Hello everyone,
As we gear up for 2026, here is a detailed round-up of all feature releases in Zoho Desk web throughout the year.
Zia (powered by
open source language model [Llama 3.1]), can perform a variety of actions from predicting behavior to automating crucial ticket handling actions to providing 24x7 self-service to customers.
Zia Agents: Support Specialist & Resolution Expert
Available on request basis only
AI agents can automate large amounts of work to reduce the load significantly and improve your team's efficiency. Zia Agents, namely Support Specialists and Resolution Experts, specialize in automating and simplifying daily support activities with the same precision you'd expect from any support professional. These AI agents assist human agents in resolving tickets faster by taking over simple tasks, which gives agents time to focus on complex issues that demand judgment, empathy, and deeper intervention.
The Support Specialist can draft empathetic, knowledge-base–driven replies for routine queries, ensuring faster responses while freeing agents from repetitive work. If the required information is unavailable, it steps back and reassigns the ticket to a human agent.
The Resolution Expert can automate adding of resolutions to the tickets by identifying the root cause and capturing the final solution. This saves significant amount of time, reduces manual effort, and ensures accuracy.
Together, Zia Agents help support teams scale efficiently, handle higher ticket volumes, and deliver a more reliable customer experience.
Every support ticket tells a story, because it often requires multiple conversations before the real problem is uncovered. These valuable interactions, however, remain locked within tickets.
With Zia’s Article Generation, agents can convert select ticket conversations into knowledge base articles, making solutions reusable for both agents and customers. The AI generates a draft article from chosen threads, which agents can refine before publishing in the Knowledge Base. This helps document real-time problems, reduce repetitive tickets, and improve self-service.
Zia’s Generative AI model, Qwen, delivers improved accuracy in content generation and ticket summarization, which enhances the overall performance and reliability of Zia’s Generative AI capabilities.
With 32 billion parameters, Qwen is trained on large-scale datasets, enabling it to generate more contextually accurate and relevant outputs for better user experiences.
AI-based automated actions executed through Workflows can improve work management capabilities in businesses by intelligently assisting human actions and decisions. Most importantly, these actions do not require training (except auto-email reply).
The following Zia actions are introduced in WFs:
Available on request basis only
Auto-email reply: Zia can analyze the ticket context and draft an email that best suits the reported issue while maintaining a tone that resonates with the customer's sentiment and intent. It sends the first response to the customer to help agents adhering to the SLAs.
Available on request basis only
Generate content: Zia can summarize the customer requirement and highlight the main points discussed in the email. It can also take into account fields such as recent thread content, ticket description, ticket status, priority level, and subject to understand the context and generate a summary. Users can also give a prompt instruction to help Zia generate a contextual summary. It then provides a concise, easy-to-consume text to help agents take appropriate actions quickly. The summary is auto- populated in the private comment, public comment, or in a multi-line text field as configured in the workflow.
Field prediction: Zia can analyze the email content, thread replies, subject, description, and several other fields available in the layout to predict values for specific fields. It evaluates the content and automatically maps the values to the most relevant field.
Field extraction: Zia can extract values, such as email, phone number, due date, case type, product code, order number, and purchase date, from the ticket conversation and autopopulate them in the ticket. This saves time and considerably reduces the chances of missing important details or causing errors while entering values manually.
Zia Insights
Highlighting the tone and underlying sentiment gives agents crucial cues about the conversation. Insights display a collection of key points or terms that are used in the conversation, and this gives agents an idea about the topic being discussed. Using this information, the agent can draft an appropriate, empathetic reply. They can prioritize tickets with negative sentiment to contain critical issues from escalating.
The ticket summary is repositioned within the reply interface to provide a better usability experience and provide more clarity. The thread summary will give you an overview of the conversation in a thread.Generate content: Aside from responding to ticket queries, agents sometimes need assistance drafting invitation emails, meeting reminders, follow-up mailers, and more. Zia's writing assistant abilities can help generate content based on the prompt; for example, "Generate invitation email for the upcoming sales." The content can be used as a reply or regenerated with a different prompt.
The tone of the entire response or a section of the content can be adjusted to meet the customer's conversational style. You can adjust the tone to formal, informal, diplomatic, assertive, or humorous.
