Cloud based customer service ticketing and support software
4.3/5 (2266 reviews)Zendesk is the proven cloud-based customer service software solution that is the fastest way to enable great customer service in companies of all sizes and industries. Zendesk is so easy to use, it is loved by support teams and their customers worldwide. You can access Zendesk anywhere, from any device
Over 40,000 customers trust Zendesk including some of the world's leading brands such as Airbnb, Gilt Groupe, Groupon, Tumblr, Box, Sony and Sears.
Pros
The ticketing platform was much easier to use than our antiquated ticketing service we used. I like the different options and features that Zendesk has vs some of the other companies out there.
Cons
The interface is a little tricky if you have not used it before. So unless you have a diverse knowledge of ticketing software the hill can be a little hard to climb at first, but once you do its smooth sailing from there.
I can't stress enough how easy Zendesk makes it to pass tickets back and forth between people and teams. My team gets a constant flow of tickets and we are able to keep them organized by time, urgency and topic. All customer emails and voicemails that are incoming to my department are received in Zendesk and it's very simple to either respond or make a note and pass along the ticket to the correct person. Zendesk contributes enormously to my company's efficiency and overall organization.
Pros
Zendesk allows my team (the accounts receivable team) to work seamlessly with the customer support team. On a daily basis, we pass tickets back and forth to accomplish both simple and more difficult tasks for our customers. The majority of our customer emails, voicemails and recorded calls are logged in Zendesk, so it's easy to search the history of any given customer to find out what they have contacted us about and who helped them. Zendesk makes it super simple to switch back and forth between emailing and making internal notes. A single ticket can contain customer-facing communication, a phone call recording and employee-only notes, all of which are vital to managing our customer accounts.
Cons
There are really only two things I don't like about Zendesk. First, I don't care for how it looks when two or more tickets are merged together. Instead of logging emails and notes from oldest to newest like a chain of events, Zendesk collapses one ticket into the other and you have to open both to see everything. It's just a little difficult to understand visually. Second, my company used to use a similar system called Help Scout and it was able to tell us when a customer had opened an email from us. Zendesk is not able to do that.
This software has been really efficient since not only it allows to give a good attention to the client but also it is possible to do a follow-up to the attention agents to know who stands out the most, who are available to take care of the client and this makes that not wait for any client but all are served in the best way possible and you can solve their problems in the shortest time, there is also no way to have a collapse in the channels as there are different channels of attention that can be chosen to suit each client, that is why I think Zendesk is a tool with great potential and can be used in any type of company regardless of the size of it.
Pros
Zendesk is a customer service software with very relevant features that make me like it, one of them is that it has an extremely friendly interface, since it can be customized which allows it to be easy to use, allows the agent to have information about who the client is, in this way the help process becomes simpler and faster, the client can choose because they want to be served because this software provides different channels as an option being all in real time, besides it offers a highly efficient ticket management efficient since agents can create different notes on the same ticket and even several of them can serve the same client making the process much more efficient and the best thing is that through it you can track users as well as the tickets which is a great advantage since an order is maintained.
Cons
Despite being extremely efficient in terms of providing the most optimal tools to make the customer service process simpler and faster and adjusted to the needs of each client, this software still has some things that should improve as is the case of providing plans that can adjust more to each company since their plans has a fairly high price, also the creation of reports is very efficient but it is not easy to use so it can take more time than expected to complete the same
Overall, Zendesk makes customer service more efficient. As a manager, I'm able to see my employees satisfaction ratings, how long they spent that day answering emails, how long it takes them in general to answer an email, how long they spent on the phone, etc. Zendesk has been great in streamlining my customer service team while also optimizing the customer's experience.
Pros
Seems like Zendesk is the go-to for any e-commerce site these days. I wish there was another company that had the same amount of features and functionalities as zendesk does but I haven't found one. The chat widget is easy to implement and I like the option to have the "help" functionality act as a buffer between the customer and chat- we have the customer first try to find the answer to whatever question they have by searching our "help" articles. Then, if they can't find the answer they're looking for there, they can choose to chat with a live agent. This helps our customer service agents get the most out of their time- they're not chatting answering obvious questions that can be found all over our website (for the most part..).
Cons
What I like least about Zendesk is the automated "your ticket is open" and "your ticket is closed" functionality. This confuses customers a lot. We will close a ticket (email chain) and then zendesk automatically sends out to the customer a separate email that says "hour request is now closed." This really confuses customers- especially older ones. They'll send us a separate email saying "what request? what is closed" and we have to explain it to them, and then close the ticket again, thus sending the same "your request is now closed" email to them. Sometimes it's an endless circle.
