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 trustsatisfaction, 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

    Access your files securely from anywhere











                            Zoho Developer Community





                                                  • Desk Community Learning Series


                                                  • Digest


                                                  • Functions


                                                  • Meetups


                                                  • Kbase


                                                  • Resources


                                                  • Glossary


                                                  • Desk Marketplace


                                                  • MVP Corner


                                                  • Word of the Day


                                                  • Ask the Experts





                                                            Manage your brands on social media



                                                                  Zoho TeamInbox Resources



                                                                      Zoho CRM Plus Resources

                                                                        Zoho Books Resources


                                                                          Zoho Subscriptions Resources

                                                                            Zoho Projects Resources


                                                                              Zoho Sprints Resources


                                                                                Qntrl Resources


                                                                                  Zoho Creator Resources



                                                                                      Zoho CRM Resources

                                                                                      • CRM Community Learning Series

                                                                                        CRM Community Learning Series


                                                                                      • Kaizen

                                                                                        Kaizen

                                                                                      • Functions

                                                                                        Functions

                                                                                      • Meetups

                                                                                        Meetups

                                                                                      • Kbase

                                                                                        Kbase

                                                                                      • Resources

                                                                                        Resources

                                                                                      • Digest

                                                                                        Digest

                                                                                      • CRM Marketplace

                                                                                        CRM Marketplace

                                                                                      • MVP Corner

                                                                                        MVP Corner







                                                                                          Design. Discuss. Deliver.

                                                                                          Create visually engaging stories with Zoho Show.

                                                                                          Get Started Now


                                                                                            Zoho Show Resources


                                                                                              Zoho Writer Writer

                                                                                              Get Started. Write Away!

                                                                                              Writer is a powerful online word processor, designed for collaborative work.

                                                                                                Zoho CRM コンテンツ




                                                                                                  Nederlandse Hulpbronnen


                                                                                                      ご検討中の方




                                                                                                            • Recent Topics

                                                                                                            • Function #53: Transaction Level Profitability for Invoices

                                                                                                              Hello everyone, and welcome back to our series! We have previously provided custom functions for calculating the profitability of a quote and a sales order. There may be instances where the invoice may differ from its corresponding quote or sales order.
                                                                                                            • Integrating Chatbot with Zoho Creator Application

                                                                                                              Is it possible to integrate a chatbot with a Zoho Creator application?
                                                                                                            • Average Costing / Weighted Average Costing

                                                                                                              Hello fellow maadirs. I understand Zoho Books uses FIFO method of dealing with inventory costing, but do you guys have any plans to introduce average costing? We indians need average costing. It's part of our culture. Please. I beg thee. Thanks.
                                                                                                            • 'Add Tax To Amount' not reflected in Invoice

                                                                                                              Hi Zoho Support, I'm experiencing an issue with tax calculation display in my invoice template. Despite having "Add tax to amount" box checked in the template settings, the Amount column is not showing the tax-inclusive total for line items. Current behaviour:
                                                                                                            • "Subject" or "Narration"in Customer Statement

                                                                                                              Dear Sir, While creating invoice, we are giving in "Subject" the purpose of invoice. For Example - "GST for the month of Aug 23", IT return FY 22-23", "Consultancy", Internal Audit for May 23". But this subject is not coming in Customer Statement. Only
                                                                                                            • A real WYSIWYG field instead of the limited rich text

                                                                                                              Hi to everyone A "real" WYSIWYG or HTML field that outputs good HTML code when accessed through the API would be excellent. I tried to use the rich text field, but the styling options are limited. For example, there are no heading tags (h1 to h6), and
                                                                                                            • Delete my store of Zoho commerce

                                                                                                              Hi Team, I want to delete my stores of commerce. Please help me asap. Looking for the positive response soon. Thanks Shubham Chauhan Mob: +91-9761872650
                                                                                                            • Delete Inactive Zoho Accounts - Access Cleanup_User Id: 60001640923

                                                                                                              As part of our Zoho access hygiene, we’ve reviewed and deactivated several inactive user accounts. These accounts have not been used in the past year and are no longer tied to active operations. All access rights have been revoked, and records retained
                                                                                                            • Add Image Upload Field to Zoho Bookings Registration Form