Agents can check the quality of their response before sending it to their customers. Zia will highlight spelling and grammatical errors and offer suggestions. It will also provide the readability score and sentence length.
Agents need to engage with customers beyond just troubleshooting and resolving queries such as inviting them for events, follow-up meetings, onboarding follow-up etc. In these cases, Generate Content can assist agents by creating custom content on demand through prompts. Agents also have the flexibility to modify the prompt, use the generated content as a response, or regenerate it by adjusting the tone and length to fit the context better.
Analytical Abilities
Support managers can actively monitor the ticket handling process and improve the existing strategies by defining better criteria and optimizing resource allocation for critical services. The lifecycle report will highlight the time spent at each stage; the number of tickets that are moved to another team, agent, or department; and how much time it took to resolve a ticket, which are all critical in identifying bottlenecks and improving assignment strategy.
For example, if L3 tickets are frequently reassigned and take longer to resolve as a result, it can indicate that the tickers are being classified incorrectly. By redefining the criteria and setting proper filters, these tickets can be correctly identified at the submission stage and assigned to the right department, team, or agent.
Managers can track each agent's active working hours to calculate the billable hours. They can regulate agents' availability by closely monitoring their session timings.
The report is drilled down into:
- Summary view: An overview of an agent's daily attendance, including their first login time, last logout time, total hours worked, and the number of sessions they conducted.
- Session view: A detailed breakdown of the login and logout times of each session. It provides insights into how often an agent logs in and out and the duration of each session.
Monitoring the performance of an individual, a team, or a process identifies areas needing improvement. KPIs can also track progress or decline, and make periodic corrections. Some common performance indicators—like the number of tickets closed, task completion rates, monthly outbound calls, and pending asset requests—can all indicate whether there are any delays or if the agent requires training in handling special cases.
KPI components such as metric cards, comparison indexes, bullet and dial charts provide visual representation of important business metrics that help with:
- Resource management: Monitoring agent productivity can help managers understand agents' bandwidth and allocate tickets and tasks accordingly.
- Performance tracking: Measuring First Response Time (FRT) and Time to Resolution (TTR) can help identify underlying reasons for any delays and take necessary actions to improve resolution time.
- Goal alignment: By measuring FRT or resolution time, businesses can align support activities to bigger goals, such as quicker ticket closure, improved customer satisfaction, and a decrease in tickets.
Agent productivity
The Tickets module facilitates automatic computation of the customer's age in years, insurance policy tenure, claim amounts, service costs, and more, which would otherwise require an agent to calculate manually.
This functionality allows agents to perform actions, send information, track locations, and alert third-party vendors with the click of a button. Buttons can be accessed from the Ticket Detail view. It can invoke a URL or initiate a spectrum of actions through functions.
- Agents can refer to the company's term insurances, plans, benefits, and payout details while addressing a customer issue from the ticket.
- The customer's exact location can be found using the correct coordinates in the navigation service URL.
- Agents can create a record or initiate a process in another tool, such as creating a project in Zoho Projects or filing a bug in JIRA.
Businesses that use custom or private extensions (that aren't available in Zoho Marketplace) to manage their processes can add those extensions to the custom module. This allows them to view data generated by location trackers, forecast budgets, or even load and view images right inside the module's subtab, improving accessibility and usability.
The Community module UI has been redesigned to enhance its visual appeal and improve the user experience.
We've upgraded the filters, the community detail view, and the moderation settings page with a sleek new design, making navigation and accessibility simpler and more intuitive for users. With the new Approve All button, admins can now approve all posts that are pending approval at once.
Multiple contacts can be sent a WhatsApp message at once, saving time. Agents can also select multiple contacts and update a value or delete them.
Agents have the flexibility to respond to a ticket that was submitted through the IM channel via email.
Businesses that use custom modules can use workflow rules to update the field values in these records automatically. The "update record action" will update static and dynamic values in the custom module and its related modules. For example, if the employee name is updated in the Employee module, the name will be updated in the Payroll module as well.
These logs offer a detailed record of both successful and failed custom function executions triggered by automation rules. It includes execution details, passed arguments, and print statements, helping you debug issues and identify the causes of any failures.
