Release Notes

Zoho Desk provides a way to relate a single contact to multiple accounts so your agents can easily track the relationships between the customers and companies they work with. Additionally, contacts can view all the tickets belonging to their account on the help center.

When you enable this feature, each contact requires a primary account. The primary account represents a direct relationship. But you can associate additional accounts to the contact in a secondary relationship.

• Set the visibility of a category to Agents only. The forum topics added to such a category would be visible only to the agents on your account and strictly internal.
• Choose who can post and reply to topics in a category.
• View key metrics of categories like the number of forums they have, the number of topics and comments they received, and the percentage of topics created under each topic type on the category details page.

Zoho Desk will automatically archive tickets that have been marked as closed and are inactive for 120 days to speed up the loading time in ticket views. You can view and unarchive these tickets under an exclusive view called "Archived Tickets". Tickets will also be unarchived when they receive a new conversation or on changing any of their properties.

• List views will display the last modified time of an article besides its owner and current version.
• Authors can discard the draft of an article from the list views and detail view.

In addition to more than 20 languages that Zoho Desk supports, we now support Telugu (one of the native languages of India) in the agent and administrator interface.

With the following updates you get more control over the finer details of your processes:

• Use strict mode to restrict agents from performing key ticket actions outside of a blueprint's transition bar.
• Configure the actions and fields you want to make mandatory during a transition.
• Reorder transitions based on priority using a simple drag and drop mechanism.

In addition to the Professional and Enterprise editions, the default widgets used to display additional information on your help center is available for the Standard edition as well.

Earlier, the notification received on sharing a ticket with your department was not user-customizable. Now, you can customize both the email and SMS templates corresponding to this notification. You can also turn off this notification if you don't want to receive them in a department.

In addition to 20 languages that Zoho Desk supports, we now support Tamil (one of the native languages of India) in the agent and administrator interface.

Two new permissions are added for the help center. With one permission, you can show or hide private department tickets on the help center, and with another, you can mandate captcha when unregistered users submit tickets.

A new role called "Personal Team" has been introduced for agents which allows individuals to access tickets owned by them, their team, and those unassigned in a department. You can set this role for both new and existing agents in your help desk.

Skill-based ticket assignment will assign tickets to the agents based on the skills you have defined for them. It works by stamping the skills needed to resolve a ticket, mapping them to agents with the matching skills, and assigning the ticket to the available agent with the lightest ticket load. This way, you can ensure that tickets are assigned to the agents who are most proficient in dealing with them.

With the federated login feature, your customers can now sign in and access your help center through identity providers such as Zoho, Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook. The advantage of using federated login is that your customers will no longer need to create separate help center accounts to track their tickets.

Zoho Desk Help Center is now available in Kazakh, which you can enable and offer to your customers from: Setup > Help Center > Languages > Default Language.

User interface of the knowledge base dashboard is revamped to give a clearer and comprehensive view of the data.

You can now listen to customer conversations over Instagram pages. This integration helps you connect with your Instagram customers to build better social media customer experiences as it allows you to view feeds, convert comments and reply to posts as tickets without leaving your help desk account.

Activities such as events, calls, and tasks will be automatically marked as spam when their linked ticket or contact is marked as spam. Once marked as spam, the activity is moved to the "Spam Activities" view. A ticket or contact must be marked as "Not Spam" to remove an activity from spam.

You can now unpublish a knowledge base article if you want to remove it from the help center, but keep it saved for future use.

Earlier, end users can only update the profile photo in their help center account. They now have an option to delete their photo as well.

The number of records (rows) displayed per page has been increased from 20 to 50 in the recycle bin.

This new permission namely, "Customers must sign in to your help center to submit tickets" has been introduced, which lets you decide whether customers must log in to submit tickets or not. By requiring your customers to register, you help to ensure that the support tickets you receive are legitimate and not spam.

f you have created blueprints in your help desk account, you may want to rename the ticket statuses used in it. This action is now possible in Zoho Desk.

You can configure the trigger threshold for anomalies and the deviation percentage for different ticket volumes to help Zia predict anomalies better. In addition, you can choose to receive anomaly notifications during specific business hours. Although Zia is an Enterprise-only feature, customers on other paid plans can start a 45-day free trial to know what she has to offer.

You can now mark a field as ePHI (Electronically Protected Health Information) if it contains the health information of your customers or patients. Marking a field as ePHI will encrypt its values in the database and add the ePHI label beside the field on the agent's interface and the help center. ePHI fields are available only in the Tickets, Contacts, and Accounts modules.

In addition to the existing modules, you can now configure and execute a workflow rule for the Calls and the Events module in your help desk account.

You can display your help desk's overall happiness ratings to customers by adding the Customer Happiness Ratings widget to your help center theme.

