Updated on 27 November 2023

Zendesk Review

Item: Zendesk
Rating: 4.5
Author: The Logician

Zendesk is one of the best CRMs available. Learn more about it, including what you can do with it, in this Zendesk review.

Updated on 27 November 2023

4.5

Can bring 286% return on investment
Versatile packages that cover many business aspects
Over 1,400 third-party app integrations

Starting From

$55/month

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Recommended: Best Customer Support

Zendesk is an excellent CRM solution that can be used by businesses of all sizes. It is especially great for those who want to improve their customer service significantly. Moreover, this CRM has a huge marketplace for third-party apps and integrations and allows you to build your own custom package.

Price	Starts at $55/agent/month
Ease-Of-Use	Intuitive and Customizable Dashboard, Fast Onboarding, Easy Navigation
Features	Zendesk for Service, Zendesk for Sales, Sunshine Platform, Internal Help Desk, Omnichannel Support, AI, Customizable Self-Service
Customer Support	Support Is Available 24/7 via Live Chat, Phone, a Ticketing System, a Help Center, an Agent Workspace
Integration	Integration With Over 1,400 Apps

An In-Depth Review of Zendesk – A Great Customer Service Solution

Customer support is one of the key pillars of creating a successful business. If you want to ensure that you’re offering the best support possible to your customers, then a CRM like Zendesk might be exactly what you need.

Zendesk is a powerful CRM solution that’s used by many well-known companies worldwide. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the perfect solution for you. However, by reading this Zendesk review, you’ll be able to easily determine whether or not you should use Zendesk to improve your customer service and your relationships.

I’ll cover all of Zendesk’s features, tell you how much it will cost you to use this CRM and give you my personal insights from using this software. So, without further ado, let’s get right into it.

Zendesk At A Glance

Zendesk is a SaaS (Software as a Service) company that was founded in 2007 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Now, it has its headquarters in San Francisco, California, United States, and it can be used by companies from all over the world.

Zendesk mainly focuses on developing and providing products related to customer service, sales, and other communications, making it an excellent CRM solution. The features that it offers include Zendesk for service, Zendesk for sales, Sunshine Platform, a large marketplace, omnichannel support, AI-powered tools, and more.

Zendesk Features, Pricing, & More

Now that we’ve gotten the introductions out of the way, let’s get into the features, services, prices, and other capabilities that make Zendesk one of the best CRMs on the market.

Features

The features that you’ll get from Zendesk include the following:

Zendesk for Service: Zendesk for Service is a great tool for building long-term relationships with customers. It’s a complete customer service solution that allows you to personalize all your conversations, anticipate requests with AI, adapt to changes, and make data-backed decisions. Other features that you’ll get with Zendesk for service include messaging and live chat software, AI, automation, Help Center software, integrations, built-in routing and intelligence, ticketing, data privacy and protection, and reporting and analytics software.

Tip

You can view all of Zendesk’s security certifications on its website, but you should know that it is compliant with all the major regulations and then some.

Zendesk for Sales: The first words I thought when I saw how Zendesk’s sales CRM looked were modern, intuitive, and productive. With Zendesk for sales, you can easily maximize your productivity, create a visible and easy-to-navigate sales pipeline, and grow revenue. However, that’s not all you’ll get. Namely, you’ll also have access to email integration options, sales engagement tools, a task player, call and text functionalities, smart lists, templates, sequences, a power dialer, bulk outreach possibilities, sales triggers, a complete customer view, integrations, API, a mobile app, subscriptions, forecasting tools, pipeline analysis tools, advanced analytics, activity reporting, performance metrics, and a custom dashboard.

Note

You’ll get a centralized platform where you can manage your sales leads, contacts, and account information and learn everything you need to know before contacting a customer.

Sunshine Platform: The Sunshine platform is Zendesk’s native CRM platform on which everything else that Zendesk offers is built. And let me tell you, it’s one of the best CRMs I’ve used. This platform allows you to build innovative customer experiences, which I’ve found super efficient in reeling in customers and making them remember you for a long time. In addition, you can customize the agent workspace and organize your team the way you want, automate processes without a single line of code, and create streamlined workflows. Sunshine is also a great CRM for developers as it allows them to create experiences on mobile, web, and social apps. What’s more, with the Sunshine platform, you’ll get fast CRM system setup and deployment, the ability to easily create the system you want via open standards and common languages, and the freedom to write your own code or configure your dashboard with a few clicks.

