Zendesk Overview
What is Zendesk?
The best customer experiences are built with Zendesk. Our customer service and engagement products are powerful and flexible, and scale to meet the needs of any business. Zendesk serves businesses across hundreds of industries, with more than 200,000 customers offering service and support in over 60 languages.
Zendesk Support is a help desk solution proven to increase customer satisfaction and agent productivity - at any scale. This all starts with the customer experience: meeting them where they are, on their terms, and collecting the right information. We intelligently route these requests to agents, providing them with the context and tools they need to resolve issues and build stronger relationships. And it works. On average, our customers achieve a 95% customer satisfaction score.
Within the Zendesk platform, Zendesk Chat enables support agents to manage and switch between multiple support cases at once via multiple channels including chat, phone calls, email, and social media messages. Using automated triggers, customers can be engaged at the moment support is needed, before they've asked their question. Live chat analytics provide measurable insight on customer satisfaction and agent performance, to help business ensure that their support services continuously improve.
Zendesk Connect manages proactive, multi-channel customer communication, segmenting users based on their actions within the product, and their individual support history. Conditional logic determines the content of messages sent to individual users using IF, ELSE, and looping logic, while A/B testing continuously analyzes which content is the most successful, automatically choosing the winning content to send for future messages.
Zendesk Overview
Cost
Pricing options
Pricing for Zendesk Support starts at $5 per agent, and scales across five pricing plans: Essential, Team, Professional, Enterprise, and Elite. A free trial is 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 Features
Screenshots
Zendesk Reviews
Zendesk Reviews
The best professional ticketing solution
I have had several smooth years using zendesk and really love using it for every ticket incident I have to resolve.
Need help from Zendesk? Forget it. Don't even bother.
Horrible. I only use this software because it would be a hassle porting all existing tickets over to a different platform. I needed billing support from them, and my ticket was 'escalated' to the Finance department, but nobody ever got back to me in time. Literally a few days went by and not one word from my Zendesk agent. They have a poor support system. So, if you don't ever need help with anything and know what you're doing, then ZD is probably for you.
Honestly, This is Probably the Best CX Platform for Startups
We use Zendesk as an email platform to communicate with our users (also via phone), and we also use it as a platform for our FAQs and Help Center.
Easy Inter-team Communication and Customer History
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.
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The best professional ticketing solution
Pros
I can manage my tickets with ease using Zendesk. It provides me with the perfect user interface to easily navigate between all my tickets and incidents. This tool is also widely used making it great for training new colleagues and customers to use this for internal systems.
Cons
The software is great however it can take a couple of hours to get used to the flow of tickets and interfaces in comparison to some other CRM software. Once familiar this is not an issue.
Need help from Zendesk? Forget it. Don't even bother.
Horrible. I only use this software because it would be a hassle porting all existing tickets over to a different platform. I needed billing support from them, and my ticket was 'escalated' to the Finance department, but nobody ever got back to me in time. Literally a few days went by and not one word from my Zendesk agent. They have a poor support system. So, if you don't ever need help with anything and know what you're doing, then ZD is probably for you.
Pros
The software functions nicely. It is very well put together. They make it easy to run a help desk.
Cons
The support, or lack thereof. If you need support for this software, they take a long, long time to get back to you. You better know what you're doing, because if you need to get a hold of them, I wish you the best of luck.
A mediocre product that doesn't get better as it grows
Pros
I struggle to find good things to say. It works and rarely has performance problems. If you need very basic support ticketing and are just starting out, you could use it and be successful. We did. But the functionality and support for those organizations between startup and large corporation is nil. If we were a very large organization, I could see it being a valuable product.
Cons
1. It is incredibly difficult to keep track of business users. When you are a SaaS supporting clients who have end-users, organizing tickets and documenting issues is very important to find patterns. This is not possible in Zendesk, at least at the Team feature level. There is not a central location for information for an organization outside of a Notes box that is basically a tiny sidebar textbox that allows no formatting to make notes over time readable.
2. There is no way to reference individual comments in a ticket because individual comments do not have their own IDs. This makes it very cumbersome to keep succinct notes and refers back to my first point. The only way we can review a client's history is through wading through a bunch of tickets with an endless stream of comments. I can't get a good timeline overview of their experience and issues, which is so essential to good issue triage.
3. Lack of features for those at the less pricey levels is pretty bad. There's no way to make our contact forms more customizable (like having a message to the person on the ticket - there is only limited description area and those are question/field based) and we don't have access to conditional logic on the forms. So we are left with clients just throwing issues at us without getting good information from them to get a one-touch resolution. The way Zendesk works it forces us to give lower-quality support.
4. There's no exporting your ticket information or running any sort of report if you are using the Team or lower feature level. These, to me, should be basic features as they pertain to the most basic of needs for any support team. Not only that, it ties you to the product and punishes you for leaving. We can't move to another product because we can't take our ticket history with us.
5. The features and performance is inconsistent. For example, there are "Triggers" and "Automations". Triggers and automations are the same. The only difference is the automations are time-based. But they don't tell you that in the interface - there's nothing telling you what is required to set up the automation in order for it to pass validation, only an error message. And by following the instructions of the error message, you can still get more errors. But there's nothing there to tell you the overall requirements so you can avoid errors in the first place. And in the Triggers interface, they leave out a large amount of placeholder options for seemingly no reason, so you have to go find the placeholder references for yourself.
