Zoho is an impressive company all around—the startup’s web-based productivity competes directly with Microsoft and Google, but has never taken any outside funding. And Zoho now has 25 different productivity apps, with 3.5 million users actively using Zoho’s apps daily. Today, we can add one more to the mix with the launch of Zoho Support, a web-based help desk software.
Zoho Support aims to help businesses manage and respond to customer support inquiries logged via the phone, email or through a website. Similar to Zendesk, Zoho Support allows IT staff and technicians to prioritize customer tickets, find the appropriate response and get back to the customer as soon as possible.
The requests tab helps technicians prioritize the support requests that are coming in from customers, allowing staff to assign different tasks, mark tasks as completed or not completed, and create an order of tasks to complete. The requests module also helps organizations triage these support requests so they can be quickly routed to the appropriate team.
An accounts and contacts module allows organizations to define, track and enforce specific service level agreements they may have agreed to with their customers. For example, two support requests that appear to be similar could have a different priority depending on the agreement hat was promised to each individual customer.
Via a dashboard and reports tab, Zoho Support will show organizations what products are getting the most requests, which problems are taking place most often, who has the slowest response time and more. The task module gives reps the ability track and schedule activities, from getting back to a customer or internal research on an issue.
One useful feature of Zoho Support is the ability to create a solutions data base, which is a wiki-like destination where reps can create and publish solutions to customer support problems. The database is searchable as well.
The advantage of using any of Zoho’s apps, is that it integrated with its other apps seamlessly. Zoho Support is integrated with Zoho CRM and Zoho Chat. Zoho Support, which is available through a freemium model, offers a free plan, and other plans starting at $12 per month per agent (based on the number of tickets created per day.
Zoho’s evangelist Raju Vegesna tells me that the company will also plan to create a Google App in the Apps Marketplace for Zoho Support. The startup already offers a number of apps in the marketplace, including Zoho CRM and Invoice.
