Zendesk is best customer service platform
June 28, 2017
Zendesk is best customer service platform
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Enterprise
Overall Satisfaction with Zendesk
Our company, Regent Solutions, is the only Premier Partner for Zendesk right now. In that capacity, we have helped dozens of companies using Zendesk optimize their customer service setup, migrate from other products to Zendesk, build custom solutions for agent efficiency, integration, or other tasks.
We have built and optimized Zendesk instances for small departments within large companies, small business, large companies with hundreds of agents, and one of the largest Zendesk instances in existence! We helped get 80% of government Zendesk instances up and running or improved their use of the tool.
We have built and optimized Zendesk instances for small departments within large companies, small business, large companies with hundreds of agents, and one of the largest Zendesk instances in existence! We helped get 80% of government Zendesk instances up and running or improved their use of the tool.
- 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.
- Zendesk can help large and small companies improve their customer service capabilities. Customer service can drive repeat sales, deflect returns, and increase customer satisfaction in measurable ways.
- Zendesk can be more expensive than alternatives, however it is a more complete product than many alternatives, so the additional features and integration should be weighed against lower cost.
Zendesk competitors include:
- Microsoft Parature -- this product intreface is possibly the worst I've seen for customer service. Looks like a mid-90s enterprise application and is about as intuitive to use. We have help migrate dozens of instances away from Parature into Zendesk as clients look for more modern, intuitive, and cost effective tools.
- Fresh Desk -- on the surface is very similar to Zendesk feature for feature and a not-dissimilar interface. Freshdesk automation leaves something to be desired vs Zendesk. They separate automations into categories that are hard to align and get a full picture. Clients get confused and end up with a lot of extra settings they aren't certain of the functionality for.
- Desk.com -- Salesforce standalone customer service product. Compared the Zendesk the API is heavily lacking. The interface is more simplified, but this doesn't scale well to anything beyond a small team.
- Salesforce Ticketing -- Salesforce itself has ticketing functionality. This can be powerful if the company has a well functioning Salesforce instance, or a disaster if they do not. Customer service agents will need to understand all of Salesforce to be effective. We recently moved a large client's customer service team to Zendesk then integrated tickets into Salesforce so the data was present for other parts of the company.