Note

Developers can use Sunshine to code customer experiences, while non-tech users can automate processes with just a few mouse clicks, no code required.

Agent Workspace: The Zendesk Agent Workspace allows agents to manage conversations across a wide range of messaging, email, social media, and phones – all from one comprehensive platform. With this feature, you can unify your channels, collaborate with other agents, track conversation updates, update ticket forms and fields across various channels, and assign tasks. You’ll also be able to get information on your customers, as well as live updates from email, chat, phone, and conversations done via messaging apps.
AI and Automation: Zendesk’s AI tool is built on billions of real customer service interactions, meaning that it can provide you with personalized support. This allows you to save a lot of money on hiring customer support agents and focus on other aspects of your business. Some of the functionalities of Zendesk’s AI and automation tools include suggesting responses, detecting customer intent, building bots to solve customer requests, finding the appropriate agents to solve more complex issues, optimizing operations, providing AI-powered insights, anticipating needs, writing support articles, setting a bots’ tone, getting data-backed automation suggestions, resolving issues with no human intervention, providing your agents with valuable information on customers, solving requests faster, providing personalized article recommendations to help customers, content cues, and completing repetitive tasks.

Tip

Even if you use AI for customer service, you should always have at least one customer support agent to handle more complex issues.

Internal Help Desk: Zendesk’s internal help desk is a feature reserved for employees. Namely, it allows business owners to manage tickets coming from employees and makes sharing information easier and much more streamlined. With it, you’ll get HT and IT flow automation, the ability to create a knowledge center for employees, the ability to track trends to improve your employee support system, and integrations.
Customizable Self-Service: Zendesk allows you to create a smart knowledge base that customers can use to get all kinds of information on your products and services. A sound knowledge base can also help you reduce support costs and customer ticket volume, giving your employees more time to focus on more important issues. You can use customizable themes to organize your knowledge base and create it in a way that represents your brand. Also, you can translate your content in more than 40 languages.

Customization

Zendesk allows you to customize many different aspects of your dashboard, but only users who get its highest-tier plan can customize their platform entirely.

All users can customize their Help Centers easily and create customer experiences that suit their strategies. In addition, you can customize web widgets and add them to your CRM system.

Sadly, that’s more or less everything you can customize with Zendesk, so I wouldn’t recommend it to those who require more freedom.

Integration

The apps and themes you can find in Zendesk’s marketplace will help you boost the functionality of your CRM as well as your business as a whole. More specifically, you can find apps for the following categories:

Analytics & Reporting
Compose & Edit
Email & Social Media
Marketing & Lead Generation
Surveys & Feedback
Channels
CTI Providers
IT & Project Management
Productivity & Time-tracking
Telephony & SMS
Collaboration
eCommerce & CRM
Knowledge & Content
Quoting & Billing

In the marketplace, you can also find themes for your Help Center, both free and paid.

Tip

You can find a suitable theme in the marketplace by entering a keyword that relates to your business or what you want your theme to look like. For example, in the keyword search bar that you’ll see on your page, you can write green if green is your brand’s color.

Ease of Use

Compared to other CRMs I’ve used, Zendesk was surprisingly fast to set up. Also, the interface I got was intuitive. I could find everything I needed without breaking a sweat. So, suffice it to say that Zendesk is easy to use.

What’s great about Zendesk is that almost everything you need to use in terms of features works out of the box, so you won’t have to make any changes or take steps to implement a functionality to use it.

The user interface you’ll get will vary depending on the plan or product you use, but having tried most of what Zendesk offers, I can assure you that all variations are easy to use.

Customer Support

Zendesk offers top-notch customer support to all users, no matter which plan or product they get. Its support is available 24/7 via live chat, phone, and a ticketing system, and all of those channels offer fast responses.

But that’s not all. Zendesk also offers a wide range of written resources that you can use to learn more about its features and services. There’s a blog, a community where you can chat with other Zendesk users, dedicated support, expert guidance, product updates, and more.

