Zendesk Reviews

Customizable features, sandbox, documentation, support

We were able to get up and running with Zendesk in a very short time. While our IT department uses Zendesk for it's internal ticket handling, my team uses Zendesk to integrate with a web app on a project for a client. We're able to build a robust web app including help desk functionality that makes the product owner and client very happy.

The look and feel could use a little more polish. The way information is presented in the admin console is a bit unorthodox and hard to get used to.

Three months

We initially tried Desk.com but their documentation was not accurate and their API was buggy.

It was mostly straightforward initially. Once you get into it it gets more complicated. We wanted to embed the solution into a webpage which required the Zendesk team to make a custom tweak to their config (which they warned us about).

In-house consultant and in-house employees. They did a great job.

We pay about $70/month per agent which is pretty high. We plan to add more agents soon but need to think carefully about who exactly is an "agent" in this context, because the price is quite high.

Yes we evaluated (and mistakenly purchased) Desk.com

Rely on their excellent documentation and don't be afraid to ask them for help.

We've been satisfied with its general capabilities. 

The stability has been very good.

The licensing model needs to be more customer-friendly. At the moment you have to buy different pieces. ServiceNow, for example, provides just a part of their premium.

There needs to be better insights and analytics. Right now it's lacking.

The dashboard could be better.

We haven't bought service provisioning. We haven't bought the knowledge base, those were part of the main product. The chatbot is there, however, we tried it and it was lacking.

I've been using the solution for over seven years. It's been a while. 

We have found the stability to be quite good. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

We also are familiar with ServiceNow which has better licensing and better analytics. It also has a nicer dashboard.

I wasn't a part of the implementation process. I wouldn't be able to comment on how it went or what was involved. 

The licensing should be more extensive and not broken into individual pieces. It's hard to figure out what you need at the outset.

We are a customer and an end-user.

I'd rate the solution at a six out of ten. It's good, however, it lacks a few features across different areas. 

The features I find most valuable are the relative ease of configuration and the add-ons.

We used to receive email notifications into Outlook. It is extremely easy to create a mail.

• They should build in a ticket auto-assignment module, which would be amazing. This would set Zendesk apart without having to use third-party apps. Although these are fantastic and useable, they would allow for consulting opportunities for them and really tailor the ticket management solution for a prospective customer.
• Partitioning rules and triggers need improvement.
• It would be great to go beyond multi-brand and allow for a brand to be self-managed by its own administrator with visibility from global administrators.
• Enhancements to Help Center. A broader selection of templates, though if you have in-house web skills, the CSS, JScript, and markup environment should be flexible enough for most needs.
• We would like to see enhancements in how the knowledge management process is managed in Help Center. Perhaps some work flow behind article creation to approval, also easier methods to flag articles for review, deletion flagging that can be executed with work flow from UI rather than having to do through API.
• Custom reporting capability like for Zendesk ticketing for Help Center.
• I would like to see the service to update the Twitter feed used more frequently and be updated with more meaningful info, but that happens with every service tool I have ever known since I was born.

We've used the enterprise edition for three years.

In general, no, there we some issues around report name change during the reporting platform migration which was a little frustrating, but in general updates are managed well and even when they do fail they recover well.

It's a solid 7/10 for specific contacts, and it would be higher including my account managers in two different regions and also tech contacts. I would rate them all 9/10.

Setup was straightforward if you know where you’re looking. Therein lies the crux of the issue. Do you know where to look? Given that there are a lot of configuration points to correctly setup your ZD instance ,it may not be out of the box, but no tool is, and I feel the investment to get up to speed with ZD is definitely worth it.

In-house, but if time is a consideration, get a vendor. If you cannot afford it, invest the time and users to ample guides and knowledge on their support site and get involved in their communities. Actively use Zendesk support, which is great particularly for new users.

The ROI is related to your requirements and what you are trying to achieve and how well they address those needs. For us, it does what we need, which is ticketing, reporting, automation, responders, use of .csv imports, data extracts, API use for Help Center and other projects.

Take the time to understand what your workload is before you even move into Zendesk. You will then be able to determine how many agents licenses you require.

Also, understand the requirements for what you need in terms of functionality as Zendesk Enterprise is significantly more costly than Plus but offers much more. You need to work out if you actually need that functionality and what price point is acceptable for the number of agents you have.

Remember, if you are looking at big numbers of agents talk with an account manager and see what price you can get. You will never know unless you give it a go.

