Zendesk Reviews

Our primary use case of Zendesk Guide is for care and use instructions, or for web shop instructions. We use it to provide basic knowledge about how eCommerce products work—for example, "How do I cancel an order?"—as well as for contact forms, like registrations of warranty. It's not standard, but you can build several contact forms for one brand. A use case we are building now is for storing product pages and information so that our support team can sell products that are not on the web shop. We also use it for information about the company and we link it with the live chat so that we can share articles on the Zendesk Guide directly into the live chat, which is a great help to customers. 

We have 23 brands, which means we have to develop 23 Zendesk Guides, all in different languages. I'm pretty sure this solution is cloud-based because we don't store anything into our system. 

One of the most valuable features is the ease of use. If you take the standalone product, it is so easy to use, but if you want a tailor-made Zendesk Guide, you can't do it yourself. However, you can use a template that already exists—they have a lot, and they're very cheap, around 300-400 euros—and use it on all your brands. It's a very easy product to use. 

Zendesk Guide's customization could be improved. I would like it to be easier and maybe open-sourced, so that if you have a developer in your company, you can do it yourself. Right now, that isn't allowed, so you need to have it done via the integrator. Another improvement—this is nit-picking—is that it could be less easy to make changes. Some things are so easy that they sometimes look a little amateur-ish. Most of the templates are built-in so they can be used directly, so they are very simple. 

An additional feature I would like to see is an option to pay more for a more refined template.

We have been using Zendesk Guide for the last year. We acquired Zendesk three years ago, and we started to develop Zendesk Guide when we outsourced the customer service.

There are about six people involved with Zendesk Guide in my organization. We have plans to increase our usage. 

The tech support is very good, and was provided by the integrator himself. They know this solution a lot better than we do, and I have no complaints. 

Our company didn't previously use a similar solution. We used to build it ourselves on our website, but it was very disappointing. 

The installation is very easy. There's nothing to do because once you pay for the license, it's effective. For the first one, it took us about two to three weeks to totally set up and deliver, because we used an existing template. 

The integrator will set you up in the beginning, and then give you the key to upload everything. For deployment, I would say you need a team of three: the integrator, project manager, and operations—someone who is going to fill everything in. 

We had an integrator help us with implementation in the beginning. 

We receive less questions from customers, so this is a big win for our support. 

Zendesk Guide is linked to your Zendesk license, so there are no additional costs. 

I rate Zendesk Guide an eight out of ten, but I would never give a ten out of ten anyway. It's a very good product for the price you pay. 

To those considering implementation, I would advise you to draw up your plan before you buy the solution. 

Public Cloud

We primarily use the solution for customer-facing tickets.

The solution is a kind of standard SaaS support for our customers when they have technical issues. Usually, they'll generate the ticket, sometimes they are not sure and may contact me as the main point of contact for our partnership. I'll generate the ticket with them CC'd on it. Then our support team takes it from there. Sometimes there's an additional contact that the customer may have provided and I'll add those in. We use the Slack integration with Zendesk Support. I'll usually add the additional context via the Slack integration, so it's added to Zendesk.

It's just offers really good collaboration flow between the customer success team that I'm on and the support team they're on. We obviously have a lot of back and forth sometimes, especially with our larger customers and more complex situations that we need to kind of go back and forth on.

I always find myself exclusively on Slack using Zendesk. I really enjoy the Slack integration. I don't think I've ever been the actual interface for Zendesk. Our support team of course lives in the Zendesk interface every day. I kind of just use the Slack integration. 

The stability is very good.

The initial setup is simple and straightforward.

An area of opportunity for Zendesk is probably just when there's a long email chain and everything gets forwarded to support, I know it can be time consuming for them to extract the important information from the email chain. Sometimes if there was a way to just flag the actual issue out of those email chains - that would be really helpful.

It's just so time consuming, especially trying to find attachments too. I think it'd be good to have just one place, "Here's all the attachments and the 24 emails that's been sent in this chain."

