Ring in the New Year with Guided Conversations for Smooth Offline Support

As we step into the new year, it’s time to refocus, re-energize, and gear up for fresh opportunities. But what about your customers as they begin the year with their own set of challenges or queries to resolve? 

With Zoho Desk’s Guided Conversations (GC), you can ensure they’re supported seamlessly, even as your team navigates the post-holiday rush.

Zylker Techfix, a mobile gadget firm, has a busy start as its customers flood them with requests: repair appointments, service inquiries, delivery tracking, and questions about new products. By leveraging Guided Conversations, Zylker Techfix provided an efficient, self-service experience that kept customers engaged while their team prioritized high-value tasks.

Here’s why Zylker Techfix setup the Guided Conversations feature within Zoho Desk:

• Customers could effortlessly log repair or service requests.
  
• Delivery updates and product inquiries were instantly addressed without delays.
  
• Clear and reassuring messaging kept customers informed that their concerns were logged and would be prioritized.
  
  
  

Guided Conversations acts as a dependable, 24/7 virtual assistant, automating ticket creation while offering a personal touch. Its intuitive, drag-and-drop builder enables you to design workflows that guide customers through their questions, gather essential information, and create tickets—even when your team is unavailable.

For businesses like Zylker Techfix, GC turned the often-hectic start of the year into an opportunity to build stronger customer relationships. By ensuring requests were acknowledged and logged, customers felt valued and confident that their needs were being addressed.

As you plan for the year ahead, Guided Conversations can help you create a customer experience that’s efficient, thoughtful, and future-ready. 

Guide to Set up Guided Conversations (GC) in Zoho Desk

Here’s how you can easily set up Guided Conversations to create tickets when agents are unavailable/offline:

1. Go to Setup > Self-Service > Guided Conversations.

2. Select the department before creating the flow because Guided Conversations are department-specific. 

Create a New Flow

3. Click on the Create Flow tab in the top-right corner.

4. Select the Web Channel. 

5. Enter a Name and Description for your flow, then click Next.

6. The GC design window will appear. Below the Guided Conversation icon, click the + icon to start building your flow.

7. Drag and drop elements from the right-hand panel to create your conversation blocks.

8. Drag the Text Message Block and drop it into the flow. Type a Welcome message. 

9. Enter the Name of the block and the Message you want to display to customers. This block is used to share direct information with your customers.

10. Click the + icon below the text message block and add a Question Block.

11. Use the Question blocks to collect inputs from customers based on your questions.

For example, use the following Question Blocks using the + icon to receive the information from your customers: 

• Name (Text Block) 
  
• Email (Email Block)
  
• Contact Number (Number Block)
  
• Date (Calendar Block for availability)
  
• Attachments (Attachment Block to receive files or images, such as screenshots).
  

Add Button Choice Blocks

12. Use the Button Choice Blocks to present predefined options to customers, such as a list of countries, states, or regions. This is useful for collecting specific information like location and understanding the time zone.

13. Drag the Text Question block to receive a description on the Issues submitted. 

14. Create the Date and Time question block to get the customer's availability time to reconnect, if required. 

To Create a Ticket

15. Now, click on the Zoho Desk blocks, click on the Create ticket.

16. Give the Block Name, choose the Department (the same department where you create this Guided Conversation), choose the layout for the Email template. 

17. In the Input variable mapping, click on the gear icon, map the field variables in the Tickets layout with the Flow variables created within  GC. 

For example, map the Email field within Tickets to the Email block in GC, map Phone with the Phone field, map Subject with the Issue Type, and map Description with the Describe issue text block

18. Click Save to save the mapping variables

19. In the Output variable mapping, click on the gear icon, map the ticket related information which you would like to share with the customers within the GC.  

Preview and Publish

20. Once all blocks are added, click on Preview to view the flow and ensure it works based on your requirements. 

21. Save your changes, and click Publish. Your Guided Conversation is ready to use!

Note: Some blocks are being developed for Instant Messaging (IM) channels and will appear faded out if you choose IM channels.

