Item: Zendesk Suite
Rating: 7
Author: Nicholas Adams

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Zendesk exclusively as a ticketing system for our support clients. It allows us to keep track of multiple tickets spread across multiple clients. We also use previously solved tickets as reference for new tickets. Rather than having to solve the same problem multiple times, it is much easier to locate the same problem in a previous ticket and use that solution for reference.

Pros and Cons

It allows multiple agents to access different tickets
It allows different permissions to be set for both clients and agents
There are configurable views of open tickets available
There is a search function
There is basic markdown support

"Improvements" to Zendesk, especially the UI cause our entire company's productivity to drop for anything between a week and a month as we are yet to see anything that actually improves on what we had in 2017.
The search function has a lot of room for improvement e.g. boolean functions, searching for phrases rather than individual words. Quotes help but only a little.
Zendesk seems keen to focus on lightweight support e.g. the free online chat based support type in B2C websites. By focusing on that, B2B clients such as ourselves suffer as what may work well for B2C does not necessarily work well for B2B
There are lots of "features" we have no use for but still have to pay for in our bill. Better billing options where we can remove unneeded services and get a discount would be a significant improvement.

Return on Investment

Zendesk was grandfathered in to our IT stack and the cost of migration to another, more suitable platform is too high to justify it.
It plays a key role in our primarily support based business and has high up time.
Despite not having scores of agents, this still remains our highest single IT cost.

Usability

When you know what you want to do, it's often easy or occasionally impossible as some seemingly obvious features are missing.

I have no idea what Zendesk's ever evolving customer needs are. Our needs have stayed exactly the same for over 7 years and we have watched Zendesk drop in usability for our needs whilst increasing in price by over 40%.

Customer Experience

I have used Zendesk support. Despite having to go as far as recording a video of my issue, the help desk representative claimed they couldn't replicate my issue and closed the ticket. Long time requests from Zendesk users such as markdown tables continue to be ignored for years whilst completely undesired "features" are routinely added.
For agents, the app is reasonably intuiative. However, the admin screen is a whole new board game. You need to do some pretty creative guess work to configure some things right. So much so, it's still trial and error whilst reading their docs.

Alternatives Considered

Best Practice Clinical

rt4 was a ticketing system I used previously. For the level of functionality we need which is B2B ticketing with multi-agent and multi-client tickets, it would be perfect.

Zendesk is a lot prettier than rt4 but not free. The sole reason we are still using Zendesk is that it was grandfathered in to our company and the cost of changing system, including user disruption and re-training would be too high for us to migrate.

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Zendesk Suite go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Zendesk Suite again?

Other Software Used

Slack, Riak, HAProxy Community Edition

Likelihood to Recommend

Zendesk used to be potentially the world's greatest ticketing system in my opinion. It's still not a bad ticketing system but there seems to be an increasing amount of scope creep to add more functions. Now it seems to try to get a much wider range of users with a much fluffier idea of what it is trying to be. For a multi-client, multi-agent setup, it does the job reasonably well. This is ideal for B2C usage and used to be very good for B2B users. If you are looking for something in house Zendesk is overkill in my experience. Go find something off the shelf with a one time purchase license instead and your CFO will thank you.

Zendesk - how the greatest can fall in the name of "improvement"

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Zendesk Suite