Zendesk: The Good and The Bad
Zendesk is a very capable ticketing system. We used it to service the IT needs of 10+ companies. Anyone with an IT related requested would …
Starting at $55 per month agent
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What is Zendesk Suite?
The Zendesk Support suite is a cloud-based customer support software built for better customer relationships. Designed to improve customer satisfaction and to support customers on any channel: text SMS, web, mobile app, phone, email, social media. The vendor states more…
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Popular Features
- Ticket creation and submission (114)9.292%
- Ticket response (113)8.989%
- Organize and prioritize service tickets (113)8.686%
- Email support (110)8.585%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Support Team (Foundational Support Only)
$19
Cloud
per month agent
Suite Team
$55
Cloud
per month agent
Support Professional
$55
Cloud
per month agent
Entry-level set up fee?
- Setup fee optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.zendesk.com/product/pricing…
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Starting price (does not include set up fee)
- $55 per month agent
Product Demos
Zendesk Demo: The Basics
YouTube
Features
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Product Details
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- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- Downloadables
- FAQs
What is Zendesk Suite?
The Zendesk Support suite is a cloud-based customer support software built for better customer relationships. Designed to improve customer satisfaction and to support customers on any channel: text SMS, web, mobile app, phone, email, social media. The vendor states more than 200,000 companies such as Uber, Groupon, Box, Airbnb, and Slack are using Zendesk to lower their support costs, raise productivity, and increase customer satisfaction. Zendesk offers a full suite of products to meet customer needs ranging from help desk software to live chat to knowledge base management.
Zendesk Suite Features
Incident and problem management Features
- Supported: Organize and prioritize service tickets
- Supported: Expert directory
- Supported: Subscription-based notifications
- Supported: ITSM collaboration and documentation
- Supported: Ticket creation and submission
- Supported: Ticket response
- Supported: Automated responses
- Supported: Attachments/Screencasts
- Supported: SLA management
Self Help Community Features
- Supported: Forums
- Supported: External knowledge base
- Supported: Internal knowledge base
- Supported: Surveys/polls
Multi-Channel Help Features
- Supported: Customer portal
- Supported: Live help chat
- Supported: Phone support
- Supported: IVR
- Supported: Call scripting
- Supported: Social integration
- Supported: Email support
- Supported: Help Desk CRM integration
Zendesk Suite Screenshots
Zendesk Suite Videos
Zendesk Videos
This software unboxing dives into Zendesk, a platform for support, sales, customer relationship management, and more. As we demo the product, we rate Zendesk on its usability, interface, installation, customer support, and more. While not a full tutorial, if you're considering...
Show More TrustRadius takes an objective look at the pricing plans, marketed top features as well as what users consider to be the best features and limitations.
Zendesk Suite Integrations
- Jira Software
- Trello
- Slack
- Shopify
- AppFollow
- Intercom
- Geckoboard
- Zight
- Mailchimp
- Nutshell CRM
- Talkdesk
- Zoom Workplace
- TeamViewer
- Zoho Assist
- Seismic Learning
- Zoho Books
- Trustpilot
- Pendo.io
- Dropbox
- LiveChat
- Hootsuite
- Box
- 8x8 Contact Center
- Giphy
- MaestroQA
- Qualtrics XM for Customer Frontlines
- RingEX
- HubSpot CRM
- Medallia Agent Connect
- Salesforce Sales Cloud
- Myndbend
- Google Play Reviews
Zendesk Suite Competitors
- Freshdesk
- HappyFox Help Desk
- HelpSpot
- Kayako
- Mojo Helpdesk
- Salesforce Service Cloud
- Zoho Desk
- UseResponse
- UserVoice
- KronoDesk
- ChangeGear Service Desk
- Kustomer
- Oracle Fusion Service
- ServiceNow IT Service Management
- eGain
- Ameyo by Exotel
- Microsoft Dynamics 365
- Gorgias
- Freshservice
- Gladly
- Intercom
- Talkdesk
- Twilio
- LiveChat
- SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
- Pega Customer Service
- Genesys Cloud CX
- HubSpot Service Hub
Zendesk Suite Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android |
| Supported Countries | 160+ |
| Supported Languages | 60+ |
| Security |
Zendesk Suite Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
Zendesk Suite starts at $55.
Reviewers rate Ticket creation and submission highest, with a score of 9.2.
The most common users of Zendesk Suite are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(927)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
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January 30, 2018
Versatile Customer Support Solution
- Ease of use for end users
- Help/Self-Service support page is a lifesaver for our support team and clients
- Integrations into Salesforce, JIRA, and other software is a breeze
- The integration with the Knowledge Base and Confluence was a little tricky
- More customer support through the onboarding process
December 21, 2017
Zendesk Provides Product Teams With Design Transparency
- Zendesk allows us to see the life cycle of a specific customer and all of the issues they have run into.
