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. 

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.

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.

• 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.

We were looking for a solution and we found Zendesk.

Other solutions that were considered include ConnectWise, LanDesk, Spiceworks, among others. Zendesk was chosen because it is the most user friendly.

No we didn't as before our team took on Zendesk, it was already implemented within our IT team.

I was not involved with this decision making process and thus cannot comment on this question.

I would highly recommend Zendesk for medium sized IT teams of approximately five to 20 people.

• Remedy
• RemedyForce

We did not look at any other solutions, this product was the only one that I tried.

It wasn’t my personal decision, but, I would go for Zendesk over QuickBase or MS Dynamics, which I had a chance to use for years as well, anytime.

• ZoHo
• Freshdesk
• SysAid

We checked out Freshdesk and HelpScout -- upcoming with better pricing! Migrating from Zendesk will be a major move though, so we are sticking with Zendesk for now.

SalesForce