Our review of Zendesk

It’s hard to overstate the importance of customer support in any sales strategy: it’s the key to building long-term customer loyalty. Choosing the right customer support is essential for your business.

Zendesk has become a key player in this field. A leader in its field for many years, it offers a host of powerful features and customization options to meet your needs.

Features, pricing, advantages and disadvantages: here’s everything you need to know about Zendesk customer support!

My Zendesk review in a nutshell

Advantages and disadvantages of Zendesk

• The market leader, it is the most functionally profound customer support software, whether in terms of managed channels, available integrations, automations or reporting.
• The software is very easy to use, and rather less cumbersome than functionally equivalent products like JIRA, even if it’s still a big machine.

• The price is really high, even if it is negotiable beyond a certain number of licenses. It’s a bit like the Salesforce premium for CRM software.
• It’s a big machine to set up: if your needs are lighter, it may be a bit overkill.

Zendesk support : Functional scope

1. Omnichannel management of support tickets

Zendesk lets users generate support tickets. This can be done via various channels: social networks (Facebook and Twitter) or chat applications (WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger).

It also offers more traditional support methods: email, telephone assistance and an online portal.

The little extra: Zendesk now offers support for business messaging (via Slack and Apple Business Chat).

All channels are organized via the Views concept: this enables agents to sort tickets according to certain criteria. Views can be customized to adopt the most practical and efficient organization for your structure.

Zendesk allows you to adapt your service to your internal support organization. For example, an agent can group tickets according to product, the customer’s geographical area, or the nature of the problem. Line managers can also make these organizational choices at department level.

Ticket scheduling lets you add repetitive tasks to the system and track their progress. This is particularly useful for devices requiring regular maintenance (e.g. scheduled printer maintenance).

To help you with your scheduling, there are applications such as Ticket Scheduler.

2. Collaboration tools

In addition to omnichannel management, Zendesk offers a collaboration tool that enables better communication between administrators, agents and users to ensure efficient working.

You can assign your agents different roles with a relative impact. For example, light agent status allows you to act as an advisor, stay informed about requests and add private comments if necessary.

A system of secondary conversations enables internal and external team members to exchange information without interrupting the main communication flow.

Last but not least, the help desk enables agents to maintain control over both public and private comments. They can add, delete and track the support ticket without the user being informed.

This tool is particularly important for international organizations: it facilitates the transfer of tickets from one office to another, taking into account time differences.

3. Automation tools

Zendesk’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) functionality works alongside your support team to help your customers.

The Answer Bot is always online, even when your agents are not available. It answers common questions and handles simple tickets from any channel.

With this feature, you can access requests from more customers, reduce waiting times and increase overall satisfaction.

Automation also reduces repetitive work for your employees (such as collecting customer information – we recommend our guide to customer files).

Answer Bot also pre-fills support ticket fields. It shares conversation transcripts with your collaborators to give them context around an issue raised.

Good to know: You can create new bots, or synchronize an existing bot.

4. Live chat with Zendesk

Zendesk offers a complete messaging service: you can add live chat to all your support channels. The process of managing and reporting on ticket status is centralized in a single workspace.

You can also customize chat and messaging to suit your company’s needs.

Thanks to AI and automation with Answer Bot, you can provide rapid responses to your customers, even when your employees are unavailable.

5. Zendesk support center

Zendesk lets you create a self-service customer portal using its knowledge base and community features.

Combined with AI, FAQs and support tickets requiring little action are directed to this portal. This self-service function relieves your agents of repetitive tasks: they can concentrate on high value-added tickets and potential leads.

The portal enables you to improve the efficiency of your customer service.

Reporting on Zendesk support: our opinion

The Zendesk Explore reporting tool lets you manage your analyses. It is now included in Enterprise plans.

It consists of ready-to-use dashboards that display key information in graphical form. Enterprise Plan users can create editable copies of these tables and customize them to their needs.

Dashboard data can be exported in Excel, CSV or PDF format, or as an image (dimensions can be adapted to suit different devices).

In terms of in-app analysis, Zendesk Explore does very well. It uses queries to drive reports and dashboards, according to specific data defined by agents (e.g.: assistance, discussion, guide, chat).

A set of default queries is provided in the form of a pre-built dashboard, which can be modified by agents according to their needs. You can also create a new query from scratch.

Although there are other products with the same capabilities on the market, the solution is complete and easy to use.

Zendesk support: customer reviews

Zendesk benefits from excellent customer reviews on all existing platforms. Those who adopt the tool are quickly convinced, not least because of its intuitive, easy-to-use interface. A recurring negative point among customers: support, which lacks responsiveness.

Customer support at Zendesk

Support is available via live chat, email and even telephone from the Suite Team plan. It’s available in French, very complete and well constructed.

Zendesk offers various support methods integrated into its own products: a knowledge base, community forums, help widgets and live chat (which is only available when you are logged into your account).

Zendesk has 23 offices around the world, most of which have contact telephone numbers or e-mail addresses. Please note: opening times are not mentioned on the website.

Zendesk integrations: our opinion

Zendesk offers around 1,200 third-party applications and integrations. Even if this represents an additional cost, it allows you to customize the platform and solve your day-to-day compliance problems.

The solution offers an open, well-documented API. It allows users to add tickets on a scheduled basis (individual or grouped), particularly when they have been through the telephone support system.

This service is particularly interesting if you’re migrating to Zendesk from another helpdesk: you can keep your support tickets or transfer your data for tracking purposes.

Zendesk : pricing

Zendesk pricing isn’t always easy to understand because it comes in three types of plans, which we’ll decipher for you right here:

Zendesk Foundational Support plans

These plans give access to the customer support function only.

• Support Team: €19/month – Ticket management, access to customer information and history. The plan also includes reporting on the number of tickets and the level of customer satisfaction.
• Support Professional: €49/month – The plan also includes Customer Satisfaction Surveys to measure customer satisfaction at individual agent, team and global levels. The support is also available in several languages (around 40 available).
• Enterprise Support: 99€/month – Here, tickets are automatically assigned to your agents according to their skills, for greater efficiency. The platform can be customized to suit your needs, and storage space is available, especially for third-party data.

Zendesk standard plans

Here you have access to all support, sales reporting, analytics and automation functionalities.

• Suite Team: €49/month – High-performance ticket management system, with conversion from email or social networks. You have access to an Answer Bot with up to 50 automatic responses available. The plan also includes access to a storage system and Zendesk support service during office hours.
• Suite Growth: 79€/month – The number of automatic Answer Bot responses is increased to 100. You can give third-party experts (up to 50) access to your ticket management system as and when required. You can customize ticket plans for more efficient information gathering.
• Suite Professional: €99/month – Access to private chat channels for your agents, and a community forum for your customers. Tickets are automatically assigned to your agents according to their skills, for greater efficiency.

Zendesk business plans

Options for upgrading :

• Suite Enterprise : €150/month – In addition to all the services included in the previous plans, you have access to automatic generation of activity reports for your employees. You can customize the platform to suit your brand image. Each agent can also customize the platform to suit his or her needs.
• Customized offer: for €215/month, to be discussed with Zendesk.