Zoho Desk serves as one of the most feature-complete IT support and helpdesk solutions available to small to midsize businesses (SMBs) today.
The platform offers a free plan for up to three agents and serves as a gateway to Zoho's wide array of other products.
As with those services, Zoho continues to add features to improve Zoho Desk, building on an already rich feature set that includes advanced functionality like voice over IP (VoIP) and social media integration, as well as data analysis for managers monitoring customer interactions and service level agreements (SLAs).
Though it doesn't offer support for Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) practices like problem management, change management, and asset management, Zoho Desk is an ideal pick for customer-facing support teams, making it a clear winner of our Editors' Choice.
Even the free version is usable, especially for test purposes or for smaller businesses that may not be sure they need such a product.
It supports work modes, a knowledge base, forums, custom branding and domain mapping, SLAs, basic reports, and remote support for one user.
The Pro version ($12 per user per month) adds multichannel support, automations, advanced SLAs with business hours, integration with other Zoho apps, customer satisfaction ratings, cloud telephony integrations, social media support, and advanced reporting.
For $25 per user per month, the Enterprise tier checks every box in our features table except for asset management, which is typically limited to solutions that offer full ITIL support (and pricing to match).
It includes support for multiple brands in the customer portal, report scheduling, custom ticket templates, role-based access control, live chat support, and the Zia AI platform (currently in beta).
Unlike ServiceDesk Plus, which is also owned by Zoho (but released under its subsidiary brand ManageEngine), Zoho Desk is not available as a standalone on-premises app but only as a managed cloud service.
As you can see, Zoho Desk's pricing is very competitive, topping out at $25 while HappyFox starts out at $29 per user per month.
Freshdesk's free Sprout tier doesn't limit the number of agents and its Blossom tier is a thrifty $15 per user per month, but many Freshdesk features are unavailable until you pay for the Estate level at $49 per user per month.
Setup and Getting Started
Zoho does a good job keeping things simple, starting with the free version, which lets an IT department test the basic system without even having to provide a credit card number.
New accounts have access to the full Enterprise service level for a 15-day trial period, which may be extended up to 45 days by reviewing the product.
During initial account creation, you can either perform common configuration steps or simply begin using Zoho Desk and configure it later.
Zoho Desk even supports migration from Zendesk or Freshdesk through the Zwitch feature.
Tickets may be created via email or the customer portal, both of which can be customized heavily—email by adding additional support addresses, configuring outgoing email, and setting options for handling how email info is utilized, and the portal by customizing the knowledge base or adding community features (forums and gamification).
Zoho Desk offers unique customization features for the agent interface.
Top-menu modules can be rearranged or disabled entirely and various components can be renamed to more effectively align with your business needs.
Individual views can be customized to a high level: optimizing field placement in order to facilitate efficient data entry, removing unnecessary fields or requiring key information, or even setting field-level permissions.
Ticket Management
As with Freshdesk or HappyFox, tickets can be created through the customer service portal, email, or Facebook or Twitter.
Zoho Desk's ticket management UI provides simple ticket aggregation through any social media channel or directly through your company's portal.
Managers can easily drill down to incident details or view tickets by agent, issue, keyword, or customer.
While there is no dedicated asset management system, it's certainly possible to create an asset tag entry on the customizable ticket form as well as user names that could allow agents to perform limited asset-management-style searches, such as seeing whether the user or his or her PC has had problems in the past.
Managers can also monitor SLAs by user, department, or company.
The Headquarters feature provides an administrative dashboard of what's happening within the support team, with a handful of basic widgets and the ability to see which agents are active.
One of the neatest features you'll find in Zoho Desk is a customer satisfaction dashboard, which shows whether a select group of tickets has been resolved or is still open.
While the Headquarters dashboard gives you some key data at a glance, you can't configure the dashboard outside of a couple of filters here and there.
Zoho Desk lets you sort open tickets based on when they were created, which are overdue, which are due within two or three hours, and so forth.
You can categorize tickets by priority if time isn't a factor.