It's hard to say what needs improvement being someone who usually does the communication was Zendesk in Slack rather than the actual interface. However, on the customer success side, it would be really, really helpful if I can somehow categorize all these Zendesk tickets by customers, so that I can see all the outstanding support tickets. That way, the status is in one place for that customer. Right now I really have to check by ticket number. 

We use Pendo, which is another complete different software, however, they have something called NPS scores. I just do a quick search in Slack for the customer's name. Then I see all the NPS scores out of the search results. If I put in the customer name, it's just kind of not associate on the account level in this solution.

It's my understanding that we have been using the solution for about a year and a half.

The stability of the solution is excellent. It doesn't crash or freeze. there are no bugs or glitches to speak of. Its performance has been reliable and very good overall.

The scalability capability seems pretty straightforward. I can't speak to how the support team is using it, to be honest. I can't speak to if they actually have attempted to scale it in any meaningful way just yet.

Our support and customer success teams are the main users of the product. We have about 15 people in total on the solution at any given time.

We also use Jira internally. We also use Pendo.

I was not involved in thte initial setup of the solution. I can't speak to how straightforward or difficult the process was.

We are customers and end-users of the solution.

We are using the current version of the solution.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It works really well. It's very seamless, and is very good software. Just from the customer success side, based on what I do, I would just like a more centralized account organization kind of feature.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

We are in support. Zendesk is being used by the IT group help desk and also by our team. We are an internal team that supports SharePoint, Salesforce, and Tableau. We use it for tickets for customer issues. We also use it for a help desk for everyone else internally.

The product offers very good management. It has a great ability to assign tickets based on content.

There is multi-channel support and a self-service portal.

The product integrates well with Salesforce. 

The product features as we were currently using them are fantastic.

The solution offers a very good SLA. 

We concerned with and want to understand more about the change management features of the solution.

The solution itself wasn't easy to set up. 

We're only using a third of all of the features, and we wanted something that was more simple to configure and set up. We don't have anyone who has the skill set to do the configuration. On top of that, the way the service model is, we have a team that are practicing within our organization. We would like to have the expertise internally instead of relying on a vendor for support.

Anything that's related to the HelpDesk, where they're tracking, your device, your phone, that kind of stuff, would be nice if it was included.

The solution should offer API connections to make it easier to integrate between other solutions.

We've been dealing with the product for about three years at this point.

The solution has been very stable. IT's why I was curious as to why we were considering switching. However, apparently, there are other features that we want that ServiceNow offers and Zendesk doesn't offer. 

We didn't really talk about scalability previously. That wasn't even something that was considered as there were so many things that ServiceNow does that Zendesk doesn't from an IT infrastructure perspective. We're looking at those features for the future in terms of our roadmap, security, asset management, and so forth.

Currently, we have about 24 people on the solution. They are admins or developers, for the most part.

At this point, we don't intend to increase usage.

I've never been in touch with Zendesk technical support. I met with the vendor and they were very, very helpful. We were going to use one of them to expand on some of the features, however, we now have plans looking at something else.

We are a service IT company. We have Zendesk for our employees internally and ServiceNow being used as a practice for external customers. They also have a practice at ProKarma and they are using it. Now we are experts and can set up whatever we need. We're trying to decide between Zendesk and ServiceNow.

Our IT director set it up. He set up something that was very simple, and basic, and it's working for him. However, he knew that there were more features that he should be using, however, he didn't know how to use those features. Then we found out from the vendor, that there were a lot of features that were grandfathered in, and we're not even utilizing those either. At that point he made a decision that from an infrastructure standpoint, there are other features that he wanted that ServiceNow provides however, it was more on the infrastructure and security side. Therefore, we may be moving away from the product.

We are still in a contract with Zendesk until the end of the year. And then they will make the decision whether to switch or extend the contract. Nothing has been decided at this point.

The solution originally took less than three months to set up. If I recall correctly, deployment took about eight weeks. We don't have anyone assigned to regular maintenance.

We had the solution set up in house using our own resources. We didn't require any outside assistance.

I'm not sure if we can really point to an exact ROI, however, it would be a good item to watch in the future.

