When moments in customer support get "spooky"

When moments in customer support get "spooky"

It’s Halloween again!
Halloween is celebrated with spooky symbols and meanings based on history and traditions, with each region adding its own special touch. While we were kids, we would dress up in costumes along with friends, attend parties, and enjoy the thrills of the season. Growing older, our perspectives and the way we celebrate might may have changed. Now, we might find ourselves watching children enjoy their spooky fun or simply relaxing.
But for those working in customer support, Halloween can reveal different kinds of “spooky” moments. Some moments at work can feel just as haunting as the Halloween characters that test patience, empathy, and presence of mind. This Halloween, let’s talk about how we can turn moments of horror in customer support into delightful experiences.

The “spooks” of customer support  

Overflowing tickets

When you sign in to your Zoho Desk account, you might immediately have more tickets than you can handle. Too many tickets can make you miss your first-response time, drop your metrics, and soon you’re buried under an endless stream of unresolved tickets.

Falling resolution rates

As the workload piles up, your average resolution time can slip. Despite your best efforts, the gap between customer expectations and your responses continues to widen.


Tone gone wrong

With an overwhelming number of tickets, we might rush to reply quickly, which can make the emails sound curt or emotionless. We end up sounding rude or robotic without intending to. The lack of warmth can turn a neutral interaction into a negative experience.

Disappointing feedback

After all this, you work hard to respond to your customers and close all the tickets, aiming to solve their problems, yet the customer leaves a negative rating or an unhappy emoji. These negative rating can affect our CSAT scores leading to a more chilling experience than a Halloween scare.

Endless escalations

You’ve given your best, but tickets keep escalating one after another. Encountering one frustration after another while juggling deadlines is enough to make any support agent feel haunted by unfinished work.

Self-service pages

Imagine the customer's frustration when they're trying to find an answer, but the outdated knowledge base goes unpublished because it is outdated. What could have been resolved turns into a frustrated ticket.

Let's see how we can turn those spooky moments into spectacular ones.
Every “horror moment” in support can be transformed into an opportunity for excellence with the right tools, automation, and teamwork.

Organize your tickets

The prediction tools in Zoho Desk help you identify the high-priority tickets and learn from ticket history in less time. Zia can also detect anomalies and notify your team of tickets that require attention. The summary tools help you understand tickets and conversations quickly.
Use the default views and create custom views to categorize your tickets based on their assigned priority levels and due dates. Use various views under Workmodes to resolve tickets based on status, priority, and SLAs. The ticket notifications also help you view details where your name is tagged (@ mentions), unread, and flagged messages. These will help you resolve tickets quicker, leading to happy customers.

Assignment rules

Assignment rules help you distribute tickets evenly among agents so that one or two agents do not feel overwhelmed. Sharing the workload with fellow agents helps your team respond faster and serve customers more efficiently. The agent collision feature alerts you if two agents are working on the same ticket, thus avoiding duplicate efforts.

Workflow rules

Automate notifications for customer tickets or complaints. A simple response and acknowledgment can reassure customers that their issue is abeing ddressed to offer resolution.

Define service level agreements (SLAs)

Establish clear response and resolution times based on your business hours and ticket priorities. SLAs help you address the most urgent cases while maintaining service quality and consistency.

Update your availability status

Under profile, set your status for each support channel in Zoho Desk. When you’re online, you’ll be notified of new chats or emails to ensure nothing goes unnoticed.

Keep knowledge base (KB) articles updated

Set expiration dates for your help articles so you’re notified when it’s time to review or update them. Updating your knowledge base with the current information helps customers find the right answers faster, reducing ticket load.

Use Zia

Zia can help you sense the tone of the customers' emails. If you miss noticing the customer's emotions, Zia Insights and Zia Reply Assistance are at your service with emoticons and quick references to respond effectively. Zia insights give you an analysis of the customer's tone as well as the topics they discussed. You can also view the customer's CSAT ratings under their contact info.

