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Zendesk Support Review: The Ultimate Help Desk Solution?

Zendesk is one of the most popular help desk software, suitable for all companies, no matter what size or industry sector.

Zendesk Pricing

Zendesk offers 4 pricing plans:

Essential:
$5/mo per agent when billed annually
or
$9 when billed month-to-month
Team:
$19/mo per agent when billed annually
or
$25 when billed month-to-month
Professional:
$49/mo per agent when billed annually
or
$59 when billed month-to-month
Enterprise:
$99/mo per agent when billed annually
or
$125 when billed month-to-month

Elite

$199/mo per agent when billed annually

There’s a 30-day free trial with no credit card required.

Zendesk Design

Zendesk Branding

Since August 2016 a new version of the agent/admin interface of Zendesk is available, with a more clean and modern design.

Starting with the Team plan, Zendesk will give you the option to transform your interface to match your brand. With familiar customization tools, you can easily tailor the look and feel.

Zendesk Features

The Help Center is designed to help you a complete self-service support option (knowledge base). Users can use the information you are providing or turn to a community forum for answers.  Your Agents can also use the Help Center to help solve tickets. You can deliver all the content in multiple languages.

Top features include:

Essential:

  • Unlimited email addresses
  • Twitter and Facebook channels
  • Basic knowledge base

Team:

  • Branded Help Center
  • Performance Dashboards
  • Public Apps Marketplace

Community:

  • Community forums
  • Multilingual content
  • Business hours & SLAs
  • Insights analytics

Enterprise:

  • Multibrand support
  • Ticket Forms
  • Hourly Insights analytics
  • Auditing & admin controls

An integrated live chat software (Zopim) and phone support app (Zendesk Voice) are available – both sold separately.

Zendesk Backend Features

Zendesk backend

Zendesk will give you the option to transform your interface to match your brand. With familiar customization tools, you can easily tailor the look and feel.

There are five menu items on the left side of the screen:

First, a Home button gives you access to your dashboard, where you’ll find a snapshot of your current configuration. On the Views section you’ll find your unsolved tickets. Next is the Reporting section, where you will get detailed snapshots of ticketing, agents, customers, self-service, and more. Last button, on the bottom left corner, will take you to your settings where you’ll find all the fine-grained controls for your account.

The last button you’ll find, on the bottom left of the screen, is a link to the Admin home page. Here you’ll find the tools you need to configure Zendesk.

Two more menu items can be found on the top right corner:

First (next to the search box) is a menu item that lets you select between the Support section and the Help Center. Next, if you click on your avatar you can access all your Profile Settings.

Zendesk Reports

Zendesk Design

Zendesk Reports are available for all plans and provide metrics such as daily ticket activity, service level agreement compliance, average resolution time, customer satisfaction, agent performance, ticket resolution time, and efficiency.

Insights provides advanced reporting and metrics and is available only for the Professional and Enterprise plans.

Zendesk Flexibility

Zendesk offers a built-in chat option, a mobile app (both for iOS and Android), integrated apps so that you can offer fully scalable customer support. The Help Center gives you a lot of flexibility.

Before deciding if Zendesk is a good option for your business you can signup for a demo where a consultant will give you a brief, guided tour of the product.

Zendesk Extensibility

Zendesk offers more than 350 integrations available, called apps. The apps are found in the Apps Marketplace with  some of the most being: SalesForce, ZenCart, Magento, JIRA, TeamViewer, Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, PlanBox, MailChimp and 8X8. If you wish to create your own custom app, you can take advantage of Zendesk’s API.

Zendesk Support

Zendesk has a dedicated support section where you can access the knowledge base, Getting Started tutorials and the community forum.
If you can’t find here the answers you need, or you just need to get in touch with them about pricing or billing, then you have all the options available: contact form, phone support (with separate phone numbers for different countries and time zones) and social media (if you’re looking for a quick answer).

Conclusion

Zendesk is a customer care solution that can grow with your business. It includes all key communication methods that are needed: phone, chat, webform, email, and social media.  It also gives you the option for building a branded knowledge base and online community. Powerful insights and more than 500 integrations make Zendesk one of the best options when it comes to customer care solutions.

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Catalin is a blogger and a big fan of ecommerce. He also loves mindfulness and matcha tea!