Zoho introduces Blended Conversations to boost support for growing customers

Onome Amuge

Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company,  has created 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 per cent year-over-year revenue growth for the past five years in Nigeria and globally, currently serves over 100 thousand businesses around the world.The platform has also witnessed a phenomenal adoption across the MEA region, achieving 580 per cent CAGR over the past five years.

New capabilities in Zoho Desk include Blended Conversations,a seamless combination of human-driven and bot-powered conversational service experiences,as well as several refinements to the user interface to make it simpler, faster, and more accessible to users with a wide spectrum of different needs. These additions enable customer service agents to improve engagement and deliver higher-value customer experiences (CX).  An express edition was also launched 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.

Blended Conversations for Zoho Desk enable customer service agents to deliver the best experience by delegating the majority of manual and transactional tasks to bots, while remaining in control of the overall service experience.

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 organisations to integrate any messaging service they use with Zoho Desk, and comes pre-integrated with services like WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, WeChat, Messenger, and Instagram.

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 considered the company’s biggest step towards improving digital accessibility to date.

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.

Commenting on the development, Hyther Nizam, President MEA, Zoho Corp, noted that the best companies are doubling down on customer retention while simultaneously trying to do more with less during  challenging economic times.

“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,” he added.