No matter which business, your support staff could be able to manage all customer contacts more effectively and efficiently as a result. Include live chat, push notifications, and self-service queries.
It may consolidate all customer service desk requests from many sources into one place. Additionally, enabling you to resolve problems and provide a better client experience rapidly.
Most importantly, it isn’t the most expensive customer service option. Using Zendesk, a small business may develop an enterprise-level customer service solution.
Read further to learn more about Zendesk, in our review we will detail its features, pros and cons with our rating, and a conclusion about why you should use it.
Click on “open” if you want to see exactly what we will talk about in the rest of this article.
Quick Overview
What is Zendesk?
Zendesk is a complete solution that enhances the help desk and customer support. Support across channels might be challenging, but your consumers shouldn’t be aware of it. The Support Suite enables the company to interact naturally with consumers while shielding them from any behind-the-scenes activity. It is complicated enough to fulfill your demands and straightforward enough to start using it immediately.
While preserving all the interactions and proper context in one place for your agents, the Support Suite enables you to conduct discussions with clients on any channel (email, chat, voice, and even social messaging applications like Facebook, WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, and more). Your teams can provide consumers with a more personalized experience with a unified agent workspace.
The support, sales, and customer interaction software developed by Zendesk, a service-first CRM firm, is intended to improve customer relationships. Zendesk thinks that any organization, regardless of size, industry, or ambition, should be able to deliver robust and creative consumer experiences.
This goes for both major corporations and start-ups. More than 160,000 clients use Zendesk in over 30 languages and various sectors. San Francisco is the headquarters for Zendesk, which has offices worldwide.
Zendesk specifications
| Features | Analytics / Knowledge Base / Live chat |
| Best suited for | Small businesses, Mid size businesses, Large enterprises |
| Website languages | English |
| Website URL | Visit official website |
| Support link | Support page |
| Live chat | No |
| Company address | San Francisco, California |
| Year founded | 2007 |
Pricing
Zendesk pricing: How much does Zendesk cost?
Zendesk has two pricing options:
- Zendesk for service: This includes plans for everyone and plans for enterprises.
- Zendesk for sales: This includes Zendesk Sell Team, Zendesk Sell Growth, Zendesk Sell Professional and Zendesk Sell Enterprise
| Pricing range | From $19/month to $215/month |
| Pricing types | Annual subscription / Monthly subscription |
| Free plan | No |
| Free trial | Yes, 14 days |
| Money back guarantee | No |
| Pricing page link | See plans |
Zendesk pricing plans
The detailed pricing plans are as follows.
Zendesk for service Plans for everyone:
1. Suite Team – US $49 per agent per month, billed annually
- Industry-leading ticketing system
- Messaging across web, mobile and social
- Email, voice, SMS, and live chat support
- Help center – SINGLE
- Easy-to-set up automation & workflows
- AI-powered automated answers – UP TO 50
- Unified agent workspace
- Reporting and analytics – PREBUILT
- Data and file storage – STANDARD
- 1,000+ apps and integrations – PREBUILT
- Robust APIs – STANDARD RATE LIMIT
- Online support from the Zendesk team
- Onboarding and adoption guidance
2. Suite Growth – US $79 per agent per month, billed annually
- Industry-leading ticketing system
- Messaging across web, mobile and social
- Email, voice, SMS, and live chat support
- Help center – MULTIPLE
- Easy-to-set up automation & workflows with additional options
- AI-powered automated answers – UP TO 100
- Unified agent workspace
- Reporting and analytics – PREBUILT
- Data and file storage – INTERMEDIATE
- 1,000+ apps and integrations – PREBUILT & CUSTOM
- Robust APIs – ADVANCED RATE LIMIT
- Online support from the Zendesk team
- Onboarding and adoption guidance
- Self-service customer portal
- AI-powered knowledge management
- Customizable ticket layouts
- Light access licenses – UP TO 50
- Service Level Agreement (SLA) management
- Multilingual support and content
3. Suite Professional – US $99 per agent per month, billed annually
- Industry-leading ticketing system
- Messaging across web, mobile and social
- Email, voice, SMS, and live chat support
- Help center – MULTIPLE
- Easy-to-set up automation & workflows with additional options
- AI-powered automated answers – UP TO 500
- Unified agent workspace
- Reporting and analytics – PREBUILT & CUSTOM