We pay for the solution on a yearly basis and my understanding is that the cost is about $30,000. That's the cost for 24 to 25 agents. There are no other fees. Many items were actually grandfathered in. We have Zendesk Guide Professional, Zendesk Explore Professional, Zendesk Gather Professional and Zendesk Sunshine Lite. All of these things are not being leveraged as of today. It looks like we were using just Zendesk Support Enterprise, and the vendor was sharing that with us.

We looked at Service Cloud. They have a help desk on it, however, it came with a cost. You had to pay for every user who actually wanted to use it. We have 3000 or 4000 employees. We would have to have some type of restricted user license. That can be very expensive if the company is growing. 

We're using the Core Optimization package. We also have Zendesk Explore Professional, even though we're not really using it as well as the Zendesk Sunshine Lite. I'm not sure of the exact versions of the solution we're using.

You really need to know how you are trying to service your customers to make a decision of whether or not to go with a particular solution. We were looking at three products. We were looking at ServiceNow, Zendesk, and also Service Cloud. You really need to know what are your requirements? What are your needs? And what your future roadmap? Those should have been the driving factors for making a decision.

Zendesk is a very good product. I didn't understand why we were moving to something else when we weren't using all of the features. Usually, you use everything and then you outgrow that solution and you're looking for a new solution. To me, that wasn't the case. 

Overall, I would rate the solution seven out of ten. I would give it higher marks if they were offering some more features like asset management or if they were more integrated like Service Cloud. 

Private Cloud

Since I'm the main user for the retail site I haven't had to deal with any multi-user issues so can't comment on that. The 'mark as spam' and setting up tickets with certain titles to be automatically solved/deleted is probably the most important feature for me. Weeding out spam and tickets that don't warrant any attention is extremely valuable when it comes to time-saving.

Zendesk allows you to manage Twitter messages, Olark chats and phone messages all in one place. It's a great hub for all of your customer service issues and not sure how tough it would be to manage all incoming inquiries in a timely manner without it.

Right now, Zendesk does what we need it to do for us. I've had a few issues setting it up to receive incoming facebook messages. Not sure if this needs attention on the backend or if I just need a rep to help with the setup, but like I mentioned earlier, if they reached out to us from time to time to discuss how we could improve the use of their program to help us function more efficiently that would be great.

I think there's always room for improvement, but right now it fits our needs just fine.

I've been using it for little more than a year and we had it for another year or two before I signed on with the company. I'm the main user for the retail site and I'm usually on it roughly six days a week.

The setup was fairly easy.

There have been non issues with the stability.

The scalability isn't an issue for us right now.

Good. I really wish they had a chat feature - like Olark for example. But I guess it makes sense. Olark is chat program and Zendesk is a support ticket program. That said, chat would be useful. No reason they shouldn't have this deployed at this stage of the game. People want / need answers immediately. They don't want to send in a support ticket and wait for a response.

Zendesk has been with us from the beginning.

Zendesk was implemented before I came on board with the company, but I've had several discussions with the zendesk support team to improve / setup certain features. Advice - Do your research. Read their content. Talk to their support team. And put a proper amount of time into setting it up so that you know all the ins and outs of the program. There could be features you're missing out on so explore and connect with the zendesk team to make sure you're accessing everything you need to be successful and efficient going forward.

Zendesk is an invaluable tool. It's tough to put a price tag on it, but it's definitely worth the investment.

This is pretty much the only customer service solution I've used for this purpose so can't compare it to anything else. It gets the job done and there's not much to complain about in terms of functionality and results. It'd be nice to have them check in from time (or once a month), examine our usage and relay any information that they think might be useful for us.

In a nutshell, it's a great tool that allows you to manage all your customer service issues in one location. Not sure where we would be without it, but response time is a crucial element when it comes to customer satisfaction, and zendesk helps us manage all of it at a high level.

I'm in support and I'm using it basically for incident management and things like that.

It's very convenient to use. 

We can add the time, including the time it takes for a particular incident ticket to be resolved. It's convenient that we can add the time taken for each incident ticket. It helps illustrate how long issues take to resolve.

