Love benchmarking capabilities.
Updated December 09, 2014

Love benchmarking capabilities.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review

Software Version

Plus

Overall Satisfaction with Zendesk

Pros

  • The ability to single sign-on from a client’s instance of our software which is built on Salesforce.com
  • The support ticketing functionality is very good. It is very seamless and much more streamlined than Salesforce.com which is ultimately flexible but less easy to use
  • There is very good automation of escalation workflow
  • With the PLUS edition, we got good analytics which are very useful. We can track self-service success and measure against benchmarks.
  • The integration to Salesforce.com, our corporate CRM for ticket metrics and complete view of / reporting on our users and client accounts.
  • Zendesk is a small nimble company. They are very innovative and responsive.
  • I really appreciate their benchmarking. They have fifteen thousand clients and provide benchmarking on staffing, resolution time, and volume, broken down by industry, size, etc.
  • The pricing is more economic than Salesforce.com cases, where you have to pay a fee per client end-user. Zendesk only charges for admins – there’s no cost for end-users – it would eat too much into our margins.

Cons

  • Weaker on forums functionality, but getting there.
  • They could get stronger on forum analytics. Without PLUS/ Good Data, ticket analytics was not so strong
  • As a small company, there are some things they don’t do yet that Salesforce cases does
  • It needs improvements in chat support, or integration to a better chat support tool.
  • It has helped us scale to a large number of clients with a very small team. We have 2 people in support for 400+ clients and 1300 users with current bandwidth to scale to 500 clients / ~1600 users.
  • Integration of self-service (i.e. community) with support has been particularly important for scaling.
Salesforce.com cases - we use Salesforce.com as our CRM and it is the support system of record for our company's other major product line (our enterprise solution). Salesforce.com cases is more flexible than Zendesk, and therefore ultimately more powerful, but Zendesk is easier to use and manage on-going. The biggest difference is end-user cost and the ease of access for users. ZenDesk does not charge for for end-user access, and has much simpler single sign-on. Another difference is that with Salesforce.com, you need to buy a separate community application like Jive or Lithium and we wanted an integrated application.

Jive - at the time, Jive was our company's customer community platform. Jive is a community only product. The absence of integration of support and self-service was an issue. It was harder to make the SSO work. Jive was far more complex – powerful, automation of subscriptions etc. deeper – but harder to use.
If self-service forums are important to you, it’s worth it to upgrade to PLUS, especially if you care about analytics.

Using Zendesk

0.25 - No IT support is really required. Sometimes the Salesforce.com integration requires a little support. I along with our lead support person do a lot of configuration adjustments to make process improvements. We probably do several each week. Maybe altogether we spend 0.2-0.25 FTE in administration.
  • Online product support – submission and resolution of support requests via online tickets. We use it in lieu of Salesforce.com cases (our CRM) which is used as the product support system by the other product group at our company.
  • Client self-service via forums, community. We use it in lieu of Lithium, which again is used by the other product group at our company.
  • Client submitted feature requests. We use it in lieu of Salesforce.com Ideas, which is used by the other product group at our company.

Evaluating Zendesk and Competitors

Salesforce.com for support tickets and feature requests and Jive for community/forums.

Zendesk Implementation

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.
  • Implemented in-house

Zendesk Training

  • Online training
  • Self-taught
I did some at the very beginning. I didn’t find it helpful. I am more of a click around type of person. It is a bit light weight and not that useful.
Yes, very easy to learn without training.

Zendesk Support

I hold them to an incredibly high standard as they are a customer service company. They are very responsive and usually solve stuff pretty well. Their typical response is 4 hours or less (business).
No - With PLUS, we get 24x5 Zendesk phone support in addition to online support. With REGULAR, we just got online support.

Using Zendesk

Everything is clicks not code (except single-sign). There are English language rules for workflow, adding a field. It is easier to use than Salesforce.com, but still very powerful.

Zendesk Reliability

We have almost never had availability issues, but did have had one glitch last week.

Integrating Zendesk

  • Our own SAAS product, a Force.com based application
  • Our corporate CRM Salesforce.com
  • GoodData
  • Screener
Our own Force.com based product - just via simple single sign-on.

Salesforce.com - two-way integration comes with Zendesk, easy to set up

GoodData – integration comes with PLUS edition. Data syncs are hourly. It was very simple to set-up. You just have to copy a token over.

Screener – prebuilt integration provided by Zendesk, very simple to set up.
  • A good chat support tool (if Zendesk doesn’t improve their own)
  • Potentially our phone system.
Not sure of their plans around chat support.

They have phone support integration which we don’t have turned on yet.

Relationship with Zendesk

Not negotiable and no need to negotiate.

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