Zendesk is a complete customer service solution that unifies email, chat, messaging, social media, and voice into one workspace. It offers advanced customization, AI agents, and a comprehensive knowledge base creator to boost team efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Managers also benefit from Zendesk's easy-to-understand reporting and real-time analytics, which support better and more informed decision-making.
The best part is that the provider successfully offers such an extensive platform while remaining user-friendly for both agents and managers.
Prices start at $19 per agent per month with annual billing, and you can try everything for yourself by signing up for the 14-day free trial – no credit card necessary.
In general, Zendesk is a robust, scalable platform that’s ideal for mid-size businesses.
Zendesk is a cloud-based customer support solution designed to streamline communication across multiple channels. It effectively unifies email, live chat, messaging, social media, and voice into one workspace.
With automation, AI-powered bots, and customizable knowledge bases, the software helps customer service agents be more efficient and focused on what truly matters.
The platform also provides intuitive reporting and real-time analytics, offering easy-to-understand insights about team performance and customer needs. And this is just scratching the surface of what Zendesk can do.
The centralized ticketing hub is at the heart of Zendesk. It brings all communication channels (email, live chat, message, social media, and voice) together into one agent workspace. Users can directly answer messages, add internal notes, update customer data, and much more, maintaining a clear view of customer issues at all times.
But it’s not only about centralizing everything together in one place.
Traditional customer support processes include a lot of manual, repetitive tasks that don’t bring much value to the company or the customer. Zendesk answers to this pain point with its automation features.
While the intelligent routing ensures tickets are assigned to the right agent based on workload and expertise (reducing delays and transfers), macros are perfect for providing consistent responses with the click of a button.
Additionally, the ability to create custom triggers allows you to make sure your team prioritizes tickets correctly, meets SLAs, and more. For example, it’s extremely easy to make customers feel valued and become more loyal by adding auto-responses via email when someone submits a request or by changing ticket priority to high when the customer has the tag ‘VIP’.
Salesforce’s ticketing and automation might be more customizable than Zendesk's, but at the expense of a much more complex system.
Although macros and triggers are perfect to provide quick and accurate customer support, having reliable self-service customer portals allows clients to find answers themselves without taking time from your agents.
With Zendesk Knowledge, you can easily create knowledge bases and community forums. Organizing content into logical sections and categories to help customers find answers quickly with zero frustration is possible through the user-friendly organization tools available.
The post editor is also simple to use and provides everything you need to make the content engaging and easy to read (rich text, code blocks, images, video, and tables). You can also enable comments to encourage community engagement and choose who can see the articles for secure content management.
The help center software is customizable, allowing you to input your brand logo, colors, and domain name. Plus, it supports multilingual content – perfect for international businesses.
Creating community topics is just as easy. With a few clicks, you’re able to gather customer comments, which you can manage directly from the help center software.
But the feature that stood out the most for us was the AI-driven suggestions, which work similarly to Google AI results and are far ahead of competitors like Freshdesk.
When enabled, visitors can ask questions in the search bar, and the AI will provide answers considering the articles you’ve published, making your help center far more intuitive and useful.
As you would expect, Zendesk provides live chat features. In addition to a web widget, the platform also works with WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and more.
There’s plenty to customize and automate here, too. You can set omnichannel routing, trigger chat messages based on user behavior, and create shortcuts. This way, your customers get proactive help exactly when they need it, which is known to improve conversion rates.
And it’s not only the knowledge base that is AI-powered. Zendesk also has AI agents to help answer common questions and provide 24/7 chat support even when you don’t have human agents working around the clock.
The AI bots use generative AI to answer customer queries, using the content from your knowledge base to provide accurate and helpful responses. More interestingly, the AI agents can also resolve customer requests via email and web form.
In general, we were happy with the chat’s answers – Zendesk sits at the top of the leaderboard of AI agents, even if a few providers like Intercom have more advanced bots.
You can also try Zendesk's AI agent by going to the company’s website – the team uses their own tools, after all.
Zendesk's analytics and reporting platform, named Explore, offers an overview of customer support performance through premade dashboards.
It monitors all types of metrics in easy-to-read charts and graphs, helping managers identify bottlenecks, optimize workflows, and improve customer satisfaction.
Even though the standard reports already offer plenty of data for you to get your teeth into, you can also customize them to your business needs without requiring any technical expertise.
Reports can be shared within the platform or exported in CSV or PDF formats so everyone is able to make data-driven decisions to improve customer support quality.
Of course, real-time data insights are as (if not even more) important to a customer support team. Balancing the volume of tickets and their type with agents’ availability is key to any customer support manager. Fortunately, this can be easily done via Zendesk's live data tracking.
Zendesk Explore is one of the best on the market, providing comprehensive reporting without being too complex or hard to learn.
Bought separately, Zendesk Sell is the perfect sales CRM platform for businesses that are part of the Zendesk ecosystem.
It integrates flawlessly with Zendesk Support to offer a smooth collaboration between sales and support teams, allowing them to provide a seamless customer journey.
The solution available on desktop and mobile comes with core CRM functionalities, including pipeline management, email and call integration, activity tracking, and sales automation.