You can now notify agents via email and text messages when customers add, edit, or delete comments on their tickets in the help center.

In addition to the existing time-based automation conditions, a new condition called "Hours since requestor response pending" has been introduced. Using this condition, you can send alerts, create tasks, and update fields based on the hours that have elapsed since a requestor responded to their ticket.

This integration now allows you to add Office 365 users as a contact in Zoho Desk. You can add a maximum of 20 users at a time.

Gamescope helps you incentivize positive agent activity using customer support-related games and challenges. Users can identify measurable goals for agents and set up challenges for a group of peers, a team, or even an entire department. During a game, your agents become players and earn points based on their actions, helping you convert negative situations into positive customer experiences. The Gamescope library has trophies and badges that you can choose to commemorate wins for any given goal. When an agent wins a challenge(s), the associated badge or trophy is added to their Agent Card.

When customers don't find your Knowledge Base articles helpful, they may reach out with negative feedback. Zoho Desk now lets you automatically convert this feedback into tickets, so every comment can be tracked and replied to immediately. If needed, you can also choose to convert comments into tickets, manually.

When you use Zoho Desk to handle a large volume of tickets, you may need to perform a bulk action on 50+ tickets. For example, if you're about to go on a holiday and need to hand your tickets to a colleague, you will find that it's much easier to do it via bulk action, rather than reassign them one by one.

If your team uses Email Templates within Zoho Desk extensively, then this refinement will make navigating the long list of templates a lot easier! For quicker access, you can add commonly-used templates to your Starred Templates list, and mark a single base template as your Default Template for easy, hassle-free replies. What's more, these updates are agent-specific and can be personalized by each agent based on their preferences.

Custom functions can help simplify complex business processes within your help desk. With Schedules, you can automate these custom functions to trigger at any particular time or on a recurring basis. Tasks like clearing backlogs, sending reminders, closing tickets, among others, can all be automated using Schedules.

Track how effective your Help Center is with granular metrics. The improved PageSense integration now provides Goal Metrics to help you gauge how well your Help Center is performing against the targets you set. Monitor the type of traffic you receive by source, demographic, type of device and more. Observe trends and hotspots in visitor traffic and optimize to get the best out of your Help Center.

Make your Help Center your own by adding pages, custom widgets, and tabs, and customizing it to match your brand's design. Desk offers a variety of themes to choose from, as well as advanced HTML-CSS customization so you can match aspects of your portal to the look and feel of your website. Learn more about this here. 

Create sandbox themes to test and experiment without fear of affecting your live instance. You can create a new sandbox any time you want, but you can only have one per theme at a time. More about this here. 

We've made improvements to our Social module to help you stay on top of your social media and better leverage those channels. The revamped Social module organizes your social media accounts into "brands," so you can manage Facebook and Twitter pages associated with one brand, together. By addressing the challenges of the previous version in this revamp, we take you a step closer to efficient social media management. 

Delivering great customer service depends on the accuracy of data you're working with. Validation Rules use field validation to ensure that the data that enters your help desk is relevant and actionable.

Understanding user behavior on your website and help center is slowly becoming key to delivering customer service. Web forms were once the most common way to gather customer feedback, but when you engage in digital conversations, sometimes, you don't see the whole picture and end up missing out on important context. The Form Analytics integration for Zoho Desk gives you the stats and analytics you need to engage with your customers better.

Don’t lose track of all the activities that go into resolving a ticket successfully. With the new Activity Module, see a list of your calls, tasks, and events lined up for the day - all from a single place. Plan your day easily now, and keep track of all the backend tasks associated with your tickets.

A simple way to engage your user community is to incentivize their participation. With Gamescope for Zoho Desk, you can set these up in a jiffy. With points, levels, and badges, encourage your community to participate proactively. Recognize the time and effort they put in to share their ideas, feedback, and doubts.

When you have hundreds of tickets to address, quick resolutions are essential. We've improved the article editor so you can save time and reply faster with the following enhancements:

• Paste clipboard images directly into the reply editor. You can also resize, drag, and position them right within the editor.
• Upload multiple images at once.
• Play around with size and fonts in tables.
• Edit and preview links directly from the reply editor to send reference links quickly.

Table View is useful when you want more control over the ticket information you see. This is a tool for users who find themselves limited in terms of the level of information that is being offered in the Classic View and Compact View. With an upper limit of 15 columns, agents can look at most ticket details without having to open the ticket.

Tracking how well your team meets your SLA commitments is often a key indicator of delivering good customer service. The new SLA Metrics Dashboard helps you monitor your team's performance on a day to day basis and regularly monitor and correct your SLA policies if required. This SLA-specific Dashboard allows you to calculate results both on a per-ticket basis and on a per-instance basis.