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Couldn't do without it!
July 09, 2013

Couldn't do without it!

Taylor Wielage | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Regular

Modules Used

  • Ticketing
  • Knowledge Base

Overall Satisfaction

  • Manage incident volume, and helps route questions to the correct individuals
  • Helps create a database of searchable learning content for customers and colleagues
  • Helps us provide better support. Customer questions don't get lost.
  • Currently, it does not integrate with our Infusionsoft CRM system. However, Zendesk is currently working on this and it should be available shortly. We have been helping with the requirements and are looking forward to this being available.
  • Our use of the system is pretty simple: we have a small team and do not really push the envelope on system usage. It works perfectly for us.
  • This is hard to quantify, but the product more than justifies the expense. SInce we do not have a large team of support agents, for us the real value is being able to keep track of everything easily; putting inbound tickets into the right buckets, etc. For example, whenever trial users of our product have any kind of support issue, we have designed a workflow that routes these tickets to our "power agents" so that they get priority treatment. This is very important in converting these users into paying customers. In the past, we did not handle these trial users so consistently.
I cannot see myself doing without Zendesk. It is integrated to our process and has become indispensable.

Product Usage

5 - Customer service/sales team use Zendesk to answer functionality questions to prospective customers.
Support team resolves user issues through Zendesk.

1 - I support the software internally.
  • Zendesk allows companies to manage the flow of customer service and support inquires and makes sure that incidents get attention until resolution.
  • The Forums feature allows companies to build a knowledge base of content that is forward facing and searchable, allowing customers to proactively answer their questions on their own. This feature can also be used to help train employees and co-workers on support/customer service related chalenges and procedures.
  • Automations & Triggers can be used to manage workflow of tickets and send relevant auto responses to customers who've asked questions.

Evaluation and Selection

We were previously providing support through e-mails.
Mojo HelpDesk, Zoho... I picked Zendesk because it felt the most intuitive, powerful and seemed more polished.

Implementation

  • Implemented in-house
I managed the implementation myself. In our case, it was very straightforward since we were not migrating from another system there was no data migration or data libraries to copy over to the new system. Starting from ground zero really made the process quite simple. I can imagine that converting from another system would be more challenging.

Training

  • Self-taught
Yes. I like to figure things out for myself and, for anyone with some familiarity with customer support systems, this system was not hard to learn. I attended some local best-practice sessions put on By Zendesk, and that was helpful. Overall, the system is quite intuitive and, whenever I ran into any difficulties, I found answers on the knowledge base. Once I had learned the system, I trained our internal users.

Configuration

We did some fairly simple configuration in three areas:
1. Look and feel. We did some branding to match the color palette to our corporate branding and add the logo etc.
2. Workflow: We set up a simple workflow to ensure that tickets get routed to the correct resource. Users answer some questions on a form which determine whether the ticket goes to a developer of to a front-line service agent.
3. Macros: We set up some auto-responder emails and canned responses for high-volume questions.

Support

This has been very good overall. Zendesk has an excellent knowledge base which answers most of my questions. I haven't actually used support too much: I submitted a couple of tickets about portal configuration issues and they were dealt with promptly and well.
No - Not required.

Usability

Zendesk released a new agent portal about 8 months ago and the UI has been completely redesigned. The interface is now pretty slick and is significantly better than some of the competitor products I have seen.

Reliability

We have not experienced any non-scheduled service interruptions. Maintenance is generally scheduled at weekends or at low-demand periods and this has not been a problem.
There has been minor performance degradation on a very few days out of the two years I have been using the product.

Integration

  • We have integrated with our project management / bug tracking system - Atlassian Jira. If a ticket relates to a technical problem with our application, we push the ticket from Zendesk to Jira so that developers have access to the ticket.
  • This was a fairly straightforward integration. It's offered as an out-of-the-box integration by Zendesk and did not require any coding on our part. It took a little while to set up, but was not particularly difficult.
  • We are looking forward to building an integration to Infusionsoft as soon as it's available.
Yes. They are working on it.

Vendor Relationship

When we first trialed a number of different products, Zendesk was the first to check in with us to see how things were going. Post sale, they do a very good job of engaging customers and bringing new functionality / best practices to our attention.
We pay month-to-month. It may be possible for larger organizations to negotiate on price but, in general, they are very transparent about pricing. The price is the price! We are not locked in: we can stop using at any point with no penalty.