Zendesk reviews

Zendesk is a complete customer service solution specifically built for the customer experience. Our customer-centric platform makes it easy for support teams to deliver personalized service, with tools and features that set your teams up for success and keep your business in sync. Zendesk also offers a sales CRM that boosts productivity, helps generate leads, increases pipeline visibility, and grows revenue.

• G2 voted Zendesk as the best software
• Zendesk was voted best help desk for customer service by Forbes
• Ratings by Forrester and Gartner
• Customer stories
• Why Zendesk is the right choice for your business
• Product overview
• Plans and pricing
• Frequently asked questions
• Ready to try Zendesk?

Talk about a winning streak. For the past four years, Zendesk has been recognized by—and received various awards from—G2 as an exceptional software solution. The 2023 Best Software Awards resulted in Zendesk being named the top product in these three categories:

• #1 Best Software Product
• #1 Best Customer Service Product
• #1 Product for Mid-Market (companies with 51–1,000 employees)

These awards were determined by evaluating authentic user reviews. The competition was stiff, with the top 100 software companies from around the world being considered.

Here are a few recent reviewers discussing Zendesk:

“We’re really happy with the integrated email and chat dashboard for our agents (Agent Workspace) and the ability to manage useful reporting, automated responses, and Answer Bot resolutions.

“The SLA functionality also helps agents stay focused with ‘top-of-the-bucket’ prioritization so they don’t have to spend cycles trying to figure out which ticket is most important, or lose track of tickets in the queue.”

–Dan R., mid-market (51-1000 employees)

“Zendesk Support allows all the necessary features with an easy-to-learn interface in order to work on the cases or Customer Support System. Zendesk enables its users with various features like follow-up reminders, integration with other apps, and creating related tickets for internal teams for further actions and efficient follow-up on ongoing cases.”

–Rajesh T., enterprise (more than 1000 employees)

“Zendesk has been fairly easy to pick up and do basic things with. Their usability is better than most other ticket systems I have used. Their support during difficulties has been superb and responsive, no matter how complicated or in-depth the issue might prove to be. They also have responded far faster than their chatbot suggests they will. My last experience with Fritz went beautifully and I had my issue resolved within 15 minutes.”

–Erica S., small business (50 or fewer employees)

Read more about Zendesk dominating the G2 Best Software Awards here.

Yes, that Forbes. No big deal.

Forbes compiled a list of the best help desk software for 2023, and Zendesk took home the gold as the best platform for customer service.

The best part? Forbes lists Zendesk pros and cons—but the only con they found was “no free option.” Wait until they find out about our free trial.

Forrester Consulting conducted a study in 2021 that examined potential ROI for various enterprise companies. This Total Economic Impact (TEI) study determined that the benefits of Zendesk included a high ROI. The study noted our benefits in implementation and onboarding, visibility, integrations, automation, and adding support channels.

The study showed these results over a three-year period:

• 286% ROI for a composite organization
• $23.1 million net present value (NPV)
• 40% cost reduction per ticket
• 15% increase in ticket deflection
• 15% growth without adding agent headcount

In another study by Gartner, Zendesk ranked #1 in digital customer service use cases. Gartner gathered information from its own client base and peer reviewers and found that Zendesk excelled in overall usability. Gartner praised the ease of use, customization, and administration. The research firm also highlighted the fast time to value and agility that Zendesk delivers, enhancing the customer experience.

One user in the telecommunications industry left a five-star review on Gartner, praising Zendesk for how customizable the platform is:

“I like that you can customize things on a singular user level like creating shortcuts to maximize efficiency. I like that the whole platform can be modified to cater to the specific needs of the business. I like that you can eliminate unnecessary fields/buttons/tabs/actions that can be confusing or irrelevant to our business process. I also really appreciate that you can see when someone is looking at the same case as you are at the same time and that there is also a pretty legitimate audit trail for accountability.”

Another review calls out Zendesk for being a “game changer” for their business:

"Zendesk implementation and operations have been a tremendous success for our organization. With over 1000 agents licensed and supporting our customer base globally. The ability to develop macros and workflows for our global community of support agents has been a game-changer in streamlining our business operations."

Finally, an enthusiastic user left an honest review, giving Zendesk four stars, and saying, “Zendesk will boost your multichannel support! Agents and customers will love it!”

We love it when our customers share their experiences with the world. Here are just a few highlights from our customer stories.

Zendesk reviews for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs)

It’s hard to believe a time when Impossible Foods was a startup trying to share its groundbreaking plant-based meat with the masses. When a video featuring Impossible Foods went viral in 2016, the company picked Zendesk to help manage the massive influx of customer support requests.

