Zoho Desk is the flagship customer support platform from Zoho Corporation, a privately held business software company founded in 1996. Built originally out of Zoho’s Tenkasi development center in India, Zoho Desk has grown into a mature, cloud-based help desk solution used by more than 100,000 businesses worldwide. It brings together email, chat, social media, telephony, web forms, and messaging into a single ticketing platform so support teams can manage the entire customer experience from one place.
The product emphasizes context-aware support: agents can see the full history of a customer’s interactions, view CRM data from Zoho CRM or Salesforce, and collaborate with other departments using internal comments and team feeds. Automation features such as SLAs, workflows, blueprints, macros, round-robin and skill-based routing help teams scale their operations while maintaining response time and resolution targets. Zoho Desk also includes a comprehensive self-service layer with knowledge base, community forums, and the ASAP in-app widget, plus multilingual support for both customers and agents.
A major differentiator is Zoho’s AI layer, Zia. In Zoho Desk, Zia powers capabilities such as ticket sentiment analysis, thread summarization, topic tagging, reply suggestions, anomaly detection, and AI “Agents” that can handle routine tasks or serve as answer bots for customers. These agentic AI capabilities are built directly into the platform and integrate with both Zoho’s own LLMs and external models where configured, giving teams sophisticated AI workflows without bolting on third-party tools.
Zoho Desk occupies a strong position in the customer support market as a value-focused alternative to Zendesk, Freshdesk and Salesforce Service Cloud. It is especially compelling for SMB and mid-market organizations that want a modern omnichannel help desk tightly integrated with the broader Zoho ecosystem—CRM, analytics, finance, collaboration, and more—while still being able to scale up to larger, more complex deployments as their needs grow.