Admins can send marketing template messages via Whatsapp from the Tickets and Contacts module, making it easier to connect with customers directly via one of the most widely preferred modes of communication. With this, teams can drive faster responses, deliver personalized campaigns using ticket history, and maintain brand consistency through pre-approved marketing templates. Agents can send messages individually, while admins can manage bulk or mass outreach.
Admins can improve outreach by sending bulk messages to multiple contacts from Tickets.
For example, service updates, reminders, cancellation notifications can be sent to the primary contacts from the relevant tickets.
This allows quick, consistent communication at all times.
Agents can receive task reminders, alerts, and notifications via Workflows through Zoho Cliq, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Google Chat allowing smoother collaboration.
The Help Center has reliably given customers the right platform for self-service tools where they can learn about the product or service, troubleshoot their problems, and engage with their peers and the organization's employees to share ideas and discuss their problems.
Now, we are extending this opportunity further to the internal stakeholders and employees of an organization to empower themselves with the self-serving capabilities of the Help Center.
The Employee Self-Service portal (ESSP) comprises two important tools that provide robust self-serving opportunity:
Knowledge base articles: Support agents or users in similar roles like IT or system administrators, employee help-desk professionals and the like can immensely benefit from having ready access to the knowledge base articles that they use to resolve internal and customer queries. For example, support agents may need to refer to pricing or subscription details, troubleshooting tips, customizable solutions, or additional charges while responding to customer queries.
These articles are not publicly available and published only under Agents mode. The ESSP, provides a single place for users to quickly access all such articles thereby saving time and preventing overseeing of information.
Training module: Organizations often run professional trainings for their employees, such as compliance and security training, training on soft skills and professional etiquette, and new employee or partner onboarding. ESSP brings these training courses within Desk by bridging two platforms: TrainerCentral (Zoho Spark) and Desk.
Zoho's online training and certification platform (TrainerCentral) integrates with Zoho Desk to facilitate the creation of courses within Desk's interface. It also provides employees an opportunity to complete these courses and view their certification status in Desk. The courses are readily accessible to the Desk users to complete at their own pace for a productive learning environment.
The Content Analysis tool acts as a digital proofreader. It scans KB articles to identify typos, logical errors, grammatical inconsistencies, poor sentence structure, readability scores, and more. This allows the writers to create more comprehensive, high-quality content that will be helpful to readers.
Documents created by different writers often follow different formats, which can bring inconsistencies to the overall structure of an article. Article Templates help define a consistent format for each type of content they create such as FAQs, learning guides, troubleshooting articles, and more. Templates ensure consistency is maintained for a specific content style irrespective who writes it, it can also help new writers adapt quickly, and greatly improve the readability and quality of documentation.
Open platforms help businesses engage with customers effectively, but they can also attract spam comments. To maintain brand's reputation and authenticity, KB admins can enable moderation settings.
Moderators can approve or reject public comments on articles to prevent spam or invalid comments from being published in the help center. Businesses that allow help center access to public can maintain brand authenticity and stay consistent with the guidelines by setting up moderation.
Enhance the Help Center UI using JavaScript to create a more interactive interface. Add animations, improve visuals with responsive design, and integrate third-party tools such as analytics and feedback forms to boost user engagement and customer satisfaction.
For wider outreach and to address multilingual needs, the Help Center offers multi-lingual support for image (label) and audio-based captchas. During login, users can easily select their preferred language to understand and complete the captcha-based verification process.
Custom views are user specific; they allow a user to create exclusive lists of records that they frequently need for their daily activities, such as a list of premium accounts, overdue tickets, or high-value cancelled subscriptions.
Sometimes these views can be useful for other stakeholders in the organization, like the finance or logistics teams. To maintain data security and enhance collaboration, agents can be given permission to edit, share, re-share or view these custom views, depending on their role and requirement. This helps maintain data integrity and prevents accidental data loss.
Zoho Desk offers accessibility controls to help diverse user groups enhance their navigational experience and ensure complete inclusivity.
Help Center users can select an accessibility persona and further customize the elements such as color, font, alignment, and much more to make the interface comfortable and suit their individual needs.
Help Center users can export tickets for reference and share them offline with other stakeholders for collaborative decision-making.