This is especially helpful for organizations that have tied Zoho Desk to Zoho CRM, where white-whale accounts might require immediate customer service even though the ticket may be sitting at the bottom of a timed queue.
The integration will automatically pull in customer relationship management (CRM) contact information to let you know if you're dealing with a major client.
There are several nuances to the Zoho Desk interface which enhance efficiency once mastered.
Tickets can be opened fully or simply viewed using the Peek button, which overlays ticket details over the ticket list.
Peek view gives you all the pertinent details, including suggested articles from the knowledge base and a ticket history for the customer.
Both views display all the conversations and comments that have been placed on the ticket by previous agents.
This includes sales data pulled from the CRM tool as well.
If there's an open ticket, when it's closed in Zoho Desk it automatically moves to the closed column and all the service information is updated in real time in Zoho CRM.
A few efficiency tools are worth calling out.
Snippets can be configured by end users allowing them to build out common responses using replacement variables including both agent and customer details.
Agent collision helps prevent multiple agents viewing or responding to the same ticket by placing notifications both in your notification menu and within the ticket, minimizing wasted effort and potential conflicts.
Macros are managed by an administrator and can incorporate several steps to be performed against a ticket when triggered.
Macros can incorporate alerts or data updates, as well as tasks, which can include changes to the status, priority, owner, or due date.
When situations requiring approval from a different department or a supervisor arise, Zoho Desk supports approval requests.
Approvals involve selecting one or more approvers and populating free-form subject and description fields; once submitted, they'll send the approvers notifications within the application and via email.
Approval requests may either be approved or rejected, though no opportunity is provided for the approver to give reasons for the decision, which seems like an oversight.
We'd also like to see this process be a little more formal, with administrator control over who can approve certain things.
A new helpdesk agent may not know where to send approvals, and it makes sense to build this into the application.
The Zoho Desk workflow module resembles macros executed on particular events.
Workflows use events and criteria to specify when actions (alerts, tasks, or field updates) should be performed.
Unlike macros, workflows can leverage custom functions, built using a language called Deluge (Data Enriched Language for the Universal Grid Environment), which means you can touch a huge array of things in a single pass including email, chat, other Zoho products, or even third-party web services.
Zoho Desk provides a comprehensive reference guide for using Deluge.
Blueprint is another powerful feature which perhaps better fits the traditional definition of a flowchart-based workflow.
Using Blueprint, you can restrict status changes on tickets to those on a valid path, or incorporate other actions (alerts, field updates, tasks, or custom functions) when transitioning between two states.
You can also flag a state as a common transition, meaning users can always return to that point from any state.
Individual states support SLAs and escalations, giving you a tool to not only monitor SLA compliance but also notify the necessary people before you violate the SLA.
Self-Service, Reporting, and Integration
Encouraging customers to find their own solution before tying up an agent improves helpdesk efficiency and can increase customer satisfaction.
Zoho Desk's self-service portal includes access to a custom knowledge base.
Agents can easily add to the knowledge base while solving a new problem as well as editing an existing entry as things change.
The knowledge base system is both flexible and easy to use, with separate categories for FAQs, how-to articles, and known issues.
It's a simple matter to set up multiple portals for different customers, whether internal or external, with customized forms using different logos or other branding.
The knowledge base supports building out categories and subcategories in order to help customers find relevant solutions.
You can even assign permissions to articles, making them available to the public, only to registered users, or only to support agents.
The knowledge base also supports search engine optimization (SEO) at the article level, increasing the odds that users will be able to find the solution to their problem even if they start at their favorite search engine rather than your front door.
Zia, Zoho's AI platform, is currently in private beta for Zoho Desk Enterprise customers.
Several useful tools become available with Zia enabled, including the ability to perform automated sentiment analysis (allowing Zia to make a judgment regarding the customer's satisfaction), automated tagging and notifications, and a widget-based chatbot.
In addition to the knowledge base, Zoho Desk also supports community forums, which can be displayed in the customer portal.
Forum categories can be configured for moderation or forum posts can automatically be converted into tickets.
Gamification is supported and offers a high degree of customization.
