Zoho Desk is Zoho's customer support platform — email ticketing plus live chat, social channels and phone logging, closest to something like Zendesk. It's organised into departments (customer support, finance, cancellations, technical support…), each with its own ticket queue, and users only see the departments they belong to.
Parent and child tickets let one ticket depend on others. Crucially, child tickets can now sit in a different department from the parent — so the right team does the work, and everything stays connected.
Example: a cancellation request
- A customer emails support saying they want to cancel. Support tries to help, but the customer still wants to leave — and support can't process cancellations.
- From the ticket, choose Parent and child → create child ticket, set the department to Cancellations, add the customer and a description.
- Put the parent on hold. It shows it's waiting on an open child ticket in Cancellations.
- The Cancellations team sees a new ticket in their queue, linked to the parent, and handles it.
- When they close the child, the parent shows it's resolved, and support can reply to the customer and close the parent.
To speed this up, add a custom button such as "Submit cancellation request" that creates the child ticket, links it and copies across the details automatically.
Other good uses
- Customer onboarding. When a deal is won in Zoho CRM, create a parent onboarding ticket with child tickets in each responsible department — finance set-up and credit checks with finance, delivery with operations — rather than leaving sales to chase everyone. (Zoho Projects suits this too; Desk works well when most of the work is email.)
- Outages and bugs. Create one parent ticket for the issue and link every affected customer's ticket to it. When it's fixed, you know exactly who to update.
Desk and Zoho CRM
With Desk connected, tickets appear on CRM records in their own Zoho Desk section, separate from emails — so support conversations don't clutter the sales view, but the whole team can see them.
Watch the June 2025 What's New in Zoho webinar for a demo.