Admins who have the permission to manage agents can add a maximum of 10 agents at once. This can be particularly useful during onboarding, team scaling, and creation of new departments. While adding the agents, the number of remaining seats available under the current Zoho Desk subscription will be displayed for reference.
Users can apply filters to the standard and custom ticket views and save them to create user-specific views. These views can be beneficial in multiple cases, such as when support managers or leads need quick reference to premium business accounts; they can set the necessary filters and save them for quick access later. It saves time spent setting the same criteria multiple times, even reducing the chances of inadvertent errors. Saved filters are user-specific, allowing them to rename, delete, or modify it without affecting others' views.
Agents can be assigned tickets as soon as they close one from the backlog. This helps to prevent even minor time lapses that are very common due to the periodic assignment cycle. Most customer support services or critical operations where it's challenging to keep up with the rapid influx of tickets can benefit from immediate assignments.
These have been introduced to provide help center users with ease of navigation.
The happiness rating feedback form can be translated in multiple languages to improve outreach and allow customers to submit feedback for the support they received in their native language.
These templates allow businesses to store multiple language versions under a single template ID, ensuring that messages are sent in the recipient’s preferred language. This eliminates the complexity of managing multiple templates and streamlines the WhatsApp approval process. These templates can also be triggered via our API, allowing businesses to automate multilingual messaging and enhance customer engagement at scale.
These bots allow customers to interact with you in their preferred language with multilingual GC bots in WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Business Messaging. It detects the user’s language, translates, and provides responses accordingly, eliminating the need for separate language-specific bots.
OTPs allow users to access the help center without their login credentials. Sometimes, when users are in a rush or have forgotten their login credentials, an alternative secure login system keeps them connected. OTP-based user authentication is currently available only for India-based customers.
Users can verify their identity using either of the options while accessing the help center.
The happiness rating feedback form can be translated in multiple languages to improve outreach and allow customers to submit feedback for the support they received in their native language.
These templates allow businesses to store multiple language versions under a single template ID, ensuring that messages are sent in the recipient’s preferred language. This eliminates the complexity of managing multiple templates and streamlines the WhatsApp approval process. These templates can also be triggered via our API, allowing businesses to automate multilingual messaging and enhance customer engagement at scale.
These bots allow customers to interact with you in their preferred language with multilingual GC bots in WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Business Messaging. It detects the user’s language, translates, and provides responses accordingly, eliminating the need for separate language-specific bots.
Data administration
The Audit Log is now available for both the Contacts and Accounts modules. Admins can track the changes and actions performed in these modules to gain more visibility.
The Detail view of the Audit Log is introduced to view and analyze all of the logs. Admins can track specific actions and events all in one place to gain more clarity instead of navigating back to each record individually.
Audit log data can be exported in CSV format file for future reference.
Read more
The user interface has been revised to keep it sleek, intuitive and engaging. The field mapping capabilities have been improved to allow users to select a module and easily map fields from the import file to the Zoho Desk module.
A real-time preview displays how the imported data will appear in the module, giving users full control and clarity on where each field goes.
The new and enhanced interface offers advanced filtering options that allow users to export data based on views, criteria, and time period, from both standard and custom modules.
Additionally, to support easy access, exports can be initiated directly from the view's more option. Both standard views and custom views can be exported from all standard modules.
The Audit Log displays the following:
- Role and data sharing updates made to user profiles alongside addition, edit or deletion of users allow monitoring changes in roles and data accessibility across organization.
- See each agent's availability status (online or offline) across channels like email, phone, chat, and IM for greater visibility into agent availability.
In addition, up to 60 days of data can be exported; users can also filter the data to view and export specific data that can be used for monitoring and compliance purpose.
Changes made in the Contacts, Accounts, and custom module records can be viewed in detail page under the History tab. The date and time, agent name, IP address, and the action performed are displayed to ensure transparency.
Marketplace and Integrations
Zoho Desk can be integrated with Microsoft Azure DevOps, a suite of cloud-based tools and services developed to support the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Integration improves collaboration between support and development teams by enhancing communication and visibility of requirements, progress, and issues.
For example, a ticket raised for a feature request or feature enhancement by the customer is handled by the customer support team in Zoho Desk. The software development team handles their tasks, such as validating the request, coding, and testing in Azure DevOps.
