ZenDesk - A Great Tool for the IT Director to Stay on Top of Client Support
September 21, 2015

ZenDesk - A Great Tool for the IT Director to Stay on Top of Client Support

David Drinnon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Regular

Overall Satisfaction with Zendesk

We use Zendesk as our internal IT help desk application to support over 1,000 employees and to support users of our public facing website. Zendesk has significantly improved our communications as an IT team. Specifically, it streamlines the escalation of issues, hand offs to other staff for resolution, and more importantly...it provides me as the IT Director a view into the issues that are trending within our organization.
  • 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.
  • Increased resolution time.
  • Increased capacity has helped us defer hiring more support technicians to handle the volume. We are handling 620+ tickets a month with only 3 employees.
  • Increased visibility for me as the IT Director. I much more equipped to monitor issues that arise and jump in where needed.
No comparison to TSC2. We used it years ago and it was very limited (no automation, customizations, etc). We used Kace for 3 years and hated it as a support desk solution. It was great for asset inventory, but that was all. Spiceworks was just too busy to look at. JitBit was a close contender for us, but we liked the feature set and integrations that ZenDesk provided. JitBit is great if you have a tight budget.
For non-profits the pricing may be a challenge for some. However, ZenDesk is a great product. If you are looking for a solution that marries your support tickets with project management, then this solution may not be the one for you. Integrations are available with some third party project management solutions, but they are very limited. While ZenDesk is A+ on tickets/tasks and workflow, it does not have the features to make it a project management solution (though it wouldn't take much effort for them since they are so close in functionality).

Using Zendesk

13 - ZenDesk used by 13 IT team members to respond to the desktop needs of our staff and website visitors. Currently, we are supporting 1300+ users across six locations in our metro area. We average around 627 tickets a month.
Since ZenDesk is cloud based solution, we spend zero time managing or supporting the software itself. If we have a problem, we just submit a ticket to ZenDesk support or read their support forums (which are highly helpful)!
  • IT Desktop Support
  • Project Support
  • IT Change Management
  • We use tickets to assign tasks so capture specific IT processes, information, reports, etc that are required by our auditors each year. So when the time comes for our annual audit, I search on the appropriate tags to get the information I need.
  • Well....believe it or now, I have actually seen how ZenDesk may be leveraged as a tool to handle requests for our church members for prayer, hospitial visits, or death notifications. These are all life situations that require a response from our church and often involve the communications of multiple members of our staff. Some of the language (like ticket) is impersonal; the functionality does overlap quite a bit.
We love Zendesk. For a small IT shop (13 IT Staff, 1,300+ users) it provides everything we need to be efficient and timely in responding to various issues.