The solution is quite fast.

It is quite a stable product overall.

Zendesk used to have a whole reporting tool, which they have actually terminated. That has been a small blow for us, however, it used to be a feature where they had that tool that allowed you to just have reports on the go, on the fly. They should bring this feature back. 

They have something called Zendesk Explore, which isn't as good as what they had in place previously. The reporting and analytics part should be improved even more. The effort taken from the user side to configure the reports is a bit more when it's compared to the solution that was there earlier. 

I've been using the solution for about one year or so at this point. It's been only a short while.

We've found the solution to be very, very stable. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches. It's quite good.

I used to use TOPdesk. We switched to Zendesk. Now we are comparing the two to see which we'd prefer. Some of my colleagues are still using TOPdesk, however, I am exclusively on Zendesk.

I'm actually currently working on a comparison between this solution and TOPdesk. I'm also looking at Jira Service Management, however, I don't know if it is the best out there or not.

We are just customers and end-users. We aren't partners with Zendesk and we don't have a business relationship with them.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. Largely, we have been happy with its capabilities.

I'd recommend the solution, especially if a company is considering a choice between this and TOPdesk. TOPdesk is somewhat inferior and Zendesk is a better choice. 

We are in support. Zendesk is being used by the IT group help desk and also by our team. We are an internal team that supports SharePoint, Salesforce and Tableau. So we use it for tickets for customers' issues. And then of course I see folks use it for the help desk for everyone else internally.

In terms of the most valuable features, we like the SLA options and the reporting feature because it runs a report.

Additionally, it has good management, the ability to sign tickets based on content, multi-channel support, the self-service portal, the integration with Salesforce, the setup process, and the product features as we are currently using them.

We go in there and we set up our requests for how we want it for each of our groups, meaning for the Salesforce team, and so forth. And then we change it accordingly, adding different features or attributes based on the need, and then run reports.

In terms of what could be improved, it was not easy to set up so we're only using a third of all of the features, and we wanted something that was easier to configure and set up. I asked my director how come we don't just keep Zendesk because it doesn't cost anything, we're already paying for the file. Why would we turn around and buy a Cadillac, like ServiceNow for IT? He said because we're only using some of the features. We don't have anyone who has the skill set to do the configuration. And the way the service model is with ServiceNow, we have a team that uses it in our organization. So we have the internal expertise instead of relying on a vendor for support.

I have been using Zendesk Guide for probably three years. I believe we've been on the Core Optimization package.

Zendesk has been very stable. Which is why I was trying to understand why we were switching. The director said that there are other features that we want that ServiceNow offers and Zendesk doesn't. So instead of me learning about the new features, he wanted to go with ServiceNow from an infrastructure standpoint.

We are a service IT company. We have Zendesk for our employees internally and for external folks, but it's just used internally and ServiceNow is being used as a practice for external customers. They are also using it at ProKarma. They have the means so that experts can set up whatever we need. The director made a decision to go over and start using ServiceNow internally instead of Zendesk. I think he was more interested in ServiceNow from a roadmap perspective.

In terms of scalability, that wasn't even something that we were considering, just that there were so many things that ServiceNow does that Zendesk doesn't from an IT infrastructure perspective. And we were looking at those features for future-state from the roadmap, security, asset management, and so forth.

We only have about 24 people interfacing with Zendesk. They are admin or developers. Then there's a few BA who are mostly either engineer support for the help desk IT or they  belong to one of those internal groups that we support, Salesforce developers, SharePoint developers, or Tableau developers and architects. These are the people who need to resolve the tickets when there's an issue.

Our IT director set it up. He said he has some basic things in there, a very simple workflow, an SLA, a change management, and I do a few reports. I have a couple of things where I set up the processes so that certain things get kicked back to IT to follow up on. But he said he set up something that was very simple and basic, and it's working for him. But he knew that there were more features that he should be using but he didn't know how to use them. And then we found out from the vendor that there were a lot of features that were grandfathered in and we're not even utilizing those features. At that point I think he made a decision that from an infrastructure perspective there are other features that he wanted that ServiceNow provides that Zendesk doesn't. I think it was more on the infrastructure and security sides.