The integration helps in consolidating data from Desk and syncing it with PowerBI via API connectors, which allows real-time data sync, customizable DAX formulas, and rich visualizations. By utilizing these capabilities within the PowerBI platform, organizations can perform in-depth analysis of various customer support analytics and gain better insights to support informed decision-making.
Teams often use different platforms to manage their work. This integration allows agents to file customer issues within GitLab to streamline issue tracking and enhance cross-team collaboration. It keeps everyone aligned by syncing comments and statuses across tickets, commits, and merge requests to ensure real-time updates and improved workflow efficiency.
Instant messaging and guided conversations
The AnswerBot can generate relevant answers from knowledge base articles to automate chat interactions and reduce response times. The agents can review the answers and choose whether to send them. Chat services on WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Business Messaging help manage high chat volumes, provide 24/7 support, and ensure quick resolution for common questions. When necessary, the AnswerBot will transfer conversations to human agents, ensuring a smooth customer experience while optimizing agent availability and efficiency across multiple messaging channels.
Triage chat conversations by systematically routing each new inquiry to the next available agent in a predefined sequence. This ensures an even workload distribution, eliminates manual assignment efforts, and enhances response efficiency, leading to better customer service and streamlined operations.
AI inside the CPaaS inbox offers real-time message suggestions, conversation summaries, sentiment analysis, and intelligent response recommendations. Available for WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Business Messaging, it facilitates faster resolution of customer queries while maintaining consistency in responses.
The AI-powered composer enhances the agent's productivity by offering real-time writing assistance, language translation, and tone adjustments. It ensures clear, refined, and contextually appropriate communication that resonates with the brand's messaging.
Generate AI-powered responses with context retention in Guided Conversations. The Generative AI Block understands complex queries and remembers the conversation history within a session to give personalized replies. It also provides a chat summary for agents, ensuring a smooth transition and better customer interactions.
Use industry-specific templates from the gallery to build contextual chatbot ready-made flows that are optimized for multiple languages and channels.
Connect Guided Conversations with Zoho CRM, Zoho Cliq, Zoho Connect, Zoho Projects, Zoho Mail, and Zoho Calendar. These integrations enable data exchange and automate workflows across platforms for smoother operations.
Create and deploy chatbots with unified widgets and flows. Switch between editing and viewing modes, preview blocks on hover, and customize the block listing panel. Reposition the panel for flexibility and track real-time metrics to optimize chatbot performance.
Automate user actions and personalize chats across messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Facebook Messenger by using the IM variable in the GC flow. IM variables enable session-specific actions, user identification, and ticket management for smoother interactions.
Personalize the logo, theme, launcher, and background. Set custom session end rules, idle timeouts, and enable multilingual support for a tailored chat experience.
The GC Mobile SDK (Android and iOS) supports multiple languages, adapting to the user’s device or preferred language. It ensures a consistent chatbot experience. App Clip and instant app Cliq support enables instant chatbot access without installing the full app.
Merge multiple variables and text into a single structured variable for better data integration. Use it to streamline workflows, improve ticket creation, and enhance AI responses. This reduces manual effort and ensures better context retention in conversations.
The new IM Session Status Webhook ensures you never miss a moment in your instant messaging conversations. It provides real-time notifications for every chat status update, whether a session is opened, picked up, put on hold, reassigned, ended, or blocked. The webhook also shares detailed payload data, including assignee, session state, and message counts. This helps you integrate chat insights into your support processes and stay in control of every customer conversation.
Voice Note allows agents to send voice messages directly from the reply editor, making conversations faster, more personal, and accessible. Instead of typing long replies, agents can record audio and send it for quick delivery. Voice Note is especially useful when explaining complex processes, comforting distressed customers, or engaging in multilingual conversations. It also helps busy agents work on their mobile devices or manage communication more efficiently while multitasking.
Dynamic URL Setup for WhatsApp Templates in IM lets you personalize links with recipient-specific details like name or email. Instead of sending the same static link to everyone, IM automatically replaces placeholders with real contact data to create unique URLs and ensure more accurate tracking. Agents can easily add placeholders such as Contacts.First Name or Contacts.Email to call-to-action buttons, making WhatsApp interactions more relevant and impactful.
