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

    • The way that Users can view the ticket

      I have created users. What I would like to achieve is the following: All users under the same company account should be able to view each other’s tickets.

    • Zoho UAE SMS/WHATSAPP

      Hello everyone, so I have a question as regards DC and their impact on automation, integration and app usage. For example I am working with a UAE clientniw but each time I tried to connect their WhatsApp and sms then automate their process I tend to receive

    • Looking to Flag or Tag contacts/ accounts on Zoho Desk?

      I am looking for a way to flag certain accounts and make it obvious on the views pages. So for example if a has a certain package or needs extra attention it is clear before even clicking on the ticket. This could be via adding a tag or flag onto an account,

    • setting date-time field from string

      hello everyone, i hope someone could help me. i have a date-time field in a form that i want to fill in from two separate fields of date, and time. i need to combine the two fields to a one date-time field but can make it work. i tried to convert the

    • Calendars and CRM Contacts

      I'm finding having multiple calendars in Zoho One so confusing. I have a few questions so I can get this straight. We have a meeting room that we have set up as a resource in Calendar. Can this be set up in Bookings and the CRM Calendar? Using Zoho Calendar,

    • Announcing new features in Trident for Mac (v1.23.0)

      Hello everyone! Trident for macOS (v.1.23.0) is here with interesting features and thoughtful enhancements to elevate your workplace communication and productivity. Here's a quick look at what's new. Record your meetings. You can now record audio and

    • Applying a record template

      Hi all, I can't figure this out. I hope you can help. The scenario: We have learners who have to complete a 'digital' journal with tasks in order to qualify. Those tasks, once completed, need a final signature from their 'Mentor', which will trigger their

    • Quickbooks invoice with Zoho Creator

      Is it possible to push data from Zoho Creator directly to an invoice on QuickBooks? If so, where can I find information on how to do this?

    • Help: Capture full page URL in hidden field when same Zoho Form is embedded on multiple pages (iframe)

      Hi all, Goal Use one Zoho Form across multiple pages and record the exact page URL (incl. subdomain + path + hash) where the user submitted it. Example pages: https://www.example.com/cargo/ https://www.example.com/cargo/containers/#contact https://cargo.example.com/auto/

    • Automatically Populate fields - HELP!

      There have been many discussions on this but I still can't seem to get it to work for me. I am trying to create a lookup field and have other fields automatically populate. Based on the instructions in the Help Center, I should be using the "on user input". It's just not working, here is the layout...   Both forms are in the same application. Current form is called Add Note, form to fetch records from is called Add Client. Lookup field is called Select_Client_ID related field in fetch form is called

    • Push notifications to portal users

      Hi all, it is possible to send push notifications to portal users?

    • Rename the attachment from record template pdf in the sendmail deluge script

      Hello Zoho, I urgently need a feature to rename record templates that I send via the sendmail feature. The program I created sends emails to clients with an invoices that have been created in the invoice database. If the user selects 3 invoice numbers,

    • Alt Text On Multiple Images

      I'm using Zoho Social to post to a charity website. Often the posts have multiple images, but it seems there is only one field for Alt Text. Does that mean I can only include it for the first image? Or is there a way to add alt text for all the imag

    • [SOLVED] Getting 401 when trying to download ticket attachment via API

      I'm able to use the API just fine to access ticket content. But I cannot download ticket attachment, keep getting 401 Client Error. Example: https://desk.zoho.com.au/api/v1/tickets/{ticket_id}/attachments/{attachment_id}/content?orgId={org_id} For headers,

    • Zoho project – Workdrive integration.

      Hello everyone, I was wondering something, we did the Zoho projects integration with Zoho Workdrive but nowhere during this integration we could set the location of the folders that would be automatically created in Workdrive. As I understand it, it creates

    • Scriptを埋め込みたくてOn User Inputを探しているのですが・・・

      編集モードで、Scriptを埋め込みたい項目を選択し、「項目のプロパティ」パネルで、その下のほうに「フィールドアクション（Field Actions）」という見出しがあると聞いたのですが、そもそも、それが見つかりません。そのために、On User Inputなどのイベントが選べません。 画面の英語を日本語に訳しているためにわけわからん状態になっているのかも知れませんが、わかる方、いらっしゃいますか？

    • Problem with cloud query exceeded

      When making a call I get this error, It is associated with a function in node that calls external APIs This is the code //tokenConsultar = thisapp.ObtenerToken(); //input.token = tokenConsultar.get("output").toMap().get("token");

    • Showing Total of Funnel Chart Legend (With Values) Items

      Hi, We are using the funnel type chart for displaying our zCRM sales pipeline stages and associated sum of deals in each stage.  We have configured the legend to show the associated value (Deal Amount (Sum)) for each stage adjacent to the legend items (Stages). Is there a way to display the total of the values in the same chart?  For example, at the bottom of the legend or maybe as a #merge placeholder in the legend title?