“We’re the team that knows who our customers are and whether they’re having positive experiences with our brand,” says Gabrielle McCobin, director of internal communications at Impossible Foods. She adds that with Zendesk, Impossible Foods is “able to track [the customer experience] and analyze it in a way that can be shared with other teams and start to understand the journeys of our different types of customers. That is a massive value add.”

Since implementing Zendesk, Impossible Foods has seen results like:

• 17,000 restaurants served
• 50% of tickets deflected with our help center, ticket forms, and Zendesk bot
• 4-hour median first reply time
• 15-minute first reply time for onboarding tickets

When COVID-19 arrived, the nonprofit educational platform Khan Academy experienced a 250 percent growth in online traffic. The business called on Zendesk to help manage support requests with automations, self-service, and community forums.

“Zendesk’s integration capabilities, flexibility, and feature depth has allowed me to be creative with how we’re using it, and lets us scale in really interesting and powerful ways,” says Laurie LeDuc, head of community support for Khan Academy.

With Zendesk, Khan Academy achieved these successes:

• 38:1 ratio of community forum views to support tickets
• 250% increase in traffic since COVID-19
• 150% increase in learning time on the platform, year over year
• 92% customer satisfaction (CSAT) score

Zendesk reviews for commercial and mid-market customers

With one of the largest premium hospitality networks in the world, Accor Plus needed a platform to enhance its customer journey with an omnichannel system. After implementing Zendesk, Accor Plus has been able to leverage social messaging apps, email, help center, and web for more personalized conversations at scale and offer multilingual support to global customers.

Additionally, the company has leveraged AI to resolve low-touch, high-volume tickets, and increased agent efficiency by 352 percent.

“Zendesk has improved the agent experience by leaps and bounds,” says Christopher Douglas, regional director of member experience for Asia Pacific at Accor Plus. “The workflows are easier and more intuitive, so agents can quickly view member interactions across multiple channels and personalize every conversation.”

Zendesk helped Accor Plus hit impressive metrics, such as:

• +352% improved response time
• +20% increased inbound revenue (digital sales)
• +220% improved resolution time
• +246% increase in self-service, year over year

Zendesk customer reviews for enterprises

Grocery retail giant Tesco needed to implement a platform that could handle IT requests from its 460,000 employees located all around the world. After partnering with Zendesk, Tesco streamlined ticket volume by leveraging a knowledge base and self-service resources. Tesco customized Zendesk to meet its business needs and extended the platform across five locations.

“Zendesk is our preferred strategic solution,” says Adam Bruce, head of product, service desk at Tesco. “It’s a lot simpler to use out of the box and simpler to manage from a central team perspective than a lot of the other tools.”

Here are just a few examples of how Zendesk helped Tesco:

• Handling 40,000 IT tickets per week
• Resolving 79% of tickets in one touch
• Implementing 6 API integrations
• Reduced dev resources by 40%

The Zendesk Customer Trends Report 2023 shows that 70 percent of consumers spend more with businesses that offer fluid, personalized, and seamless experiences. As these experiences become expectations, your business needs to pick customer service software that helps you deliver an exceptional customer experience (CX).

Customer feedback and data, user reviews, and analyst reports have shown myriad ways our software stands out. Here are just a few.

High return on investment (ROI)

Zendesk consistently delivers a low total cost of ownership (TCO). Our fast setup, ease of use, and reliable software minimize costly downtime and reduce implementation and training costs. Because of the frictionless agent experience, you’ll also see less employee turnover. Additionally, Zendesk offers onboarding and support resources to ensure a seamless deployment process so you can start maximizing your ROI.

Fast time to value

You can start using Zendesk in minutes, not days or weeks. Our intuitive software lets agents start using it immediately to eliminate gaps in customer service. With Zendesk, you can implement new solutions quickly, resulting in a fast time to value (TTV). As Zendesk continues to innovate and enable new features, your team can implement them without delay or headaches.

Scalability

You can’t afford to get stuck with software that stays the same. You need a support solution that scales as you do. Zendesk is built to absorb new teams, divisions, and global bases. Our security measures keep everyone safe, regardless of size.

Here’s an overview of the core capabilities and features of Zendesk.

Omnichannel experience

Zendesk offers an omnichannel experience made easy with our intuitive Agent Workspace. This workspace gives the agent a single view of the entire customer journey, including the customer conversations, ticket statuses, order history, personal data, and context needed to provide personalized service.

Interactions over several channels—like phone, live chat, email, and social messaging—get consolidated into a single conversation. Ticket tabs help agents stay organized, allowing them to manage multiple tickets in a single browser tab. Additionally, our side conversation feature lets agents handle numerous conversations simultaneously, maximizing efficiency and productivity.

