Zendesk for Service Review [Tested & Reviewed]

Zendesk for Service

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Zendesk for Service is an AI-powered customer service platform to improves customer retention, increases customer satisfaction or CSAT, and simplifies workflow from a unified platform for customer service teams.

In this article, I will discuss how you can use Zendesk for Service to manage your customer support and automate its features and use cases, as well as what I didn’t like.

Features

• Create automated workflows, triggers, and macros
• Manage customer interactions across email, chat, phone, and social media
• Deliver instant responses using AI-powered bots and reduce ticket volume
• Visualize all vital metrics like wait times, resolution times, and other performance metrics
• Connect with payment gateways to solve payment or billing-related issues and refunds
• Manage all tickets in a unified view and automatically route them to qualified agents

Pros

• Offers AI suggestions and insights to help human agents
• Has excellent automatic routing via IVR to agents
• Improve customer satisfaction using self-service help center, AI answer bots, and personalized recommendations
• Real-time dashboard for visualizing productivity metrics
• Offers advanced reporting features to help you visualize performance and productivity

Cons

• Steep pricing as it’s based on per-agent
• Data exporting and uploading aren’t the best
• Advanced AI feature is available as an addon at a higher plan
• Many advanced features, such as audit logs and custom agents, are unavailable in the basic non-enterprise plans

What is Zendesk?

Zendesk is a cloud-based and AI-powered CRM that can streamline workflows and improve customer engagement. Built for SMBs, e-commerce platforms, startups, and SaaS companies, Zendesk is 100% customizable and provides omnichannel communication, easy automation, and a centralized database.

With powerful integrations to internal and external communication tools, it’s a complete customer service solution. You can prioritize cross-department communication across marketing, sales, and customer service teams to improve performance across the business.

This leading all-in-one customer platform is headquartered in San Francisco and serves over 130K global brands in more than 30 languages. Founded in 2007, it caters to users from 160+ countries.

How Does Zendesk for Service Work?

To start using Zendesk for Service, you need to subscribe to a plan, preferably the free trial if you’re new. The registration process is simple.

Step 1: Go to Zendesk > Start a free trial.

Step 2: You’ll be asked to input your work email, name, contact number, designation, and country.

Step 3: Once you verify your email, you will be able to log into your Zendesk profile.

I love how intuitive and easy-to-use Zendesk’s UI is. Zendesk doesn’t involve a steep learning curve. There are onboarding guides on the homepage, as well as a guided tour of how to use each feature.

You have to copy the website widget, paste it to your website, and then connect your social media channels or configure voice channels as required.

Zendesk Product Offering

Though this review focuses on Zendesk’s service, let’s take a quick look at Zendesk’s offerings:

1. Zendesk Service

Zendesk service is an AI-powered customer service and support platform. It delivers phenomenal customer experiences across all popular channels like email, SMS, and social media platforms.

All in all, Zendesk focuses on improving customer experience across channels—delivering personalized messages instantly and forming meaningful connections all the way. With a unified inbox, automated ticket management, live chat, self-service options, AI-powered bots, advanced reporting and analytics tools, agent workspace, and integrated voice solutions, businesses can provide personalized support at scale. It also streamlines operations and manages inquiries from a centralized location.

2. Zendesk Sell

Zendesk sell is a sales CRM solution that’s aimed at sales teams closing more sales, increasing their productivity, and building better customer relationships. Additionally, it’s extremely useful for getting full visibility into the pipeline, tracking leads, automating reachouts, and generating leads.

You can set up triggers and view key customer information and where they are in the buying journey. Also, you can customize Zendesk Sell to fit your business needs, integrate it with your existing solutions, connect top apps from the Sell marketplace for automating and billing, and get help from global partners in improving sales processes.

3. Zendesk Employee Service

If you’re looking for HR support software, Zendesk Employee Service is ideal for streamlining HR operations with a customizable help center and personalized support. It has the only AI model that is trained on employee data to manage operations, route tickets, offer 24/7 agent support, and automate workflows.

Additionally, AI can help you triage requests faster, improve service quality, and protect employee data—all from a single, easy-to-use platform. You can connect your existing systems like Teams, Slack, okta, Rippling, PagerDuty, and more integrations to make your workflow seamless.

8 Best Features of Zendesk for Service

Zendesk for Service offers a wide range of essential features that can enable businesses to provide personalized customer support at scale:

1. Messaging

Zendesk for Service is a complete messaging solution that provides personalized messaging across all channels. You can build and grow customer relationships, use customer data to initiate tailor-made conversations, enable 24/7 support, and manage all interactions from one place.