                                                                                                              Hi, We would like to request the addition of an image upload field to the Zoho Bookings registration form. Currently, Zoho Bookings only supports text-based fields (e.g., Single Line, Multi-Line, Email, Checkbox, Dropdown, Radio Button, and Date), but
                                                                                                            • Cant recieve mails

                                                                                                              I’m having an issue with my external IMAP account not fetching any emails into Zoho Mail, even though the connection test says “Success”. I can send, if someone sends an email to me. my original directory (home.pl host) recieves it in their portal but
                                                                                                            • No feedback from Zoho Books regarding Yodlee feeds for Investec

                                                                                                              I reported on 6 Feb 2025 that the Bank Feeds for Investec bank via Yodlee are not working. To date there has been no resolution. You are charging us for a suite of products where the functionality does not work. Please advise how you will refund me for
                                                                                                            • Inappropriate Removal of Features

                                                                                                              It's the first with any software where I am experiencing that an existing customer has some of his exiting features removed. Moreover, new Zoho One users are paying less than us. Is this going to be Zoho's "normal behaviour". If so, it is going to be
                                                                                                            • Filtering report embeded in page

                                                                                                              Right now we are using a page variable to filter a report on a page. However, it being a page variable makes it reset if you go to another report/form, we want the filter to be kept the same. I tried using an application variable according to zoho you
                                                                                                            • Browser and address bar hide

                                                                                                              Hi, How i can do hide the address bar with browser headline when i am working on the sheet, because i am using (freeze panes) which i want visible for full work. For your reference here i am attached the screen shot and marked yellow lines which really
                                                                                                            • Export Invoices to XML file

                                                                                                              Namaste! ZOHO suite of Apps is awesome and we as Partner, would like to use and implement the app´s from the Financial suite like ZOHO Invoice, but, in Portugal, we can only use certified Invoice Software and for this reason, we need to develop/customize on top of ZOHO Invoice to create an XML file with specific information and after this, go to the government and certified the software. As soon as we have for example, ZOHO CRM integrated with ZOHO Invoice up and running, our business opportunities
                                                                                                            • Zia summarizes your IM bot chats in real time

                                                                                                              Hello everyone! Let's say you’re an agent taking over a chat where a customer was booking a flight through a bot on WhatsApp. They've already shared key details, like their destination, travel date, and number of passengers. You need to understand the
                                                                                                            • Megamenu

                                                                                                              Finally! Megamenu's are now available in Zoho-Sites, after waiting for it and requesting it for years! BUT ... why am I asked to upgrade in order to use a megamenu? First: Zoho promised to always provide premium versions and options for all included Zoho-applications
                                                                                                            • Cancel and refund

                                                                                                              Hi, Yesterday I paid for the Zoho email subscription. Within a few minutes, I realized that the subscription counts one email ID as one user. To make another email ID for the same domain name, I'd have to pay for another user. I emailed right away to
                                                                                                            • One Contact with Multiple Accounts with Portal enabled

                                                                                                              I have a contact that manages different accounts, so he needs to see the invoices of all the companies he manage in Portal but I found it not possible.. any idea? I tried to set different customers with the same email contact with the portal enabled and
                                                                                                            • Kaizen# 209 - Answering Your Questions | All About Client Script

                                                                                                              Hello everyone! Welcome back to another exciting Kaizen post! Thanks for all your feedback and questions. In this post, let's see the answers to your questions related to Client Script. We took the time to discuss with our development team, carefully
                                                                                                            • Unable to copy into a new document

                                                                                                              Whe I create a new Writer doc and attemp to copy and past I get this message. The only way to copy into a document is I duplicate an existing document, erase the text and save it under a different name and then paste the information. Not ideal. Can you
                                                                                                            • To Do: shareable task links without login

                                                                                                              Hi! I’m using Zoho Mail and ToDo in my daily work, and I’ve run into one limitation that’s a real blocker for me. Right now, to share tasks with managers or directors, they need to have a Zoho account and be added to a group. In practice, many of them
                                                                                                            • Ability to turn off "Would you like this amount to be reflected in the Payment field?" message

                                                                                                              Team, Is there any way to turn off the message" Would you like this amount to be reflected in the Payment field?" when I make a payment? This is so annoying. This happens EVERY TIME I put an amount in the Payment Made field.
                                                                                                            • Two currencies

                                                                                                              More and more I am finding that internattional payments' fees are unpredictable. I would like, on my invoices that are in a foreign currency (eg. USD$ or EUR€) for there to be a GBP£ TOTAL display alongside the invoice's currency total. This would make
                                                                                                            • Massive spam pretending to come from our address – is this a Zoho security issue?