- Data and file storage – INTERMEDIATE
- 1,000+ apps and integrations – PREBUILT & CUSTOM
- Robust APIs – ADVANCED RATE LIMIT
- Online support from the Zendesk team
- Onboarding and adoption guidance
- Self-service customer portal
- AI-powered knowledge management
- Customizable ticket layouts
- Light access licenses – UP TO 100
- Service Level Agreement (SLA) management
- Multilingual support and content
- Conversation routing based on agent skill
- Integrated community forums
- Private conversation threads
- Customizable and shareable dashboards
- Advanced voice capabilities
- Data Location Options
- HIPAA compliance
- Events Connector for Amazon Web Services
Zendesk for service Plans for the enterprise
Suite Enterprise – US $150
- Advanced knowledge management
- Custom team roles and permissions
- Customizable agent workspaces
- Customizable branding for web conversations
- Light access licenses – UP TO 1000
- Live data and external dashboard sharing
- Sandbox environment for change management
- Robust APIs – ENTERPRISE RATE LIMIT
Zendesk Sales Pricing
- Zendesk Sell Team
- Customizable sales pipeline
- Email integration with tracking
- Calendar integration
- Task and appointment setting
- Document storage—2GB/user
- Call tracking and recording and text messages
- Offline mobile access
- Pre-built sales dashboards
- Public apps and integrations
- Robust APIs—core
- Onboarding and adoption resources
- Zendesk Sell Growth
- Customizable sales pipeline
- Email integration with tracking + bulk emailing and unlimited templates
- Calendar integration
- Task and appointment setting
- Document storage—5GBuser
- Call tracking and recording and text messages
- Offline mobile access
- Pre-built sales dashboards
- Public + private apps and integrations
- Robust APIs—core + premium
- Onboarding and adoption resources
- Custom sales reports and dashboards
- Sales forecasting and goals tracking
- Advanced activity reports
- Product and price book
- 1000 enrichment credits per user/month
- 25 prospecting credits per user/month
- Zendesk Sell Professional
- Customizable sales pipeline
- Email integration with tracking + bulk emailing and unlimited templates
- Calendar integration
- Task and appointment setting
- Document storage—10GB/user
- Call tracking and recording and text messages
- Offline mobile access
- Pre-built sales dashboards
- Public + private apps and integrations
- Robust APIs—core + premium
- Onboarding and adoption resources
- Custom sales reports and dashboards
- Sales forecasting and goals tracking
- Advanced activity reports
- Product and price book
- 3500 enrichment credits per user/month
- 150 prospecting credits per user/month
- Lead and deal scoring
- Task automation
- Advanced roles and permissions
- Company hierarchy
- Zendesk Sell Enterprise
- Account Management
- Sales Tracking
- Automation and Activity Tracking
- Sales engagement tools
- Communication
- Mobile
- Collaboration
- API, apps and integrations
- Reporting and Analytics
- Data
- Support
Features
Zendesk features: What can you do with it?
Here is the list of things you can do with Zendesk:
Helpdesk
Since Zendesk has existed for a long time, some people refer to them as “the godfather of helpdesk tools.” They have added many features to their ticketing system, including
- Creating tickets from phone, chat, email, and social media inquiries.
- Assemble tickets from disparate outlets in one location.
- Maintaining and addressing support tickets
- Make custom ticket views
- Support custom and conditional ticket fields
- View the activity record and the representative’s identity.
- Support dashboards and reporting
- Let’s focus on a few things that will help with customer support.
Live Chat
Zendesk offers two different live chat options: Zendesk Messaging and Zendesk Live Chat (legacy).
A more extensive app called Zendesk Messaging enables you to have conversations on messaging services like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp and live chat on your website. The platform centralized all these chats, allowing agents to change channels swiftly. On the other hand, centralized chat is only accessible through their Messaging app, a different application that links to Zendesk’s Agent Workspace, and its setup costs extra.
On the other side, Zendesk Live Chat is an outdated application that only allows for website-based chats. In other words, it doesn’t consolidate messages sent over WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or any other messaging service.
After determining which option is best for you (and navigating some nickel-and-diming), Zendesk enables you to embed chat into your website and engage in real-time communication with clients across messaging apps:
- Engage a consumer in a conversation to direct them toward the checkout process.