Create A GC Widget

i.    Go to Setup(S) >> Self Service >> Guided Conversations >> GC widgets. 

ii.   Click on Create GC widget. Give a Name and Description. 

iii.  Choose the Channels. click on the drop-down arrow under Associate flows >> Add Flow >> select the Published GC.

iv.  Click Associate. under Access Permissions, select users based on your preferences. 

v.   Enter your preferred welcome message that you would like to appear on your GC widget.

vi.  Enter End Options based on your preferences.

vii. Click Save to save your GC widget. 

ASAP Widget

Go to Setup (S) >> Self-Service >> ASAP >> Create New Widget. 

a. Enter a Name, enable the widget launcher to show the widget on your website. 

b. Associate the help widget with required departments.

c. Choose the required modules to associate with the widget.

d. Once you are done, click on Generate.  

Embed GC 

You can obtain the embed code to integrate the widget into your website or Help Center, as well as the organization ID for iOS and Android SDKs.

i.   Go to Setup (S) >> Self-Service >> ASAP. 

ii.  Hover over the created ASAP widget; click on Embeddable Code.  

iii. Copy the web embed code for use on your website or Help Center.

iv. Use the iOS ID for iOS SDK and the Android ID for Android SDK.

That’s it—your Guided Conversation is now live and ready to assist your customers! 

Pro Tip 

Guided Conversations can be tailored to suit a variety of scenarios, from managing customer inquiries to streamlining ticketing operations. Enhance the customer experience by customizing, editing, or updating workflows to meet their needs effortlessly.

Explore our Guided Conversation Guide and the automation with GC to  ensure your customers always have the support they need.

Here’s to a fantastic start to the New Year! Wishing you success and seamless experiences ahead: Happy New Year from the Zoho Desk Team! 🎉

• Topic Participants

• Lydia | Zoho Desk

  

• 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

• How to move emails to Shared Mailbox?

  Hello, I created a Shred Mailbox instead of using a distribution group. But I cannot move previous emails to certain shared mailbox. Is it possible move some emails from inbox to shared mailbox?

• How to implement new online payment gateway?

  Hello, Can you tell me how to proceed to implement my local payment gateway? DIBS has an open avaiable API that should be easy to implement into ZOHO BOOKS. http://tech.dibspayment.com/dibs_payment_window

• Zoho CRM - Portal Users Edit Their Own Account Information

  Hi Community, I'm working on a client portal and it seems like the only I can make the Account record editable to the Contact, is if I add another lookup on the Account to the Contact record. Am I missing something as the account already has a list of

• I’ve noticed that Zoho Sheet currently doesn’t have a feature similar to the QUERY formula in Google Sheets or Power Query in Microsoft Excel.

  These tools are extremely helpful for: Filtering and extracting data using simple SQL-like queries Combining or transforming data from multiple sheets or tables Creating dynamic reports without using complex formulas Having a Query-like function in Zoho

• Connecting Zoho Mail with Apollo.io

  Hi, I am trying to connect my Zoho Mail account with my Apollo.io account to start sending cold email for prospecting purposes. I have activated the IMAP setting but I am still unable to connect to the Apollo account. I am using my email credentials but

• Where does this report come from in the Zoho One ecosystems?

  Is this directly from MA, Analytics or ??? ???

• Contact's title in "Contact Role Mapping"

  When I'm creating a deal, I'd like to see the contacts title in the listing. Right now, I only see this: How can I get the contact's title in there?

• Zoho CRM - Client Portal - Hide Notes Related List

  Hi Community, I'm building a customer portal and I can't find a way to hide the notes related list. I don't want the client to see the notes I have about them. Is there a way to do this as it is no bin/trash icon when I hover over.

• "Pivot Table" Conditional Formatting

  Team, I there a way to use conditional formatting a "Pivot Table"  report? Thanks, Arron Blue Pumpkin Hosting | Solutions Made Simple

• How many clients can be added to Zoho Practice?