Pricing

Zendesk’s Suite plans offer a complete CRM solution for your business. The cheapest plan, called Suite Team, costs $55 per agent per month on an annual basis.

It includes a ticketing system, email, chat, voice, social messaging, help center software, standard bots, prebuilt analytics, access to all the apps in the marketplace, pre-defines responses, sales triggers, automation, online support from Zendesk, digital onboarding and adoption resources.

As you can see, the entry-level plan comes with quite a few features and services. However, Zendesk is still a bit pricier than other CRMs, so you need to be sure that it’s the right option for your business before you commit. Luckily, you can do that by using Zendesk’s 14-day free trial.

Tip

Make sure to cancel your free trial before the 14 days end so that the services you’re using don’t automatically activate.

Reputation

Zendesk is one of the most popular CRMs on the market. People like it most for its excellent customer service features, as well as the amount of third-party apps they can add to their systems.

Zendesk Pros & Cons

To further help you with your decision on whether Zendesk is the right CRM for you, I’ll list some of the benefits and drawbacks that you can expect from this tool.

Best for

Fast setup process with many features that work out of the box
A wide range of customer service features and capabilities
A large marketplace with more than 1,400 third-party apps
Powerful reporting and analytics tools
The tool supports multiple languages

Not good for

The pricing plans are a bit complex
Only users of the most expensive plan can customize their dashboards completely

Zendesk Standout Features

Out of the many features that Zendesk offers, the following are the ones that, in my opinion, make it stand out from the rest:

Advanced Data Privacy and Protection: Zendesk offers BYOK encryption options, protected support, access log, advanced data retention, advanced redaction, data masking, advanced encryption, and more.

Note

Zendesk allows you to tailor your security and privacy to your needs and meet all the requirements your industry has in place.

The Zendesk Customer Service Benchmark: This feature allows you to measure your customer support efforts and compare them to your competitors. It helps you see if you’re doing a good job and decide if you need improvement.
Tymeshift: Tymeshift is a Zendesk-owned company that allows you to create schedules, make forecasts, monitor activity in real time, get analytics, and more.

Who Is Zendesk Best For?

In my opinion, Zendesk is best for companies that offer complex products and have many employees. Also, it is ideal for businesses that have a lot of customers and hundreds or more support requests a day. Zendesk can also serve organizations that need third-party integrations.

Conclusion

All in all, Zendesk is a robust CRM tool that can easily meet the needs of businesses of all sizes. It’s also easy to use and offers developer-friendly options, so it’s suitable for everyone. Sure, it comes with higher prices, but the customer service functionalities it provides can easily make up for it.

Best By The Logician

Discover my personal recommendations in my Best By section, ranked in quality according to my experience with the products.

Best By The Logician

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Frequently Asked Questions

No, Zendesk doesn’t offer refunds. Instead, you can try out its services for free for 14 days and see if they suit your needs.

Yes, Zendesk is a reliable company. It has been around for over 15 years and has served large organizations all over the world successfully.

Yes, Zendesk offers AI. Zendesk’s AI tools allow you to do all kinds of tasks, from content writing, suggestions, and insights to forecasts.

Yes, Zendesk offers 24/7 customer support. All Zendesk users have access to it via live chat, phone, and a ticketing system, as well as detailed written documentation.

Yes, Zendesk is good. Actually, it’s one of the best CRMs on the market, especially for customer service and streamlining sales processes.

Zendesk’s entry-level Suite plan costs $55 per agent per month and includes many features, such as a ticketing system, email, chat, voice, social messaging, help center software, standard bots, prebuilt analytics, access to all the apps in the marketplace, and more.

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The Logician

Trademark of a Living Legend

Zendesk Review

4.5

$55/month

Recommended: Best Customer Support

Frequently Asked Questions

The Logician

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Zendesk Review

4.5

$55/month

Recommended: Best Customer Support

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Zendesk Offer Refunds?

Is Zendesk a Reliable Company?

Does Zendesk Offer AI?

Does Zendesk Offer 24/7 Customer Support?

Is Zendesk Good?

How Much Does Zendesk Cost?

The Logician

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