- Utilize pre-chat forms to gather contact information.
- Chatbots can divert consumer interactions (due to the lack of human interaction)
- Make dashboards to track the team’s live chat performance.
Knowledge Base
Similar to many other helpdesk systems, Zendesk gives you the tools you need to create a scalable support system, mainly through FAQs and community forums.
With the basic plan, you can write, arrange, and distribute help center content in a single language. Support articles, also known as embeddable, can be added to websites as widgets.
Higher-priced clients are the only ones who can access more sophisticated customer self-service capabilities and support for over 40 languages. Additionally, the Pro and Enterprise clients are the only ones who may use the community forums function.
Ticketing System
A support and helpdesk solution must be able to gather support tickets, and Zendesk’s system does it somewhat. Their ticketing generally attempts to:
Gather support tickets from email, chat, social media, and other places and place them all in one place. You may keep track of discussions easily in one place to simplify your support workflow. Quickly resolve customer complaints. Some helpdesks combine tickets into more significant discussions. However, other companies might want to use a technology that adheres to conventional wisdom.
All tickets from all channels are collected in one workspace so that agents can readily see them. A feature called Side Conversations allows agents to have conversations with other support team members without leaving the main ticket screen. From a Zendesk for Service workspace, this tool makes it simple to send an email or create a Slack post. Agents can switch the discussion between chat, email, and even the company’s voice-over IP (VoIP) phone with ease.
Reporting And Analytics
You’ll use the Zendesk Explore reporting tool, which is now a part of the higher levels, to manage analytics. Explore comes with pre-built dashboards that present the most frequent data in a graphical style. Users on the enterprise tier can make editable versions of these dashboards to personalize as they see fit.
Dashboard data may be exported to Excel or CSV formats, as well as images and PDF files. Images may be sent in sizes that will fit on various devices. You can import data into third-party analytics platforms using CSV and Excel, but that requires at least two steps, not including any data cleaning. Even the cost-free Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk product offers a direct download plug-in for Microsoft Power BI, which is available without charge.
Given that you can get so much visual power in one go without investing a dime, Zendesk should upgrade its reporting capabilities, particularly in visualizations. With a more responsive report builder, Zendesk could easily eliminate the extra step of manually resizing reporting images for various screens. To be fair, a brand-new Dashboard Builder is still in beta, but you can already test it out.
Zendesk provides Zendesk Explore, a component of their platform that provides you with a foundation for gathering, gauging, and analyzing data about the clients and their customer experience:
- Obtain pre-built performance reports (updated daily)
- Enjoy analytics and reporting automation
- Improve the client experience using analytics
- Make your dashboards unique (for Pro and Enterprise customers)
When just considered as an in-app analytics metric, Zendesk Explore performs admirably. To power all reporting and dashboards, it runs queries against particular datasets that agents can create, such as support, talk, guide, chat, and the Answer Bot. The general support repository has a primary dataset that agents and managers will use.
Everything you require to know about tickets, SLAs, ticket changes, and backlog history is contained in this dataset. A pre-built dashboard includes preset questions that agents may change to suit their requirements. A new query can also be created from scratch. As long as you don’t need to access your data outside Zendesk, this solution is comprehensive and simple, even though competing products offer comparable functionality.
Community Forums
The community forum solution from Zendesk is called Zendesk Gather, and it is offered with Suite, Professional, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus subscriptions. Online forums relevant to your business or your products may help with branding and provide you with further input.
- Make areas where your clients may converse with one another
- Elicit candid comments from clients
- To lessen the help desk workload, permit customer interactions to troubleshoot one other’s problems.
Sales CRM (Zendesk Sell)
You can do much more with customer relationship management software than just keep track of connections. You may create vital connections and promote customer-company synergy with the correct infrastructure. You may record those crucial encounters with the help of these highly regarded CRM services.
In the past several years, the globe has seen significant change, and, probably, your business has too. With salesforces embracing hybrid work patterns and many consumers still restricting in-person interactions, communication has particularly undergone enormous disruptions. There is no turning back now that digital communication channels have taken the place of conventional ones. You require customer relationship management (CRM) solutions more than ever.
Even if you currently have a CRM in place, it could be time to switch to a newer one that is more compatible with contemporary business practices. A competent CRM keeps a full audit record of every encounter your team has with each client, going beyond simple contact monitoring.