  How many clients can be added to Zoho Practice without having their zoho app?

• Stage History

  when viewing a ticket , and you look at stage history tab (kanban view) and look at the stage duration column in days, it shows the current stage of the ticket as " current stage ". Should it not rather show the amount of days it has been in that current

• Send Automated WhatsApp Messages and Leverage the Improved WhatsApp Templates

  Greetings, I hope all of you are doing well. We're excited to announce a major upgrade to Bigin's WhatsApp integration that brings more flexibility, interactivity, and automation to your customer messaging. WhatsApp message automation You can now use

• Automating Ticket Responses Using Zoho Desk's AI Features

  We’re looking to set up an automation within Zoho Desk that can analyze incoming emails or tickets and automatically respond with relevant knowledge base articles based on the content of the request. Could you please guide us on how to configure this

• Optimising CRM-Projects workflows to manage requests, using Forms as an intermediary

  Is it possible to create a workflow between three apps with traceability between them all? We send information from Zoho CRM Deals over to Zoho Projects for project management and execution. We have used a lookup of sorts to create tasks in the past,

• Service locations are tied to contacts?

  Trying the system out. And what I discovered is that it seems that the whole logic of the app is, I'd say, backwards. There is a Customer - a company. The company has contact persons and service locations can be associated with different contact persons.

• Enhancements to Zoho Maps integration tasks

  Hello everyone, We're excited to announce enhancements to the Zoho Maps integration tasks in Deluge, which will boost its performance. This post will walk you through the upcoming changes, explain why we're making them, and detail the steps you need to

• Bug in Total Hour Calculation in Regularization for past dates

  There is a bug in Zoho People Regularization For example today is the date is 10 if I choose a previous Date like 9 and add the Check in and Check out time The total hours aren't calculated properly, in the example the check in time is 10:40 AM check

• Cliq iOS can't see shared screen

  Hello, I had this morning a video call with a colleague. She is using Cliq Desktop MacOS and wanted to share her screen with me. I'm on iPad. I noticed, while she shared her screen, I could only see her video, but not the shared screen... Does Cliq iOS is able to display shared screen, or is it somewhere else to be found ? Regards

• UPS Label size when generated via Zoho

  We've integrated UPS with Zoho inventory. When creating and downloading the shipping labels they are created in a larger paper size. I'd like them to be generated to print on a 4x6 printer. Zoho have told me I need to do this within our UPS portal. UPS

• Narrative 12: Sandbox - Testing without the risk

  Behind the scenes of a successful ticketing system: BTS Series Narrative 12: Sandbox - Testing without the risk What is a sandbox environment? A sandbox environment is a virtual playground that allows you to test freely and experiment with various elements

• Dynamically catching new file creations

  I have a team folder with many subfolders, and in those folders we add new documents all the time. I'd like to have a workflow or script to notify me (and then take other actions) when a file is added anywhere in that structure that ends in "summary.txt".

• Announcing new features in Trident for Mac (1.27.0)

  Hello everyone! Trident for macOS (v1.27.0) is here with new features and enhancements to improve scheduling and managing your calendar events. Let's take a quick look at them. Stay aligned across time zones. Both the scheduled and original time zones

• Branding of native system emails

  Make system emails adjustable in terms of branding. We want our system to be completely white label, because it is not a CRM anymore, it's way more than that. We are following the strategy of "CRM for everyone" to use the CRM in all departments, not only

• Slow uploads of large files

  I'm wanting to use Workdrive for transferring large images and video (we're talking things from 100MB-5GB). I'm running solo on a 500MBit/sec fiber connection. I'm getting upload speeds to Workdrive of no more than about 1-3Mbytes/sec when going through

• Notes of Tasks in Zoho CRM

  Hello, Is there a way to filter the Notes that appear on a Task to only show the notes related to that specific Task and not display all the Notes of the objects related to that Task (Accounts, Contacts, Deal, etc). In essence, our team struggles to understand

