Likelihood to Recommend If your business has more than 50 users, don't use KANA Express. User management and setup is not intuitive, and back-end email management takes a large amount of time. If your business emails more than one recipient and expects replies from more than one recipient, don't use KANA Express. The system is built for one-question-in, one-answer-out. Anything more than that requires extra customization or is impossible, according to their development team. If managing your inbound email either internally or externally is critical to your operations, don't use KANA Express. Downtime is more frequent than is acceptable, and their Netherlands advanced support team's hours make down-time in the western hemisphere a lot longer than it needs to be.
Read full review Inbound messaging it is top notch, it does it well and couldn't imagine anyone's program doing it better. Like I said before been using ZenDesk for over 7 years and absolutely love it. We use the talk feature with the phone very limited so Zen works fine for us, but if I was running an inbound or outbound call center I don't believe Zen has all the functions I would want as a manager. For limited phone use and mostly email, text, and even web chat, ZenDesk works great. Having the iOS App is so great and flexibility with notifications allows my team to be "on call" anytime without unnecessary interruptions
Read full review Pros Allows you to manage multiple email queues with different business rules. User interface is somewhat intuitive, allowing users to navigate fairly easily. Admin controls allow for a considerable variety of customization. Read full review Reporting and Analytics Ease of Agent Training and Use Able to add multiple brands with related custom reports and dashboards Adding a new brand and basic help center is easy to do without the need of an expert or web team Ability of agents and supervisors to see customer history across multiple channels Read full review Cons KANA Express is NOT set up for business models where email is conversational and involves multiple recipients and responses. If your business model is one-question-in, one-answer-out, then KANA Express will probably work for you. Since signing on with them, KANA Express' support team has been severely lacking in expertise and acceptable turnaround times, especially when the platform encounters a system-wide issue to leads to downtime. Our assigned sales contacts jumped ship with the company almost immediately after we went live, which is never a good sign. Admin panel and functions are very antiquated and not user-friendly at all. Email management through the admin tool lacks crucial insight that prevents admin users from being able to easily route and manage emails. Our organization had to write our own KANA user guides that KANA Express then took and started using themselves and for other clients. The KANA Express platform does not have proper spam or auto-reply management tools. Admin users must manually turn off the KANA Express auto-response emails in order to prevent email loops with other parties' auto-responses. Analytics options are lacking. Admin users must run at least three separate reports in order to gather appropriate insight as to user activities and metrics. Email queue/user set up is not intuitive. If adding a new queue or user, all users must be manually adjusted to include that new queue. There is no mass-edit tool for KANA Express users. Read full review I think the Graphical User Interface could use a facelift. It not the most aesthetically pleasing platform in my experience. Particular things like where the default is when you click on each and every dropdown menu. The macro integration could be a little more simplified. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Zendesk is super easy to use and navigate. I really enjoy the sleek layout, the ability to tailor tickets, the macro option, and the quick key guide they have to make your use of time even more effective. My whole team loves working with Zendesk and rarely ever has problems.
Read full review Usability As an agent it's very simple to use. As an admin it's also easy to use, but sometimes lacks some functionality that would be nice to have such as expanded native 2 way sync functionality for many major apps that are commonly used today like
HubSpot and Salesforce. The ability to add followers to tickets to they get updates and are in the know without the customer seeing this agent cc'd is a nice touch. This ensures additional visibility and easily following the communication without having to appear as a CC to the customer, who could accidentally remove that person in a response, thus breaking the visibility
Read full review Reliability and Availability In the past year, I'd say I have only noticed maybe two hours total of downtime in my own usage. Very minimal.
Read full review Performance There has been minor performance degradation on a very few days out of the two years I have been using the product.
Read full review Support Rating Every time I contacted them they were not only very responsive and knowledgable, but always seemed to have a positive upbeat attitude. It probably helps that we did not have significant service outages or sev 1 level issues, but even my lower severity issues were quickly answered. And the positive and upbeat attitude really made things feel comfortable.
Read full review Online Training Zendesk has tons of available material for training - videos, webinars, articles, etc. The only reason this is not a 10 is because it can be hard to figure out how to navigate to these things and find what you are looking for.
Read full review Implementation Rating I was very satisfied. They have a free trial for 30 days and I recommend you do that and use it. It is very easy to get started with the basics and the build on over time. The only thing technically complex was single sign-on and integration to Salesforce.com required some tweaks – otherwise setting up system was very easy
Read full review Alternatives Considered If spoken honestly Intercom is a level-par with any nearest competitor, Tools like Zendesk has to catchup with them in speed. However, there is an advantage to Zendesk with its simple and easy-to-get software which falls in every mid and small-size business pocket wherein Intercom is way too expensive and needs a tech admin to customize the product. The kick-starting feature with negligible configuration made Zendesk the ideal choice of our organization + the budget fell under our expenses.
Read full review Return on Investment KANA Express was originally presented as an excellent alternative to Fastraq, an email management system that was in EOL during the time we were shopping for alternatives. Unfortunately, our originally planned ROI was not achieved due to lost functionality and broken sales promises, leaving us with an email management system that's built more on workarounds than out-of-the-box solutions, requiring considerable time for admin activities that could be avoided by a better-designed system. Read full review The positives weigh more than the negatives here, as it gives us a one-stop portal where we can tend to customer needs using one web app It has also helped us identify areas of improvement based on the reporting feature The value it provides outweighs any missing or lacking features that I'm sure will be available in the future Read full review ScreenShots Zendesk Suite Screenshots