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
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.
Zendesk is an easy-to-use, dynamic, intuitive customer service tool that allows the use of macros to optimize messages to customers.
Zendesk is easy to implement and with adaptable prices. I have recommended this tool to several friends for their organizations
Pros
Zendesk is an excellent tool for the management of requirements or requests. It facilitates the management within my Support Center.
It allows to automate response to our customers. Also, customize the tool according to the type of company.
From this tool I manage to serve the internal and external clients of my organization. As well as, send satisfaction surveys once the support is finished.
Their specific user roles allowed me to implement the tool in the organization in a short time, even without investing much time in training because it has very good material for users on the web.
What I like most about Zendesk is to be able to automate the responses to clients and macros.
Zendesk has elements for case management, live chat, design a knowledge base, have a panel to the client. Since we included this tool in the company we have improved our response levels in the support tickets and with this to customer service.
I like the flexibility of purchase packages or use of the tool, through payment by users or agents. Also, although we have not configured it for now, it is interesting to integrate with VoIP to take the call from customers or interested parties.
Cons
Zendesk for being a tool for customer service would be interesting to link or customize good practice agreements at the service level and operational.
We as a client can add response times, and define with a category that is requirements or request and that are incidents.
Next, what features Zendesk would need:
* Add response time according to the type of requirements or request.
* Define type of requests and incidents
* Get graphs by type of incidents
* Get graphs with crossings between service agreements and operational agreements. This would allow us to measure the effectiveness of the support center based on agreements with customers
* Have notifications every time you are consuming the time of a ticket, considering the times of agreements at the service or operational level
* Have a video call
ZenDesk really is the best CRM I have ever used, and I was in customer service for 10 years. By far and away the most intuitive, simple and clean user experience you will have for a consumer facing CR interface.
Pros
My consumer care team went from using another CRM to ZenDesk and it was like night and day! Cluttered to organized! Overwhelming to clean and easy to navigate! The best feature, in my opinion, is the ability to search for tickets by contact, user or subject and merge those tickets into one. That way you don't have to respond to multiple ticket from the same consumer about the same issue, you can clear those all out at once while creating a better consumer experience (one outbound email). Similarly, the ability to mass select tickets and close at the same time either as Will Not Address (which is a great option) or you can mass select and close using one macro/template. This is particularly helpful when your site has experienced a glitch and you've gotten thousands of tickets about the same issue, you can close them all at once when the issue is resolved or if you have an update. Speaking of macros, having an easy place to store your personal templates as well as share the best templates from your team is a game changer. No more keeping templates stored in random docs and then copying/pasting. Overall, I love ZenDesk! It must have been desinged by people who have been in customer facing roles or focused group the pain points for CRMs incredibly well.
Cons
I really do love this product. The only thing to mention that could use improvement is the (seemingly) constant outages. There were some days where we would have to wait hours to get back in to the tool. I will say, though, customer support was always on top of it and super responsive.
Tremendous scaling benefits. Adding more users is not just easy, but we have recourse to ensure that our teams can grow at their own paces without worrying if the software can keep up. Zendesk can absolutely keep it; it does not even flinch.
Pros
Consistency: Very few service outages and very little change in UI and product structure. Both of these things create a more familiar and consistent workflow.
Robust: Robust is a buzz-phrase I try and avoid using, but honestly the robustness of Zendesk is one of the primary reasons we transitioned to it away from HelpScout in 2017. Everything is fairly robust; reports, ticket indexing, integrations, customizations, admin tools, inbox monitoring, and so on.
Connectedness: Zendesk makes it super easy to have specific teams stay connected with eachother; not just the support team. We can have folks all across our company set up in Zendesk to help with JIRA reports, historical sales information through Salesforce from our Salesforce admins, folks on research teams, EAMs, and so forth. We can all play in this giant Zendesk sandbox together in our own corners with ease.
Cons
Innovation: Zendesk seems to have done all of its innovation years ago as the product has achieved a plateau of functionality of features
Support: I very much dislike Zendesk's support set up. The amount of money you pay them seems to have a significant impact on your ability to get quick support help. Instead, they depend heavily on an open forum system where other Zendesk users try and help support eachother. Often these support threads turn into a bash-fest with poor attitudes.
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: $5/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
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.