• MS CRM
• SalesForce
• Siebel
• Infra
• Front Range HEAT
• AR Remedy

We chose Zendesk because of its ease of use and the projected ROI. Do you really need to invest in the beast and have a TCO that needs to cover an architectural team worth over $500,000 a year? In some cases absolutely, and the ROI justifies it in my case for this and my last organization. There are a lot of things where we can work with what we have.

Go and see people who use it, or at least gather feedback from the community. Join the Zendesk support community and ask.

Zendesk Ticket Interface

Reporting

The most important feature that I was able to utilize the most was the ability to create the different groups in which our support emails came in. Since we had different departments (e.g. Pre-orders, Order Management, Technical Issues, Billing, etc.), It was important to identify these types of cases by having them arrive in the appropriate group.

This feature allowed our team orgranize and assign certain members to a particular group. Without this feature, we would manually comb through our cases which could take forever.

This has positively impacted our customer service experience by allowing us to respond to users in a timely manner. Quickly reply back to our users with a listed of saved responses.

A timely and accurate response is all the user can see on their end. When executed perfectly, it can create a an amazing user experience that QA teams dream about!

For smaller environments, some type of tutorial or walk through would be helpful for first time users. Hands on training will speed up productivity and will get agents to hit the ground running with a minimal learning curve.

I'm not sure if there is a way to "train the trainer" process so that our internal trainers can seamlessly train a team quickly on how to use Zendesk, but that would be very helpful and would help when teams scale. Bringing awareness to the features that could easily be missed using a variety of forms will be helpful (e.g. digital newsletters, social media, email updates, etc.) would be helpful.

There were no issues deploying it for us.

We've experienced no issues with performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

It had already been in place for a year when I joined the company

I seegreat potential I see in Zendesk and how effective we were in supporting our users with this product. I'm sure my rating will continue to get higher as the company continues to evolve and add on more features.

The first time I sued this product, I was working for a fast-growing startup and there was a lot of software. In terms of the service, there were 60% of questions based on issues. We could do a customized answer or handle customized activity to address this. However, 30% to 40% repeated certain questions over and over. We were able to prioritize our design based on these. Knowing what people were asking about gave us a direction. They helped us to prioritize features. 

We saw a decrease in the number of tickets. It was at least 25% less. There was an increase in customer satisfaction. And that was due to the fact that this solution helped us see what we needed to see and prioritize based on what most people wanted from the company. 

What is cool about Zendesk is that they invest a lot in their documentation. If you spend a reasonable amount of hours reading the documentation, you can have a good understanding of how the solution works. 

By default, by just using their predefined templates, you can get something very nice. 

I like how it works together with support. With Zendesk support we can insert articles in our resolution to close the ticket. Your colleagues can collaborate on everything as well including work and updating an article.

The fact that you can set up an approval process, where everybody can have their own opinion, however, in the end, I was the one that was validating or not. 

The insights they provide are great. For example, you can find out what are the most popular articles? What are the articles that are not that popular? What are the keywords that people search? In that case, if they don't find anything or almost nothing, that is a clear trigger for us to write an article or improve a current one about a specific topic based on search trends.

What is cool about Zendesk Guide is how it works together with others Zendesk products. Especially with support and with the analytics. Put those together for a small or medium-sized company and it's a really powerful tool.

If I write an article, and I have a team of 30 people, and they all have a Zendesk account, when I write an article, I send them an email. "Hey guys, I just wrote this article. It's one of the most popular topics this month on which we are not covered. Please check it and make sure that you include it in your resolutions". 

The issue is, once I send it to those 30 people, and they open it, the next morning, that article is the most popular article. It has 25 to 30 reviews, however, that's not right as 80% of those reviews were by my team, not by the customer. They need to find a way to separate internal link clicks from external ones. 

I've used the solution since 2014. I've used it across two different companies. 

The solution was stable. I never had issues. The scheduled maintenance was announced well in advance and was on the weekend during hours that I wouldn't have considered work anyway.

If you wanted to scale from ten agents to 1,000 agents, then it's tricky to do it by yourself.

That's the moment when you should go for an implementation partner or something. I tried to do it by myself. I tried scaling from three or five people to 30 people. And the biggest problem is when you have a structure, and you change the structure. I found that when I was doing extracts, I had a lot of data on the previous structure and I didn't have data on the current structure and I had to do a lot of manipulation in Excel. Basically, you are losing a lot of data in analytics at the moment you decide to change the structure of your team.