With embedded live chat, Zendesk for Service aims to prevent customer escalations and drive customer engagement. You can send outbound communications with messaging integrations like maps or customized bots. Offer quick replies by creating automated flows in a few clicks or transfer seamlessly to live agents.

Meet your customers wherever they are, or make use of group messaging to make sure things run efficiently and offer better customer solutions.

2. AI and Automation

Built on years of customer experience data, Zendesk’s AI manages high demand with AI agents, increases operation efficiency, and reduces agent workload. In fact, agents get a proactive agent copilot embedded into workflows for full context and guidance. When a human agent picks up the conversation, they’re no longer lost. Nor do they need to get the brief from the client.

Moreover, they get suggested replies and insights from AI easily. In fact, businesses can achieve excellent automation success as Zendesk AI agents can handle complex issues while reducing costs.

3. Help Center

Help Center is a larger knowledge base that operates as a self-serve platform for customers. Building out a rich, interactive knowledge base enables quick and convenient customer support. Not only that, but it’s also useful for agents to keep themselves updated with product know-how! You can also set up a community or a forum inside a Help Center to grow a satisfied user base and increase customer engagement.

Having a help center reduces support costs and ticket volume and offers meaningful support. There are customizable themes that can help you personalize the Help Center. Moreover, what makes it even more attractive is how it caters to different audiences and regions in over 40 languages.

4. Voice Support

Zendesk for Service comes embedded with voice support. Sometimes, your customers just want to talk to a human – provide a voice solution that’s based on instant communication in your mobile app or website browser.

With Zendesk for Service, your agent will have full visibility into the unified conversations with the customer profile. You can integrate your preferred call center solution. Zendesk for Service connects to over 90 telephony providers.

Zendesk for Service offers interactive voice response (IVR) routing, group routing, after-hours routing, and overflow to make things easier. Manage maximum queue and wait size and improve phone support operations with real-time analytics.

5. Ticketing and Routing

When a customer submits a request or opens a conversation in live chat, Zendesk for Service generates a ticket and categorizes it based on topic, urgency, and priority. Then, the system will route the ticket to the most appropriate agent. This also happens in the case of voice support, which is called interactive voice routing or IVR.

This minimizes response times, cuts down on manual efforts, and improves overall efficiency. Zendesk for Service has customizable workflows and automated responses that’ll route calls after work hours or manage overflow based on predefined rules you set up. In Zendesk for Service for Workspace, you can manage all tickets in one place and see contact info and interaction details.

You can also loop in teams without leaving the ticket or switch to different channels to serve the same customer.

6. Analytics and Reporting

Zendesk for Service has advanced analytics and reporting features to help you measure and track key customer service metrics. While you can customize your reports, you can start off with pre-built templates like ticket volume, response times, resolution times, customer satisfaction (CSAT), and agent performance.

Real-time dashboards allow businesses to enhance service delivery, monitor team productivity, and identify support bottlenecks or other frequent issues.

7. Data Privacy and Security

Zendesk’s data privacy and security solutions keep your business safe, offer personalized, protected support, and keep a check on who’s viewing what data is in the access log.

You can create custom retention policies to define what data you keep while also removing personal data with AI-powered redaction. You can also define agent roles and mask data so that confidential information remains safe.

Plus, use customer-controlled encryption keys to hide customer data from third parties and prying eyes.

8. Workflow Engagement Management

Zendesk’s workflow engagement management is AI-powered, so getting the full picture is easy. You can do efficient resource planning, scheduling, forecasting, and real-time monitoring. You can also use predictive analytics to forecast customer demand and assign agents with advanced scheduling features to improve customer experiences.

Zendesk AI

Zendesk AI has automation, predictive analytics, and intelligence to support your customer experience efforts and take them to the next level. You can use AI to set up chatbots that handle routine customer queries, product inquiries, and issues instantly.

AI agents can escalate more complex issues to human agents, too! AI-enabled copilot empowers human agents with suggested responses and insights to improve response times and customer satisfaction.

Zendesk AI routing is quite efficient in routing tickets to the most appropriate agent, depending on the topic or predefined rules. You can automate repetitive tasks, reduce agent burnout, and predict customer behavior.

Businesses can automatically forecast peak times, volume spikes, and customer sentiments in advance and proactively manage staffing levels and workflows. Moreover, AI can enhance the community and help center by guiding users to relevant articles. This reduces tickets and solves simple issues, allowing human agents to focus on high-value tasks.

