Zoho Launches Blended Conversations for Zoho Desk, Delivering Highly Contextual and Conversational Customer Service Experiences

Unifies Human-Driven and Bot-Powered Customer Service Capabilities for Exceptional Omnichannel Support and Better Informed Agent Interactions

Austin, TX - December 15, 2022 — Zoho Corporation , a leading global technology company, today launched new tools for Zoho Desk , the anchor application in the company's customer service platform, to help customer service teams evolve with the changing needs of customers and meet heightened business expectations. Zoho Desk, which has achieved 45% year-over-year revenue growth for the past five years, now serves more than 100K businesses globally. New capabilities include Blended Conversations, a seamless combination of human-driven and bot-powered conversational service experiences, as well as several refinements to the user interface. These developments enable customer service agents to improve engagement and deliver higher-value customer experiences, removing the guesswork for agents and drastically minimizing friction that often results in bad customer experiences.

"During these challenging economic times, the best companies are doubling down on customer retention while simultaneously trying to do more with less," said Mani Vembu, Chief Operating Officer, Zoho. "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."

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 Zoho CRM Plus , for example.

In addition to Blended Conversations, Zoho also announced a technological overhaul of the user interface to make it simpler, faster, and more accessible to users with a wide spectrum of different needs -- the company's biggest steps towards improving digital accessibility to date. Updates include options to support: cognitive and dyslexia challenges; visual impairments including astigmatism; animation reduction for those with seizure disorders; customization capabilities for color-blindness.

Zoho continues to build a system of experiences that focuses on every aspect of the customer journey, giving every stakeholder greater ability to add value to CX, from planning and creating diverse customer experiences to delivering and evolving them for the future. Zoho's CX offerings help organizations of all sizes enable employee productivity, improve stakeholder collaboration, and increase customer success. Specifically, Zoho Desk's integrated omnichannel approach supports entire service teams to connect with customers and with one another. On the business side, it enables high-quality consistency and reliability. Customers, in turn, have better overall end-to-end experiences with the brand, which ultimately drives loyalty and trust.

“CX is too often boiled down into big campaigns or journeys, when in reality the most impactful moments of experience happen when a customer’s expectations are met in a micro-moment of need,” noted Liz Miller, VP and Principal Analyst with Constellation Research. “Zoho’s Blended Conversations empowers agents to exceed expectations by putting powerful tools from contextual customer data to meaningful ML tools to assist in offloading mundane processes at an agent’s fingertips. It does what so many organizations are working towards today: providing an exceptional employee experience so that their people can deliver exceptional experiences to customers.”

"As we're seeing a rise in engagement via a variety of channels, it's important that we can lean on Zoho Desk to help our agents connect the dots and meet customers on whatever form of communication they prefer," said Kyle Kurdle, Global Vice President, Service Delivery at Shiji Group, a modern technology stack provider for hospitality brands. "The recent Zoho Desk update, including its impressive and intuitive UI, enables our agents to quickly and accurately address questions or concerns to minimize any operational disruption for our brand customers. This means providing 24/7/365, multi-language assistance—and the potential upside of Blended Conversations is high."

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Pricing

Zoho Desk starts at $14/user/month (billed annually) for the Standard Edition and goes up to $40/user/month (billed annually) for the Enterprise Edition. A new pricing tier called the Express Edition priced at $7/user/month (billed annually) is also available, to help startups and small businesses leapfrog into a customer service platform instead of using spreadsheets and email clients to serve customers.

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About Zoho

With 55+ apps in nearly every major business category, Zoho Corporation is one of the world's most prolific technology companies. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, with international headquarters in Chennai, India, Zoho is privately held and profitable with more than 12,000 employees. For more information, please visit: www.zoho.com/

Media Contacts:

Sandra Lo
slo@zohocorp.com

Carol Tong
carol.t@zohocorp.com