Every one of these small steps can turn potential “frights” into smooth, positive experiences, both for you and your customers. The spooky moment in customer support can fade away with Zoho Desk's automation tools, AI-powered sentiment analysis, and unified knowledge base. This Halloween, while we celebrate with costumes and candy, let’s also celebrate the courage, creativity, and care of every customer support professional who turns the fright of a long queue into customer delights.
Wish you a happy Halloween! 🎃
Wishes from the Zoho Desk team 

    • Sticky Posts

    • Register for Zoho Desk Beta Community

      With the start of the year, we have decided to take a small step in making the life of our customers a little easier. We now have easy access to all our upcoming features and a faster way to request for beta access. We open betas for some of our features

    • Share your Zoho Desk story with us!

      Tell us how you use Zoho Desk for your business and inspire others with your story. Be it a simple workflow rule that helps you navigate complex processes or a macro that saves your team a lot of time; share it here and help the community learn and grow with shared knowledge. 

    • Tip #1: Learn to pick the right channels

      Mail, live chat, telephony, social media, web forms—there are so many support channels out there. Trying to pick the right channels to offer your customers can get pretty confusing. Emails are most useful when the customer wants to put things on record. However, escalated or complicated issues should not be resolved over email because it's slow and impersonal.  When you need immediate responses, live chat is more suitable. It's also quick and convenient, so it's the go-to channel for small issues. 

    • Welcome to Zoho Desk Community - Say hello here!

      Hello everyone! Though we have been here for a while, it’s time to formally establish the Zoho Desk Community; we’re really happy to have you all here! This can be the place where you take a moment to introduce yourself to the rest of the community. We’d love to hear all about you, what you do, what company or industry you work for, how you use Zoho Desk and anything else that you will like to share! Here’s a little about me. I am Chinmayee. I have been associated with Zoho since 2014. I joined here

    • Webinar 1: Blueprint for Customer Service

      With the launch of a host of new features in Zoho Desk, we thought it’ll be great to have a few webinars to help our customers make the most of them. We’re starting off with our most talked about feature, Blueprint in Zoho Desk. You can register for the Blueprint webinar here: The webinar will be delivered by our in-house product experts. This is a good opportunity to ask questions to our experts and understand how Blueprint can help you automate your service processes. We look forward to seeing

    • Recent Topics

    • Shift-Centric View for Assigning and Managing Shifts in Zoho People

      Hello Zoho People Product Team, Greetings and hope you are doing well. This feature request is related to Zoho People - please don't move it to zoho one! We would like to submit a feature request regarding the shift assignment and management view in Zoho

    • CRM function REST API response format

      Is there a way to control the JSON response returned by the CRM function REST API? If I call a function using either OAuth or an API key it returns a 200 OK response with a string in the format shown below. I am using a particular feature of an external

    • Add Employee Availability Functionality to Zoho People Shift Module

      Hello Zoho People Product Team, Greetings and hope you are doing well. We would like to submit a feature request to enhance the Zoho People Shift module by adding employee availability management, similar to the functionality available in Zoho Shifts.

    • Using MPN across multiple SKUs and inventory tracking

      I have several different SKU's that share a common MPN and would like to track inventory by MPN. SKU1 has MPN1 assigned SKU2 has MPN1 assigned Here is an example If I start with 5 of MPN 1 in stock I want each SKU1 and SKU2 to show as 5 in stock, If I

    • Unable to Access Application:

      Whenever I try to access my application from the desktop, say I am editing it and want to test something in the desktop environment I get: An error has occurred. An internal error has occurred. Please check the URL , or try refreshing the page I can edit

    • PDF Annotation is here - Mark Up PDFs Your Way!

      Reviewing PDFs just got a whole lot easier. You can now annotate PDFs directly in Zoho Notebook. Highlight important sections, add text, insert images, apply watermarks, and mark up documents in detail without leaving your notes. No app switching. No

    • CRM gets location smart with the all new Map View: visualize records, locate records within any radius, and more

      Hello all, We've introduced a new way to work with location data in Zoho CRM: the Map View. Instead of scrolling through endless lists, your records now appear as pins on a map. Built on top of the all-new address field and powered by Mappls (MapMyIndia),

    • Link Contacts to Billed Accounts

      Hello, I want to do a survey on all my customers of 2025. For that I want to select all contacts linked to accounts who where billed in 2025. How to I create this link to I can then use Zoho Survey with this database of contacts?

