Zoho Corporation launches help-desk software

Launching a new customer service product on cloud platform here on Friday, software licensing company Zoho Corporation Private Ltd. said it plans to add 600 more staff as well as expand its development centre here.

The company is also working on a product to handle the tasks involved in the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime, Zoho Corporation CEO Sridhar Vembu told reporters here.

"This year we increased our headcount by 600 people. A similar number will be added next year." The company currently has around 4,000 employees.

Speaking about the new product 'Zoho Desk', Vembu claimed it is the industry's first context-aware help desk software, built by a team of officials here.

"It is a product made in rural India and made for the world," he said.

According to him, the product enables a customer service assistant to collate all details pertaining to a customer on a single page so that his/her queries/complaints are attended to without switching pages and collating relevant information.

He said the company will construct a new development centre at Tenkasi in Tirunelveli district to house around 250 persons. Its existing centre has around 140 employees.

Zoho Desk is the sixth product the company launched in 2016. The product's clan-user interface packs innovations like work modes that help agents send context-aware responses.

"There are around 150,000 paying organisations as our customers. We will target them first," Vembu said.

Zoho Desk product is integrated with the company's CRM (customer relationship management) software and other products, he said.

Vembu said US is a major market for the company and India ranks second in its overall business scheme of things.

"We are targeting the Indian customers. Our customer base is wide and varied and there is no major concentration of any particular industry segment," Vembu said.

Zoho Corporation's centre in Tenkasi has grown to around 140 people over a period of five years.

"We bought an abandoned building that used be a fruit-pulp manufacturing factory," he said.

Picturesque Tenkasi (Kasi of the south) is located on the foothills of Western Ghats and is the second largest town in Tirunelveli district.

"In an industry where companies have come to believe that the only location that matters in the cloud is few square miles of downtown San Francisco, we are proving that a determined and sincere group of people can build pathbreaking products anywhere," Vembu claimed.

Zoho Desk is free up to 10 users. Paid plans begin at Rs 270/user/month for professional edition and increase to Rs 1,500/user/month for the enterprise edition.

--IANS

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