Zendesk

"The best professional ticketing solution"

Comments: I have had several smooth years using zendesk and really love using it for every ticket incident I have to resolve.

Pros: I can manage my tickets with ease using Zendesk. It provides me with the perfect user interface to easily navigate between all my tickets and incidents. This tool is also widely used making it great for training new colleagues and customers to use this for internal systems.

Cons: The software is great however it can take a couple of hours to get used to the flow of tickets and interfaces in comparison to some other CRM software. Once familiar this is not an issue.

"Need help from Zendesk? Forget it. Don't even bother."

Comments: Horrible. I only use this software because it would be a hassle porting all existing tickets over to a different platform. I needed billing support from them, and my ticket was 'escalated' to the Finance department, but nobody ever got back to me in time. Literally a few days went by and not one word from my Zendesk agent. They have a poor support system. So, if you don't ever need help with anything and know what you're doing, then ZD is probably for you.

Pros: The software functions nicely. It is very well put together. They make it easy to run a help desk.

Cons: The support, or lack thereof. If you need support for this software, they take a long, long time to get back to you. You better know what you're doing, because if you need to get a hold of them, I wish you the best of luck.

"The CRM your company needs"

Comments: I love Zendesk. I suggest it to everyone to use. It's not robust like Salesforce but worth the investment.

Pros: The product is so easy to use. You can integrate any software to it to make your support processing streamlined and simple. We integrated JIRA, Slack, Gmail and TalkDesk. Zendesk also allows you to create a knowledge base within the system.

Cons: Setting up automations can be difficult, but rewarding once you have the process down. Also, searching for previous tickets for reference can be tedious and all over the place.

"A mediocre product that doesn't get better as it grows"

Pros: I struggle to find good things to say. It works and rarely has performance problems. If you need very basic support ticketing and are just starting out, you could use it and be successful. We did. But the functionality and support for those organizations between startup and large corporation is nil. If we were a very large organization, I could see it being a valuable product.

Cons: 1. It is incredibly difficult to keep track of business users. When you are a SaaS supporting clients who have end-users, organizing tickets and documenting issues is very important to find patterns. This is not possible in Zendesk, at least at the Team feature level. There is not a central location for information for an organization outside of a Notes box that is basically a tiny sidebar textbox that allows no formatting to make notes over time readable. 2. There is no way to reference individual comments in a ticket because individual comments do not have their own IDs. This makes it very cumbersome to keep succinct notes and refers back to my first point. The only way we can review a client's history is through wading through a bunch of tickets with an endless stream of comments. I can't get a good timeline overview of their experience and issues, which is so essential to good issue triage. 3. Lack of features for those at the less pricey levels is pretty bad. There's no way to make our contact forms more customizable (like having a message to the person on the ticket - there is only limited description area and those are question/field based) and we don't have access to conditional logic on the forms. So we are left with clients just throwing issues at us without getting good information from them to get a one-touch resolution. The way Zendesk works it forces us to give lower-quality support. 4. There's no exporting your ticket information or running any sort of report if you are using the Team or lower feature level. These, to me, should be basic features as they pertain to the most basic of needs for any support team. Not only that, it ties you to the product and punishes you for leaving. We can't move to another product because we can't take our ticket history with us. 5. The features and performance is inconsistent. For example, there are "Triggers" and "Automations". Triggers and automations are the same. The only difference is the automations are time-based. But they don't tell you that in the interface - there's nothing telling you what is required to set up the automation in order for it to pass validation, only an error message. And by following the instructions of the error message, you can still get more errors. But there's nothing there to tell you the overall requirements so you can avoid errors in the first place. And in the Triggers interface, they leave out a large amount of placeholder options for seemingly no reason, so you have to go find the placeholder references for yourself. In my opinion, Zendesk doesn't have the user in mind. They put out new features and integrations, but the core product is so severely lacking that it seems like they feel they are operating on auto-pilot and their product needs no update itself. It's a shame, because it was probably was a good product with a lot of potential back when it first started up.

"Easy Inter-team Communication and Customer History"

Comments: I can't stress enough how easy Zendesk makes it to pass tickets back and forth between people and teams. My team gets a constant flow of tickets and we are able to keep them organized by time, urgency and topic. All customer emails and voicemails that are incoming to my department are received in Zendesk and it's very simple to either respond or make a note and pass along the ticket to the correct person. Zendesk contributes enormously to my company's efficiency and overall organization.

Pros: Zendesk allows my team (the accounts receivable team) to work seamlessly with the customer support team. On a daily basis, we pass tickets back and forth to accomplish both simple and more difficult tasks for our customers. The majority of our customer emails, voicemails and recorded calls are logged in Zendesk, so it's easy to search the history of any given customer to find out what they have contacted us about and who helped them. Zendesk makes it super simple to switch back and forth between emailing and making internal notes. A single ticket can contain customer-facing communication, a phone call recording and employee-only notes, all of which are vital to managing our customer accounts.

Cons: There are really only two things I don't like about Zendesk. First, I don't care for how it looks when two or more tickets are merged together. Instead of logging emails and notes from oldest to newest like a chain of events, Zendesk collapses one ticket into the other and you have to open both to see everything. It's just a little difficult to understand visually. Second, my company used to use a similar system called Help Scout and it was able to tell us when a customer had opened an email from us. Zendesk is not able to do that.