Points and badges can be offered for user participation, and community-specific reports are available.
Zoho offers a wealth of canned reports as well as the ability to customize existing reports or add custom reports to your library.
Reports may be scheduled and delivered using a variety of file formats, which is particularly useful for monitoring performance metrics or SLA compliance.
Integration with Zoho Analytics brings reporting to the next level, though depending on your needs there may be additional costs.
Perhaps the biggest reason to consider Zoho Desk is its tight integration with other Zoho apps.
We've already mentioned Zoho CRM and Zoho Analytics, but the company also offers tools for bug tracking, accounting, invoicing, and remote support which could easily add value.
A number of third-party integrations are available, including Microsoft Office 365 and Teams, as well as Jira, Salesforce, Slack, and Zapier.
Though not listed under integrations, Zoho Desk supports more than a dozen telephony providers including Twilio, RingCentral, and Amazon Connect.
Social media integration offers more functionality than merely importing your Facebook and Twitter traffic—Zoho Desk will let you support and promote your brand or brands by monitoring accounts or keywords.
Configuring social media support may require some quality time with the help docs, not because the process isn't streamlined but because it's full-featured and a bit nuanced.
Once you grasp the concepts you'll be set up swiftly.
Overall, Zoho Desk is a highly capable, easy-to-use, and nicely priced helpdesk system.
The free trial makes creating a test bed simple and provides a well-designed and capable UI for the Enterprise version.
Unless you're specifically looking for a helpdesk system with integrated asset management, such as Freshservice or Zendesk Support, Zoho Desk should definitely be on your short list.
Pros
Tight integration with other Zoho products
Highly configurable and easy to manage
Majority of feature set available at midrange pricing tier
The Bottom Line
Zoho Desk is an ideal choice for smaller companies that want a platform that can grow with them.
It's always adding features, it's priced affordably, and it's an easy winner of our Editors' Choice designation.
Zoho Desk Specs
Asset Management
No
Tickets From Social Media
Yes
Remote Control
No
Knowledge Base
Yes
Self-Service Portal
Yes
Smartphone Apps
Yes
Support Widget
Yes
Live Chat
No
Chatbot Support
No
Custom Reporting
Yes
Zoho Desk serves as one of the most feature-complete IT support and helpdesk solutions available to small to midsize businesses (SMBs) today.
The platform offers a free plan for up to three agents and serves as a gateway to Zoho's wide array of other products.
As with those services, Zoho continues to add features to improve Zoho Desk, building on an already rich feature set that includes advanced functionality like voice over IP (VoIP) and social media integration, as well as data analysis for managers monitoring customer interactions and service level agreements (SLAs).
Though it doesn't offer support for Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) practices like problem management, change management, and asset management, Zoho Desk is an ideal pick for customer-facing support teams, making it a clear winner of our Editors' Choice.
Even the free version is usable, especially for test purposes or for smaller businesses that may not be sure they need such a product.
It supports work modes, a knowledge base, forums, custom branding and domain mapping, SLAs, basic reports, and remote support for one user.
The Pro version ($12 per user per month) adds multichannel support, automations, advanced SLAs with business hours, integration with other Zoho apps, customer satisfaction ratings, cloud telephony integrations, social media support, and advanced reporting.
For $25 per user per month, the Enterprise tier checks every box in our features table except for asset management, which is typically limited to solutions that offer full ITIL support (and pricing to match).
It includes support for multiple brands in the customer portal, report scheduling, custom ticket templates, role-based access control, live chat support, and the Zia AI platform (currently in beta).
Unlike ServiceDesk Plus, which is also owned by Zoho (but released under its subsidiary brand ManageEngine), Zoho Desk is not available as a standalone on-premises app but only as a managed cloud service.
As you can see, Zoho Desk's pricing is very competitive, topping out at $25 while HappyFox starts out at $29 per user per month.
Freshdesk's free Sprout tier doesn't limit the number of agents and its Blossom tier is a thrifty $15 per user per month, but many Freshdesk features are unavailable until you pay for the Estate level at $49 per user per month.