                                                                                                              Hi, We’ve been receiving more and more suspicious emails lately — many of them clearly look like scams. But yesterday, we got an email that appeared to be sent from our own address, which was very concerning. We're starting to wonder if this might be
                                                                                                            • Unlock agreement intelligence with Zoho Sign's latest AI updates

                                                                                                              Hello! If you've been struggling with long, complex agreements and spending way too much time on them, here's exactly what you'll want to hear: Zoho Sign now integrates with OpenAI's ChatGPT to make agreement management smarter and simpler. Acting like
                                                                                                            • Currency abbreviations

                                                                                                              Hello, Im stuck, and need help. I need the currency fields for example, opportunity value, or total revenue, to be abbreviated, lets say for 1,000 - 1K, 1,000,000 - 1M, and so on, how should I do this?
                                                                                                            • Embed Sign Document

                                                                                                              Has anyone tried embedding a document in a webpage? I'm building a webpage (using PowerPage) and I'm trying to embed it using an iframe then I got this error: Refused to display 'https://sign.zoho.com/' in a frame because it set 'X-Frame-Options' to
                                                                                                            • Zeptomail API error 500 internal server error

                                                                                                              Hi Everyone, getting this eror continuously! Can anyone please guide around the same! Zeptomail API error 500 internal server error Best Regards
                                                                                                            • We’re transitioning from Zoho ShowTime to TrainerCentral

                                                                                                              Hello everyone, Zoho ShowTime was originally built as a training platform to serve training agencies, HR teams, and individual trainers. As the platform grew, we realized that more creators and businesses could benefit from its capabilities. That’s why
                                                                                                            • Emails Are Not Being Delivered to My Inbox

                                                                                                              Hello Zoho Support Team, I am experiencing an issue with my Zoho Mail account. The most important problem is that emails are not being delivered to my inbox. Details: My Zoho Mail address: info@coreforcelife.com What happens: I am not receiving any incoming
                                                                                                            • Upload my theme.

                                                                                                              Hello. I would like to upload my own theme, this one: https://themeforest.net/item/panagea-travel-and-tours-listings-template/21957086 Is it compatible and where I upload it? If not I will hire a developer, what do I have to ask when I search for one?
                                                                                                            • Radar In Focus: Track customer support metrics using Radar's static reports

                                                                                                              Hello everyone, Welcome back to the Radar In Focus series, where we explore how Radar features can add value to your business. In this episode, we're looking at Radar static reports. The help desk is filled with vast amounts of data that can be analyzed
                                                                                                            • Mail ToDo & Tasks Webhooks

                                                                                                              Our company uses Zoho ToDo inside Mail to manage our tasks. When I create a task and assign it to a team member it does not notify them unless I add a reminder via mail. I'm trying to create a webhook for when a task is created to send a cliq message
                                                                                                            • Allocating inventory to specific SO's

                                                                                                              Is there a way that allocate inventory to a specific sales order? For example, let's say we have 90 items in stock. Customer 1 orders 100 items. This allocates all 90 items to their order, and they have a back order for the remaining 10 items which could
                                                                                                            • Improved UI for a Seamless User Experience - Calls, Tasks, and Meetings

                                                                                                              Hello all, We are making UI unification across CRM so that the UI experience is seamless across the product. As part of that effort, we have made changes to the details page of activity-based module records—Meetings, Calls, and Tasks. Let's look at these
                                                                                                            • Where can I find rejected inbound mails and their reason for rejection

                                                                                                              Hi, I was recently made aware by a mailing list which I am subscribed to (ffmpeg-devel@ffmpeg.org) that my Zoho mail Mail account is rejecting some emails. If I look under Admin Panel > Security & Compliance > Quarantine > Incoming, the list there is
                                                                                                            • Refund

                                                                                                              Hi There, Please refund me asap possible, because of no support given. Thank you
                                                                                                            • 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
                                                                                                            • تغيير عمله الدفع"Change payment currency"

                                                                                                              ما هى طريقه تغيير عمله الدفع "ما هي طريقة تغيير عملة الدفع؟"
                                                                                                            • Next Page