Fairly easy to set up, integrate and use. Some minor speed-bumps, but nothing too bad
What do you like best about the product?
it was fairly easy to set up, and I liked that it was able to build some initial KB articles from AI scraping about the industry I'm in. The interface to handle tickets is solid, and easy to set up as well.
adding the chat agent to my website was easy. integrating email with the ticketing system was fairly easy as well.
The capabilities of the support system were solid.
What do you dislike about the product?
It was annoying to get my domain name right.
I had to do significant edits to the KB articles to get them to be accurate, but that's to be expected.
adding my customers as users was a little tedious, but not too bad.
It was somewhat difficult to figure out how to tweak the ticket form to include my custom lists of areas, but I eventually figured it out
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I have customers who have questions about the products I support, and sometimes have bugs or issues they would like resolved. They also want access to a knowledge base that includes useful information about the products in this industry.
Reliable and Straightforward Solution That Just Works
What do you like best about the product?
I like Zendesk because it’s reliable and pretty straightforward. It’s well-established in the industry, has the core features most teams need, and generally just works without much fuss!
What do you dislike about the product?
I’d say the downside is that it can feel a bit rigid at times. Some things are harder to customise than you’d expect, and a few parts still feel like older legacy bits bolted on. It does the job, but there are moments where you wish it was a bit more flexible and modern under the hood.
For example, some of the admin settings feel weirdly buried, and things like setting up more complex workflows or automations can be clunky unless you know exactly where everything lives. The reporting side is also quite limited unless you pay for the higher tiers, and sometimes the interface still has that mix of old and new screens that don’t feel consistent. None of it’s deal-breaking, but it does make the platform feel a bit dated in places.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It basically helps bring all the customer conversations into one place so things don’t get missed. It also gives teams a consistent way of working, which cuts down on faff and makes it a lot easier to track what’s actually going on. For me, the benefit is mainly visibility and speed, you can see who needs help, what’s overdue, and where the bottlenecks are without digging through different systems.
Effortless Setup and Intuitive Interface
What do you like best about the product?
I appreciate the straightforward user interface and how quickly the setup process can be completed.
It's really easy to integrate with 3rd party systems.
What do you dislike about the product?
The main aspect I would like to see improved is the way new windows keep opening every time I navigate between different areas.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We are now able to interact with our clients more quickly.
The Best Customer Service Software We've Ever Used
What do you like best about the product?
Zendesk has been the overall best software we have used for customer service over the years.
What do you dislike about the product?
I cannot think of anything bad about this software.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We would get 30+ requests for support daily and this software helped us wade through the nonsense easily.
Macros and automation have streamlined workflows and reduced manual effort across support teams
What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have not used Zendesk for a few years now, but when I did at TOPs Software, I used it for four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I previously used a different solution before Zendesk that was something internal and proprietary, but I cannot remember exactly.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What was our ROI?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Provides fast setup and useful dashboards but needs better customization and formatting options
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for Zendesk is providing support for customers. I use Zendesk to support my customers when they open tickets because they are having issues with the applications we support. For example, if something on the application isn't working well, then they open tickets through Zendesk.
I sometimes use Zendesk for extracting a few reports and some statistics from it, but that is the only different use case that I have for Zendesk.
What is most valuable?
One of the best features Zendesk offers is the dashboards. What I appreciate most about the dashboards in Zendesk is that the tables come in a data frame format, which is visually easy to understand. The dashboards generate data from the tickets automatically, and they are easy to configure as well.
The positive impact of Zendesk on my organization is the cost. Zendesk is way cheaper than other ITSM platforms such as ServiceNow, providing a good platform at a lower price so we could offer good support with a low budget for the license.
Zendesk has an API feature which you can use for extracting data from it, but I don't use it too much, so there isn't much I can say about the API.
What needs improvement?
Zendesk could actually support HTML on the tickets so we could format our text better than the current options such as size, bold, italic, or underscored, because the text processing is too simple. Zendesk could allow us to personalize our text with way more features, such as different text fonts or using HTML tags for creating tables.
I chose a rating of seven out of ten because, as I mentioned, it doesn't support HTML on the text formatting, and the windows are not well customized. Sometimes a few windows take more space than is necessary, and it doesn't let us customize our home page and a few other things, which makes me believe Zendesk is missing out on a few things compared to ServiceNow.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Zendesk for a year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Zendesk is stable and performs quite reliably.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Regarding Zendesk's scalability, we haven't had to scale up or down because we don't have many tickets that need scaling. For now, Zendesk is handling our payload quite well.
How are customer service and support?
I have never had to interact with Zendesk's support team.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have previously used ServiceNow, Co-Common, and GLPI.
How was the initial setup?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is easy to understand and straightforward. It was easy to buy and to license.
What was our ROI?
I have a sense of the return on investment. To be honest, I don't have the data, but I feel that Zendesk helped us set up our platform for providing support way faster than other platforms due to its easy configuration.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Zendesk, we actually evaluated ServiceNow as an option, as we do have ServiceNow for a few teams. However, Zendesk is cheaper, so we couldn't license ServiceNow for all agents. For a few of them, we used Zendesk.
What other advice do I have?
I cannot estimate how much we have saved due to the lower cost and good support from Zendesk since I don't have direct access to the data, but I know that we saved a lot.
My advice to others looking into using Zendesk is that if you are looking for a tool that is cheaper than others but provides a good solution, I would let them know that Zendesk is the best option. You will save costs and provide good support with easy configuration and many features for a lower price.
I was offered a gift card for this review.
I don't have any additional thoughts about Zendesk before we wrap up. However, they could change the layout of Zendesk a bit to look more like ServiceNow, as ServiceNow actually has a good-looking layout. If Zendesk changed to look more like ServiceNow and allowed users to customize their layout, I believe Zendesk could be better, but it's good already for the price. I gave this review a rating of seven out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Organized Workflows That Supercharge Customer Support
What do you like best about the product?
It's organized and helps speed up the customer service process. Automatic workflows help deliver better customer support.
What do you dislike about the product?
I haven't really found something negative that impacts my user experience.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Delivering a fast response that allows users to feel heard, especially for a company like ours, which doesn't have a large workforce.
Effortless Setup and Smooth Launch Experience
What do you like best about the product?
Easy set up, was able to fully launch without any assistance
What do you dislike about the product?
Sometimes a delay of response and alot of back and forth. Would prefer a phone call or immediate reply
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
The amount of triggers and automations needed to make things work
Comprehensive Help Center and Documentation Enhance Our Experience
What do you like best about the product?
We appreciate that it includes a help center and internal documentation. The template responses are also very useful.
What do you dislike about the product?
It can require a significant amount of time to set up and get the team fully trained.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Responding to customer from different sources in a timely manner
Seamless Freshcaller Integration Elevates Zendesk Experience
What do you like best about the product?
Fresh caller integration with zendesk makes it better
What do you dislike about the product?
Nothing such to improve and appreciate .
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Multiple different platforms to get info and data
