Jira Service Desk vs Zendesk Support Suite

• Highly configurable Notification Scheme, allowing free customization on who receives notifications and when
• Ability to add extra features through the highly diverse Atlassian Marketplace.
• Simple and highly customizable ticket interface. The Software can be almost completely branded in every aspect to represent your organization.
• Integration with Jira Software allows support tickets to be moved into other Log Term projects as necessary.

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• Triggers - we're able to automate a significant amount of tasks and repetitive work by relying on Zendesks flexible trigger options.
• Macros - The ability to create complex message templates with autofilled information is a significant time saver.
• Collaboration - since Zendesk implemented more transparent communication controls for CC contacts we're able to have more effective communication with customers and relevant stakeholders. This was a much appreciated improvement.

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• Some of the built-in functions and workflows are surprisingly limited given the fact that you can customize a lot with JQL. These limited areas do not allow you to use JQL. For instance, the built-in notifications are lacking. They have one that is great-- "notify on critical ticket creation"-- EXCEPT that it does not allow you to notify a group or anything, only individual users.
• The ticket interface is a little odd for agents. Changing the status is not a simple drop down from unassigned to open to in progress to pending, etc. There are a couple of tabs ("investigate", "pending", "workflow") where you can change the status in different ways. Maybe I am just not used to this way of doing it, but I feel like it could be simplified.
• It can get complicated deleting/changing some of the out-of-the-box fields and rules, because you never know what will break workflows or other automated/built-in features.

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• The workflow was fixed, so if your ticket flow didn't fit with how ZenDesk thought it should it was difficult to manage. For example, I like to separate tickets where we are waiting for something from the customer from tickets where I'm waiting for an employee to deliver something. This was impossible, and when I gave that feedback I was told that wasn't a valid way of looking at support. This meant I had to inspect each and every "Pending" ticket every day to separate them to generate a list of tasks.
• Their ticket UI is weird and difficult to understand.
• As a manager, I wanted to see what tickets my customer service agents submitted over the past week, but their "View" feature doesn't include OR logic making it impossible to create a proper search. Even just getting a list of all of the tickets that were completed in the past week was impossible without a lot of massaging of the data, and tech. support refused to even answer the question. I had to do two searches, one for "solved" tickets and one for "closed" tickets, and you couldn't change the state workflow since their crazy system doesn't allow it.

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• We would not be very organized as a software company without using JIRA and it would in turn reflect negatively across the entire studio and the products that we release.
• Almost everyone in our company uses JIRA in one way or another from developers to testers to marketing and every team in between.
• The only time I have witnessed that JIRA has a negative effect on our objectives is if they suffer a major failure on their part and JIRA is not accessable or usable for a length of time. Thankfully in over 3 years of using JIRA this has only occurred a handful of times.

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• Zendesk has allowed us to create a support infrastructure for a relatively low cost, allowing us to spend our money on hiring great agents who work with the tool.
• Integrating other tools into Zendesk is easy and allows our agents to work more efficiently, reducing the touches they perform and the costs associated with that.

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