Zendesk Vs. Jira: Putting the Best Help Desk Tools Under Scanner

With a number of powerful help desk applications available, it often becomes difficult for the business to choose the most suitable tool. Check out this review of Zendesk Vs. Jira to know which one is right for your organization.

For organizations of all industries, instant issue resolution and exceptional customer service is the key to customer satisfaction. This gives rise to the need for an advanced help desk application to streamline the support processes.

While Zendesk and Jira are both popular names in the service management domain, you must carefully go through the head-to-head comparison between these tools before choosing the right one.

What Is Zendesk?

Using the Zendesk customer service software, companies can ensure efficient and professional customer support to your customers. In this solution, the size of your customer base does not matter. Zendesk makes sure that customers using every touchpoint get a unique experience.

It functions both as a central tool and database for customer interaction management. Using the tool, you can manage communications across channels, including email, chat, phone calls, and social media. Zendesk assists in delivering a personalized experience to all customers with features like a knowledge base, ticketing software, and automation.

It has an intuitive user interface that agents, supervisors, and managers can readily track, prioritize, and respond to customer inquiries. As a result, you can offer a timely resolution to the issues and queries of your customers. 

Role of Zendesk in Help Desk Management 

You can rely on Zendesk to manage your complete customer service and build long-lasting relationships with your customers. It eliminates the need for configuring customer tools for your business and, thus, saves you valuable time. Just log in to the CRM from your browser, and you are good to go with the customer service process. 

Leveraging the latest customer service AI model, organizations can significantly reduce their customer service operations expenses. Especially SMEs and startup businesses with a tight budget for customer experience will get benefitted from this feature.

The Working of Zendesk

Zendesk does not offer any free plan. However, you can use this platform for free for 14 days to check its features and functionalities. This process of trial sign-up might seem somewhat difficult. But, you would eventually have access to this help desk software.

After entering the interface, you will see the Get started tab. Using it, you will find out about the suite in detail through an interactive demo. From this section, you can add agents to your support team. 

The Dashboard contains the overview of ticket status and agent productivity. Its left panel has direct links to access sections like Views, Customers, Organizations, Reporting, and Admin. From the Admin Center, you can add different third-party apps like chats, telephone, and social media to start getting customer queries. 

What Is Jira Service Management? 

Jira Service Management (JSM) is a help desk software that enables your customer support team to track, manage, and resolve queries of customers. It lets you manage the customer requests coming from different channels like emails, embeddable widgets, and a customizable help center.

The aim of this software is to bring IT, development, operations, and business teams to work in collaboration and at speed. Hence, it is quite easy to categorize service requests, organize the problems, and prioritize these requests from a single place. 

It also helps you to be on track with your goals. Being built on the Jira platform, it uses terms and concepts that are common for different Jira products. 

Role of Jira in Help Desk Management

Jira Service management software enables customer agents to provide quick answers to user queries. Agents can organize, prioritize, and resolve requests that come through various communication channels like email, chat, and phone calls. 

It does not need to install or set up heavy software. Just choose the template of your choice and get started with the solution packed with features like approval workflows, automation, and ticket flow. 

JSM also helps to bring multiple teams into one platform. Thus, they can collaborate to come up with an instant resolution to the issues faced by the users. Third-party integration, knowledge base, SLAs, and custom reports also help companies of all sizes make the most of their customer support tool.

The Working of Jira Service Management

Starting with Jira Service Management is easy. Since it offers a free account that can be used by three agents, you can create your account using your Gmail account. After you choose to sign in using Gmail, it will ask you to enter a name for your Atlassian site.

Enter the name you like if it is not taken yet, and your site will be ready in one or two minutes. Click on Create Project button and choose a suitable template for it. Then, the dashboard will open for customer service.

From here, you can access the company knowledge base and generate reports of a variety of metrics. It also allows you to add new members to your team, quickly search for any customer and have instant access to channel-wise customer queries.

Zendesk Vs. Jira: The Benefits

Business Benefits of Zendesk 

• Being a cloud-based solution, it does not require any software installation on your computer. 
• Zendesk offers different applications for customer service, sales, and upselling.
• It is quite easy to learn but has some learning curve.
• Its customer service AI feature allows you to serve more customers with fewer agents.
• Zendesk offers multiple channels for customer communication for improved engagement.