    • How to Convert VCF Contacts to CSV using Excel

      Many users switch from traditional address books to digital formats like vCard and CSV. These formats allow users to easily manage their contacts. However, a difficulty comes when you need to transfer your contact information to another application or

    • Field authorization for Linking module in Zoho CRM portal

      Hi guys! Currently building a customer portal for one of my clients, and I ran into a bit of a roadblock while using a multi-select lookup field. The issue is that there is no way to hide or define access in the linking module created by this multi-select

    • Kaizen #63 - Layout Rules in Zoho CRM

      Hello and welcome to another week of Kaizen! This week, we will be discussing Layout Rules in Zoho CRM. If you need to modify the layout of a module based on user inputs, or to show or hide sections based on the value of a specific field, we have got

    • Zoho CRM Portals - allow access per account

      Hello all, I am trying to set up a portal for our customer but I seem to be hitting an obstacle and I am not sure if it is my problem or a limitation in the software. So basically the way I understand the portal Contact Email > Each Record or Related

    • Android - Writer não acentua em Português com teclado bluetooth

      Gosto muito do Zoho, tanto o Note quando o Writer. Infelizmente, o Writer sofre de um problema sério: ao usar um teclado bluetooth, forma mais cômoda de lidar com um processador de texto, os acentos (todos!) da Língua Portuguesa não são aceitos. Todos

    • Set File Upload fields as mandatory

      Currently the CRM for some reason lacks the ability to set a file upload field as mandatory So we have an issue We have a requirement that before a Deal stage is set as Deal is Won the member needs to upload a file Now for some weird reason in Zoho I

    • Editing HTML in Zoho CRM Email Template

      I am trying to create a template within the CRM email option, but need to be able to use custom HTML. There does not seem to be a way to do so.

    • Ability to CC on a mass email

      Ability to CC someone on a mass email.

    • How to make attachments mandatory

      I want the user to be unable to mark an opportunity as Closed – Won if it doesn’t have any attachments. I’ve already tried client scripts and functions, but nothing worked.

    • SLA Ticket Report

      From data to decisions: A deep dive into ticketing system reports Service level agreement (SLA) ticket reports in a help desk system are crucial for ensuring that services are delivered according to established commitments. They help maintain accountability

    • Zoho Backstage - PCI Compliance / Web Security

      I have a couple of questions related to Backstage and payment processing.... 1. my purchasing division is not giving approval to use Backstage yet because of some security issues. In order for us to take payments via a payment gateway like Authorize.net

    • Zoho Tables August 2025 Update: Faster and Smoother

      We’ve been working behind the scenes to make Zoho Tables faster, lighter, and more reliable. Here are the highlights: Faster Response Times Optimised the way responses are generated. Reduced memory consumption by 20–25%, leading to smoother performance

    • Video Upload from app says "unsupported aspect ratio" but is verified to be correct.

      I and my social media person are experiencing a problem where Social will not accept video uploads to Instagram. The error we receive is "unsupported aspect ratio" but looking directly at the file in question we see that the width and ratio both match

    • Disposable Email Addresses

      Dear zMail Team, Can you also bring out a few disposable email addresses for each accounts? That way occasional registrations and imminent spam from them can be largely solved right? ---- Deepak Vasudevan http://thamizhththendral.blogspot.com/

    • Zoho sheet - Zoho expense

      I want to schedule to create an expense using Zoho Sheet and flow. That is the EMI that I pay on a particular date to the bank and should be itemised, like principal and interest on the loan. Can someone help me in this regard??

    • Ability to configure a schedule/shift for each user and/or crew in Zoho FSM

      Hello, In our team of Field Agents, we have different shifts. Some field agent always work from 7:00 AM to 4:00 PM while others work the evening shift like 4:00 PM to 11:00 PM. Sometime shift are on weekdays only or on weekend. It would be great to be

    • Free webinar: Streamlining customer service paperwork with the Zoho Sign extension for Zoho Desk

      Hello Everyone! Have you been wondering about bridging the gap between digitised customer service and business paperwork? Join our free webinar to learn how you can do this by connecting Zoho Sign, our digital signature app, with Zoho Desk, our online

    • Zoho Books | Product updates | July 2025

      Hello users, We’ve rolled out new features and enhancements in Zoho Books. From plan-based trials to the option to mark PDF templates as inactive, explore the updates designed to enhance your bookkeeping experience. Introducing Plan Based Trials in Zoho

    • Mail Search should allow grouping by conversation like Gmail.

      Having switched from gmail I have found the search function hard to use. Mostly because mail is not grouped by conversation in search. If I search for a word when looking for a conversation had with someone then sometimes 10 emails will come up from the

    • Improve Zoho Learn updated article notifications

      I noticed today while updating an article, that the notification users get says "[User Name] has published article [Article Name]..." My feedback to the product team is that it would be really helpful for an end user, if the system notification differentiated

    • Safari Support

      Safari, the world's second largest browser, zoho desk does not officially or fully support. That needs to change.

    • Can I get images from an "Image Upload" field in a webhook?

      I want to send images from 2 "image upload" fields via a webhook. Is this possible?

    • Next Page