Online productivity and collaboration application developer Zoho
announced the availability of Zoho Support, its Web-based help desk
application. Zoho Support helps companies provide support to their
customers by integrating complementary services such as Zoho CRM and
Zoho Chat and includes multiple modules to manage support requests,
customer information, knowledge bases and contracts.
For enterprises and large support organizations, Zoho Support offers
paid plans starting at $12 per month per agent. Zoho Support also
offers unlimited user plans for smaller companies that process up to
200 tickets per day. In addition, Zoho Support offers a free plan.
Features include a requests tab, which helps technicians prioritize the
support requests coming in from customers. There are multiple ways
support requests are created—through manual entry or e-mail accounts,
from Websites or through self-service portals. There are also multiple
ways in which a support request can be viewed using this tab. For
example, a support manager can view requests by those that are unread,
overdue or need to be addressed immediately. The requests module also
helps organizations triage these support requests so they can be routed
to the appropriate team for resolution.
Accounts and contacts provide a view into the support operation from a
customer perspective, and organizations can define, track and enforce
specific SLAs (service level agreements) they may have agreed to with
their customers. Reports and dashboards provide a quick view into what
a support organization is doing, while the task module provides a
simplified view into what a support rep needs to do—either external
activities (for example, responding to a customer with a particular solution or
diagnosis) or an internal one (for example, research or trying a new approach).
“Zoho Support is a natural extension of our business application
portfolio,” said Raju Vegesna, Zoho evangelist. “Companies have been
using Zoho CRM to help sell their products and services for years. Now,
Zoho Support provides a way for them to support their customers after
the sale. Zoho Support further extends our broad suite of applications
for small and medium businesses.”
In addition, the solutions module allows support reps to create and
publish (either internally or externally) solutions to the most common
customer problems. When a solution is published externally, it is
automatically available in the customer portal so that customers are
able to find it. Adam Shapiro, vice president of operations and
co-founder of ThinkFlood, said Zoho Support is “a very intuitive
application that has allowed our technical support representatives to
answer and react to our customers in a timely manner.”
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