Setup and Getting Started
Zoho does a good job keeping things simple, starting with the free version, which lets an IT department test the basic system without even having to provide a credit card number.
New accounts have access to the full Enterprise service level for a 15-day trial period, which may be extended up to 45 days by reviewing the product.
During initial account creation, you can either perform common configuration steps or simply begin using Zoho Desk and configure it later.
Zoho Desk even supports migration from Zendesk or Freshdesk through the Zwitch feature.
Tickets may be created via email or the customer portal, both of which can be customized heavily—email by adding additional support addresses, configuring outgoing email, and setting options for handling how email info is utilized, and the portal by customizing the knowledge base or adding community features (forums and gamification).
Zoho Desk offers unique customization features for the agent interface.
Top-menu modules can be rearranged or disabled entirely and various components can be renamed to more effectively align with your business needs.
Individual views can be customized to a high level: optimizing field placement in order to facilitate efficient data entry, removing unnecessary fields or requiring key information, or even setting field-level permissions.
Ticket Management
As with Freshdesk or HappyFox, tickets can be created through the customer service portal, email, or Facebook or Twitter.
Zoho Desk's ticket management UI provides simple ticket aggregation through any social media channel or directly through your company's portal.
Managers can easily drill down to incident details or view tickets by agent, issue, keyword, or customer.
While there is no dedicated asset management system, it's certainly possible to create an asset tag entry on the customizable ticket form as well as user names that could allow agents to perform limited asset-management-style searches, such as seeing whether the user or his or her PC has had problems in the past.
Managers can also monitor SLAs by user, department, or company.
The Headquarters feature provides an administrative dashboard of what's happening within the support team, with a handful of basic widgets and the ability to see which agents are active.
One of the neatest features you'll find in Zoho Desk is a customer satisfaction dashboard, which shows whether a select group of tickets has been resolved or is still open.
While the Headquarters dashboard gives you some key data at a glance, you can't configure the dashboard outside of a couple of filters here and there.
Zoho Desk lets you sort open tickets based on when they were created, which are overdue, which are due within two or three hours, and so forth.
You can categorize tickets by priority if time isn't a factor.
This is especially helpful for organizations that have tied Zoho Desk to Zoho CRM, where white-whale accounts might require immediate customer service even though the ticket may be sitting at the bottom of a timed queue.
The integration will automatically pull in customer relationship management (CRM) contact information to let you know if you're dealing with a major client.
There are several nuances to the Zoho Desk interface which enhance efficiency once mastered.
Tickets can be opened fully or simply viewed using the Peek button, which overlays ticket details over the ticket list.
Peek view gives you all the pertinent details, including suggested articles from the knowledge base and a ticket history for the customer.
Both views display all the conversations and comments that have been placed on the ticket by previous agents.
This includes sales data pulled from the CRM tool as well.
If there's an open ticket, when it's closed in Zoho Desk it automatically moves to the closed column and all the service information is updated in real time in Zoho CRM.
A few efficiency tools are worth calling out.
Snippets can be configured by end users allowing them to build out common responses using replacement variables including both agent and customer details.
Agent collision helps prevent multiple agents viewing or responding to the same ticket by placing notifications both in your notification menu and within the ticket, minimizing wasted effort and potential conflicts.
Macros are managed by an administrator and can incorporate several steps to be performed against a ticket when triggered.
Macros can incorporate alerts or data updates, as well as tasks, which can include changes to the status, priority, owner, or due date.
When situations requiring approval from a different department or a supervisor arise, Zoho Desk supports approval requests.
Approvals involve selecting one or more approvers and populating free-form subject and description fields; once submitted, they'll send the approvers notifications within the application and via email.
Approval requests may either be approved or rejected, though no opportunity is provided for the approver to give reasons for the decision, which seems like an oversight.
We'd also like to see this process be a little more formal, with administrator control over who can approve certain things.
A new helpdesk agent may not know where to send approvals, and it makes sense to build this into the application.
The Zoho Desk workflow module resembles macros executed on particular events.
Workflows use events and criteria to specify when actions (alerts, tasks, or field updates) should be performed.