In my opinion, Zendesk doesn't have the user in mind. They put out new features and integrations, but the core product is so severely lacking that it seems like they feel they are operating on auto-pilot and their product needs no update itself. It's a shame, because it was probably was a good product with a lot of potential back when it first started up.
Honestly, This is Probably the Best CX Platform for Startups
We use Zendesk as an email platform to communicate with our users (also via phone), and we also use it as a platform for our FAQs and Help Center.
Pros
- The ease of use
- The customization options
- Extremely user-friendly
- It just makes sense
- It's much easier to train people on how to use this platform than on other platforms
Cons
- Can be a little bit more expensive than its competitors
- Doesn't have as much customization options as some of its competitors (i.e. Kustomer)
Easy Inter-team Communication and Customer History
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.
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Zendesk Pricing
Zendesk Pricing
Pricing for Zendesk Support starts at $5 per agent, and scales across five pricing plans: Essential, Team, Professional, Enterprise, and Elite. A free trial is 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).
Pricing for Zendesk Support starts at $5 per agent, and scales across five pricing plans: Essential, Team, Professional, Enterprise, and Elite. A free trial is 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).
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Zendesk Features
Zendesk Features
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Categories
Categories
Videos and Tutorials
Videos and Tutorials
Additional information for Zendesk
Additional information for Zendesk
Key features of Zendesk
- Answer Bot
- Audit logs
- Branded customer-facing web interface
- Community forums
- Custom business rules (triggers & automations)
- Custom roles & permissions
- Email compliance archive
- Export ticket views to CSV
- Flexible ticket management with automated workflow
- Full CSS rebranding
- Group rules and macros
- Multi locale (timezone and languages)
- Multi-brand support with linked accounts
- Multi-channel support: email, web, phone, chat, social media
- Multiple ticket forms
- Open API
- Over 100 out-of-the-box integrations with 3rd party apps
- Overview dashboard
- Public and private forums
- REST API
- Real time updates
- Robust reporting & advanced analytics
- SLA management
- SSO with Twitter, Facebook, Google and SAML
- Salesforce & SugarCRM integrations
- Screencasting
- Self service help center
- Support performance dashboards
- Web widget
Benefits
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 700 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.
GetApp Analysis
GetApp Analysis
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.
What is Zendesk?
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.
Zendesk Main Features
Email System
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
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.
Self-Service
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.
Customization
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 Reporting
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
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 Integrations
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 Pricing
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.
Zendesk Bottom Line
- Unify Communications
- Customer Self-Service
- Increase Customer Engagement
- Automate Workflows
- Wide Integration scope
Zendesk FAQs
Zendesk FAQs
Below are some frequently asked questions for Zendesk.
Q. What type of pricing plans does Zendesk offer?
Zendesk offers the following pricing plans:
Starting from: USD 5.00/month
Pricing model: Subscription
Free Trial: Available
Pricing for Zendesk Support starts at $5 per agent, and scales across five pricing plans: Essential, Team, Professional, Enterprise, and Elite. A free trial is 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).
Q. What are the main features of Zendesk?
Zendesk offers the following features:
- Answer Bot
- Audit logs
- Branded customer-facing web interface
- Community forums
- Custom business rules (triggers & automations)
- Custom roles & permissions
- Email compliance archive
- Export ticket views to CSV
- Flexible ticket management with automated workflow
- Full CSS rebranding
- Group rules and macros
- Multi locale (timezone and languages)
- Multi-brand support with linked accounts
- Multi-channel support: email, web, phone, chat, social media
- Multiple ticket forms
- Open API
- Over 100 out-of-the-box integrations with 3rd party apps
- Overview dashboard
- Public and private forums
- REST API
- Real time updates
- Robust reporting & advanced analytics
- SLA management
- SSO with Twitter, Facebook, Google and SAML
- Salesforce & SugarCRM integrations
- Screencasting
- Self service help center
- Support performance dashboards
- Web widget
Q. Who are the typical users of Zendesk?
Zendesk has the following typical customers:
Freelancers, Large Enterprises, Mid Size Business, Non Profit, Public Administrations, Small Business
Q. What languages does Zendesk support?
Zendesk supports the following languages:
Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Taiwanese, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian
Q. What type of pricing plans does Zendesk offer?
Zendesk has the following pricing plans:
Subscription
Q. Does Zendesk support mobile devices?
Zendesk supports the following devices:
Android, iPhone, iPad
Q. What other apps does Zendesk integrate with?
Zendesk integrates with the following applications:
123FormBuilder, Clarizen, ClickDesk, Get Satisfaction, InsightSquared, Planview PPM Pro, Podio, SolarWinds Service Desk, Vivocha, Yonyx
Q. What level of support does Zendesk offer?
Zendesk offers the following support options:
FAQs, Forum, Knowledge Base, Online Support, Phone Support, Video Tutorials
I have had several smooth years using zendesk and really love using it for every ticket incident I have to resolve.