Narrative 4: Exploring the support channels

Narrative 4: Exploring the support channels

Behind the scenes of a successful ticketing system - BTS Series

Narrative 4 - Exploring the support channels

Support channels in a ticketing system refer to the various communication methods that customers use to contact a business for assistance. These channels enable the conversion of customer inquiries into trackable tickets, facilitating the efficient management and resolution of issues.


Importance of support channels

This type of system enhances customer satisfaction by providing users with multiple options for reporting issues and seeking assistance, which improves their overall experience. Next, offering multiple channels, including email, chat, and phone, allows customers to choose their preferred method of communication. 

A ticketing system centralizes communication across all of these channels to maximize efficiency and make relevant information easily accessible to support staff during interactions. All of this helps speed up the resolution process.

Email

Emails are the primary method of communication between customers and Zoho Desk when they submit tickets. When customers send emails, those messages turn into tickets. Each ticket is assigned a unique ID to boost tracking and management. To set this up, forward the emails from your support mailbox directly to Zoho Desk. 


Create a support email address

(e.g., support@yourcompany.zohodesk.com)

Share it with customers in your help desk to enable them to submit tickets.

Quote
Before setting up your email channel, it’s essential to understand email delivery and bounce rates. These factors significantly impact the effectiveness of your support processes. 

Phone

The Phone feature connects the PBX system to Zoho Desk, which contains all the essential customer details. With this feature, Zoho Desk provides a platform to manage incoming and outgoing calls on your computer.
QuoteQuote
 When customers call, you can see the following details on your screen: 
  •  Name 
  •  Phone number 
  •  Overall Happiness Score 

Chat

Enhance your customer engagement by enabling Live Chat to connect with your customers conveniently in real-time. Respond to support inquiries promptly, significantly enhancing your turnaround time. Delight your customers with prompt interactions and exceptional service every single day.

The Chat module in Zoho Desk serves as a central hub, enabling support agents to interact seamlessly with visitors while maintaining access to historical conversations with customers. This comprehensive overview not only facilitates real-time engagement but also enhances the agents' ability to draw insights from past interactions, ultimately leading to more effective and informed resolutions to customer inquiries.

The Chat module

My Chat: Displays the agent's active, missed, and closed.

Chats: A list view of all the chats sorted by status (active, closed, missed, reopened, and monitored)

Help Center

The Help Center is the only self-service channel. It is a customer panel that allows users to learn about and understand the product by accessing knowledge base articles.

This offers a platform for self-help and learning where customers can find answers to their questions by browsing FAQ guides and Community forums, raising tickets, viewing other users' tickets with similar issues, and more.

Instant Messaging

Instant messaging facilitates quick and direct communication. This immediacy not only streamlines conversations but also makes it easier to respond promptly to questions and ideas. The convenience of instant messaging has revolutionized how we interact by enabling seamless discussions.

How does IM work in Zoho Desk?

The instant messaging module connects your business with different messaging platforms. When a customer sends a message on any of the integrated channels, it appears in your IM inbox. Zoho Desk automatically creates or updates a ticket based on your ticket thread settings. This allows agents to respond quickly through a single interface. They can easily attach files, use predefined responses, and get AI-driven suggestions to improve communication.

You can also set up automation rules, deploy chatbots, and implement routing logic to manage messages more effectively. This method not only simplifies processes but also increases customer satisfaction by enabling quick and effective responses.

Supported Platforms

WhatsApp Business

Facebook Messenger

Telegram

LINE

WeChat

Instagram

Business Messaging (Native Live Chat)

Social

Platforms like Facebook, X, and Instagram enable customers to seek support easily, with interactions captured as tickets within your system. This integration streamlines the support process, allowing the agents to manage and respond to inquiries from social media channels alongside traditional methods. By automatically converting these interactions into tickets, businesses can establish a consistent response framework, efficiently track customer concerns, and maintain a comprehensive overview of customer engagements across various platforms.