Our company has been using Zendesk for 5-7 years. I was not personally around when we onboarded it, but I have worked with it for over 3 years now. We have terrible trouble any time we did need support, for a system problem or a question we couldn't answer ourselves via their expansive maze of KnowledgeBase. The support reps at Zendesk have been accusatory, excuse-ridden, and most of all don't even read the tickets you submit to understand the problem (Zendesk support actually became an office joke. That's about the time we decided we had to look for another tool). When we met with our Account Rep to try to get some of the issues worked out, we were told basically that we weren't even supposed to have gotten the level of support we had received, and proceeded to explain how SaaS works (we're a software company, mind you).
I think Zendesk simply got too big too fast, and somewhere along the way decided that the businesses using their product aren't important anymore. They lost this long-term customer.
Pros
Zendesk as a tool does what it is supposed to do, and it does it well. We used Support + Guide products, for ticketing for our e-learning business, and also for our Self-Serve support (knowledgebase). It is full-featured, and comprehensive. As far as support rep work goes, it's simple, to the point, and it integrates well with many tool because it is such a large company. It is designed for an enterprise company.
Cons
Because it is so full-featured, it can be years' work to get everything set like you need, and they provide little to no assistance. Some of the basic settings are so deep and so spread out, you'll spend hours reading through Help articles to understand how to customize your ticket form. It is NOT small-business friendly, it is really meant for large companies with someone dedicated to maintaining this software.
Essential: $5/agent/month (billed annually) or $9/agent/month (billed monthly).
Team: $19/agent/month (billed annually) or $25/agent/month (billed monthly).
Professional: $49/agent/month (billed annually) or $59/agent/month (billed monthly).
Enterprise: $99/agent/month (billed annually) or $125/agent/month (billed monthly).
Elite: $199/agent/month (billed annually).
The fastest way to great customer support. Rapid setup and deployment.
Increase and improve the quality of customers interactions.
Support your customers across any communication channel including web, email, chat, and social media.
Improve support team productivity and morale. Our customers love us!
Powerful reporting and advanced analytics including 20+ ready to use reports and dashboards.
Quick and easy adoption - no training required. Easy to onboard new agents.
Seamlessly integrate with existing business systems and software using our open API.
Over 100 out-of-the-box integrations with business software such as Salesforce, Google Apps, Atlassian, FreshBooks, and WordPress.
Low TCO and month-to-month payment options.
Secure, reliable, and scalable solution that will meet the demands of your growing business.
World class customer service from our team of highly-skilled customer advocates.
Zendesk is a cloud-based customer service solution that is loved for its ease of use, efficiency, flexibility and low cost of ownership. The software is suitable for every industry sector that provides some kind of customer service. It is fully scalable and can be easily and gradually be utilized by one department to a whole multi-national enterprise.
What Zendesk does is gather all customer feedback from a variety of sources such as email, chat, phone call, tweets, and bring it all under a well-designed and easy to use platform. Support agents can quickly seek the cases that need their immediate attention and deal with the customer issues right away. Zendesk even provides external information tools to help agents with their problem solving actions.
Customer feedback is not the only thing that is brought together under the same place though. Zendesk is also the solid collaboration platform that your agents or personnel from different departments can use in order to work collectively towards the solution of more complex problems. After all is done, reports and statistics are generated for you to evaluate how the software affects your efficiency.
Zendesk was created around the need to improve the quality of customer services and to bring customers and company communication closer by establishing a relationship between the two. As the software monitors all feedback sources, it allows agents to overseer all tickets and quickly act accordingly when needed. This greatly improves both the efficiency of your customer service departments, and the customer satisfaction.
With advanced workflow automation tools like the Triggers system, Zendesk guarantees that employees will no longer waste time doing the same things over and over again, while the maintaining of rich knowledge bases will help customers deal with problem even faster and further release tied-up resources.
Email is only one of the eight places Zendesk gathers customer feedback from but it is usually the most prominent and widely used, so developers made sure to equip the corresponding system with all the tools you’ll need. When an email is sent to the customer service department, it turns into a support ticket that includes all communication (replies, comments) from then on and until the ticket is solved.
Getting support request to your personal email is not uncommon and Zendesk offers such importing and forwarding capabilities to its users, so all such emails can be transformed to tickets. You can also add multiple support addresses or change the name that appears on the agent emails. Finally, from the “email template” settings, you can tweak the HTML code that defines the form of your emails.
Triggers is a smart system that users of Zendesk can deploy in order to streamline processes and automate common tasks. It basically works as a set of directions that are activated when a particular event happens. A set of triggers can be placed in a particular order, and multiple actions can then be executed as a result. An example would be to set all tickets coming from a VIP customer to be addressed by certain agent and be given high priority.
