Zendesk Support review

Zendesk is a software provider that produces solutions to help businesses with their support, sales, and customer engagement, as well as one of the best help desk software solutions. The company produces two different online help desk packages, Zendesk Support, a customer support ticketing system, and Zendesk Support Suite, which elevates the capabilities of Support with omnichannel functionality.

In this Zendesk review, we focus on the Support product and give you the rundown of its pricing, features, support, and ease of use, so you can better understand whether it would be a good fit for your business.

Plans and pricing

Zendesk Support comes in five different plans, starting with the Essential at $5/agent/month and going up to the Elite at $199/agent/month if paid annually. If you’re paying month-to-month, the price range goes from $9/agent/month up to $125/agent/month (there is no month-to-month pricing for the Elite plan).

Each plan adds to the features that exist in the previous plan, and all the plans except Elite come with a 30-day free trial that can be purchased directly from the Zendesk website. For the Elite plan, you need to fill in a form to contact the company to have your plan customized to your needs.

Features

As it is a helpdesk management system, ticketing is the backbone of Zendesk Support, and it comes packed with features to improve the productivity of your support agents. Tickets can be routed to agents based on their skills, with automation available to update tickets based on certain events or after a secified period of time has elapsed, or to send stock replies to common requests.

Collaboration features mean that agents can easily communicate with other teams via email or Slack from within the Zendesk Support app. Business rules can also be created to provide more context around your agent's customer engagements. You can initiate workflows based on a number of different conditions and ensure you deliver a more personalized response to customers.

Drilling down into Zendesk Support's extensive range of features further, users can expect to see automated resolutions, an interaction history, customer satisfaction ratings, contextual workspaces, audit logs and more - depending on which payment plan they are signed up to. 

Not ignoring the technology movement of the moment, Zendesk Support has a new feature called "AI Agents". AI tools are everywhere at the moment and you can certainly find them cropping up in all manner of live chat and help desk platforms. Zendesk Support leverages AI to help businesses scale their support offering. AI agents can solve customer issues across all of your channels, so your human agents can work on adding value elsewhere. 

Integration is provided across a multitude of channels, including web, mobile, email, and social media, and you can create a variety of ticket forms to make sure you’re asking your customers the right questions. This can also include conditional questions based on previous responses.

The integrations possible with Zendesk Support are pretty extensive, in part because of the Zendesk Marketplace, which includes a large number of third-party apps. These cover the full spectrum of business tools, from the best CRM solutions to ecommerce platforms like Shopify.   

Zendesk also has multilingual capabilities, with the admin interface that agents use available in more than 40 languages. Dynamic content also means that agents can communicate in the customer’s language without having to do the translations themselves.

And if you're a subscriber to either Support Professional or Support Enterprise, the integrations available to you even extend to private custom apps.

Interface and in use

After you’ve created an account and logged in for the first time, you’re presented with a getting started wizard to guide you through the essential settings. With that done, you can move on to the dashboard, where you get an overview of all your tickets.

Hovering over a ticket will give you a popup with a quick view of the latest replies. Clicking on a ticket adds a tab for it to the top of the window for quick access later, (until you manually remove the tab). Each ticket has a lot of fine-grained controls, like setting the ticket type, its priority, tags, who it’s assigned to, and others who should be following it.

In general, Zendesk is intuitive and easy to use, but there were a couple of aspects we found could be improved. One is that a lot of functionality—like the ability to relate tickets, display the five most recent ones, and link tickets to others—has to be installed as separate apps. Installing these only takes a few seconds for each one, but a lot of this functionality seems like it should be included by default.

Another thing was that reporting is part of a separate app called Zendesk Explore. It’s all part of the Zendesk suite of applications, but you have to launch Explore in a separate tab or window. It has its own navigation, so it doesn’t feel as tightly integrated with Support as some of the reporting tools from other helpdesk solutions. This seemed needlessly convoluted to us - especially when many help desk solutions are trying to unify companies' support offerings in an omnichannel world. 

Support

As a system designed to provide support to others, Zendesk itself features many of the support methods built into its own products, including a knowledge base, community forums, help widgets, and live chat (which is only available when you’re logged into your account).

Zendesk advertises three main support channels: its help center, contacting Zendesk Customer Support from within your product, or contacting Zendesk directly. In addition, you can also ask Zendesk experts for help by posting in the Community. There's also a Zendesk Community 101 video and you can comment on specific articles for further information. 

Also, regardless of which payment plan you are signed up to, Zendesk Support uses can purchase several add-ons for the support they receive. They can pay a little extra for 24/7 proactive support and engagement, professional services, such as hands-on configuration, solution design and advisory consultation services, customized training and certifications, and hands-on help with Zendesk Assist. So there are wide range if support options provided. 

Zendesk has 23 offices in various locations around the world, with many of them having phone numbers or email addresses listed, but office hours aren’t mentioned.

Security

Zendesk helps its customers meet their industry compliance requirements by itself achieving compliance with security and privacy frameworks like HIPAA and PCI DSS. Help desk solutions make use of large amounts of customer data - some of which is bound to be of a sensitive nature. A single breach here could prove hugely damaging.

Zendesk Support has a dedicated, globally distributed security team, and it uses AWS data centers, which have a number of on-site security measures in place like security guards and intrusion detection technology.

All communications with Zendesk and its APIs use encryption as standard, and customers can enable Zendesk authentication or use social media or enterprise single sign-on (SSO) for end-user protection.

Collectively, this adds up to some pretty robust security and it also offers some advice on best practices for users. This is important because no technological safeguard can completely protect against human failings. As such, it is essential that agents and other members of staff understand how best to keep customer information protected. 

The competition

Zendesk has a lot of competition in the online helpdesk space. Among the alternatives to consider are Zoho Desk and Freshdesk, which both offer free plans.

Freshdesk also offers five plans, with its free plan available for unlimited agents but with a limited feature set. The paid plans go from $15/agent/month up to $99/agent/month, and all plans come with a 21-day free trial.

Zoho Desk also has a comprehensive feature set, with four plans available, starting with the free plan for three agents and going up to $35/agent/month for unlimited agents. All paid plans come with a 15-day free trial.

There are also other help desk programs that work especially well with other solutions - as Zendesk Support does. For instance, Social Intents is an obvious alternative if you use Slack or Microsoft Teams a lot internally. 

Even so, there are very few help desk tools that can compete with Zendesk Support for aligning with other tools. This is because of the number of other solutions that reside within Zendesk's umbrella of solutions, including Zendesk for Service, Zendesk for Sales, and Zendesk Sunshine. If you already use any of these platforms, it's a bit of a no-brainer to also employ Zendesk Support. 

Final verdict

Zendesk is competitively priced, but it doesn’t have a free option like some competitors. It has a large feature set and an impressive approach to security. Of course, if Zendesk Support isn't enough for your team, you can always give the full Zendesk Suite a look, which is more of a complete service solution.

Zendesk Support's ticketing management system provides a lot of fine-grained control over tickets, but we found the separation of reporting into a separate app, and the fact that some functionality has to be installed rather than being included by default, detracted from the user experience.

• We've also highlighted the best helpdesk solutions.