5 Use Cases of Zendesk for Service

Zendesk for Service is a versatile customer service platform that serves:

1. E-commerce Customer Support

E-commerce businesses receive a lot of tickets relating to orders and returns. Zendesk for Service provides centralized ticket management, live chat support with reduced wait times, and self-serve options to resolve common issues independently.

For example, an e-commerce business or a Shopify business owner will use Zendesk for Service to resolve issues related to shipping, orders, and returns. The Answer Bot can respond to common inquiries, reduce agent workload, and provide personalized product recommendations for improved customer satisfaction.

2. SaaS Help Desks

For SaaS companies, customer support is key to driving product adoption and ensuring users can use their product. With Zendesk for Service, SaaS companies can provide onboarding support and respond to technical queries quickly. Easily integration with CRM and other project management tools makes Zendesk for Service a popular choice.

For example, SaaS companies like CARET use Zendesk for Service to streamline workflows and respond to internal and external queries. It has a 91% average CSAT score.

3. Call Center Management

Zendesk for Service enables seamless customer service across multiple touchpoints by embedding voice with other channels. Its interactive voice routing (IVR) ensures efficient directing of calls to appropriate agents based on skills as well as availability.

Agents can effectively manage all the incoming calls and route them in case of unavailability or overflow. They also have the full context of a customer’s issue to resolve it quickly. Its superior reporting and analytics functions allow companies to track key metrics like wait and resolution times and make real-time adjustments for better CX.

4. Multilingual Support for Global Companies

Zendesk’s multilingual support in over 30 languages makes it a great fit for global companies that want to reach out to different audiences in different regions. Zendesk’s routing system comes with language detection, which ensures customers get responses in their preferred languages.

Moreover, the multilingual support extends to the Help Center, ensuring improved levels of customer satisfaction with self-serve options, too. This empowers businesses big and small to extend support that’s personalized and yet consistent across continents.

5. Personalized Customer Service for SMBs

For SMBs, resources are often limited. But the need for personalized service isn’t. Zendesk for Service can group and segment customers based on their needs, tailor support processes, create customizable workflows, and reference past interactions for a truly personalized service.

For example, a local boutique can use Zendesk AI to learn years of customer data and send personalized product recommendations to customers.

5 Benefits of Using Zendesk for Service

The benefits of using Zendesk for Service are outlined below.

1. Personalized Customer Service

Zendesk for Service unifies all customer information in one place with a detailed view of each customer’s history, including previous tickets, inquiries, purchases, and support interactions. This equips agents to have personalized responses, increasing customer satisfaction.

Not only that, the AI-powered bot can answer queries and send personalized follow-up emails even during high-ticket volume periods. There’s also multilingual support that caters to a diverse audience base. Intelligent ticket routing can ensure that the right agent gets the right customer, increasing chances of customer satisfaction and higher CSAT scores.

2. Scalability and Flexibility for Growing Businesses

Zendesk for Service is a cost-effective solution that can scale to increasing support volumes and customer demands. The platform is flexible and customizable, and it can adapt to new workflows, requirements, and communication systems without changing the system altogether.

You can set agent roles and mask confidential information as you grow to protect customer privacy as well. Integration with 1200+ apps like CRMs, project management tools, marketing software, and more makes it a popular choice for growing businesses, as it’ll adapt to your existing systems and streamline workflows.

3. Unified Data and Analytics for Actionable Insights

Zendesk for Service has a real-time dashboard that helps you visualize ticket volumes, wait times, response times, CSAT scores, and more key metrics in a single view. That ensures businesses can gain actionable insights into performance, productivity, and customer satisfaction easily.

For example, when a business can visualize low response times or low CSAT scores, it’s in a better position to refine its customer support strategy. It can take proactive measures to fix response times, optimize operations, increase agent efficiency, and bring about higher customer satisfaction.

4. Improved Efficiency with AI and Automation

Zendesk’s AI increases operational efficiency for businesses by automating repetitive tasks and providing real-time suggestions and insights to agents on call. I liked how it had contextual responses for agents to help with customers who were dissatisfied and helped pull up customer history in a click.

If you receive a lot of product inquiries or common feedback questions, Zendesk’s Answer Bot can give them relevant answers. It’ll help you reduce ticket volume and wait time and allow agents to focus on high-value tasks or DSAT customers.

5. Comprehensive Omnichannel Experience

Integrating multichannel communication channels like social media, email, chat, and voice can help manage all customer inquiries from a single platform. Zendesk empowers agents to switch between channels without losing the context or the customer. That’s one of the things I loved while using the Zendesk service—how it helped me provide a fluid customer experience.

You can deliver high-quality customer service, enabling agents to deliver customer interactions across different channels easily.

