Zoho Desk Expert Review, Pricing, Alternatives - 2023

Zoho Desk is a comprehensive customer support software that assists companies in setting up an organized help center. It helps you build and maintain a deep knowledge base with everything a support team needs to do business.

Zoho Desk is famous for its SEO-friendly multi-brand help center and knowledge base with multiple language support. In addition, the platform provides several customizable templates to make help centers look like natural extensions of company websites. Zoho Desk also offers built-in reports and integrates with Google Analytics to help businesses track customer interaction with their knowledge bases.

Customers can submit tickets directly from within the knowledge management system. When agents receive these tickets, they can use Zoho Desk’s auto-suggest feature to pull up relevant articles from the knowledge base based on the tickets’ keywords, thereby speeding up the process.

Other features and workflows include ticket management, assignment, categorization, prioritization, escalation, and more. The knowledge base permits ticket deflection through self-service. Zoho Desk can also handle customer interaction via phone, live chat, email, texting, and even social media. 

Another recent cool feature is that agents can pick up a ticket based on previous familiarity with a customer. The platform has also grown to include dashboards to track quality metrics. These include KPIs such as customer satisfaction and overall team performance.

One common issue that users complain about Zoho Desk is the complexity of its user interface. It has a steeper learning curve than most KMSs. Some of the more advanced features are also locked behind higher price tiers, such as the multi-brand help center. Between that and their extensive feature list, it’s not far-fetched to say that those looking for a simpler tool might not find their ideal solution in Zoho Desk.

Zoho Desk has thousands of customers and many enterprise-level clients. The most notable include McAfee, Daimler, LycaMobile, and Rogers.

• Multi-brand help center: Set up different knowledge base articles for each brand you support and completely customize your help center for each one.
• Domain mapping: Make your help center an extension of your brand by mapping it to your own domain.
• Ticket management: Use support ticketing systems for internal and external end-users through email, Twitter, and chat.
• Reports: Generate reports that focus on key performance indicators and metrics vital to the business.

Zoho Desk also includes features such as:

• Portal customization
• Secure access
• Forums and communities
• SEO-friendly layouts
• Help center reporting
• Omnichannel support
• SLA management
• Canned responses
• Ticket history
• Customer profiles
• Intelligent ticket routing
• Workflow customization
• Automatic notifications
• Chatbot & help widget
• Customer feedback collection
• Custom reports
• User permissions
• Knowledge management
• Time tracking
• Mobile access

With Zoho Desk, you can extend the capabilities of your help desk with a number of add-ons and integrations. For example, you may set up telephony, connect your help desk to SMS alerts, maintain your contacts, and more with these integrations.

Naturally, Zoho Desk also integrates seamlessly with other solutions within the Zoho family such as Zoho CRM. They also offer a complete marketplace for free and paid integrations, including Twilio, Jira, Slack, Salesforce, Trello, Microsoft Teams, Intercom, MailChimp, Pipedrive, HubSpot, Asana, and more. Further integrations can be made through Zapier and Zoho Desk APIs.

Zoho Desk offers four pricing plans:

• The Free version is available for three agents, with features that include email ticketing, customer management, help center, private knowledge base, predefined SLAs, macros, multi-language help desk, mobile apps, and 24x5 email support.
• The Standard bundle ($14/user/month) includes everything on the Free bundle, plus social and community channels, product-based ticket management, help center themes gallery, public knowledge base, SLAs & escalations, customer happiness ratings, 24x5 phone support, and more.
• The Professional bundle ($23/user/month) includes everything on the Standard bundle, plus multi-department ticketing, team management, telephony, automatic time tracking, round-robin ticket assignment, ticket templates, ticket sharing, and more. This is Zoho Desk’s most popular plan. 
• The Enterprise bundle ($40/user/month) includes everything on the Professional bundle, plus live chat, an AI-powered assistant, help center customization, multi-brand help center, advanced process management, global reports & dashboards, and more.

It is worth noting that  Zoho Enterprise is on par with most top-tier plans by other providers in terms of features and goes for a significantly low price. Also, you can try any plan for free for 15 days.

Zoho Desk is a good fit for companies of all sizes looking for a comprehensive yet affordable customer support solution. Customer service-centric teams can take advantage of the integrated ticketing system, together with companies looking for a more cost-friendly knowledge management solution. If your organization uses other Zoho products, this should be an easy addition.

Zoho Desk is cloud based, which makes it easy to implement. To get started, head to Zoho Desk’s page and click the GET STARTED button at the top right hand corner. This will take you to a page where you can create a trial account to test the platform’s features and offerings.

After that, you’d take the following steps to fully implement the tool: 

• Organize: Create departments within Zoho Desk. Here, you can set up assigned agents, separate mailboxes, workflows, and automation rules.
• Set up email: This would be the channel through which your help desk will receive tickets from customers.
• Onboard: Invite your agents, grant access to specific modules, and set user controls and permissions.
• See the first ticket: Zoho Desk provides a sample ticket to let users get familiarized with the process.
• Start ticketing: Do a pilot operation of making and replying to tickets to ensure that things are set up correctly.‍
• Measure customer satisfaction: Ask for feedback and analyze the results to determine which areas need improvement.

All Zoho Desk bundles offer 24x5 customer support. Email support is available for all plans, including the free version, while phone support is provided for paid plans only. Chat support is offered for Professional and Enterprise plans. They also provide an extensive knowledge base and documentation, together with a Community forum.

Zoho Desk also offers paid support plans for assured responses within one hour and onboarding assistance.

The Zoho story goes back to 1996, with the founding of AdventNet Inc. Back then, the company made a network management tool that was popular internationally, but mainly in the Japanese market. Then, in 2001, they launched Zoho CRM, which quickly became one of their best-selling apps. 

Then, in 2005, the company caught up with the times and started offering cloud-based applications. They began with the Writer app, then Show (a presentation tool), Creator (custom application builder), and Zoho Sheets. It wasn’t long until they realized that there could be a Zoho tool for just about every kind of business app. If you’re curious, the Zoho ‘about page’ actually has an interactive timeline where you can see the evolution of the company year to year. Nowadays, Zoho has over 75 million users worldwide, several offices across the globe, and more than 50 products for marketing, finance, customer and tech support, team collaboration, and of course, HR and recruitment.