"Our customers reach out to us across several channels—including email, chat, and phone—and we want to make sure they’re always able to reach out on the channel they prefer. With Agent Workspace, we’re able to unify these channels in one place so that our support team can offer contextual, personal experiences, which has ultimately helped us boost our CSAT to 98 percent."

– Jonathan Bolton, SVP of operations at BombBomb

Self-service and knowledge management

Zendesk features self-service options that make it easy for customers and employees to help themselves anytime, day or night. Chatbots provide 24/7 support, surfacing relevant help center articles, answers to common questions, or links to helpful community forum topics. Customer portals let customers perform simple tasks, like checking a ticket status or updating their shipping address.

Knowledge management software keeps help center articles well-organized and streamlines the process of creating and updating content. You can organize content with six levels of categorization, allowing users to find articles quickly.

The Content Cues tool, for example, uses machine learning to analyze support tickets and help center articles, identifying trending topics, search patterns, and issue spikes. It can flag outdated or missing information that users should update in existing articles and suggest new articles that they should add to the knowledge base.

Another useful tool is content blocks—sections of text or media that can be added to multiple articles in the help center. Updates to the content happen in one place, and the changes instantly take effect everywhere the content block is posted.

Zendesk also features Team Publishing, a tool that streamlines the content creation and update processes. It enables teams to assign articles to agents, collaborate easily, review, and publish content.

“We’ve been successful using the Zendesk knowledge base to shift support volume away from traditional channels like email and web forms. Our web widget volume has increased by 200 percent year over year.”

–Christopher Douglas, Regional director of member experience, Asia Pacific at Accor Plus

AI and automation

Zendesk continuously finds new ways for customers and businesses to benefit from AI and automation. Our Agent Workspace gives teams access to intelligence in the context panel, an AI-powered tool that enhances the agent experience. It provides customer context and guides the agent through each interaction, with suggested responses (macros) and a recommended next course of action.

With Zendesk AI, you can deploy an advanced bot pre-trained to handle your industry's top customer service issues. The bot analyzes the conversation and detects the language, intent (what is being requested or reported), and customer sentiment (if the conversation is positive, negative, or neutral) to provide the most effective and accurate support. Zendesk AI is ready to go in minutes and works from day one. No need for developers, heavy IT spending, or months of lead time.

For example, suppose a customer reaches out via email to report a damaged delivery (the intent), and the bot can identify that the message is in French (language detected). If the intent is reporting a damaged order, the bot surmises that the customer sentiment is negative.

From there, the bot can offer conversational support to resolve the issue or direct the customer to a live agent if the situation requires a human touch. The bot can execute a seamless handoff to the right department or agent and include all contexts.

“With Zendesk AI, I'm seeing an exciting opportunity to streamline and be more efficient. That will allow our team to have more time to work on projects of importance [...] be it driving revenue or new sales channels.”

–Ian Hunt, Director of customer services at Liberty London

Case and ticket management

Zendesk enhances teams’ ability to manage and organize customer tickets and cases. Our ticketing system has built-in intelligent routing and triage features that use AI to efficiently route requests to the best-suited agent. The agent can respond quickly and accurately through the Agent Workspace.

Our customer tracking software helps support teams monitor tickets throughout their lifecycle. This tool allows agents to provide proactive communication and customer updates about ticket activity. Zendesk has a variety of customizable templates agents can use to communicate quickly and with consistent language across channels. Employees can also configure triggers and automated responses to ensure responses don’t fall through the cracks.

Tools like side conversations help you collaborate with others on an issue without pulling them into the main conversation on the ticket. You can have multiple, separate conversations, discussing specific parts of an issue.

You can configure alerts that automatically notify agents when a ticket is at risk of not meeting service level agreements (SLAs) and operations level agreements (OLAs). Within Zendesk, you can create reports that detail the performance of your SLA targets and filter them by the metric you'd like to view.

Ticket tags are words or word combinations that you can add to a ticket. They add context to the issue and allow you to surface all tickets with the same keyword. Adding tags to business rules—like automation, macros, and triggers—allows you to create custom workflows that help boost efficiency.

“The implementation [of Zendesk] was very smooth. Now that we sort tickets based on status and pull various data, we have more clarity on what’s going on in the customer’s journey.”

–Farhan Sidek, Head of customer and community experience at GetGo

Integrations

With Zendesk, you get a highly customizable platform with over 1,300 pre-built apps and integrations. Integrations allow you to expand the functionality and capabilities of Zendesk by connecting with other apps in your stack. Apps in the Zendesk Marketplace enable B2B and B2C companies to see customers in a 360-degree view and take advantage of features that make agents more efficient.

