Zoho launches Blended Conversations – Gadget
Zoho Desk, the anchor application in Zoho’s customer service platform, has received an upgrade to help customer service teams evolve with changing needs and increased business expectations.
Zoho Corporation this week launched a series of new tools for Zoho Desk, led by Blended Conversations – a combination of human-powered and bot-powered conversational service experiences. Other refinements to the user interface aim to make 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 (CX) customer experiences. Zoho Desk also includes integration with Goldtel PBX, which enables South African businesses to call their customers directly from the product interface, get contextual information about the customer they are calling, and collect analytics.
“During these challenging economic times, the best companies are doubling down on customer retention while simultaneously trying to do more with less,” said Andrew Bourne, regional manager of Zoho Africa. “Great service experiences address this by forming the basis of sustainability through economic downturns. Blended Conversations in Zoho Desk addresses exactly this outcome by smartly combining human and bot agents while also reducing friction, frustration and cost to serve.
To help small and micro businesses transform their customer service operations by empowering them with an easy and value-rich help desk solution at an affordable price point, Zoho Desk has launched an Express Edition.
Blended Conversations for Zoho Desk enables 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 quick and easy deployment that doesn’t require external help, Zoho Desk allows brands to scale their conversational service experiences through higher agent productivity without compromising 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 enables organizations to integrate any messaging service they use with Zoho Desk, and is pre-integrated with services such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, WeChat, Messenger and Instagram.
Guided Conversations for Zoho Desk enables business users to build powerful self-service flows that are useful throughout the customer journey, helping customers manage their relationship with the organization quickly and securely. It offers service teams tighter collaboration and integration with other Zoho marketing applications 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 dyslexic challenges; visual impairments including astigmatism; animation reduction for those with seizure disorders; adaptive abilities for color blindness. This is the company’s biggest step towards improving digital accessibility to date.
Prices
Zoho Desk starts at ZAR180 per user per month, billed annually, for the Standard Edition. This 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.