- It enables us to quantify the issues that our customers are running into so that we can create better training materials going forward.
- The live chat option inside of Zendesk makes it easy for us to manage the conversations with our paying customers.
- The customer facing chat application is not very "pretty". I think that it could be improved upon immensely.
- Zendesk's integration with Salesforce is not very straightforward and requires a solid amount of work to set up.
- It would be great to be able to tie inquires into the company that aren't necessarily support related. For example a sales conversation request.
December 18, 2017
Helping to create happy customers!
- Automated rules and routing to ensure the right people get the right information at the right time.
- Analytics offering allows us to track data over time and gives us extremely customizable data points to tie in with different areas of the business.
- Zendesk has multiple integrations that allow us to plug into different areas of our tech stack.
- Zendesk support hasn't always been the timeliest in follow up, or finding a resolution.
- The Community offering is extremely limited and lacks the level of customization that is present in other areas of the platform.
- The analytics might be too flexible. Can be tricky to pin point what it is exactly that you're trying to report on.
- Allows us to create separate access for all the different organisations we have as customers
- Provides a place for us to display FAQs and tutorials videos which can be locked down to be client specific
- Allows us to set SLA response times per client that we can easily monitor
- Standard reports as well as allowing you to build you on reports
- Out or hours set up, allows us to plug in our working hours
- Having a customer friendly app, currently, only agents can use the app
- More levels of admin access can be quite restraining
- CMS could be easier to use
- When updates are made some cause issues with macros that are set up to respond to tickets
December 12, 2017
Zendesk CRM - How Great is it?
- Ease of system administration and set up. It's easy for administrators to set up and support Zendesk to meet the majority of business needs.
- Customer support. Zendesk provides easy accessibility and quick support when we need them the most.
- Enhancements - Zendesk is continually improving their system which gives you hope for new functionality to help and enhance your current support processes.
- Limited functionality - Compared to some of the competitors out there, Zendesk has a long way to go, offering limited functionality such as advanced trigger logic, the limited use of the CC field, and the lack of integration between their chat and ticket reporting.
- Analytics - Reporting is only based off of ticket fields and hardly anything else. This makes it hard to really track agent productivity and more importantly, it is hard to integrate into your business intelligent systems.
- Roles and Permissions - Creating roles and permissions is very limited. I would like to have more control over what users can and cannot see within the user interface as well as access to functionality.
December 12, 2017
Zendesk is an everyday tool in our company
- Easy to use. It helps to save time when solving customer tickets.
- Great integration possibilities. There are lots of ways to expand Zendesk functionality with other tools or connecting with a CRM.
- Powerful analytics.
- Reporting part is a bit slow.
November 30, 2017
Best chat service for your organization!
- Chat window directly on our website.
- Easy to use, aesthetic and moreover affordable
- Automatic message to facilitate recurrent questions
- Sometimes when you log out it doesn't work. The service stays available on the site web even though nobody is there to answer
September 21, 2017
Relax with Zendesk
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Simple clean interface that is very easy to pick up and learn.
- Low administrative overhead which can be setup and managed without a lot of time or expense invested
- Excellent support staff that has been very responsive to questions.
- Does not have the level of customization or workflow automation that something like Salesforce cases has.
- The integration to Salesforce was not clean or simple
- As a contact management system, it is very rudimentary and that is clearly not its strength
June 28, 2017
Zendesk is best customer service platform
- Ticketing and Viewing tickets -- Zendesk has easy to create views which allow agents to see the tickets they need to complete their workflows. These are easily built by non-technical users and agents themselves so there is no bottleneck for IT to help when changes are needed.
- Knowledge Base -- Zendesk provides a comprehensive knowledge base tool called Guide (formerly Help Center). This allows posting of articles for customers but is also the basis of tools such as AnswerBot which attempt to deflect tickets by automatically providing customers with articles that may solve their ticket.
- API -- Zendesk has, hands down, the best API of any customer support provider, and it's right up there with the best APIs anywhere. The APIs are extremely well documented, comprehensive, and provide access to every piece of data in the Zendesk system without restriction. I'm sorry to say I can't say the same for Parature (Microsoft), Salesforce, QuickDesk, FreshDesk, or frankly ANY of the other tools we have migrated clients out of and into Zendesk.
- Advanced automation is lacking. Many functions, such as actions based on the contents of a text field, are not available in the built in automation tools. This is often a surprise to users who consider this basic functionality. Instead, custom scripts must be built to accommodate fairly simple actions.
- License cost -- many clients complain of higher licensing cost vs. competitors.
August 16, 2016
Zendesk, a Startups Best Friend
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- They provide a low cost solution for moderate amounts of ticket traffic.
