Zoho launches Blended Conversations

Zoho Desk, the anchor application in Zoho’s customer service platform, has been given an upgrade to help customer service teams evolve with changing needs and heightened business expectations.

Zoho Corporation this week launched a range of new tools for Zoho Desk, led by Blended Conversations — a combination of human-driven and bot-powered conversational service experiences. Other refinements to the user interface are aimed at making it simpler, faster, and more accessible to users with a wide spectrum of needs.

The additions enable customer service agents to improve engagement and deliver higher-value customer experiences (CX). Zoho Desk also includes integration with Goldtel PBX, enabling South African businesses to call their customers directly from the product interface, get contextual information about the customer they are calling, and gather analytics.

“”During these challenging economic times, the best companies are doubling down on customer retention while simultaneously trying to do more with less,” says Andrew Bourne, regional manager of Zoho Africa. “Great service experiences address this by forming the bedrock of sustainability through economic downturns. Blended Conversations in Zoho Desk addresses exactly this outcome by cleverly combining human and bot agents while also reducing friction, frustration, and costs-to-serve.”

To help small and micro businesses transform their customer service operations by empowering them with an easy, and value-rich helpdesk solution at an affordable price point, Zoho Desk has launched an Express Edition.

Blended Conversations for Zoho Desk allows customer service agents to deliver the best experience in the moment by delegating the majority of manual and transactional tasks to bots, while remaining in control of the overall service experience. With fast and easy deployment that does not require external help, Zoho Desk allows brands to scale their conversational service experiences through higher agent productivity without compromising on the quality of CX.

This experience is a culmination of Zoho’s Instant Messaging (IM) Framework and Guided Conversations, a low-code builder for self-service experiences. The IM Framework allows organizations to integrate any messaging service they use with Zoho Desk, and comes pre-integrated with services like WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, WeChat, Messenger, and Instagram.

Guided Conversations for Zoho Desk allows business users to build powerful self-service flows that are useful throughout the customer journey, and help customers quickly and securely manage their relationship with the organization. It offers service teams tighter collaboration and integration with other Zoho marketing apps at no extra cost, including Zoho’s CX Platform and Zoho CRM Plus, for example.

Zoho also announced a technological overhaul of the user interface to include options to support: cognitive and dyslexia challenges; visual impairments including astigmatism; animation reduction for those with seizure disorders; customization capabilities for colour-blindness. This is the company’s biggest step towards improving digital accessibility to date.

Pricing

Zoho Desk starts at ZAR180 per user per month, billed annually, for the Standard Edition. It goes up to ZAR525 user/month for the Enterprise Edition. A new tier, the Express Edition, is priced at ZAR105 user/month, for startups and small businesses.