This can cover everything from the customer’s first purchase through support calls and what they covered to notes from a meeting or call made by a regional sales representative. A CRM system, which frequently has interfaces with other software systems, enables you to track, analyze, and present this data as needed.
The tool’s CRM is Zendesk Sell. It increases the efficiency and visibility of your sales force by centrally maintaining the complete client account in context:
- Streamline the process of retrieving consumer information.
- Improved customer-sales team communication
- Boost the overall performance of your sales team
Zendesk Ticket Management
Zendesk offers a variety of options for consumers to submit issue tickets, including through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The same holds for well-known messaging programs like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Email, phone help (through integration), and a packaged self-service portal are still among the traditional options. Slack and Apple Business Chat, which also manages discussions across macOS and iOS, now allow business messaging. There was no information on whether Microsoft Teams will be integrated as of this writing.
The notion of Views, which enables agents and supervisors to categorize and classify tickets based on particular criteria, is how Zendesk organizes all these channels. Agents have complete control over views, allowing them to arrange tickets however they see fit.
An agent may organize her tickets based on the product, the customer’s location, or even the type of issue, depending on how your help desk staff is set up. Alternatively, the agent manager could similarly arrange tickets at the department level.
One technique to include repeated tasks into the system and monitor their progress is by scheduling tickets. This could involve planned maintenance for machines like printers and other things that need regular upkeep. The Ticket Scheduler App guides you through entering the proper information in fields like Requester Email and Name when establishing a new schedule.
Customers may programmatically add tickets individually or in bulk using the application programming interface (API) provided by Zendesk for Service. This is especially useful for tickets received from other systems like email or your phone.
This is useful for anyone switching from another help desk system to Zendesk while retaining open tickets or transferring historical data for tracking. Your programmers can get in-depth guidance on utilizing the API from the Zendesk developer page, complete with code samples.
Conclusion
Zendesk review: Why you should use it?
Businesses of all sizes (big and small) can move swiftly, concentrate on innovation, and scale their growth thanks to Zendesk. They provide a broad selection of customer service tools for organizations of all sizes, anytime. Zendesk is the software solution for improving customer connections whether you have one person or a thousand.
They create software at Zendesk for entrepreneurs. It allows individuals to experiment with new ideas and is flexible and simple to build upon. Teams can understand important data to them thanks to Zendesk reporting’s unique metrics, bespoke reports, and configurable data visualizations. Because of these reasons, Zendesk has preferred the above alternative customer support software:
- Easy implementation: The goods are simple to use and put into practice.
- Strong reporting, all adapted to the specific requirements.
- Built to scale as the business expands, Zendesk can keep up.
- Collaboration: Zendesk is there when you need them.
Currently, Zendesk has more than 170,000 paying clients, is available in 160 different countries, and has a website that aids organizations in finding helpdesk software options. It is successful for a lot of businesses. If your business has the following characteristics, Zendesk might be right for you
Being huge, Zendesk is ideal for big multinational businesses. Firms, particularly those with sophisticated product offerings and more than 500 workers.
One of the main advantages of such large teams is that Zendesk is loaded with many functions and supported by such a huge staff. When Zendesk uses its whole suite of tools and consultancy, it can assist businesses that wouldn’t receive it from a smaller, more focused helpdesk. Consider businesses like airlines, clinics, and others.
Zendesk could be the best option for you if your company is large enough to have seven-figure expenditures for customer service and you anticipate working with Zendesk experts to migrate to the platform.
Zendesk is primarily an enterprise offering for businesses needing in-depth reporting and complex analytics. You may have a different product designed just for reporting and analytics with the Zendesk Explore add-on.
Additionally, Zendesk experts can collaborate with your reporting team and developers to simplify insights, create customer customizations, and push data to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
Over 1,000 connectors exist for Zendesk. It is integrated with business-level applications like Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, and Oracle. Few helpdesk systems link to the types of enormous software required for banks, airlines, and other industries with strict regulations, but the majority offer connectors suitable for customer care teams at small and internet retailers.
Alternatives
Zendesk Alternatives
Before subscribing to Zendesk, it’s always a good idea to check out the competition and find the Best Knowledge Base Software for your needs. You can find the Zendesk alternatives here.
Here are some versus to compare Zendesk with its competitors:
FAQ
