Zoho unveils Blended Conversations and new user Interface for Customer Service Platform Zoho Desk

-  Zoho Desk's new version offers one-of-a-kind Blended Conversations feature, combining human-driven conversation and machine-intelligence conversational services.

- New user interface offers greater accessibility for users with cognitive and dyslexia challenges; visual impairments, seizure disorders and color-blindness.

Dubai, United Arab Emirates- December 15, 2022 — Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, today launched an updated version of 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.

Supporting Arabic language, the new version includes 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 minimising friction that often results in bad customer experiences. 

Zoho Desk witnessed an overall 579 percent growth in the MEA region over the past five years, with UAE among top fastest-growing markets in the region recording more than 36 percent CAGR since 2021. 

'The best companies are doubling down on customer retention during
challenging economic times by offering great service experiences,' said Hyther Nizam, President, Zoho MEA. 'However, brands trying to scale their customer service through conversational channels face challenges like complexity in bot design and integration, inability of bots and humans to serve the customer in parallel, and switching across channels. All of those result in frustration, which leads to poor
customer experiences, and strained relationships. A smooth
conversational experience for customers requires human agents and bot agents to work in tandem to bring the best of both to the customer's experience. Blended Conversations in Zoho Desk addresses exactly this challenge by cleverly combining human and bot agents while also reducing 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 an automated, fast  and easy deployment, 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 organisations to integrate any messaging service they use with Zoho Desk, and comes pre-loaded 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 organisation. It offers service teams tighter collaboration and integration with other Zoho marketing apps at no extra cost, including Zoho's CX Platform. 

In addition to Blended Conversations, Zoho unveiled an 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.

Zoho Desk starts at AED51/user/month (billed annually) for the Enterprise Edition. A new pricing tier called the Express Edition priced at AED 26/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.