Utilizing Social for customer support not only enhances responsiveness but also broadens the reach of customer service, allowing businesses to connect with customers where they are most active. This holistic approach to ticket management helps improve overall customer satisfaction and loyalty, as customers feel heard and supported, no matter the medium they choose for assistance.

Web Forms

Web Forms make it easy to capture support tickets straight from your website and import them into your Zoho Desk account. These tickets can come from customers who need help or want to share feedback about your product or service. No matter the reason, Web Forms are straightforward to use.


There are two types of Web Forms in Zoho Desk:

  • Feedback Widget: This is a simple option that you can easily embed on your website. It allows customers to share their thoughts or concerns with minimal effort.
  • Advanced Web Forms: These offer more customization and can gather detailed information from customers. You can adjust them to meet specific needs and ensure you have all the necessary information to address customer inquiries effectively.

Community

The Community support channel offers individuals a platform to collaborate and discuss shared interests. Customers can pose questions, seek assistance, share tips, respond to inquiries from others, or start discussions. Agents, too, can address customer queries, provide solutions, and collaborate with users to brainstorm ideas and solutions.

Due to its extensive reach, the Community also serves as an adequate space for making announcements regarding product launches and beta feature access. Organizations can effortlessly collect suggestions from customers when required. Ultimately, these proactive strategies can help improve outreach and elevate the overall customer service experience.

Now boost customer service efficiency.

  • Customers can conveniently choose their preferred method of communication, such as email, chat, phone, or social, making support more accessible and user-friendly. 
  • Aligning the type of support request with the most appropriate channel speeds up resolutions. 
  • A variety of channels allows support teams to balance their workload more effectively. 
  • When appropriately managed, multichannel support ensures customers enjoy a cohesive and consistent experienceacross all platforms. 
  • As your business grows, multichannel approaches scale easily, allowing you to serve more customers simultaneously.
  • Prompt, multichannel assistance demonstrates care and reliability, which fosters trust, satisfaction, and ultimately leads to customer loyalty.

Conclusion

Managing support channels in a unified platform is essential because centralizing interactions allows agents to access customer history quickly, respond efficiently, and maintain high-quality service. Providing multiple support channels enhances efficiency and makes support more accessible to meet the needs of each customer.


Please stay tuned for more Desk behind-the-scenes series.

 

Regards,

 

Kavya Rao

The Zoho Desk Team

    • Recent Topics

    • Generate leads from instagram

      hello i have question. If connect instagram using zoho social, it is possible to get lead from instagram? example if someone send me direct message or comment on my post and then they generate to lead

    • Zoho PDF editor has a lot of issues.

      Zoho PDF editor needs a lot of work. It hangs and glitches a lot. Deletes annotations and clearings randomly.

    • Where is the desktop app for Zoho Projects???

      As a project manager, I need a desktop app for the projects I manage. Yes, there's the web app, which is AWESOME for cross browser and platform compatibility... but I need a real desktop app for Projects that allow me to enter offline information where

    • How to Automate Monthly PDF Reports with Filters in Zoho Creator

      Hi everyone, I’m trying to build an automated monthly reporting process in Zoho Creator and would appreciate suggestions or best practices from anyone who has done something similar. What I’m trying to do: I have a form called New_Customer with fields

    • Feedback: Streamlining Note Management in Zoho Notebook

      Dear Team/Support, I would like to share some feedback regarding the note management system that could help improve usability and accessibility for users like myself. Notebook 1 (screenshot attached): Currently, the system does not allow selecting and

    • showing Limit exceeded

      Good afternoon...trust you're good. I've been having issues working with but it's not responding. it's showing Limit exceeded, sorry it seems like too many people are working on the sheet right now please try again later. meanwhile no one is working on

    • Converting Sales Order to Invoice via API; Problem with decimal places tax

      We are having problems converting a Sales Order to an Invoice via API Call. The cause of the issue is, that the Tax value in a Sales Order is sometimes calculated with up to 16 decimal places (e.g. 0.8730000000000001). The max decimal places allowed in