Business Benefits of Jira Service Management

• JSM allows non-technical organizations to build, customize and deploy software for awesome customer experiences. 
• Its workflow can be customized using a no-code structure.
• It supports collaboration between multiple teams to deliver standard and scalable service.
• The software helps you track agent performance through various productivity metrics.
• Teams can go live with their customer support quickly.
• Seamless integration support for other Atlassian tools can be utilized.
• It can generate reports on turnover rates, resolution time, and customer satisfaction rates.
• Jira Service Management has multiple transparent pricing tiers that can be scaled up as your business grows.

Zendesk Vs. Jira: A Comparison Table 

Now is the time to find out how these two prominent help desk applications perform when you compare them face-to-face using some essential features.

Zendesk Vs. Jira: Use Cases 

Business Use Cases of Zendesk

#1. Financial Services

Using Zendesk, financial services can invest in building long-term relationships with their customers. Your agents will get quick access to the necessary customer information, and the software also stores the customer data with maximum security.

#2. Healthcare

Zendesk can also offer secure and personalized customer service to payers, providers, and vendors across the healthcare system. It provides a 360-degree view of every patient by collecting information using EHRs, medical devices, appointment histories, and medical partners. 

#3. Manufacturing

Manufacturing companies use Zendesk to leverage features like automated workflow, collaboration, and system integration. Its customized workspace empowers the agents, while AI-powered automation and knowledge base facilitates ticket deflection.

#4. SaaS

Software and cloud service providers can offer frictionless customer experience and increase brand loyalty with this help desk tool. Its AI-powered bots can answer common queries. It sends the tickets to the subject matter experts through intent detection. 

#5. Education

Educational institutions worldwide choose Zendesk to offer flexible support solutions to their students, parents, and faculty. It lets them communicate using email, chat, phone, and social media. Moreover, it supports a self-service knowledge base to keep the information available 24/7.

#6. Telecommunication

Using Zendesk Guide and Answer Bot, telecom companies can scale up support by investing more time to resolve complex issues. The agents can use Zendesk Sunshine to view customer data, like their preferred products and content.

Business Use Cases of Jira Service Management

#1. Financial Services

Banks, insurance companies, brokerage firms, and companies that offer financial services use Jira Service Management for scalable customer support. It reduces the chance of data breaches and ensures compliance with regulations. Thus companies can offer elevated experiences to their customers.

#2. eCommerce

JSM is also used by eCommerce companies for providing quick customer services. It enables agents to access real-time data on inventory, sales, and customer history for quick communication.

#3. Manufacturing

Jira helps to manufacture companies to efficiently manage product supply. Its customer-facing portal streamlines work across the teams by removing silos. The software also lets the employees manage inventories for products and assets. 

#4. Telecommunication

Telecom companies use Jira to set up a highly secured service desk. This software allows them to tailor the workspace as per their needs using features like automation rules, custom workflows, SLAs, and risk management plans.

#5. IT Support

This solution is custom-built for ITSM; hence teams working with IT support, operations, and IT businesses can offer the best experiences to the customers and employees using it. The software allows you to link issues across the platform so the agents can instantly respond to requests.

#6. Enterprises

Using Jira Service Management, different teams or departments of an enterprise can build their own service portal for request management. They can also create custom workflows to ensure smooth collaboration and alignment across the enterprise.

Author’s Note

Both Zendesk and Jira Service Management are packed with unique and useful features that companies of all sizes and industries can utilize. However, when it comes to choosing any one of these for your organization, you need to consider your team structure, business-specific requirements, and existing applications.

For example, if your company needs robust ticketing software and self-service facilities, you should go for Zendesk over Jira. On the other hand, If you are looking for a solution with an easy automation process and ITIL-focused features, Jira is the tool you should go for without any hesitation.

Moreover, If you already use any Atlassian products like Trello, Confluence, or Bitbucket, choosing Jira will ensure that the help desk software integrates effortlessly with that product.

Another factor to consider before choosing the right help desk tool is its pricing. Jira offers a free plan for teams with three agents, while Zendesk has no free subscription plan. Jira offers three paid subscription plans, starting at $21/month for one agent. 

Contrarily, Zendesk offers separate pricing plans for service and sales. If you want to subscribe to both, it will cost you a minimum of $68/agent/month, which is multiple times costlier than the minimum Jira pricing model. If you are a small business or have budget constrain, Jira should be your best bet. 

Now, you can consider the crucial factors mentioned here and choose the right software for your customer support team. If you want to check out other help desk applications, you can read our review of Zoho Desk, Freshdesk, and Hesk.