What it is
Zoho Desk is a help desk for organizing tickets from email, phone, chat, social and messaging apps, with SLAs, automations, a help center and Zia, its AI assistant. It has a free plan for small teams and lower per-agent pricing than Zendesk, and it connects natively with Zoho CRM and the rest of the Zoho suite.
How to use it
- Receive tickets from email, web forms, chat, WhatsApp and social in one view.
- Automate assignment and SLAs with rules and workflows.
- Connect Zoho CRM to see each customer's sales history.
- Publish a knowledge base and a portal where customers track their cases.
What it's good for
- A medical equipment distributor already on Zoho CRM that wants warranty tickets connected.
- An internet provider handling outage reports with SLAs by customer type.
- A 3-person team starting on the free plan and growing without switching tools.
Pros
- Free plan for up to 3 agents
- Paid plans from about US$7 per agent per month
- Native integration with Zoho CRM, Zoho Books and other Zoho apps
- Spanish-language interface
Cons
- Dense interface: lots of options and a real setup effort
- Zia and the most advanced automations are limited to higher tiers
- Works best inside Zoho; integrations with other CRMs are shallower
