8 reasons why you need to use Zoho Desk for customer support

Offering customer support is a core part of almost every business. A customer will always get back to you when they have a problem with your service or product. Non-responsiveness from you will only do you more harm if you cannot satisfy their query on time. 

But if you are a business that has dealt with a lot of customers, it can also be quite overwhelming to keep track of all the post-project support. Whether you are small, medium or an enterprise sized business, you need dedicated people to support your customers in a timely manner. 

This is where Zoho Desk becomes useful. Zoho Desk is a modern and efficient platform that will help you automate and track your customer service requirements. It has a clean UI and you don’t need to be technically savvy in order to use the platform. You can also use the chat platform Zoho Cliq to communicate with your team instantly when dealing with tickets.

Here are 8 reasons you should use Zoho Desk as your go-to platform for your customer service needs. 

1. Get automatically notified about tickets

You can set up Zoho Desk in such a way that when a customer sends an email to a specific email address (example: [email protected]), it will automatically be captured as a ticket in Zoho Desk. When this is set up, any email that goes to that address will also notify you or other users in the organization so that action can be immediately taken.

Not only that, but you can also get automatically notified if a customer replies to you or re-opens the ticket. You are always notified and kept on the loop whenever these messages occur, so you won’t lose track unless you are actively avoiding your phone or email.

2. Comment privately or reply to customers in the same interface

In the Zoho Desk ticketing interface, you can directly reply to your customers and view their email chain. This way, you don’t have to give your support staff access to your support email inbox directly. They can reply to customers from the support email ID as long as it is linked in Zoho Desk. 

Zoho Desk also offers a “Comment Privately” feature, where you can communicate with your staff internally about the specific ticket. These comments cannot be seen by your customer. So the ticketing interface is a great way to both reply to your customers as well as discuss issues internally all in one place.

3. Set SLAs and track Agent availability

If you are familiar with customer service, you’ll know that Service Level Agreements (or SLAs) are a key concept. You can set the specific turn around time that you require support tickets to be replied to, followed up or closed. In the event that the SLA is not met, you will also be notified about the same and the ticket will have a red highlight.

Agents can also set their availability in the top right corner of Zoho Desk. That way, you will know which Agent is available at the desk to take care of the support tickets. In the ticketing interface, there is also a feature which detects “agent collision”. When two or more agents have the same tickets opened and are viewing them at the same time.

4. Create Modules

Zoho Desk allows you to separate different customer data into “Modules”. For example, you may have different individuals who send you support tickets or who were your customers in a project. These individuals are often in the “Contacts” module. 

Now, these “Contacts” may be affiliated with a company who you have billed. So these Contacts would be associated with an “Account”. “Accounts” is typically the module.

5. Create Custom Reports

You can also find out a summary of your tickets and detailed reports on the metrics for your tickets. Reports can be viewed as a summary, in tabular form or in a matrix. You will need to configure and customise your report before you can view it.

Choose a module, then choose the different columns from the module you would like to see in the report. You can group your columns as you wish and you can also choose to display a mathematical value such as a sum or an average.

For example, if you want to see how many tickets were closed by your agents, you simply need to choose the agent’s name or email, the status (which is “closed”) and you can set a sum of all the numbers. There are different customizations you can achieve but reports simply boil down to – report types, columns, columns total (arithmetic calculations) and criteria for the report.

6. Integrate Zoho Desk with other Zoho apps or third-party apps

If you use other Zoho applications such as Zoho CRM or Zoho Projects, there are some built-in integrations that you can utilize for Zoho Desk. You can import your contacts into Zoho Desk or you can issue bug tracking from a Zoho Desk ticket in Zoho Projects. There are also other Zoho applications which integrate with Zoho Desk.

But it’s not just Zoho applications you can integrate. It is also possible to issue third-party applications. You can integrate Slack, GoToMeeting, Zoom, YouTube and many other applications should you require them. A full list of the third-party applications can be found in Zoho Desk Marketplace.

7. Create a Knowledge Base

Finally, Zoho Desk offers you the option of creating a public or private Knowledge Base. A Knowledge Base acts as a set of documents or instructions that can provide useful information, general guidelines, answer FAQs and more.

The point of a Knowledge Base is to create articles and references so that you, your team or your customers can use them as a reference point. Documentation goes a long way and it can prevent you from answering many of the same questions. 

You’ll have to create and organize your Knowledge Base articles into Categories, Sections and Sub Sections when you are done. This will make it easier for your team or your customers to navigate through articles and find exactly what they are looking for.

8. Automate your tasks with Blueprints and Workflows

Blueprints help with refining your process workflows by segregating them into different stages (or transitions as they are called in Zoho Desk). With each transition/stage, you can prompt your agents to attach documents, fill in some details or automatically schedule an email or a task. It also helps you see which ticket is in which stage.

You can also assign Workflows in Zoho Desk. This will allow you to automatically assign tickets to specific agents or send automatic emails or update a process automatically. This can help you save time and cuts out manual labour. Every ticket may not be the same and maybe automation won’t always help. You can also use macros for dynamic levels of automation in your Zoho Desk.

How SyncEzy uses Zoho Desk

Here at SyncEzy, we have a dedicated support email: [email protected]. Customers who write to this email will immediately have a ticket logged for them on our Zoho Desk platform. 

The tickets are automatically assigned to one or two dedicated support staff. From there on, they will review the ticket and assign it to the respective staff member who can resolve the issue. Items with their status in red mean that they are past the due date of resolution. 

We discuss tickets internally to come up with the best resolution for our customers. Once we have done so, we take the necessary actions for resolution and reply to the customer via the Zoho Desk interface.

Conclusion

Zoho Desk is quite a robust platform. As you have seen in the previous points, Zoho Desk makes it easy for you and your team to stay on top of your customer service needs. You can discuss tickets and reply to customers on one screen, you can share commonly asked questions and answers in the form of articles and integrate third-party applications. 

Zoho Desk is also available on mobile and tablet, so you can always stay connected to ensure you stay on top of your tickets. Zoho Desk allows for quite a bit of flexibility on how you would like to run your customer service operation. We recommend you give the platform a try and see if it suits your organization well. 

If you need any help, please feel free to contact SyncEzy for assistance, integrations, setup and more.