Zendesk for Service Pricing

Zendesk for Service has a per agent per month pricing and multiple plans to suit SMBs, agencies, and enterprises.

Integrations of Zendesk for Service

Zendesk’s 1200+ integrations make it a popular customer service platform, as that means you won’t be switching contexts or platforms to have everything in a single, unified space. Good integrations create a seamless flow of information between departments, enhance customer service efficiency, and make sure all data can be visualized in one place.

• CRM Tools: You can integrate Zendesk with popular CMRs like Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics, etc., to capture data related to sales, customize pipelines, add sales stages, maintain control of every sales deal, and more.
• Social Media Platforms: Many businesses use social media like Facebook, X, and Instagram for sales and customer service. Zendesk integrates with these platforms to provide timely, unified responses across multiple touchpoints.
• Payment Gateways: Payment gateways are vital for e-commerce businesses to handle billing queries, manage refunds, and access transaction data seamlessly within Zendesk. Integrations with Stripe, PayPal, and Shopify enable faster, more efficient payment issue resolutions directly within customer tickets.
• Analytics and Reporting Tools: Zendesk’s dashboard tracks key metrics like resolution times and agent performance. For website customer behavior, integrating Google Analytics helps identify common issues. Tableau and Power BI integrations provide detailed visual reports and insights to optimize operations and refine strategies.

Zendesk for Service Support

Zendesk’s support is robust, and they offer many options to ensure you get the help you need:

• Live Chat: Zendesk offers live chat support for technical and platform-related issues, with the Z bot available from the trial stage. Most queries are resolved without needing a live agent. I like its round-the-clock chat, which ensures quick help without service interruptions or email delays.
• Knowledge Base: Zendesk’s Help Center offers a detailed knowledge base with self-serve articles, onboarding guides, and comprehensive documentation. It includes training videos for visual learners and a community for instant query resolution. Role-based guides ensure users focus only on relevant content.
• Community Forums: Zendesk’s community offers 1:1 assistance, product updates, and best practices from global users in over 30 languages. Developers can access APIs, SDKs, and an Apps Framework in a dedicated community. Users can share feedback and connect with the Admin Center through forums.

Zendesk for Service Alternatives

I love how Zendesk for Service offers flexibility in automatic routing to agents. But, cost is always a concern for smaller businesses or startups. So, I have highlighted the alternatives for Zendesk for Service.

Here is a table comparing Zendesk for Service with its competitors, Freshdesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, Zoho Desk, and Help Scout. I’ve picked the starting pricing plan features to compare.

Who Should Use Zendesk for Service?

Zendesk for Service is a perfect platform for those looking to improve customer service, manage interactions across multiple platforms, and streamline processes:

Growing Businesses Needing a Robust Customer Service Platform

Zendesk offers a scalable all-in-one platform that integrates multiple channels like email, chat, and social media to track and resolve customer issues. Its advanced reporting visualizes key metrics, while AI automates workflows, reduces wait times, and guides users to self-service options. Ideal for SaaS, startups, and e-commerce businesses aiming for growth.

SMBs Wanting to Streamline Support Processes

Zendesk simplifies omnichannel customer service with easy setup, boosting SMB team performance from day one. It streamlines ticket management, routing, and prioritization while providing agents with AI-driven recommendations for faster responses. SMBs can also leverage self-serve platforms to reduce ticket volume and enhance customer satisfaction.

Who Should Not Use Zendesk?

Zendesk for Service is not a good fit for micro startups and companies requiring on-premise solutions.

Micro Startups with Minimal Customer Service Needs

Zendesk is not suitable for micro startups due to its advanced features, which might be underutilized given its low ticket volume. The cost can also be steep, making simpler alternatives like a ticketing extension more practical. Investing in a full-fledged solution may not be necessary at this stage.

Companies Requiring On-premise Solutions

If your company requires on-premise solutions and has strong data control requirements, the Zendesk cloud-based platform isn’t a good fit. On-premise solutions also require more customization and control, which Zendesk cannot provide.

Zendesk for Service Verdict

Zendesk for Service is an intuitive and feature-rich customer service platform that combines omnichannel support, automated workflows, and centralized workflow management.

Zendesk for Service receives the Geekflare Amazing Innovation Award for streamlining workflows and increasing customer satisfaction across multiple channels. It’s excellent at automatic ticket routing through IVR, phone trees, and other predefined rules.

What’s next?

Once you streamline your workflow and customer engagement, read our following guides to take your customer service to the next level.

Best Customer Service Software to Improve Your Business Support

Best Helpdesk Software

Best Live Chat Software [Interact with Your Customers]