- Macro functionality offers a quick way to set up and utilize FAQ responses.
- Trigger functionality offers a pretty straight forward basic automation for moderate amounts of tickets.
- Companies with a large amount of ticket traffic will see some performance issues, hanging browser and hard refreshes needed on occasion.
- Feedback mechanism is limited and cannot be customized.
- No back-end interface to write custom reporting such as a SQL shell.
August 16, 2016
Is Zendesk Right for you?
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- A cloud-based system means agents can work from anywhere.
- Custom reporting allows for full transparency of customer service activities and metrics.
- The ability to handle emails and customer service calls without the need of physical help center equipment helps keep overhead costs to a minimum.
- Zendesk occasionally will fail to make outbound calls inexplicably. This can be rectified by logging out and back in to the system.
- Zendesk Voice does not have the standard ability to transfer calls. This makes passing calls between departments cumbersome.
- The standard ticket statuses are limiting. The ability to customize ticket types beyond Open, On-Hold, and Pending would be welcome in maintaining an organized environment.
May 03, 2016
Zendesk
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- It is designed for ease of use. Not much training has to be done for users on how to use it.
- Maintains records of each ticket worked, so technicians can easily search for previous tickets to see what the solve was and even has the ability to link that ticket to a new ticket giving the user the solution without a technician actually having to go do a hands on.
- All departments can be incorporated into Zendesk to use it also. Example: Maintenance Department can use it, the print shop, Distance Learning, Web services etc.
- A drop down menu for the user to pick from as to what area their problem is with - hardware, password, WiFi, software, virus, etc.
April 06, 2016
Why Zendesk will help your business grow!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Zendesk is really user friendly! I can only compare it to Desk.com as I used this in a previous company and this is far superior.
- The ability to freely customise the help center has been hugely beneficial as we can then align it with our corporate website.
- The number of integrations with other pieces of software has helped in the day to day running of the business - e.g. integrating with Slack, Zopim and Zapier.
- An internal agent chant functionality would be really useful!
- The search function is a bit annoying as the results are sorted in an odd way. You expect it to show currently active tickets at the top and then list the rest in order from newest to oldest, when I search for a common issue I still get old tickets near the top!
- It would be nice to be able to bulk edit orders - i.e switch a lot of tickets to another agent.
December 28, 2015
Zen works great for us
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Usability.
- When you need a new feature, it is already there.
- Lots of people that you hire have already used it so they are quickly up to speed.
October 06, 2015
Zendesk has proven itself to be extremely valuable
- Zendesk gives everyone involved simple, clear data to track and manage issues or projects. For me the greatest help has been this repository of tasks I can come to everyday without worrying about whether I've forgotten something or not.
- The basic bits of data have proven very valuable. Leveraging even the most basic data about response times, tickets all related to one specific issue, recurring areas of trouble has been and is continuing to be very encouraging.
- Being able to give our staff direction on how they can get support helps everyone feel better about how our time is being used. Going from nothing to Zendesk has taken a lot of stress off of my plate, even with the lowest package, Starter.
- The main functionality of Zendesk that has been apparently lacking to me is when a user creates a new ticket its not clear enough how they can follow along with that ticket specifically. I could see the default automated ticket creation response being focused more on allowing the creator to view that ticket online. A few users will send a new email, thus creating new tickets, before I get a chance to respond to their original ticket.
- The app feels more limited than the website. I'm not sure that it actually is, but because it seems more focused on viewing than taking action I don't use it as much. I do find that when I want to do something from the app it's usually possible, I just feel that it could be simplified in terms of common actions being forefront. More so than the standard tab bar iOS UX/UI mechanism.
- I'm not sure how you would implement this, but intercepting other support members chiming in on completed tickets or adding redundant comments.
September 30, 2015
Zendesk excels as internal helpdesk
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- A full feature set and the right automation and integration features, enough to support support staff so that the system is used to capture everything. This is a key difference: a product that gains a positive feedback loop versus one that slowly fades out of proper usage.
- Automation and customization settings and user interface.
- Mobile app.
- Email integration - the feature to forward an email into Zendesk and have it pick up the requestor from the FWD is a key enabling feature when used as an internal helpdesk.
- A broad set of integrations.
- Reporting and tracking of metrics.
- The agent user interface is good, but still needs work: there are two versions of the UI - the older version is fairly static and has too many clicks often to get common tasks done. The new interface has "tabs" inside the interface instead of taking advantage of browser tabs, and the back button cannot be used in many situations.
- The knowledge base is good, but not great: the interface is a bit clunky, more so than the other areas of the interface. Also, when using it for an internal helpdesk on a Plus account only "agent" accounts can edit articles, so internal users cannot collaborate well on knowledge-base articles.