Unlike macros, workflows can leverage custom functions, built using a language called Deluge (Data Enriched Language for the Universal Grid Environment), which means you can touch a huge array of things in a single pass including email, chat, other Zoho products, or even third-party web services.
Zoho Desk provides a comprehensive reference guide for using Deluge.
Blueprint is another powerful feature which perhaps better fits the traditional definition of a flowchart-based workflow.
Using Blueprint, you can restrict status changes on tickets to those on a valid path, or incorporate other actions (alerts, field updates, tasks, or custom functions) when transitioning between two states.
You can also flag a state as a common transition, meaning users can always return to that point from any state.
Individual states support SLAs and escalations, giving you a tool to not only monitor SLA compliance but also notify the necessary people before you violate the SLA.
Self-Service, Reporting, and Integration
Encouraging customers to find their own solution before tying up an agent improves helpdesk efficiency and can increase customer satisfaction.
Zoho Desk's self-service portal includes access to a custom knowledge base.
Agents can easily add to the knowledge base while solving a new problem as well as editing an existing entry as things change.
The knowledge base system is both flexible and easy to use, with separate categories for FAQs, how-to articles, and known issues.
It's a simple matter to set up multiple portals for different customers, whether internal or external, with customized forms using different logos or other branding.
The knowledge base supports building out categories and subcategories in order to help customers find relevant solutions.
You can even assign permissions to articles, making them available to the public, only to registered users, or only to support agents.
The knowledge base also supports search engine optimization (SEO) at the article level, increasing the odds that users will be able to find the solution to their problem even if they start at their favorite search engine rather than your front door.
Zia, Zoho's AI platform, is currently in private beta for Zoho Desk Enterprise customers.
Several useful tools become available with Zia enabled, including the ability to perform automated sentiment analysis (allowing Zia to make a judgment regarding the customer's satisfaction), automated tagging and notifications, and a widget-based chatbot.
In addition to the knowledge base, Zoho Desk also supports community forums, which can be displayed in the customer portal.
Forum categories can be configured for moderation or forum posts can automatically be converted into tickets.
Gamification is supported and offers a high degree of customization.
Points and badges can be offered for user participation, and community-specific reports are available.
Zoho offers a wealth of canned reports as well as the ability to customize existing reports or add custom reports to your library.
Reports may be scheduled and delivered using a variety of file formats, which is particularly useful for monitoring performance metrics or SLA compliance.
Integration with Zoho Analytics brings reporting to the next level, though depending on your needs there may be additional costs.
Perhaps the biggest reason to consider Zoho Desk is its tight integration with other Zoho apps.
We've already mentioned Zoho CRM and Zoho Analytics, but the company also offers tools for bug tracking, accounting, invoicing, and remote support which could easily add value.
A number of third-party integrations are available, including Microsoft Office 365 and Teams, as well as Jira, Salesforce, Slack, and Zapier.
Though not listed under integrations, Zoho Desk supports more than a dozen telephony providers including Twilio, RingCentral, and Amazon Connect.
Social media integration offers more functionality than merely importing your Facebook and Twitter traffic—Zoho Desk will let you support and promote your brand or brands by monitoring accounts or keywords.
Configuring social media support may require some quality time with the help docs, not because the process isn't streamlined but because it's full-featured and a bit nuanced.
Once you grasp the concepts you'll be set up swiftly.
Overall, Zoho Desk is a highly capable, easy-to-use, and nicely priced helpdesk system.
The free trial makes creating a test bed simple and provides a well-designed and capable UI for the Enterprise version.
Unless you're specifically looking for a helpdesk system with integrated asset management, such as Freshservice or Zendesk Support, Zoho Desk should definitely be on your short list.
Pros
Tight integration with other Zoho products
Highly configurable and easy to manage
Majority of feature set available at midrange pricing tier
The Bottom Line
Zoho Desk is an ideal choice for smaller companies that want a platform that can grow with them.
It's always adding features, it's priced affordably, and it's an easy winner of our Editors' Choice designation.
