Item: Zendesk Suite
Rating: 1
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Zendesk to handle customer questions from our website contact form and social media. It allowed multiple people to be able to do customer support from day-to-day.

Pros and Cons

It integrated with Facebook.
It integrated with Twitter.

The workflow was fixed, so if your ticket flow didn't fit with how ZenDesk thought it should it was difficult to manage. For example, I like to separate tickets where we are waiting for something from the customer from tickets where I'm waiting for an employee to deliver something. This was impossible, and when I gave that feedback I was told that wasn't a valid way of looking at support. This meant I had to inspect each and every "Pending" ticket every day to separate them to generate a list of tasks.
Their ticket UI is weird and difficult to understand.
As a manager, I wanted to see what tickets my customer service agents submitted over the past week, but their "View" feature doesn't include OR logic making it impossible to create a proper search. Even just getting a list of all of the tickets that were completed in the past week was impossible without a lot of massaging of the data, and tech. support refused to even answer the question. I had to do two searches, one for "solved" tickets and one for "closed" tickets, and you couldn't change the state workflow since their crazy system doesn't allow it.

Return on Investment

Customer support costs went way up. A rep would spend hours and only be able to handle a couple of tickets.
Managing customer reps required many extra hours to sort out how to do simple searches and to actually review their performance.

I initially selected Zendesk because it advertising Shopify integration, but that turned out to be useless and we ended up having to do searches by hand in Shopify, taking more time per ticket.

I've used Freshdesk for several years with a previous company and switched to that again and it just works. The Freshdesk Shopify integration is also saving a bunch of time, so it's a great value.

Support Rating

Zendesk pushes customers to help each other and wouldn't answer any questions.

Usability

I've used a half-dozen support systems in my career and Zendesk is by far the most idiosyncratic. The web interface doesn't differentiate between actions that change state and those that don't, so training customer service reps was difficult. We tried the iPad and phone apps but those didn't work at all as there was no facility to submit ticket replies.

Key Insights

Do you think Zendesk Suite delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with Zendesk Suite's feature set?

Did Zendesk Suite live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of Zendesk Suite go as expected?

Would you buy Zendesk Suite again?

Other Software Used

QuickBooks Online, Freshdesk, Slack

Likelihood to Recommend

If you have a very simple need to just log emails or phone calls without a workflow then it worked fine as long as your requirements are dead simple.

They promised integration with Shopify and that never worked. The ticket workflow system couldn't be modified. The online solution database was useless and we couldn't use it. Typically you'd create a database of responses to quickly answer common questions, but the idiotic feature to insert the responses was so difficult to use we ended up having to use a separate window and then copying and pasting everything. It took twice as long as the system we switched to.

Inflexible and Difficult to Use

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Zendesk