    • Sorting columns in Zoho Projects

      Hi, In project management best practice, sorting columns (ascending, descending) is an important tool. Sorting dates to see the order of tasks starting, sorting on priority or even on planned hours is a must for an efficient project control. Currently,

    • Business Continuity - Disaster Recovery

      I know about the Zoho CRM backup .zip files, however, this doesn't include any of the infrastructure with like custom fields or custom modules. I am curious on what everyone has in place for a true backup or what your plan is if your Zoho instance were

    • Upload API

      I'm trying to use the Upload API to upload some images and attach them to comments (https://desk.zoho.com/DeskAPIDocument#Uploads#Uploads_Uploadfile) - however I can only ever get a 401 or bad request back. I'm using an OAuth token with the Desk.tickets.ALL

    • Losing description after merging tickets

      Hello, We merge tickets when they are about the same topic from the same client. It happens sometimes. We recently noticed that after the merger only the description from the master ticket is left in a thread. And the slave-ticket description is erased.

    • update linked contacts when update happens in account

      Hi, I have a custom field called Licence in the Accounts module. When someone buys a licence, I’d like to update a custom field in the related Contacts. How can I achieve this? I noticed that workflows triggered on Accounts only allow me to update fields

    • Problem Management Module

      I am looking for a Problem Management module within Zoho Desk. I saw in some training videos that this is available, and some even provided an annual price for it. I want an official confirmation on whether this is indeed available. This is not a particularly

    • Unable to explore desk.zoho.com

      Greetings, I have an account with zoho which already has a survey subscription. I would like to explore desk.zoho.com, but when I visit it while logged in (https://desk.zoho.com/agent?action=CreatePortal) I just get a blank page. I have tried different

    • Offline support for mobile app

      Accessing your files and folders from your mobile devices is now quicker and simpler, thanks to the power of offline support. Whether on an Android or iOS device, you can use the Offline function to save files and folders, so you can review them even

    • Zoho Desk KB article embedded on another site.

      We embed KB articles from Zoho Desk on another site (our application). When opening the article in a new tab, there is no issue, but if we choose lightbox, we are getting an error "To protect your security, help.ourdomain.com will not allow Firefox to

    • Transitioning to API Credits in Zoho Desk

      At Zoho Desk, we’re always looking for ways to help keep your business operations running smoothly. This includes empowering teams that rely on APIs for essential integrations, functions and extensions. We’ve reimagined how API usage is measured to give

    • List of packaged components and if they are upgradable

      Hello, In reference to the article Components and Packaging in Zoho Vertical Studio, can you provide an overview of what these are. Can you also please provide a list of of components that are considered Packaged and also whether they are Upgradable?

    • Does Attari Messaging app have Bot option and APIB

      Hi, Does Attari also have Bot and API as we use in WhatsApp??

    • How to add application logo

      I'm creating an application which i do not want it to show my organization logo so i have changed the setting but i cannot find where to upload/select the logo i wish to use for my application. I have seen something online about using Deluge and writing

    • Introducing Keyboard Shortcuts for Zoho CRM

      Dear Customers, We're happy to introduce keyboard shortcuts for Zoho CRM features! Until now, you might have been navigating to modules manually using the mouse, and at times, it could be tedious, especially when you had to search for specific modules

    • Empowered Custom Views: Cross-Module Criteria Now Supported in Zoho CRM

      Hello everyone, We’re excited to introduce cross-module criteria support in custom views! Custom views provide personalized perspectives on your data and that you can save for future use. You can share these views with all users or specific individuals

    • Send Automated WhatsApp Messages and Leverage the Improved WhatsApp Templates

      Greetings, I hope all of you are doing well. We're excited to announce a major upgrade to Bigin's WhatsApp integration that brings more flexibility, interactivity, and automation to your customer messaging. WhatsApp message automation You can now use

    • Verifying Zoho Mail Functionality After Switching DNS from Cloudflare to Hosting Provider

      I initially configured my domain's (https://roblaxmod.com/) email with Zoho Mail while using Cloudflare to manage my DNS records (MX, SPF, etc.). All services were working correctly. Recently, I have removed my site from Cloudflare and switched my domain's

    • Zoho Analytics Regex Support

      When can we expect full regex support in Zoho Analytics SQL such as REGEXP_REPLACE? Sometimes I need to clean the data and using regex functions is the easiest way to achieve this.