To create such triggers, you can click the admin icon on the sidebar and then select the “Triggers/Add Trigger” option. You may then add the name, conditions and actions for the new trigger and save it. You can re-arrange the order, edit, or delete any triggers later from the same settings menu.
For a 24/7 service solution, Zendesk offers advanced self-service capabilities by using comprehensive knowledge bases that you can enrich, or update by correlating solved cases and assigning them with tags. This way customers can visit your company’s website and search to find what they are looking for, without trussing your resources.
Besides the knowledge base, customers may also visit community portals with discussions that contain valuable information and advice regarding common problems. The satisfaction that the customers get when finding the solution to their problem by themselves, is higher compared to that gained when waiting for an agent to reply.
Companies strive hard to distinguish themselves in highly competitive environments through individualization and specialization. For a help center to be effective and coherent with a company’s style and character, Zendesk must offer deep customization options and high tailoring abilities. Thankfully, it does exactly that.
You can use themes that are created with great tenacity for every promotional and functional detail and let your customers quickly find what they are looking for. Different layouts with different elements on the front page, assure that the special needs of each distinct service will be met by Zendesk.
Zendesk Reports form part of the standard feature set offered by Zendesk. Reports are available on all plans and provide metrics on KPIs such as daily ticket activity, service level agreement compliance, average resolution time, customer satisfaction, agent performance, ticket resolution time, and efficiency.
The reporting tool provides a snapshot overview of a collection of tickets for a specified time period. By defining ticket properties you can decide which tickets you want to monitor and for which time period.
Zendesk Insights is an advanced reporting feature offered on the Plus and Enterprise plans. This feature provides the ability to carry our more customized analysis of KPIs at a deeper level. These reports could be used to analyze a particular customer group, such as VIP clients, or certain demographic groups based on variables such as location, age or satisfaction rate.
Zendesk Insights is an essential feature for those looking to pinpoint issues and identify key performance areas. This in-depth analysis is enabled through the use of custom fields on tickets, users and organizations, along with the ability to create metrics, reports and dashboards based on contextual data most relevant to your business. The export function is also critical for executive reporting.
Zendesk is one of the most integrating pieces of software out there, with more than 200 integrations available free of price through the software’s official Apps Marketplace. The apps found there concern agent productivity enhancers, deeper analytics tools, e-commerce helpers, issue trackers, IT management applications, social media conglomerators and telephony/sms and chat clients.
Some of the most popular apps that integrate well with Zendesk are SalesForce, ZenCart, Magento, JIRA, TeamViewer, Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, PlanBox, MailChimp and 8X8. If you still can’t find what you need though, you can always build your own integration using the development tools provided by Zendesk.
Zendesk is available in five different flavors that incorporate different sets of features. This together with the “per agent” pricing provides very high efficiency in the factor of costs to actual needs, as companies are in a position to pay and cover precisely their needs, instead of getting useless features and/or excess user licences.
The packages are the Starter (1$ per agent per month), Regular (25$), Plus (49$), Enterprise (125$) and Enterprise Elite (195$). For more details about what features these include, visit Zendesk pricing webpage. The Plus package is also offered as a trial for 30 days and in the case that you buy a license, all data, customizations and actions remain intact.
Below are some frequently asked questions for Zendesk.
Zendesk offers the following pricing plans:
Starting from: USD 5.00/month
Pricing model: Subscription
Free Trial: Available
Essential: $5/agent/month (billed annually) or $9/agent/month (billed monthly).
Team: $19/agent/month (billed annually) or $25/agent/month (billed monthly).
Professional: $49/agent/month (billed annually) or $59/agent/month (billed monthly).
Enterprise: $99/agent/month (billed annually) or $125/agent/month (billed monthly).
Elite: $199/agent/month (billed annually).
Zendesk offers the following features:
Zendesk has the following typical customers:
Freelancers, Large Enterprises, Mid Size Business, Non Profit, Public Administrations, Small Business
Zendesk supports the following languages:
Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish
Zendesk has the following pricing plans:
Subscription
Zendesk supports the following devices:
Android, iPhone, iPad
Zendesk integrates with the following applications:
123FormBuilder, Clarizen, ClickDesk, Get Satisfaction, Innotas, InsightSquared, Podio, Vivocha, Yonyx, Zendesk Chat
Zendesk offers the following support options:
FAQs, Forum, Knowledge Base, Online Support, Phone Support, Video Tutorials
We used Zendesk at 3 of my last 4 jobs. The last 2 at my suggestion. We handle a diverse amount of different customer issues and its a great system to manage and track all the different interactions our customers are having as well as the agents that are handling them.