As your business is determined to deliver exceptional customer service choosing the right software becomes paramount. This article will help you to choose the best one among Zoho Desk or Zendesk.
Customer service software plays an indispensable role in facilitating good customer support, service, and experience. The fact is clear from this Grand View Research article that forecasts an $86.3 billion market revenue in the customer service and relationship management software business by 2030.
Undoubtedly, Zoho Desk and Zen Desk will play a critical role in helping the industry achieve this phenomenal growth in revenue figures. Because the same research also suggests that Zoho Desk is expected to account for 3.8% of the global CRM software market share by 2030. On the other hand, Zendesk Desk is expected to account for 2.9% of the global CRM software market share by 2030.
If you do not have ample time to research these tools, no problem! I am doing it in this ultimate Zendesk vs. Zoho Desk article. Read it until the end and decide smartly!
What Is Zoho Desk?
Zoho Desk is a sensational customer experience tool to make customers happy, empower agents, and help your business grow. Businesses of all sizes and niches have been using Zoho Desk for decades to provide personalized, accurate, empathetic, and professional customer service.
The tool helps you sync all customer service channels to one centralized software. These customer service channels include Telephony, Email, Multi-department, Instant Messaging, Live Chat, Social Media, Multi-brand Help Center, and Omnichannel.
A considerable part of the Zoho Desk cloud CRM solution is the Zia AI. You can run a human-less yet personalized customer service channel by configuring Zia AI with the self-service portal of Zoho Desk. Zia AI’s capabilities are KB Bot, Auto-tag tickets, Sentiment Analysis, Zia Notifications, Zia Dashboard, and Reply Assistant.
Also read: Zoho Desk: The One-Stop Solution to Your Customer Support Woes
Zoho Desk’s Role as a Customer Service Software
If you think customer service is tough, you must try Zoho Desk now. It makes customer service easier, more efficient, affordable, and fun. Its modern user interface gives you a complete view of the customer service operations for your brands on one screen. You get to review incoming contacts, outgoing contacts, a live gauge for incoming and outgoing operations, pending tickets, escalated cases, online agents, offline agents, and so on.
When you start getting a hold of the whole customer service thing, you automatically see that your customers are happier. Such growth in customer happiness is powered by a collection of Zoho Desk tools like Omnichannel, Self-Service, Sentiment Analysis, and Service Level Agreements.
Not to mention, your agents and managers can also help customers, open tickets, and resolve tickets on the Zoho Desk mobile app for iOS and Android devices. Therefore, Zoho Desk is here to simplify the customer service process so you can focus on the core business.
What Is Zendesk?
Zendesk is a customer service software that enables you to provide efficient and effective customer support to your customers. It serves as a central tool and database for managing customer interactions across various channels. These channels include email, phone, chat, and social media.
Its user interface is intuitive, so customer service associates, supervisors, and managers can seamlessly track, prioritize, and respond to customer inquiries. Thus, it becomes easier for you to ensure a timely resolution to customers’ issues.
With its ticketing software module, knowledge base, and automation capabilities, Zendesk empowers your teams to deliver a personalized experience. Whether your customer base is 100 individuals or 100 million, each touchpoint contact becomes and unique experience for your users.
Zendesk’s Role as a Customer Service Software
Zendesk is your complete customer service platform to build long-lasting relationships with your business clients, employees, or customers. First, it helps you increase the productivity of your customer service agents and back-end staff by 20%. You do not need to invest valuable time in configuring the software for your business. Every piece of your customer service process starts flowing as soon as you unbox the product—logging into the CRM using your web browser.
Zendesk also lets you utilize a state-of-the-art customer service AI model so you can reduce the cost of your customer service operations. Zendesk AI is highly recommended for small, medium, and startup businesses that must carefully allocate a budget for customer experience.
Other critical roles that Zendesk plays in facilitating customer service are:
- Personalized conversations for all customers
- Guess the customers’ requests using AI
- Adapt your customer service operations as the industry evolves
- Make data-supported decisions
- Increases Return on Investment (ROI) up to 286% when investing in it for a period of three years
How Do Businesses Use Zendesk?
Businesses utilize Zendesk to provide customer service and analyze the performance of their operations to improvise. For example:
- Tracking and managing customer interactions
- Providing a self-service support page for DYI customers
- Automating customer support tasks
- Measuring customer satisfaction
- Upsell products, but they need to buy Zendesk Sell separately
The Working of Zendesk
You should be able to get a free trial for 14 days from Zendesk. However, the trial sign-up process is a bit complicated. I faced failed sign-ups many times while getting emails that the sign-up was successful. However, you will be able to access the Zendesk suite eventually.
You should see a Get Started tab. It will take you through an interactive demo of the suite. Here, you can also add agents to your team. The Dashboard is the overview of all tickets and agent productivity. At the left panel, you have Views, Customers, Organizations, Reporting, and Admin.
There is an Admin Center from which you need to add chats, telephone, social media, etc., via third-party apps to start getting customer calls and chats.
How Do Businesses Use Zoho Desk?
Any business needing customer service using Zoho Desk in various ways. For example:
- Educational institutes can set up self-service portals and FAQs regarding admissions, academics, faculty, exams, etc.
- eCommerce platforms mainly use this tool to help customers with the buying and billing process.
- Telecom businesses have obligations to run customer service. So, they use Zoho Desk for affordability and productivity.
- SaaS customer support, sales, and SaaS marketing strategies also heavily use Zoho Desk for success.
The Working of Zoho Desk
You can get started with Zoho Desk by signing up for a free and quick trial support portal from the Sign Up For Free form. The tool will walk you through creating a support portal, inviting agents, migrating tickets from the old tools, etc.
