phone with a customer. As you may know by now, we're big on making all of our products tightly integrated with each other. There are a few other cool integrations in the works that we're sure you'll like as well.

Zoho Supports comes in a few different editions. For enterprises and large support organizations, our Professional and Enterprise editions, which start at only $12 per month per agent provide advanced features that will satisfy the complex needs of these organizations. Small businesses, particularly young tech startups, will appreciate our Express edition (coming shortly). are unique, in the sense that most times there is no dedicated support person, but the entire team shares a support alias. We designed the Express edition thinking of this case. So if your team gets less than 200 support tickets per day, our Express edition is for you... With unlimited uses, think of it as your support e-mail alias, but much much better! 

We've been working at Zoho Support for quite some time, and most of our Zoho Products are running on it already. We hope that you'll like what you see. This is just the start of the journey, and we look forward to your feedback. So head out to

zoho.com/support

and try it out!

Rodrigo