In my previous company, 30 to 40 people used this product. 

Support is not great. Their support is that specific support you get from a big American tech company. For example, instead of help, if you ask something specific, they point to an article with generic information.

That's why, if you don't figure it out by yourself, honestly, you are screwed. They don't help.

I can understand why it's like this. At the end of the day, you pay several hundreds of dollars per month. Only one person in the US is maybe paying $100,000 per year. I can understand why they are trying to optimize things, however, to do this through documentation, I don't know if it's effective. The bottom line is, sometimes when you ask a human question, you would like for them to receive a human answer. To get a human, sometimes it takes three days, sometimes one week.

There seemed to be only one guy handling my ticket. They were based in the US, and if I was trying to chase information about a ticket, it would take a while. They relied far too much on documentation and sharing articles. However, this seems to be a very American approach to technical support. 

Previous to having Zendesk, my company used a European solution called TOPdesk. We were the mother company, and we forced them to eventually use Zendesk. With this previous solution, we had more flexibility in building fields, however, it was a nightmare to do the integration and transition due to too much flexibility. That's why we switched.

I left the Zendesk world for Salesforce. So I'm not up to date anymore with what they're doing. I stopped using Zendesk almost a year ago. Salesforce was brought in so that we could have everything in one place. We wanted a CRM solution.

In terms of the initial setup, if you spend a reasonable amount of time reading documentation, you can do it by yourself with no issues. There might be one line of code. Not even. You can totally do it with point and click. That's very nice. 

We were a very small company. If we switched to anything to help make things more efficient, and we immediately saw an ROI. This was true with Zendesk as well. 

We found the solution to be a bit expensive. We were using the level just below enterprise grade. 

There aren't really any extra costs beyond the standard licensing. 

I'd advise those using Zendesk to make sure to connect Guide to analytics and to check what your customers are doing and improve the content according to their needs. This is the most important thing you can do.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

Public Cloud

In Views there are lists of all unsolved tickets, recently updated tickets, pending tickets, etc. It makes it very easy for me to keep track of all the tickets.

I am already a very organized person but the product really does everything for you. The way it’s set up makes it very easy for agents, end-users, and administrators to use.

It would be good to be able to edit. Unfortunately, Zendesk believes that the integrity of a ticket and its comments are important. That when either party reads comments on tickets, they should be able to trust the content is unaltered form its original context. As per Zendesk, they feel it does not fit in with the direction and vision they have for Zendesk which to many people such as myself feel it’s ludicrous and not very sympathetic to the needs of its agents and administrators. Creating triggers is complicated and confusing. They should make it easier for agents.

I have been using Zendesk for more than a year now in my current company. I am the Zendesk Administrator and in charge of all customer service within the company. I was introduced to the software at an accounting software company I worked for. It was used for customer support and to help their IT Department.

We had no issues deploying it.

There have been no issues with the stability.

I only receive a certain amount of tickets throughout my working day.

The level of technical support is very good and they are very helpful.

The product had been set up right before I started working at AP&G. I found out after I was hired I would be using Zendesk which of course I was happy about since I already was familiar with the software but I certainly have learned the software much more in depth in the recent months.

I have to admit when I started working here at AP&G, I actually got more involved into learning how to use the software better since I was the only person basically using it. I made sure to ask as many questions as I could to Zendesk support and read as many articles the Zendesk Community had to offer.

We did it in-house.

ROI I would say it has been good.

The pricing is pretty fair. Of course it all depends on what kind of business you’re running and how much traffic you have and of course how many agents would be using it.

I think it’s the view function, the privilege setting of different roles and spam filter, it helps us work more efficiently in ticket resolving and the data security.

We used to spend two to three working days to solve around 100 tickets and after we used Zendesk the turnaround time has been improved approximately 50%.

It's expensive.

I have been using this for more than six months,

We have had no issues with deploying it.

We have had no issues with the stability.

We haven't needed to scale as our helpdesk is quite small.

They have a very good Q&A page/system, I will give them the best rating.

We didn’t use any other ticket systems.

It's very easy and straight forward with a strong Q&A system supported.

I was the person who set up everything, I would say it’s very easy to set it up for a person who has adequate computing knowledge.

The price is not cheap but it’s affordable for us. I think we are on the second cheapest deal.

We were looking for a solution and we found Zendesk.