- Integration with third party applications - We love that ZenDesk integrates with so many other tools we use as an IT Support Team. This helps us readily access everything we need from one vantage point.
- Workflow. IT help desk lives and dies by how well you can manage the workflow of issues. Both the desktop app and mobile app are extremely easy to use....allowing our staff to access and respond to issues efficiently. ZenDesk also allows us to capture 'internal' comments between our staff without exposing those to the end-user. We love keeping all of our notes together in one place.
- Automation - ZenDesk has some incredible tools to automate workflow. Both their automations and triggers help us to route and escalate certain types of issues based on the contents of the emails coming in from end users.
- ZenDesk does offer a knowledge base tool, but it is very limited. It would be great if you could lock down the knowledge base site based on incoming IP address so it could be used as an internal knowledge base without requiring your staff to login. It would also be great if ZenDesk had lower cost user license just for the knowledge base so it could be used for other purposes beyond the ticketing system.
- At the 'Regular' account level, some reports are available, but they are awkward and very limited.
- It's a little pricey.
August 19, 2015
Zendesk is a simple but effective powerhouse!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Zendesk is great at getting tickets set up quickly.
- It is also great at escalating tasks and problems to different groups
- The SLA warning emails are essential for saving money.
- The macros make things super easy.
- You can hide comments so that only your company can read them.
- I'd like to see automatic paging used to alert people about high priority tickets.
- The ticket search function can use some refinement.
- I want to see a FAQ section for customers.
June 03, 2015
Zendesk is ok
- Customer contacts: can import from Salesforce
- Mobile app: excellent and easy to use
- UI: easy and intuitive to use
- Salesforce side of the app causes issues and we need to turn it off to deploy
- No easy import function: I.E no csv import, you must use the api to import and the APi only accepts one import per call.
- Due to the complication in rendering our old cases into JSON and then looping through each case individually what should have taken a few hours took 2 months,
- Need to use api's for anything fancy
May 11, 2015
Best Online Ticketing System!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Customers can easily sign up and open a ticket with our helpdesk.
- Reading, editing, updating tickets is super easy online and on phone client.
- Reporting features are a bit (just a little) limited. It would be nice to create Salesforce-style reporting where we could pick and choose more fields, criteria, etc.
April 29, 2015
Scalable, Integratable, Affordable Helpdesk Solution
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- The primary issue for us in selecting Zendesk is that we needed a product that was flexible enough to support our very specific model. Our business generates parent Purchase Orders with a series of child Purchase orders associated with each parent. We needed a ticketing system that could support this structure and Zendesk is the only one we found that could do this.
- Zendesk was also one of the less expensive systems we looked at. Competitive systems like Zoho and Desk.com were significantly more expensive - especially Desk which has a usage-based pricing model. Zendesk's pricing model is based on the number of administrative licenses with an unlimited number of user licenses underneath that.
- The API was clean and easy-to-use. We used the API to integrate the product with our website and with our home-grown CRM system.
- There were some website integration issues. It would have been nice to allow our users to login to the customer portal and be automatically logged-in to Zendesk at the same time. Instead, customers had to log in separately to Zendesk.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Email templates.
- Auto-response.
- Internal guide capabilities for support team new hires.
- Forum for customers to help each other.
- Integrates with Salesforce.
- Setting it up was a challenge, I needed to bring in our tech team and test many settings before rolling it out.
April 08, 2015
ZenDesk, definitely a good option
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- The system is very friendly and flexible.
- We used it for customer service and ticket management.
- It isn't a ticketing system, so it isn't as robust as it could be in that respect. If you have a small team and a lot of email, it is definitely a great option.
March 12, 2015
Great, easy to implement and use support platform.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Very flexible system for managing support tickets to be handled by agents in different queues or different specialties.
- Gives a very easy and polished user experience.
- Tech support for enterprise customers has been very good and responsive.
- Some of our earlier concerns have been addressed by recent upgrades to Zendesk. They continually improve their system.
- The ability to unsubscribe former users to forums isn't obvious or easy, and that results in a lot of bouncebacks that result in suspended tickets. We'd like to see a feature where 'x' number of bouncebacks automatically unsubscribes users.
- We'd like to see the ability to fully customize the default agent user dashboard.
March 10, 2015
Zendesk review
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Zendesk cuts down on time spent responding to customers through the use of automatic replies and macros.
- Zendesk removes the clutter of having all inquiries in your inbox by having them routed to the Zendesk inbox instead.
- Allows for creation of a customer service portal that is customizable.
- Ticket creation gives customers peace of mind that their request is being addressed.
- Metrics allow management to identify areas where customer service efforts can be improved.
- I honestly have no complaints about Zendesk.