In general, Zendesk is intuitive to set up and use. We think that the company has found the right balance between a comprehensive solution and an intuitive interface that many competitors fail to.
The modern-looking agent dashboard is pretty simple, with a list of tickets, easily filtered by status or channel. Here, you can also check tickets that you’re working on as a team or the ones that you just want to follow (ideal for managers training new agents).
Meanwhile, the ticket page contains a lot of information in one place, but it’s designed in a straightforward way that doesn’t make the page look too busy.
As already mentioned, the experience of setting everything up is also clear, even though Zendesk is a beast of a platform and provides a lot of tools that need to be configured.
As a way to make things simpler, Zendesk divided these tools into separate dashboards. Although this means you may end up with dozens of open tabs in your browser, we actually prefer it, as you can clearly understand what you’re configuring.
The first time you log into Zendesk, you’re prompted to follow a built-in setup guide that walks you through the necessary steps to configure everything you need to get started. The configuration might take a while, as you’re going through many different settings and aspects of customer support, but the process is smooth and intuitive.
The platform is browser-based without a desktop app, but there is a handy mobile app for answering customer queries on the go. Although it doesn’t provide the full range of features, it’s a reliable app for ticket management, real-time notifications, and team workload and performance monitoring.
Customer data security is key for any business, no matter if your company needs to comply with CCPA, GDPR, or HIPAA.
Zendesk encrypts data in transit (industry-standard HTTPS/TLS protocols) and at rest (AES-256 encryption), and it has certifications for ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 27018, and ISO/IEC 27701.
Additionally, the company offers security features to further enhance data privacy, such as user access controls, two-factor authentication, and audit trails to track changes and access to sensitive data.
To take Zendesk even further from the competition, it offers an Advanced Data Privacy and Protection add-on for businesses that require that extra lock on their information. For $50 per agent per month, it provides BYOK encryption options, personalized and protected support, and a more detailed access log.
Zendesk supports over 1,900 third-party integrations that you can easily access through the company’s marketplace, which is much more than the industry standard.
In other words, you won’t have to change your current settings to start using the customer support software. Some of the integrations you can count on include:
Zendesk's open API is the perfect solution for businesses that require custom integrations for flexible workflows or a connection with proprietary tools.
| Lowest price | $19/user/mo |
| Free trial | 14 days |
| Money-back guarantee | |
| Free version |
Starting at $19 per agent per month (with annual billing), Zendesk is at the lower spectrum of the industry’s entry cost – a great option for small businesses.
And it’s not only about the price, as the entry-level Support Team subscription provides high value with the ticketing system, email and social media support, AI agents, and more. Support has two other plans, but for their price, it’s best to stick with the company’s all-in-one solutions (called Suite).
For $55 per agent per month, you’re able to get the Suite Team, which offers help center tools, reporting, macros, triggers, and automations. But to get access to SLA, CSAT, multilingual support, and self-service customer portals, you need to subscribe to Suite Growth for $89 per agent per month (also with annual billing).
Finally, Suite Professional puts the cherry on top for $115 per agent per month by adding custom and live analytics, skills-based routing, integrated community forums, and more.
Bigger companies might want to contact the sales team to get a comprehensive solution that meets all of their needs with Suite Enterprise.
Although there isn’t a free version like with a few of its competitors, all of Zendesk's plans come with a 14-day free trial, which can be extended for another 14 days on the account admin page. Plus, going for annual billing instead of monthly saves you 23%.
In addition to the Advanced Data Privacy and Protection add-on already mentioned, there are plenty of other extras to make your plan even more comprehensive:
| 24/7 | |
| Live chat | |
| Phone |
It wouldn’t be a great example for a customer support software provider like Zendesk to offer lackluster customer service. So, it’s natural to see Zendesk using all of its tools to their maximum capacity.
The live chat is available 24/7 through an AI agent (Z Bot), but human agents are only available during business hours. Phone support is also an option, operating from 8 am to 6 pm (Eastern Time).
Although Zendesk's knowledge base is thorough, intuitive, and informative, helping Z Bot provide answers, we would have liked to be able to reach out to a human agent 24/7 or, at least, have the option to send an email to support directly.
The company also hosts a community forum, and you can find it on all the main social media channels.
Zendesk is a leader in the customer support software industry for good reason.
The provider offers a comprehensive and customizable platform without being too difficult to learn or use.
Zendesk also provides everything your team needs to increase productivity and customer satisfaction, including comprehensive automation, a unified agent dashboard, a thorough knowledge base creator, and multilingual support.
Better yet, the software is well priced compared to the competition. Even though it doesn’t provide a free version, it does offer an (extendable) 14-day free trial that allows for enough time to test everything for yourself and check if the platform suits your needs.
Surprisingly enough, customer support is where Zendesk needs to improve. Even though you’ll find answers for most of your questions through the knowledge base and AI agent, the possibility of having a complex issue when no human agents are available can be unsettling.
Nevertheless, Zendesk is the perfect solution for mid-size businesses, customer support teams looking for scalability, or companies that want to use both Zendesk Support and Zendesk Sell.
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