    • Zoho Creator customer portal limitation | Zoho One

      I'm asking you all for any feedback as to the logic or reasoning behind drastically limiting portal users when Zoho already meters based on number of records. I'm a single-seat, Zoho One Enterprise license holder. If my portal users are going to add records, wouldn't that increase revenue for Zoho as that is how Creator is monetized? Why limit my customer portal to only THREE external users when more users would equate to more records being entered into the database?!? (See help ticket reply below.)

    • Filter in fields from Jira extension

      We have installed the Jira extension so we can maken Jira issues from Zoho desk. In Zoho desk I can also see the Jira issue status for example but I can not filter on this field. I would like to setup an filter showing me the closed Jira issues. How can

    • Cannot see Application from Lookup field

      Hi all, I am trying to access data for an application on our account via a lookup field; however, the application doesn't appear in the dropdown at all. Can anyone shed any light on this, please? I have asked Zoho support; however, they're just as confused,

    • Cannot see correct DNS config for mail after moving domain to another provider

      I have moved my domain from one provider to another and after that zoho mail stopped working (expected). Problem is, zoho mail admin panel still shows (10 hours after move) that all records are correct while I haven't changed anything in my domain DNS

    • Zoho CRM Meetings Module Issues

      We have a use-case that is very common in today's world, but won't work in Zoho CRM. We have an SDR (Sales Development Rep) who makes many calls per day to Leads and Contacts, and schedules meetings for our primary Sales Reps. He does this by logging

    • Zoho Books integration sync from Zoho CRM does not work

      Hi Zoho Community & Zoho Support We just tried to get a sync some products into Zoho Books from CRM using the native sync and we're getting an error: "It looks like some mandatory fields you're trying to map are empty. Please provide valid field names

    • P & L Sub-categorized accounts

      How can I show sub-categorized Income and Expense accounts on the P & L report?

    • Report showing Bill Details with Project and Sales Invoice Number

      Hi There, I am hoping that someone can help, I am looking for report that can show the bill and expense details along with project its as assigned to and the invoice number that the sales has been raised in. The goal is I can filter a customer/project

    • Advanced Payment for Inventory Items with serial numbers

      Hello, We sell equipment that we track the unique serial numbers on using Sales Orders. We can charge the customers an advanced payment, then the balance on delivery. We cannot figure out a way to do this in Books/Inventory: - Cannot part invoice a SO

    • Is it possible to restrict ZCRM user to see only custom views created by administrator

      I have segmented data in my CRM and I want to allow different users to be able to see only parts of it based on some criteria. I've tried to create and share a custom view, but then there is always an option for user to see all open lead for example.

    • Issues Logging into ZOHO

      Hello, one of my coworkers is having issues logging into ZOHO, she has requested a code when entering and the email is correct but she has not received the code. can you help us with this?

    • Google Fonts Integration in Pagesense Popup Editor

      Hello Zoho Pagesense Team, We hope you're doing well. We’d like to submit a feature request to enhance Zoho Pagesense’s popup editor with Google Fonts support. Current Limitation: Currently, Pagesense offers a limited set of default fonts. Google Fonts

    • Add Popup Rejection Metrics to Reports

      Hello Zoho PageSense Team, We would like to request improved reporting for popup interactions. Current Limitation: PageSense currently provides conversion data, but there is no clear visibility into: Popup rejections Popup closes (✕ button clicks) Dismissals

    • Ability to Reset / Reinitialize Popup Cookies

      Hello Zoho PageSense Team, We would like to request the ability to manually reset popup cookies. Current Limitation: At the moment, it is not possible to initiate a new popup cookie from the our side. Visitors who rejected or closed a popup will not see

    • Control Popup Cookie Expiration Duration

      Hello Zoho PageSense Team, We would like to request an enhancement related to popup cookie management. Current Limitation: Currently, PageSense popup cookies remain active for 365 days, and this duration cannot be modified by us. If a visitor closes or

    • Clone / Export Popup Design Across PageSense Projects

      Hello Zoho PageSense Team, We hope you’re doing well. We would like to request an enhancement that allows popup designs to be reused across different PageSense projects. Problem Statement: Currently, Zoho PageSense allows popups to be duplicated only

    • Are there settings for hyperlinks?

