Zoho Desk Cloud-Based Customer Service Software Review

Zoho Desk is one of the favorites among companies and allows you to provide support irrespective of where and how your customers reach you or where you are.

Customers are a critical part of every business.

Without an excellent customer support system, you might go out of business as fast as you came in.

When customers feel no one is listening to or attending to them, they jump ship to where they feel cared for.

To put it straight: No business survives without excellent customer service.

For customer service to function at its peak, they need excellent customer service software.

This is where customer support systems (or help desk software) come in.

They help companies interact with, organize, and manage requests from customers, and also resolve customer support systems.

 

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What is Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is a cloud and web-based help desk software that enables businesses to manage and assist their customers using a single interface.

Anyone looking for a customer support system for his business will be on the lookout for one that is comprehensive.

But when it comes to customer support systems, what does comprehensive mean? A comprehensive help desk software provides multichannel support, helps you automate the complete ticketing process, and is an excellent self-service platform for your customers.

Other features include customizing dashboards and performance reports so that you can deliver quality service faster.

Zoho Desk has all these and more, making it a superior help desk application and one of the industry’s leading choices. Some of Zoho Desk’s features include.

Features

Zoho Desk has all these and more, making it a superior help desk application and one of the industry’s leading choices. Some of Zoho Desk’s features include

Multichannel

Zoho Desk makes it possible for customers to reach you from different channels because it has support for them. Some of these channels include chat, email, phone calls, your website, and various social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter. One excellent thing about the software is that you don’t have to toggle between multiple windows to attend to these different channels. You can handle all of them within one window.

Self-service

Not every problem requires the attention of your customer service representatives. Some customers will even prefer to solve their problems by themselves rather than wait for a few minutes to a few days to have a support ticket attended to. Thirdly, there are specific questions about your business that most customers often ask. Instead of having your customer service representatives answer these questions every time, you can embed a user community, knowledge base, and even AI capabilities into your mobile app, SaaS product, and website to ensure your customers easily find answers.

Workflow automation

The simple rule of automation is this: If it is a repetitive manual process, automate it. Customer service has many such processes, so it is only fitting that you use customer service software like Zoho Desk that allows you to automate these processes. With the software, you can also manage complex cross-functional service processes, spot every bottleneck your processes have, and track accountability.

Artificial intelligence

Zoho Desk has an AI-powered assistant that makes many of your tasks proactive and straightforward. For example, while having the capability to manually assign degrees of importance to tickets as they are created is good, being able to do that proactively is incredible! With the Zoho Desk-Zia combination, you can spot anomalies in ticket traffic, analyze customer sentiments, and triage support tickets proactively.

Integration with other platforms

You can connect or integrate Zoho Desk with most of the other tools your team members already use for their work. You can take it a whole notch further by adding custom capabilities through REST APIs. If the apps you’re working with are not giving you the desired results you want, you can even proceed to build your help desk-based internal app via SDKs. Your choices are truly unlimited with Zoho Desk.

Multiple languages

Zoho Desk allows you to set up help articles in several languages to ensure your customers receive help in their languages.

Insights and reports

The software provides you with detailed insights and reports to enable your team to improve performance. It features standard metrics in your dashboard to help you track and improve your service.

Besides the standard reports that the system sends, you can customize the reports you get by defining custom data such as the average number of tickets closed daily, average resolution time, and more.

Manage service-level agreements and contracts

This help desk software assigns an appropriate resolution time for customer tickets when they are created. It does this based on set parameters and business hours.

If the parameters are missed for any reason, the software automatically escalates them. Before any contracts or service level agreements expire, you will be notified.

Customizability and flexibility

You determine the look and feel of your help desk. It allows you to customize staff roles and profiles, contacts, business hours and other parameters, email templates working tabs, web forms, help folders, accounts departments, catalogs, workflow rules, and more.

Team collaboration

Team collaboration is an essential feature of help desk software, and Zoho Desk has it. It allows agents to tag colleagues, comment within tickets, post-announcement in Team Feed, or chat with one another in real time irrespective of where they are.

Zoho Desk login

To log in to your Zoho account, navigate to https://www.zoho.com/login.html, and click the Sign In button. Enter the email address that you opened the account with or the mobile number associated with the account. Click on next to enter your password, and you’ll be redirected to your dashboard if successful.

Alternatively, you can sign in with your LinkedIn, Microsoft, Facebook, or Google accounts.

Zoho Desk API

Sometimes you might want to integrate a third-party application or another Zoho application; this is possible. Zoho provides the Zoho Desk APIs so that integrations can be done following RESTful principles. With their APIs, you can programmatically access and edit data in the Zoho Desk modules. As earlier stated, they also provide SDKs for developers. All these make integration of other applications and even developing custom Zoho Desk applications possible.