We are still in a contract with Zendesk until the end of the year. And then they will make the decision whether to switch or extend the contract. So nothing has been done at this point. 

It took less than three months to set up, maybe about eight weeks.

I don't know about the deployment because they haven't made any significant changes. All I know is it took about eight weeks to create the processes and the flows that we currently have.

We did the implementation and maybe used some internal resources to set it up.

The licensing is yearly and it's less than 30 grand, I believe. We had a lot of things that were grandfathered in, so we were using a lot of things - Zendesk Guide Professional, Zendesk Explore Professional, Zendesk Gather Professional and Zendesk Sunshine Lite. All of these things are not being leveraged today. So it looks like we were just using Zendesk Support Enterprise, and the vendor was sharing with us basically what we had and what we were using.

You really need to know how you are trying to service your customers to make a decision on whether or not to go with it. We were looking at three products, ServiceNow, Zendesk and Service Cloud. And you wanted the infrastructure component, the Cadillac version, right? All three different, too. That was another thing you really need to know - what are your requirements? What are your needs? And also look at your future roadmap. To me, those should have been the driving factors for making a decision. Just to clarify, those three solutions are the possible replacements if we decide to phase out the Zendesk Guide. We were looking at Service Cloud and I don't know if we made a decision on it because we are already using Salesforce.

They have a help desk for it, but it came with a cost where you had to pay for every user who actually wanted to use it. We have 3000 or 4000 employees. They also had some type of restricted user license and that can be very expensive if the company is growing. But that would be good. It would be something just to follow up on to find out with ServiceNow. 

The total cost of ownership was a significant differentiator for Zendesk. I thought they were very reasonable. ServiceNow is very expensive, and adding each component every time you want to add a module and you're taking a lot of money. And they still decided to go with it.

One of the things that they showed me in ServiceNow is that they have an asset management component. That was pretty cool. So when you assign a computer to someone, they actually had a picture and they basically had a little card. Anyway, it was easy to click on and set up. I thought that would have been nice if they had some type of asset management component. I think we were using Salesforce to do asset management. Anything that's related to the HelpDesk, where they're tracking your device, your phone, that kind of stuff. So, it would be nice if that was included.

To be honest with you, I thought Zendesk was a very good product. I didn't understand why we were moving to something else when we weren't using all of the features. Usually you use everything and then you outgrow that solution and look for a new solution. But to me that wasn't the case. So the biggest lesson for me was all three products. This is not an apple to apple comparison. You have to know what your requirements are and the roadmap, which is what I mentioned, but I didn't feel that Zendesk fell short at all. I felt management was making a decision without knowing what the future roadmap looked like. Meaning, when I say, "What do you want for the future?", "I don't know, but we are thinking about the infrastructure component" and then they decided to go off and do ServiceNow.

So I guess my lesson learned is to make sure your requirements and your future-state roadmap are all in alignment with your strategy. And I didn't feel that that was the case because I felt that they were making the decision without any ROI analysis to back it up. I'm being honest. That's how I felt. But I felt Zendesk didn't fall short. So what's the issue? And they just said, "We don't know how to do all of this stuff, and we already have an internal group that uses ServiceNow with the infrastructure components. So we're going to go with that product." I said, "it is going to cost a lot of money. They said they were okay with that. They thought that they could still bring down the cost based on their usage. And they went with it.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Zendesk Guide a seven.

To make it a ten, they should offer some more teachers to compete with the other folks for Help Desk, and other components like asset management. That was another thing that Service Cloud does. It's totally different. I had a feature matrix that showed me those comparisons. There was something that Service Cloud does that makes them more integrated. There was an issue with integration between Salesforce and Zendesk, but the vendor said they fixed that issue and now the integration should work. So that was another concern about just integrating with the internal tool, making sure it's an easier API connector, making it easier to integrate with other tools.

Private Cloud

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.

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