Zoho Support: A Step Towards A More Integrated Suite

Zoho (CloudAve sponsor since beginning. See past CloudAve coverage of Zoho related news here) last week announced that they are releasing Zoho Support, a customer care solution integrated with their existing business suite. This is one of the applications long sought out by Zoho customers (Accounting app is another one I could think off) and Zoho satisfied this need with this reasonably powerful app. Zendesk is already going strong in this space. They have some features which Zoho doesn’t have but Zoho has some powerful workflow features (like their CRM app) which will come handy for businesses

Zoho Support comes with the following modules

Requests – This is where support requests coming from customers are aggregated and prioritized
Accounts and Contacts – Similar to what they have in the CRM and it is powerful enough to define, track and enforce SLAs of customer. In my opinion, this is one of the few features that makes Zoho Support stand out
Reports and Dashboards – Any support team needs a good dashboard and reporting facility to offer a high quality support for their customers and this feature takes care of those needs
Tasks – This module will allow support team to be more organized and efficient
Solutions Database – Same as the knowledgebase which is standard in many support systems
Workflow – This is something which is not available in many support solutions that are available in the market. They have taken the core functionality from their CRM app and included it in this app. Pretty neat and this will help any support team work efficiently in the organization
API, Templates and others – They expose all their functionality through API for third party integration. This is important to include Zoho Support into the existing business processes. The other features are some of the standard features usually available in any major support system

Like with other Zoho products, they have priced it aggressively. They have a free plan which has some limitations in terms of number of agents and number of support tickets per day. It also doesn’t have few other features like workflow management. The free plan is good enough for one person shops and organizations with limited IT. For Enterprises and large support organizations, Zoho Support offers paid plans starting at $12 per month per agent. Zoho Support also offers unlimited-user plans for smaller companies that process up to 200 tickets per day. The difference between the Enterprise version and professional version is the support for contract management.

The following video offers an overview of the new support app.

It is a pretty powerful app and it is priced very aggressively. It will be interesting to see how Zendesk responds to this new competition. As it is the case with Zoho apps, the app is not mature yet. They have a policy of releasing early and then sprucing it up as a mature product and then integrate with other services of Zoho. This is definitely a good start and it will be interesting to see where they go from here in terms of not only integrating it with other Zoho services but also with Google Apps.