What's new in Instant Messaging? | Zoho Desk | Feature Releases | Sept'2024

Improve your business communications with these new and enhanced features in Instant Messaging!

Excellent communication is at the heart of every strong work relationship. These new features and enhancements for professionals will help you build better connections with Instant Messaging.

We're adding more ways to stay connected with your customers! 

We are excited to add Facebook Messenger and Instagram to Zoho Desk's list of IM integrations. You can now easily manage your Meta Business (Facebook) Page's activity alongside messages from various channels on one common platform.

Facebook Messenger

One of the most popular messaging channels, Facebook Messenger, fulfills your business communication needs and provides an easy outlet for communicating with customers and maintaining your social media branding. 

Instagram

Manage your Instagram messages directly from your instant messaging inbox and assist your customers using the same inbox automation features you already rely on, such as blueprints, business hours, and much more.

These new integrations let you link your business account with Zoho Desk and respond to customer inquiries on this popular IM platform.

Business Messaging that matches your needs

Business Messaging

Integrate Zoho Desk's native Business Messaging widget seamlessly across webpages and apps, and customize it to align with your brand's style. This allows seamless hand-offs between bots and agents with automation to facilitate personalized and engaging conversations. Whether integrated independently or through the ASAP help widget, you can manage all your interactions using the Instant Messaging module.

Now, you can personalize your messenger to align with your brand, making your conversational experience accessible on both web and mobile platforms. Engage with a broader customer base through our business messaging channel, which is easy to set up, adaptable to your needs, and scalable for future expansion!

Enhancements in WhatsApp

Multi-WABA support

Great news! We are now supporting multi-WABA for businesses on the instant messaging platform. If you've been using the WhatsApp channel to communicate with your customers, you're likely aware that every WhatsApp Business Account (WABA) needs a verified phone number specifically dedicated to that IM channel for the current WhatsApp Business Platform. Log in for more information: Facebook Business Manager Account.

Acquire in-depth insights on how you spend WhatsApp Credits

Easily identify conversation patterns and anomalies, spot trends quickly with our color-coded graph, and promptly see your actual usage with our clear and easy-to-read conversational payment statements.

Blended conversation is now available across multiple channels

Get ready to experience Bot messaging like never before

You have the option to create a complete Guided Conversations custom bot flow, which enables the development of entirely automated interactions that work in tandem with Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Line, Telegram, and other business messaging channels.

Support teams can set their status as online or offline

Set Business Hours

Now, customers can specify their business hours. This feature provides greater flexibility in managing customer expectations with instant messaging. It allows you to customize business hours for individual teams to accommodate varying time zones or differing work hours for support and sales teams. We have also included the offline message as an automated response informing customers that the support team will be unavailable for an extended period.

Now chat with your customers the way they want

Instant Messaging inbox enhancement

We've enhanced the instant messaging inbox to improve and optimize messaging to provide better tools, features, and capabilities for managing and responding to messages.

Easily configure webhooks in IM

Do more with our Instant Messaging APIs

We introduced a webhook to support all inbound and outbound messages from your applications for custom events across channels.

Promote your business with replies via WhatsApp

Send WhatsApp messages in bulk to your contacts

Agents can now select contacts from the Contacts module to send WhatsApp messages to multiple contacts. The message can be sent to the contact's phone number, mobile number, or both. WhatsApp facilitates effective marketing, engagement, and customer retention management.

 
Send a WhatsApp message to a Contact using quick action

Agents can send WhatsApp messages to single contacts directly from the quick actions list by clicking the drop-down arrow from the top panel next to the plus sign (+). Alternatively, they can use the keyboard shortcut "w+" from any location within the desk. Each time a message is sent to a new contact, a new record is automatically created in the Contacts module.

Omni-channel messaging

IM conversations thread separation

You can now manage all channel conversations in your ticketing threads. This brings all IM channels and their conversations into one easily accessible ticket thread so that you can quickly understand how communication is handled across users.

Reply to IM tickets

Allows support agents to respond to customer inquiries and interact with them seamlessly across different messaging platforms while maintaining a unified view of the conversation history.

Associating agents made easy

Edit channel form

After successfully adding the instant messaging channel, you will be alerted: You have successfully linked your Zoho Desk account with a messaging channel. You can update your preferences for each messaging channel created in your help desk anytime. The preferences allow you to assign different agents for each channel within the channel form.

IM Automation

Triggering Blueprint is designed as a process management tool for IM conversations

Automating ticket actions via Blueprint transitions helps your team save time and streamline ticketing processes for instant messaging conversations. This allows agents to connect with customers and ensures the proper process is followed.

Monitor customer happiness ratings

Measure Customer Satisfaction across IM channels

By enabling the happiness rating, you can ask the customer to rate their experience in a survey that appears after the conversation ends—supported channels are WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and LINE.

With these improvements to your business communications, you can resolve issues faster, boost customer satisfaction, and grow your business successfully.

For more details, refer to the Instant Messaging help docs.

Cheers,

Kavya Rao
The Zoho Desk Team

• Topic Participants

• Kavya Rao Addepalli

  

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