Zendesk Suite

I have not used Zendesk  for a few years now, but when I did at TOPs Software, I used it for four years to set up macros, to handle the ticket and user management within there, the customer service and success and onboarding. We used Zendesk  for all of it.

The most I have used Zendesk was again with TOPs Software for customer ticket management. All of our SaaS customers and our on-prem solution, the original TOPs, all filtered their support inquiries through Zendesk. That is how our support and product and development and customer success teams managed the tickets and collaborated to merge them for multiple items related to product feature requests and such.

We loved the notifications and the way to build custom views for a specific user's open tickets and to see how long they have been open, how long it was since the last request.

This is in relation to customer ticket management, reporting and integrations, and communication through Zendesk. The customer's replies being directly fed into Zendesk and us being notified of those updates, being able to customize the updates for a specific user.

I really loved the macros. It was easy to use. There were some scripts and things that our support manager would have to run sometimes to get it to work right, but otherwise it was a great product.

We would all bring those tickets together under one master ticket. We used the macros a lot to handle processes through automation that we did not have to redo every single time based on what the ticket was about or how we wanted to respond to it.

We loved the notifications and the way to build custom views for a specific user's open tickets and to see how long they have been open, how long it was since the last request. I really liked the ability to merge and notify the associated customers that there had been updates on their tickets.

The reporting and integrations were something we obviously used extensively. We used Open APIs for all of our integrations to TOPs, to our various systems. I feel the views and the prompts and the visibility inside the regular Zendesk interface pretty much give you everything you need at a user and group level without necessarily having to formulate and push a bunch of reports.

All of the outcomes related to better service for customers. Obviously, the response times were faster because everything is real-time. Being able to put response counters on certain tickets and have certain ones that are high priority and have a tighter SLA than lower priority items, being able to categorize them as a question versus an urgent request, and being able to bucket them as feature requests or product enhancements, being able to communicate all of this back to the end user and the customer without having to manually write all of it up. It is all built into the macros, prompts, notifications, or updates that we built into Zendesk.

The ability to communicate on the Zendesk ticket through the actual user software, so TOPs, would have been helpful. Somehow seeing a user's ticket history within our app would have been beneficial. That is the only thing that I do not think existed at the time that might have been helpful.

Some people struggled with Zendesk, but it was always easy enough to show them how to use it and what they were missing. The only times we really had people report concerns about it was when they did not understand that it could do that or how to use it in that way.

I have not used Zendesk for a few years now, but when I did at TOPs Software, I used it for four years.

There were no issues at this time regarding the needed improvements to Zendesk or something about the product itself or my experience with updates, support or features.

From what I recall, the experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Zendesk was quite expensive and that is what prohibited us from expanding usage of it into more users and using more of its capabilities. I did not get directly involved with much of the pricing and negotiations or contracting.

We loved being able to track everything about tickets, including their open times and notifications for users associated with the tickets. It provided better service to customers both internally and to the end users.

All of the outcomes related to better service for customers. The customer's replies being directly fed into Zendesk and us being notified of those updates, being able to customize the updates as a specific user. Obviously the response times were faster because everything is real time.

I previously used a different solution before Zendesk that was something internal and proprietary, but I cannot remember exactly.

We had all of those solutions to deploy Zendesk. Our company was started in 1985. In that time we moved from floppy disk all the way to web-based through Azure .

I can tell you that we probably saved at least three employees full-time with the ticket management and the automation and the macros and the user follow-up being built in. I do not have personal ROI details on what was spent versus what was returned, but I can say that the knowledge base build-outs, we had a person dedicated to that, but had she not been able to create knowledge-based materials and replicate those on a routine basis, we would have had to have multiple people do her job whereas Zendesk took care of it as soon as she loaded the materials into the system. I do not have any other metrics besides that.

From what I recall, the experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Zendesk was quite expensive and that is what prohibited us from expanding usage of it into more users and using more of its capabilities.

The marketing for Zendesk could potentially be improved because I have not used it for years. I feel it could and should be used more. It is one of those systems that you will move through many ticket management systems or proprietary solutions or internal or something built into a system you already use and often it lacks a lot of the functionality that you end up finding you want, such as the response counters or the macros, or the merging of the tickets with the auto notification to everybody tied to that ticket. These are things that may have been improved upon since I last used it, but the marketing could benefit from approaches like webinars similar to what ZoomInfo  and those kinds of companies use to promote themselves and keep them top of mind for even people who do not currently use their service. I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.