    • Change of Blog Author

      Hi, I am creating the blog post on behalf of my colleague. When I publish the post, it is showing my name as author of the post which is not intended and needs to be changed to my colleague's name. How can I change the name of the author in the blogs?? Thanks, Ramanan

    • Show Attachments in the customer portal

      Hi, is it possible to show the Attachments list in the portal for the particular module? Bests.

    • Zoho CRM Formula - Current Time minus Date/Time field

      Hello, I am trying to prevent duplicate emails going to clients when more than 1 deal is being updated. To do this, I would like to create a formula to identify if a date/time field is >= 2 hours ago. Can someone please help me write this formula? Example:

    • Does Zoho Docs have a Line Number function ?

      Hi, when collaborating with coding tasks, I need an online real time share document that shows line numbers. Does Zoho's docs offer this feature ? If yes, how can I show them ? Regards, Frank

    • Feature Request - Insert URL Links in Folders

      I would love to see the ability to create simple URL links with titles in WorkDrive. or perhaps a WorkDrive extension to allow it. Example use case: A team is working on a project and there is project folder in WordDrive. The team uses LucidChart to create

    • Organization Emails in Email History

      How can I make received Org Emails to show up here?

    • How to sync from Zoho Projects into an existing Sprint in Zoho Sprints?

      Hi I have managed to integrate Zoho Projects with Zoho Sprints and I can see that the integration works as a project was created in Zoho Sprints. But, what I would like to do is to sync into an existing Zoho Sprints project. Is there a way to make that

    • how to differentiate if whatsapp comes from certain landing page?

      I create a Zobot in SalesIQ to create a Whatsapp bot to capture the lead. I have 2 landing pages, one is SEO optimized and the other want is optimized for leads comes from Google Ads. I want to know from which landing page this lead came through WhatsApp

    • How to record company set up fees?

      Hi all, We are starting out our company in Australia and would appreciate any help with setting up Books accounts. We paid an accountant to do company registration, TFN, company constitution, etc. I heard these all can be recorded as Incorporation Costs, which is an intangible asset account, and amortised over 5 years. Is this the correct way to do it under the current Australian tax regulations? How and when exactly should I record the initial entry and each year's amortasation in Books? Generally

    • How to create a drop down menu in Zoho Sheets

      I am trying to find out, how do I create a drop down option in Zoho sheet. I tried Data--> Data Validation --> Criteria --> Text  --> Contains. But that is not working, is there any other way to do it.  Thanks in Advance.

    • Show Payment terms in Estimates

      Hi,  we are trying to set up that estimates automatically relates payment terms for the payment terms we introduced on Edit contact (Field Payment terms).  How can it be done? Our aim is to avoid problems on payment terms introduced and do not need to introduce it manually on each client (for the moment we are introducing this information on Terms and Conditions.  Kind Regards, 

    • How can I calculate the physical stock available for sale?

      Hey Zoho Team,  I've tried to calculate the physical stock on hand in various ways - but always receive a mismatch between what's displayed in Zoho Inventory & analytics.  Can you please let me know how the physical stock available for sale is calculated?

    • When dispatched to crew, assigning lead missing

      Hello, For the past two or three weeks, whenever an officer assigns Service Appointment to a team, the lead person is missing from the assigned service list. Therefore, we have to reschedule the SA and then the lead person becomes visible in the assigned

    • open word file in zoho writer desktop version

      "How can I open a Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx) file in Zoho Writer if I only have the file saved on my computer and Zoho Writer doesn't appear as an option when I try 'Open with'? Is there a way to directly open the .doc file in Zoho Writer?"

    • I want to transfer the project created in this account to another account

      Dear Sir I want to transfer the project created in one account to another account

    • Next Page