Salesforce Service Cloud vs. Zendesk Talk

I think Service Cloud is best suited for medium to large operations that require both proactive and reactive service. It’s a great fit for post-sales support. However, I wouldn’t recommend it for very small companies because it can be quite costly, and many of the features may go unused. Salesforce also performs best when you have a capable team managing it, so it’s important to consider your organization’s size and readiness before starting. Once you do, I recommend exploring other parts of the Salesforce ecosystem—Service Cloud works even better when integrated with Sales Cloud, since it allows better visibility across teams.

Incentivized

Zendesk Talk is a great partner that helps us in the customer care area by managing every type of contact with customers (both phone calls and emails). I know there is also the possibility to have integration with instant messaging apps (like messenger and WhatsApp but I have never used them in my experience). In my opinion, the best scenario for Zendesk Talk is represented by a context with a high amount of contacts/requests where a unique platform could be a help both on the external side (customers) and on the internal side (a lot of colleagues who are working in the same area and have to work in a coordinate way). For customers, they could benefit from tailor-made answers, also based on past contacts for the same topic, and avoid waiting times during phone calls, with an immediate follow-up. For internal work management, operators don't overlap in a single request, and even if the same operator is not available the one who manages the request later has complete visibility of the entire topic from the historical point of view. Last but not least, I think that Zendesk Talk helps a lot in the context in which the request's speed is a KPI to manage constantly.

Incentivized

• Email to case is an interesting piece of it. The threading is very strong, sometimes too strong, but it does very well at handling the incoming emails.
• The omnichannel routing, using skill-based routing is really effective.
• Pathing. So making the workflow and helping the team understand what it is that they're trying to do, what they have to accomplish, those step-by-step pieces. That's really helpful.

Incentivized

• Call recording is a nice feature! It is great for training purposes and for quality assurance.
• The metrics you get from Explore are a great insight into how the team is handling the call volumes.
• Zendesk Talk has met most of our needs. It can be a bit unreliable at times.

Incentivized

• We had a principle initially to try and use Omni as much as we can from the user experience perspective, but have found that fairly restrictive. It was very difficult to actually get the right customer experience and customer engagement going. So we're actually on a journey at the moment to replace all of our Omni with Lightning web components that gives us that flexibility. That's probably one area where we've had some challenges in terms of how we've used the product out of the box.

Incentivized

• The lag on the phone is by far the most annoying thing with Zendesk talk due to the voice over IP.
• Using the Reporting feature in Zendesk has never been a walk in the park. We have to customize a lot of fields and when something doesn't seem to add up, it at times feels like pulling teeth to get to the final answer of what went wrong.

Incentivized

Professional edition works best for a small company with lower call volumes and is very useful but as you grow exponetially I think it has limited ability to do all the things we want to - SLA management, defect, release management to name a few. Reports and dashboards being available in real time.

I had Salesforce experience prior to using Service Cloud which made it a little easier to learn and navigate, but overall my team (some who had no Salesforce experience) caught on very quickly and found Service Cloud to be easy to use.

Incentivized

Everything about it works, as I have previously detailed. Coming from different companies and using other tools like Twilio or Aircall, those are VOIP tools that are built to be plugged into other tools, Zendesk Talk is natively built into Zendesk and feels correct in the user experience of Zendesk

Working on an application that caters to customer needs requires a platform that acts as a mediator between the actual person and the client. This mediator handles the customer and resolves many of their doubts, helps them map through the entire process, and automates the processes. Such a platform is Salesforce Service Cloud. For queries that cannot be serviced by the platform, it creates a separate ServiceNow ticket for us, and it is assigned.

Incentivized

The Salesforce Service Cloud generally has very good performance, however the overall new Lightning user experience can bring that down. For example, if you have too many tabs open, then it can take a while for the Lightning UI to load. This UI is probably not well equipped to handle loading of all of that information at once, but Users tend to leave their tabs open all day long. It can also be fickle depending on which browser you use, what extensions you have installed, and whether you've cleared your cache. This can be the downfall with any software as a service though, not just Salesforce

Incentivized

Salesforce offers support, although it generally gets routed to overseas support teams first, and once they are unable to help, it gets escalated up the chain to higher tiers. Frequently, the answer back from support is that there is no native solution, and we either have to turn to the AppExchange for some solution provided by another developer, or custom build our own solution.

In our experience, we have had to go through many support people then ultimately getting frustrated enough to go directly to our point of contact who then doesn't always seem to be able to assist. We tend to get the support we need when it is escalated up to me and I reach out to our point of a contact person to express our frustration.

Incentivized

Our in-person training was provided by our implementation partner and it was quite good. This was in part because we were already working with them and so it naturally leant itself to a good training relationship. And because they were building our customizations and configuring things, they could then provide training on those things naturally.

Incentivized

Trailheads are great but it was often unclear what actually applied to our organization. This made it difficult to get a whole lot out of it. Part of it is that because the basic Salesforce features didn't quite work for us, we had to add customizations, which then nullified a lot of the training.

Incentivized

I would go through an implementation very differently knowing what I know now. It was difficult coming from systems we liked in post-sales service and having to adapt to the clunky and underwhelming feature set in Salesforce. I would trim back our expectations

Incentivized

We selected this product because we already had some competencies in Salesforce. We own a Salesforce partner with expertise in this area, and on top of that, Salesforce purchased it — it was originally called Velocity. When Salesforce decided to acquire it, that finalized the decision for us.

Incentivized

Slack and Zoom phones cannot compare because they have no ticketing systems. Zendesk Talk was the only option we considered because we were already using Zendesk for our email ticketing with customer concerns. We then expanded to using Zendesk's chatbot and then the Zendesk Talk system to keep it all integrated and streamlined.

Incentivized

The product has scaled up with our company growth just fine. No issues here other than slowness in clicking around and running reports

Incentivized

• We have cut our service team in half over the past 5 years due to the efficiency of the tool
• The amount of direct inquiries to our technical team is less than 10% compared to the number support tickets that get entered in the system for them to work in a more organized manner
• Responses are 100% more timely because tickets can be responded to by any individual in the queue or on the team, as opposed to direct emails to just one person

Incentivized

• We were able to reduce global headcount by 20% in our call centers.
• Allowing customers to leave voicemails creates the personal touch needed and really increases our customer connectivity score. We saw increases in our CSAT scores after the implementation of this solution.
• Call handling time and case reopen rates both decreased. Y/y it decreased 18% and 60%.

Incentivized