NAF uses Zoho Desk's Guided Conversations widget to answer customers' questions around the clock

Overview

Zoho Desk's Guided Conversations feature has helped NAF be more available to customers who require immediate support and resources.  

The Company

NAF is a non-profit organization focused on providing access to opportunities that prepare high school students for successful futures. For 40 years, NAF has led a movement for immersive, career-focused teaching and learning for high school students. They aim to address the economic and social disparities that have marginalized countless students in the United States by bringing schools and businesses together to better prepare students of all backgrounds and capabilities for college, careers, and future success.  

NAF's footprint reaches over 300 high schools across the United States, supporting more than 120,000 students. Students develop future-ready skills—including problem-solving, communication, and collaboration—that will benefit them along any pathway they choose. NAF helps students build industry-specific skills that prepare them for the demands of a changing workforce.  

NAF Chose Zoho Desk as their Support Desk Partner

Prior to adopting Zoho Desk, NAF was struggling to process customer inquiries. They had only a single email channel through which customers could contact them, which—given the large number of queries they were seeing—made the process almost infeasible. Additionally, their network only had one landing page where customers could inquire or request information. So, after evaluating a number of products in the market, NAF chose Zoho Desk for its ease of use.  

The Solution

Streamlining ticket submission

One of the first steps NAF took was adding a support button to their site, which has been proven extremely useful, because now their users don't have to know which email address to submit a ticket to. Zoho Desk has made the entire process of submitting a ticket easier for their `customers.  

Zoho Desk also enables NAF to create different departments with their own separate helpdesks. Because the customer base varies with each department, this functionality has been a big help for support agents in managing their distinct departments as efficiently as possible. Since this multi-department creation was such a huge success internally, NAF opened it up to their network of educators, too.  

Guided Conversations

NAF has a smaller customer support team, and so they were looking for a feature that can help them provide an ideal customer experience from the first step of submitting a query. They wanted to answer as many of their users' questions as possible, and also drive traffic to their ticketing system, Zoho Desk, in case users want more information.  

As part of their quest to provide the best possible customer experience, NAF turned to Zoho's Guided Conversations (GC) feature: a chatbot that provides pre-defined answers to a given query—anytime, around the clock. GC met all of NAF's requirements, and they implemented it in-house within a week after preparing their workflow. They've been using GC for more than a year.  

"Since we're already customers of Zoho Desk, it made sense to try and stay within the same ecosystem, provided the tool allowed us to do what we needed to do," says Beri. "And it was easy enough to implement, which is what made us go for it."  

Benefits and ROI from leveraging the Guided Conversations feature

NAF doesn't support live chat because of their limited number of support staff, but that doesn't stop them from providing an amazing experience to their users. They implemented a robust and innovative feature, Guided Conversations, that enables them to be available for their users at all times.  

Also, NAF has circulated a few customer happiness surveys among their customers and achieved a 100% rating, which is a great success for their customer support efforts.