For example, the Slack integration for Zendesk enhances collaboration with side conversations, allows you to create and update tickets from within Slack, and deploys Zendesk bots to enable self-service.

The Zendesk Marketplace includes apps and tools that help enhance capabilities, such as:

• Productivity and time tracking
• Analytics and reporting
• Email and social media
• IT and project management
• Collaboration
• Marketing and lead generation

“Zendesk gives us the flexibility to build in automations and integrations, so we can reduce the number of staff handling each issue and increase cost savings.”

–Josh Gregor, Continuous improvement coordinator at City of Portland

Reporting and analytics

Zendesk has the tools to help you gather actionable insights and the data you need to make informed business decisions. Our reporting and analytics software comes with pre-built, omnichannel dashboards for quick, out-of-the-box reporting. You can customize our software in minutes with point-and-click configuration, so you can tailor your view to display only the metrics most important to you.

“We initially chose Zendesk to handle all incoming emails and for logging calls in one place. That enabled us to improve continuity and service for the customer and work on more detailed reporting for the business. Prior to Zendesk, I believe reporting out of customer care was sparse, if not non-existent.”

–Naomi Rankin, Global customer care manager at Lush

Security

Zendesk is a highly secure platform trusted by businesses of all sizes, including many Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies. With Zendesk, you can rest easy knowing that your data—and your customer data—is protected with enterprise-class security features. Zendesk also regularly audits applications, systems, and networks to confirm protection.

Zendesk complies with industry standards and best practices for security and has the certifications and memberships to back it up. Our platform features:

• HIPAA enablement
• Data locality
• 3-tiered General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) protection

For details on Zendesk security and to download our transparency report, visit our Trust Center.

“With Zendesk Suite, we can securely provide near real-time support for customers across our platform and all of our service channels, integrating multiple teams. Being able to quickly and efficiently share data across teams in a secure way is paramount.”

–Caitlin Wood, Vice president of global operations at ZeroFox

Ease of use

The ideal customer service software is intuitive, easy to learn, and capable of seamless implementation.

Zendesk was designed for agents to be able to jump right in and use it from day one. Our user-friendly interface reduces the amount of agent training so they can start helping customers without missing a beat. And when you must adapt to business needs, you can make changes quickly without relying on a large IT or admin team to maintain the software.

Our software’s fast setup and ease of use can level up your customer service immediately. In fact, when Shopify implemented Zendesk, its team was already up to speed the same day they “flipped the ‘on’ switch.”

“Why have we stayed with Zendesk for so long? Mainly because of the great collaboration with the Zendesk account teams and because the platform is so user-friendly for our agents. There is an option to customize just about everything to meet the specific needs of our business.”

Ivana Suljetovic, Senior manager of member services at Virgin Pulse

Total cost of ownership

Some businesses only look at the subscription price when deciding on customer support software. However, so much more can contribute to the total cost of ownership of your software.

Unlike other vendors, Zendesk doesn’t have hidden costs. For example, you don’t need to employ a developer army to implement and maintain Zendesk. Automations and efficiency tools are baked in, meaning you can keep staffing needs balanced. Its ease of use saves on agent training costs.

Zendesk offers transparency with pricing, so you aren’t surprised by any unexpected costs. The flexibility of our mature platform allows you to stick with Zendesk as you grow and adapt to changes on the fly.

"The cost was good, and the configurability was very valuable to us. The fact that Zendesk offers the light agent role was foundational to our decision because it represented a significant savings.”

–Andrew Jensen, Senior director of business operations at LendingClub

Scalability

Our platform is stable and reliable and can shoulder rapid growth to meet your business needs. Integrations allow you to connect new software as your business grows its tech stack. Adding macros, triggers, and automations will take repetitive tasks off your agents’ plates, enabling them to be more efficient and assist more customers at once. Meanwhile, AI can handle common tasks without involving an agent, deflecting tickets to help your team do more with less.

We also offer Zendesk Professional Services, which can help set your business up for success or offer options if you need to pivot.

“Zendesk helped us scale at rocket speed and allowed us to pilot this rocket, as most of the solutions provided by Zendesk are so easy to implement ourselves. We migrated all our customers from 50+ countries in a matter of days without the need for developers.”

–Bharati Amarnani, Senior director of customer support at Coda Payments

Zendesk offers plans and pricing for businesses of all sizes and industries. To help you find the right package, take our quick quiz.

*Plans are billed annually

Additionally, Zendesk has a program for startups where qualifying businesses get Zendesk for free for six months.

The floor is now open for questions.