      Clicking a hyperlinked cell in Sheet creates this little pop-up with the actual hyperlink inside. Is it possible to have a 1-click link where if you click the cell it opens the link directly with no pop-up?

    • Automatically include all ticket attachments in the ticket resolution email

      Hello Zoho Community, We are implementing Zoho Desk in a real customer-facing production environment and have run into a limitation that is becoming a blocking requirement for our clients. The problem When a ticket is closed or resolved, Zoho Desk sends

    • adding several team members to an Opportunity

      How can we add several team members to one opportunity for collaboration? I have researched and only found something called Deal Team which I cannot find in my CRM to configure.

    • Finding text within a ticket: Expand All or Search this Ticket

      The auto-collapse feature within a ticket is nice for screen scrolling, however it makes it difficult to find text within the ticket if the email is collapsed. In fact you cannot find text if it is collapsed. I would like to propose a feature that allows

    • Books & Desk. Client mapping

      Hi, I’ve been using Zoho Books for several years and am now looking to improve my customer service. I'm experimenting with Zoho Desk and want to sync and map my client data from Zoho Books. However, it seems that mapping requires both contacts to have

    • Bulk update Profile Permissions

      Dears, What should we do if we add new forms or reports and need to update more than 20 permissions? Updating them one by one feels pretty harsh, doesn’t it?

    • String handling

      If I cut a currency string from a quote and try and paste it into the Deal "Amount", it will fail unless I manually delete any commas. Dollar signs are no problem, but comma's seem to fail. Please correct this Input Validation error.

    • text length in list report mobile/tablet

      Is there a way to make the full text of a text field appear in the list report on mobile and tablet? With custom layouts, the text is always truncated after a certain number of characters.

    • email address somehow still not verified (?!)

      L.S. After creating a new email template in CRM I was about to send a group email to my clients, then Zoho CRM announced that they would change the sender address to some kind of Zoho-e-ddress because my email address "has not been verified". Not only

    • What's new in Zoho Sheet: Simplify data entry and collaboration

      Hello, Zoho Sheet community! Last year, our team was focused on research and development so we could deliver updates that enhance your spreadsheet experience. This year, we’re excited to deliver those enhancements—but we'll be rolling them out incrementally

    • WebDAV / FTP / SFTP protocols for syncing

      I believe the Zoho for Desktop app is built using a proprietary protocol. For the growing number of people using services such as odrive to sync multiple accounts from various providers (Google, Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, etc.) it would be really helpful

    • Consolidated report for multi-organisation

      I'm hoping to see this feature to be available but couldn't locate in anywhere in the trial version. Is this supported? The main aim to go to ERP is to have visibility of the multi-organisation in once place. I'm hopeful for this.

    • Feature Request - Allow Customers To Pick Meeting Duration

      Hi Bookings Team, It would be great if there was an option to allow customers to pick a duration based on a max and minimum amount of time defined by me and in increments defined by me. For example, I have some slots which are available for customers

    • Error Logs / Failure logs for Client Scripts Functions

      Hi Team, While we are implementing client scripts for the automation, it is working fine in few accounts but not working for others. So, it would be great if we can have error Logs for client scripts also just like custom functions. Is there any way that

    • Welcome to the Zoho ERP Community Forum

      Hello everyone, We are thrilled to launch Zoho ERP (India edition), a software to manage your business operations from end to end. We’ve created this community forum as a space for you to ask questions, comment answers, provide feedback, and share your

    • Support for Custom Fonts in Zoho Recruit Career Site and Candidate Portal

      Dear Zoho Recruit Team, I hope you're doing well. We would like to request the ability to use custom fonts in the Zoho Recruit Career Site and Candidate Portal. Currently only the default fonts (Roboto, Lato, and Montserrat) are available. While these

    • Next Page