• Migrate Your Notes from OneNote to Zoho Notebook Today

  Greetings Notebook Users, We’re excited to introduce a powerful new feature that lets you migrate your notes from Microsoft OneNote to Zoho Notebook—making your transition faster and more seamless than ever. ✨ What’s New One-click migration: Easily import

• need to upload from airtable to google drive

  I have a zapier zap that automates between airtable and google drive. When a customer uploads a new file into airtable via a client portal interface, zapier uploads that file into a folder linked to that customer's project record. I need to replicate

• Can't delete functions that are associated with deleted workflow rules

  We have a handful of functions that were once associated with a workflow rule, but the rule has been deleted. The function still thinks it is associated so I can't assign it to a new rule. It is starting to get really messy because we have a list of functions

• Default Sorting on Related Lists

  Is it possible to set the default sorting options on the related lists. For example on the Contact Details view I have related lists for activities, emails, products cases, notes etc... currently: Activities 'created date' newest first Emails - 'created

• Credit Management: #1 Credit You Owe vs Credits Owed to the Business

  Think about the last time you ordered food online. You might have paid in advance through your card, but you received a $20 refund because your order got delayed or cancelled. In most apps, refunds don't go into the bank account directly; instead, they're

• Tip #46- Turn Every Session into an Insight with Zoho Assist survey report- 'Insider Insights'

  Delivering exceptional remote support isn’t just about resolving issues, it’s about understanding how both customers and technicians experience each session. That’s where Survey Report in Zoho Assist come in. You can configure and customize survey questions

• Enhancing Zia's service with better contextual responses and article generation

  Hello everyone, We are enhancing Zia's Generative AI service to make your support experience smarter. Here's how: Increased accuracy with Qwen One of the key challenges in AI is delivering responses that are both contextually accurate and empathetic while

• Allow the usage of Multi-Select fields as the primary field on "Layout Rules"

  We want to force our users to enter some explanation strings when a multi-select field has been utilized. I can't understand the reason for the usage restriction of Multi-Select fields as a primary field. This is a simple "Display hidden mandatory field

• CRM/Bookings integration edits Contact names

  Hi there, I've installed the extension that connects Zoho CRM and Zoho Bookings. When we get a new appointment from Bookings from an existing Contact, that Contact's record shows this: First Name was updated from asd to blank value Last Name was updated

• Domain Change

  “Please update my Email-in domain from @biginmail.biginmail.in to @biginmail.zoho.com. Messages to the .in domain are bouncing.”

• Webhooks Limit Exceeded

  Today, I received an error message saying, 'Total number of Webhook call exceeded', but when I look at Manage > Billing, it doesn't look like any of my invokeURL calls are being logged. Following the advice from this thread: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/community/topic/webhooks-daily-limits-in-zoho-creator

• Option to block bookings from specific email address or ip adresss in zoho booking

  Sometime few of our client keep booking irrelevant booking service just to resolve their queries and they keep booking it again and again whenever they have queries. Currently its disturbing our current communication process and hierarchy which we have

• Auto select option in CRM after Zoho Form merge

  Hi, I have a dropdown field in Zoho CRM that is filled with a Zoho Form. The data is filled but not automatically shown. After selecting the right value in the dropdown the information a second field is shown. So the question is; how can I make the dropdown

• スマホでキャンペンメールを見ると正しく表示されない

  キャンペーンのメール（HTML）を作成しましたが、スマホ表示に切り替えると正しく表示されません（添付参照）過去に作成したキャンペーンでは特に意識してませんでしたが、問題なく表示されていたようです。うまく表示される場合とされない場合の違いは何でしょうか？

• Bring your CRM data straight into your presentations in Zoho Show

  Let's say you are working on a presentation about your team's sales pipeline for an upcoming strategy meeting. All the information you need about clients and leads is in Zoho CRM, but you end up copying details from the CRM into your slides, adjusting

• Next Page