Once you are inside the tool, you see the Tickets tab. As soon as you publish the Zoho Desk portal you created, you should start getting tickets. If your business gets customer chat or phone requests from multiple channels, click IM on the top and activate it.
From All Channels on the left, you can link WhatsApp, Line, Telegram, etc. The Zoho Portal will keep forwarding live chats to the Chat section. You need to activate this as well. To sync inbound and outbound telephony for customer support, link your phone service provider from Settings > Phone.
Zendesk Vs. Zoho Desk: Benefits
The Benefits of Using Zendesk
- It offers separate software for customer service, sales, and upselling.
- Zendesk is a cloud-based app, so there is no need to install any software.
- Zendesk comes with a customer service AI so you can serve more customers with fewer agents.
- Research reports have found that you start getting payback by using Zendesk for three years or more.
- Zendesk is comparatively easy to learn, but still, there is some learning curve when compared with Zoho Desk.
The Benefits of Using Zoho Desk
- You get your customer service and upselling set up in one subscription. So it saves on the overhead cost of setting up a customer service center.
- Its Zia AI is more talented and efficient than the Zendesk AI. Zia can sync up with the Zoho Desk Self-Service portal to handle customer queries automatically.
- For high-volume ticket management operations, you can automate ticket receiving to assignment and final closing using workflow automation.
- Virtually, it has no learning curve. Even a fresh graduate who knows nothing about customer service can learn the tool quickly.
- It has a mobile app so you can interact with the customers even when traveling.
Zendesk Vs. Zoho Desk: Comparison
Find below a tabular comparison between Zendesk and Zoho from the features and functionalities point of view:
| Features | Zendesk | Zoho Desk |
| User interface | Slightly complex | Organized |
| Add-ons | Most customer services functions are built into the tool | No add-ons needed |
| Third-party app requirements | It relies heavily on third-party app integrations for standard services | Simply subscription experience with fewer contracts |
| Subscription contracts | Need to sign many contracts | Use Zendesk API or buy third-party apps from the Zendesk marketplace |
| Migration services for tickets | Email and social media are built-in; for telephony, live chat, WhatsApp, etc., you need to buy third-party apps | Free migration services by Zoho |
| Cost difference | Estimated $2475 for 25 agents | Approx $1000 for 25 agents; Zoho Desk is more affordable |
| Omnichannel support | Email, social media, WhatsApp, live chat, telephony, Telegram, WeChat, etc., are built into the tool. | Email, social media, WhatsApp, live chat, telephony, Telegram, WeChat, etc., are built into the tool |
| Quick ticket view | Not available | Available |
| Split and Clone tickets | Via third-party integrations | Built-in support |
| Multilingual knowledgebase | Buy add-ons | Included with subscription |
| Community forums | Buy add-ons | Included with subscription |
| Voice and skill builder via AI | Not available | Supported by Zia AI |
| Anomaly notifications | Not available | Built-in support |
| Round-Robin ticket assignment by load balancing | Built-in support | Built-in support |
| Mobile app for managers | Available on App Store and Google Play for free | Available on App Store and Google Play for free |
Use Cases of Zendesk
- Businesses use Zendesk to receive, organize, tag, and assign tickets to agents in ticket management operations.
- You can also collect and resolve tickets from multiple contact points like emails, phone calls, live chat, and social media.
- Your company can create a self-service portal for customers powered by Zendesk AI and knowledgebase solutions.
- You can also use the Zendesk knowledgebase solution for internal training and practice purposes.
Use Cases of Zoho Desk
- It is the primary help desk management tool for any business in any industry. You can use it in the front-desk reception for the hospitality industry, internal customer support in enterprise businesses, standard customer service for telecom, and many more.
- If your business receives thousands of tickets from external customers and employees, Zoho Desk can help you sort those in minutes. You can create workflow automation in this software to tag and assign tickets to the right resource.
- Businesses reduce support requests by setting up self-service portals and knowledgebase using Zoho Desk.
- The Zia AI can help you service customers without recruiting any agent for simple to moderate requests. When things get a bit complicated and manual review is necessary, Zia AI can transfer the customer to a human agent.
- You can create performance reports for the customer service operation, its managers, and individual agents using its reporting and analytics module. Reports can include customer feedback, resolution time, average handling time, ticket volumes, etc.
Zendesk Vs. Zoho Desk: The Verdict
Zoho Desk should be your first choice for a complete customer service and sales solution. You can easily integrate Zoho Desk with other Zoho products like Zoho CRM for upselling. This tool comes with all the similar features of Zendesk. But you get additional benefits from Zoho Desk, and these are:
- Zoho Desk Zia AI has many features when compared with Zendesk AI
- The Zoho Desk UI is more minimalistic and clean than Zendesk
- It takes a few minutes to set up and start using Zoho Desk compared to Zendesk
Furthermore, pricing is critical in this Zendesk vs. Zoho Desk comparison. For Zendesk, you need to pay US$ 49 and US$ 19 separately for a one-year subscription for five agents to access Zendesk Service and Sell.
Contrarily, for Zoho Desk, you only pay $14 per user per year and scale up when you need more agent slots. Zoho Desk also has other pricing plans that you must check out before buying.
Author’s Note
I have worked in leading customer service agencies and have hands-on experience with both the Zoho Desk and Zendesk software. From an agent point of view, Zoho Desk is more suitable for entry-level agents than Zendesk. Zoho Desk is also easy to use for team leads, back-end agents, and operations managers.
Moreover, if your business is already using these popular Zoho products like Zoho Assist and Zoho Payroll, you must try Zoho Desk too.