Zendesk 2021
Customers’ time is money, and companies are prepared to go a long way to ensure that their customers receive what they need as soon as possible and are satisfied with the company’s services. Using live chat software on your website is one of several methods to guarantee client happiness. There are numerous live chat software alternatives available; however, for this topic, we’ll focus on Zendesk — one of the most well-known live chat brands.
In this review, we’ll walk you through what Zendesk is, the pros and cons of using it, how we arrived at our rating of the software, different packages available, and some product details.
What’s on This Page
Zendesk
4.5/5
- Trusted by 200,000+ businesses worldwide
- Customer experience booster
- Provides solutions for sales and customer engagement
What is Zendesk?
Zendesk is a tool that aims to reduce the amount of stress you experience while dealing with your help desk. While resolving issues for consumers is gratifying, it may also be stressful because help tickets might quickly accumulate, and customers may become dissatisfied with your service if they do not get what they want immediately.
Zendesk, for example, is a customer support software that has been utilized by more than 200,000 companies worldwide. Zendesk provides ticketing software, a knowledge base and self-service platform, a call center solution, and live messaging software. These features might be purchased as part of a package or as individual utilities.
Why use Zendesk?
Zendesk is ideal for small and midsize businesses that are hoping to integrate marketing with help desk. It has a well-developed ticketing system where you can customize and automate the ticket raising, managing, and closing processes. Once you’ve familiarized yourself with Zendesk’s customizable templates, you can easily answer 100 tickets in a blink of an eye.
Zendesk’s user interface is also very friendly. It is simple, not loaded with words, and helps you find what you need quickly. The interface for technical staff is easy to use and supported on many platforms, which helps foster communication between staff and users.
It’d be ironic if a help desk/live chat software fails to respond to their customers efficiently. Fortunately, the Zendesk customer support team is always available to answer questions or help you pull data for customized reports. They make sure that you know how to maximize their platform.
Zendesk Pros and Cons
Pros
- Highly customizable reports, dashboards, and templates
- Integrated with marketing and social media
- 200+ integrations possible
Cons
- Package prices can be steep
- Lacks proper labeling on icons
- Lacks enterprise features such as change and asset management
How to use Zendesk?
Depending on your company size and needs, you may or may not need all the functionalities that Zendesk offers. Whatever you decide to purchase, you can integrate Zendesk with your company website. For example, when a customer clicks on one of your how-to help articles from your company blog, they will be automatically redirected to your company’s knowledge base platform supported by Zendesk. Or, if you have the live chat tool installed, your customers will see a widget on your website and learn that they can type questions into the chat box and receive help anytime.
Our Rating Process
To take a closer look at Zendesk’s features, we’ve assessed the software based on how well it helps you generate leads, analyze data, respond to customer queries, and integrate with other platforms. We scored each criterion out of 5 points to help you with your decision-making process.
Lead Generation – 4.5/5
Zendesk’s live chat is smart. It can reach out to customers proactively even before they land on your site. And once they’re on your site, Zendesk will analyze past customer behavior to send them automated messages. With Zendesk, you can connect with customers via email, social media, and phone when they’re away from your site.
Not only that, Zendesk offers past chat history and live reporting on key metrics such as customer satisfaction and agent performance so you can quickly tailor your response to customer needs. The idea is to ensure that the customer support team knows exactly what has happened, what is going on, and how they can help a particular customer solve their problem.
Analytics – 4.5/5
Many companies love Zendesk for its customizability. There are templates for reports and dashboards but you’re free to add whatever you need on there. To keep it simple, the default dashboard is minimal, but you can modify it the way you want it.
There is a query tool where you can build reports based on your needs. The information on the query tool comes from live chat, phone calls, and other support platforms. It can also pull data from different apps that you have installed.
Response capabilities – 4.5/5
Zendesk likes to make your life easier by keeping things in one place. Tickets coming from email, live chat, in-app support, social media, phone, and the web will all funnel into Zendesk so you can respond to them via only one platform. Your customer support team can also add internal notes to tickets, which helps other team members understand how and when a customer has received help in the past in case they reach out for help again.
Zendesk is really good when it comes to helping you save time. Not only can you create canned responses for a chatbot to answer FAQs when you’re away or want to focus your time on something else, you can also set up automatic workflows based on changes made to the original ticket. To further foster customer engagement, Zendesk allows file transfer and supports rating surveys right there in the chat.
Integration – 4.5/5
Zendesk can be integrated with over 200 apps including popular platforms such as WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, and Shopify. To date, Zendesk has acquired various platforms to provide a more holistic customer experience. You can also make your live chats smarter using a JavaScript API.
Package Comparison
Product Details
Team
Professional
Enterprise
Price per month
$19
$49
$99
Customizable sales pipleline
Yes
Yes
Yes
Lead and deal scoring
No
No
Yes
Task automation
No
No
Yes
Bulk emailing
No
Yes
Yes
Connect to Zendesk support
Yes
Yes
Yes
Technical / Product Details
Product Details
Specs
Supported languages
30+
Compatibility
Windows, macOS
Restricted countries
None
Customer support
Yes
Frequently Asked Questions
Since Zendesk is such a big name in the help desk industry, it’s not surprising that many big companies use their services. Some clients of Zendesk include Airbnb, Google, Shopify, Slack, Uber, OpenTable, and SquareSpace.
Zendesk offers a free trial, but is not free to use after the trial. The cheapest plan starts at $19 per month, with the most expensive plan at $199 per month.
What is better, Zendesk or Freshdesk?
Overall, Zendesk seems to be easier to use and is able to handle more complex tasks. Both platforms have machine learning bots analyzing tickets and pulling in relevant knowledge base documents, but Zendesk is easier to set up. Moreover, Zendesk’s interface is concise — cognitive load is minimal. If you’re looking for more assistant text with icons, however, then you may prefer freshdesk.