Enhanced attachment support
Enhanced attachment support lets you receive and manage larger files directly within your instant messaging channels. Agents can now handle images, documents, videos, and audio files up to 50MB. Supported formats include popular file types such as .jpg, .pdf, .docx, .mp4, and .mp3. The update improves file sharing efficiency and enables richer interactions across IM channels.
Zia Reply Assistance in IM empowers agents with instant, context-specific solutions during live customer conversations. Zia analyzes queries in real time and retrieves relevant answers from the knowledge base. Agents can add the suggested reply into their composer, edit it if needed, and send it. By reducing research effort and improving accuracy, Zia enables faster resolutions and a better customer experience.
Message Suggestions in IM help agents reply faster with AI-generated responses tailored to each conversation. Powered by Zia, this feature analyzes the context of incoming messages and provides quick, relevant suggestions. Agents can use a message generated by Zia as-is or edit it for personalization. Suggestions can be previewed and inserted directly into the composer. They can also be adjusted to match the agent’s tone and style. By reducing repetitive typing and enabling timely responses, Message Suggestions improve efficiency and enhance customer experience.
In Instant Messaging, you can now set a timer to decide how long Zoho Desk should wait before converting a customer’s reply into a new ticket. You can choose a waiting period, select “None” for complete manual control, or use the new “Always” option. With “Always”, a ticket is instantly created whenever a customer responds. All subsequent replies are linked to the same ticket to reduce clutter and keep conversations organized.
Easily personalize the Business Messaging widget to match your brand. Control its placement by removing the default launcher. You can position the “Chat with us” button anywhere on your site and adjust the appearance with light or dark modes, theme colors, wallpaper images, and container settings. You can also toggle the “Powered By” tag for a clean, branded experience.
Leverage APIs to retrieve customer details such as name, phone, and email. This allows agents to access context-rich data during chats, enabling more efficient and personalized support.
Voice-to-Text Search: Android SDK customers can use voice-to-text search instead of typing.
Comprehensive callback functionality: We've introduced callback events for Knowledge Base and Community interactions. These callbacks allow developers to track user engagement and integrate support usage data with their preferred analytics tools. This provides valuable insights for optimizing support content and identifying areas for improvement.
Targeted content display: Support content can now be customized based on application screens and user contexts. For example, you can display a specific forum topic on a dedicated screen or show a particular ticket status on a ticket management page. This allows for a more tailored support experience.
The events callback for the Tickets module allows developers to track, monitor, and evaluate user engagement with tickets and view this data in their preferred analytic tool.
Submit your tickets securely through a CAPTCHA verification
Customers can submit their tickets in the help center securely by verifying themselves through a CAPTCHA mechanism.
Developer Space
Zoho Desk has transitioned from the older API limit model to the new API credit system. In the previous model, every API call was counted the same, regardless of complexity. The new system introduces a more balanced approach by allocating base credits based on your edition and adding variable credits for each agent in your organization.
API credits are consumed based on the complexity of each call, ensuring efficient usage. If your business requires more capacity, you can also purchase additional credits to support higher workloads. Together, these changes make the API credit system a more flexible, scalable, and reliable way to manage API usage.
A custom mobile application, whether customer-facing or for internal use, is a value-add for any business. It bridges process gaps and brings businesses closer to their goals and customers, while facilitating remote work. However, developing such an app remains elusive as significant time and resources are involved.
The Zoho Desk On-Demand App Service is a viable solution for businesses looking to add a custom mobile app to their tech stack. Using the service means entrusting development to the minds behind Zoho Desk. From requirement gathering and design to delivery, you get to oversee and shape the entire lifecycle.
The mobile app gallery is an exclusive marketplace within Zoho Desk that hosts a curated list of templated apps purpose-built for specific industries or verticals. These apps work in tandem with Zoho Desk to meet the customer experience (CX) needs of specific business functions, such as field service, facility management, and public grievance redressal.
Help desk administrators can purchase the apps—rebranded for their organization—directly from the mobile app gallery. Alternatively, they can collaborate with the experts at Zoho Desk to make further modifications to the applications.
That's a wrap!
Regards,
B. Akshaya | Zoho Desk - User Education