ETtechZoho Desk, a help desk software product built from scratch at a remote office in Tenkasi in southern Tamil Nadu, has reached the milestone of 100,000 customers, including large customers from 16 countries, a senior executive told ET.
Developed in November 2016 by a core team of engineers and product managers who moved to the satellite office, Zoho Desk competes with overseas firms like Salesforce to corner a pie of an estimated $30 billion (Rs 2.48 lakh crore) global customer service market.
Zoho has had a strong presence of employees hailing from the three southern districts in Tamil Nadu – Tirunelveli, Tenkasi and Kanyakumari. The regional office in Tenkasi is just one among several small offices Zoho is setting up across the country.
“Product management, engineering and design for the product still sits in Tenkasi, while a good part of support is based there too. Sales, of course, regional,” said Prashanth Krishnaswami, global head of market strategy and thought leadership - customer experience (CX) group at Zoho.
The company has said its desk software has achieved 45% growth compounded annually in revenue over the past five years, and 57% growth in India. It has leveraged machine learning and advancements to natural language processing to introduce “blended conversations”, where human service agents can hand off customer interactions to bot-driven workflows seamlessly.
While human to bot service agents interactions are already in the market – ubiquitous examples being bot interactions on food delivery apps like Swiggy – bot to human interactions in second and third rungs are tough to run.
Zoho’s advantage in the software-as-a-service segment is the multiple entry points into its product suite – the company offers more than 50 products in markets such as accounting, email, project management, collaboration tools and chat.
For the desk software, Zoho has made the access inclusive by making the software user interface friendly to users with accessibility challenges including cognitive and dyslexia challenges, visual impairments including astigmatism, animation reduction for those with seizure disorders and customisation capabilities for colour blindness.
Developed in November 2016 by a core team of engineers and product managers who moved to the satellite office, Zoho Desk competes with overseas firms like Salesforce to corner a pie of an estimated $30 billion (Rs 2.48 lakh crore) global customer service market.
Zoho had set up its office in Tenkasi a few quarters ahead of the product launch in 2016 in a bid to create far-flung office spaces to offer employees a closer-to-home work location, compared to megapolises such as Bengaluru and Chennai.
Zoho has had a strong presence of employees hailing from the three southern districts in Tamil Nadu – Tirunelveli, Tenkasi and Kanyakumari. The regional office in Tenkasi is just one among several small offices Zoho is setting up across the country.
“Product management, engineering and design for the product still sits in Tenkasi, while a good part of support is based there too. Sales, of course, regional,” said Prashanth Krishnaswami, global head of market strategy and thought leadership - customer experience (CX) group at Zoho.
The company has said its desk software has achieved 45% growth compounded annually in revenue over the past five years, and 57% growth in India. It has leveraged machine learning and advancements to natural language processing to introduce “blended conversations”, where human service agents can hand off customer interactions to bot-driven workflows seamlessly.
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While human to bot service agents interactions are already in the market – ubiquitous examples being bot interactions on food delivery apps like Swiggy – bot to human interactions in second and third rungs are tough to run.
Zoho’s advantage in the software-as-a-service segment is the multiple entry points into its product suite – the company offers more than 50 products in markets such as accounting, email, project management, collaboration tools and chat.
For the desk software, Zoho has made the access inclusive by making the software user interface friendly to users with accessibility challenges including cognitive and dyslexia challenges, visual impairments including astigmatism, animation reduction for those with seizure disorders and customisation capabilities for colour blindness.
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