Zoho Desk pricing

Zoho Desk offers the software for free for up to 3 agents. Besides the free plan, it has three other plans. They are Standard, Professional, and Enterprise. Billed annually, the prices for these plans are $14, $23, and $40 per agent per month, respectively. You will need to visit their website to see the full list of features contained in each plan.

How can a customer send in a ticket on the Zoho Desk

If you currently use or are considering Zoho Desk for your customer support system, you might want to be aware of all the different ways your customers can send in a ticket.

To begin with: a ticket is a support request a customer submits. It can be about a problem they are facing using your products or website or a feature request. Sometimes, you might even get a thank you message.

These tickets consist of the conversation and other properties such as the category, status, and more. On Zoho Desk, your customers can send in a ticket by,

• Fill out a support contact form placed on your website.
• Posting on your community forum.
• Sending you a tweet.
• Pinging you through a live chat widget.
• Sending an email to your help desk-monitored support mailbox.
• Posting on your Facebook page.
• Submitting a ticket from your customer-facing web interface.
• Calling you on your customer service telephone number.

Each of these avenues for submitting a support request is called a channel on Zoho. You can determine which ones you want to use. Whichever ones you use, when the request is submitted using those channels, it will instantly become a ticket in the Zoho Desk.

Zoho Desk Vs. Zendesk

There are many customer support systems in the market.

If you are shopping for one to replace the current one you use or start your business with, you must check out different ones before deciding.

As with most things in life, you should start by determining your needs, goals, and objectives before looking for a system. This way, when you find a good fit, deciding will be straightforward.

While we believe Zoho Desk is a good fit for all forms and sizes of businesses, irrespective of your vertical, we also know that there are other incredible solutions out there.

One of them is Zendesk. So, we will compare both of them so that you can make an informed decision if you have to choose between both.

Here’s how Zoho and Zendesk compare.

	ZOHO	ZENDESK
Alerts / Escalation	Present	Present
Call Center Management	Present	Present
Queue Management	Present	Present
Live Chat	Present	Present
Self Service Portal	Present	Present
Performance Metrics	Present	Present
Social Media Integration	Present	Present
Virtual Assistant	Present	Present
Appointment Management	Present	Present
Email Management	Present	Absent
Knowledge Base	Present	Present
Workflow Management	Present	Present
Surveys & Feedback	Present	Present
Feature Set	It has many features but is comparatively not as feature-rich as Zendesk.	It has more features than Zoho, but most of those features are available in the enterprise plan, which is expensive, making it a more expensive option.
Pricing	Free for 3 agents and comparatively cheap virtual assistant. The Enterprise plan is $35.	Prices start at $5 per agent, but the cost quickly escalates as you add more agents. The enterprise plan is $99.9 per agent (approximately three times Zoho)
Company Sized Most Suited For	Most suited to SMBs but also offer enterprise plans. Before you conclude it’s only for SMBs, large businesses, including Intel and Sears, use Zoho too.	Suited for every size of business, though SMBs might find it very expensive given that most of the features they might need are in the enterprise plan, and cost quickly escalates as you add more agents.

Zoho Desk how to delete agent

Zoho Desk makes it possible to delete agents.

You might want to delete an agent because he/she has left your organization, moved to a different department, and won’t be coming back to customer support, or any other reason.

The platform also allows you to ‘Deactivate’ an agent in cases where they might return later to continue working in support, instead of deleting the agent. Deleting an agent permanently removes them and deletes all their records.

To delete an agent,

• Go to the top bar and click on the Setup icon.
• Go to ‘Users and Control’ and then to ‘Agent’ on the Setup Landing page.
• Find the Delete icon corresponding to the agent. To do this, you’d have to hover your mouse on the corresponding agent’s details.
• Click ‘Delete Agent’ on the screen that appears next.
• If the agent were assigned activities or open tickets, you would need to take the following steps to reassign those tickets or activities.
  • Specify the agent you want to take over the activities or tickets using the drop boxes.
  • Do this for each department the agent belonged to if necessary.
  • Click on ‘Delete’
• The last step in this deletion process is to click on the ‘Yes, I understand. Delete Now’ button that appears to confirm the deletion. Once completed, the agent will be moved to the ‘Deleted Agents’ tab.

You should note that once you delete an agent, you cannot restore him or her back.

Takeaways

Zoho Desk is an affordable and feature-rich customer support software that is good for all kinds of businesses. Although it is more suited to small and mid-sized companies, large companies, including Intel, use it for their customer service.

It has all the features that a comprehensive help desk application should have. It even has some features, including AI detection of anomalies that other costlier software does not have.

It offers its help desk for free to businesses beginning with up to 3 agents. If you need to have more agents than that, you will have to choose one of its other three paid plans.

Overall, it is an excellent customer support software and a leading choice in the industry. It is safe to say that you can opt for Zoho Desk if you are in the market for a help desk solution. It has a 15-day free trial with no contract that you can use to test or get started.