In a crowded field of cloud-based customer care platforms, the latest release of Zoho Desk distinguishes itself by supporting conversations between enterprises and their customers that move effortlessly from bots to humans… and back again when appropriate. Zoho calls the capability “Blended Conversations” <https://www.zoho.com/news/zoho-launches-blended-conversations-for-zoho-desk.html>, while noting that it enables every customer service agent to delegate the majority of “manual and transactional tasks to bots, while remaining in control of the overall service experience.”

Thanks to the simplicity of Zoho’s Instant Messaging (IM) framework, customers are able to contact companies directly through their mobile apps or by choosing their favorite messaging platform from a list that already includes WhatsApp, WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, WeChat, Messenger, and Instagram. (Rich business messaging services from Google and Apple are next on the list). Once connected, they are greeted by a chatbot that can take care of routine activities like customer authentication and assessing the purpose of the contact. Businesses define and develop these chatbots using Zoho’s Guided Conversations (GC) tools. It is a “low-code” bot builder that simplifies the process of building a bot that asks relevant questions that steer the conversation and lead customers to the best solution.

Employing GC enables companies to build the conversational bots once and have them rendered correctly across all supported channels. When a customer wants to move from the self-service scenario to chatting with a live agent, that’s when Blended Conversations come into play. In the example that Zoho provides own its Web site, a chatbot is employed to assess the purpose of a contact and authenticate the customer’s identity. Then it brings a live agent in to gauge the exact action that needs to be taken and show sensitivity to the customer’s tone of voice and general mood. When appropriate, the agent can turnover the conversation to the chatbot, which can look up the status of an order or complete a transaction before turning it back over to a live agent to close things out.

A Quick and Easy Way to Incorporate Conversational AI

Simplicity, agility and cost-effectiveness are Zoho’s stock-in-trade. Over the past five years, the company has seen 45% compound annual growth in revenue and 25% compound annual growth in the number of customers for Zoho Desk. Both are attributable to the company’s commitment to making it simple for companies of all sizes to support customer care over the multiplicity of channels that customers choose and the broad spectrum of microservices and APIs that businesses have to choose from.

Public awareness of the power of Conversational AI is exploding. Thanks to the viral media coverage of tools and large language models like ChatGPT, the general public has been exposed to “chatbots” that understand complex questions and reply with thoughtful-sounding, crafted responses. Zoho’s democratization of AI takes place at the same time that businesses are figuring out how best to deploy AI-infused resources to improve customer experience as well as employee productivity and general happiness.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants, Intelligent Authentication