What Is Zendesk: How to Use Zendesk – Complete Hands-On Guide
Published: July 7, 2022
Last Updated: April 26, 2024
Last Updated: April 26, 2024
Chief Strategy Officer at Alpha Serve
Author: Anna Odrynska
The 21st-century business landscape is highly customer-driven. Businesses that want to survive and thrive must invest in customer relationships as a critical component of their growth strategy. It would mean implementing top-notch customer management strategies, having a great customer support team, and most importantly leveraging feature-rich customer support software such as Zendesk. In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about Zendesk, what is Zendesk, how it works, as well as product variation and integrations available to you.
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What Is Zendesk: Understanding the Basics
Zendesk is a cloud-based customer service solution designed to be an all-in-one tool to help improve how a company communicates with its customers across various communication channels. Zendesk platform empowers customer service and sales teams with all the tools they need to get their job done.
What Does Zendesk Do
What Does Zendesk Do
At its core, Zendesk software is designed to make customer service better for businesses. It does this by bringing all customer interactions across different channels (such as phone, chat, social media, email, etc.) into one.
From the Zendesk platform, customer service teams can easily track all support requests and answer customer queries across multiple communication platforms. It also serves as a unified platform for monitoring customer service agents while providing all the customer relationship management tools they need to make their work more effective. Both budding startups and large enterprises will find Zendesk a valuable tool for improving the quality of customer service they offer to users.
From the Zendesk platform, customer service teams can easily track all support requests and answer customer queries across multiple communication platforms. It also serves as a unified platform for monitoring customer service agents while providing all the customer relationship management tools they need to make their work more effective. Both budding startups and large enterprises will find Zendesk a valuable tool for improving the quality of customer service they offer to users.
What Is Zendesk Used For
What Is Zendesk Used For
Zendesk is a complete tool for managing sales and customer service for businesses. On the customer service front, Zendesk helps customer service teams to provide sophisticated, and seamless support across multiple channels. It also provides sales teams with all the tools needed to win prospects over. Zendesk also helps to make customer service and sales teams better by simplifying support and making information sharing a lot easier for them.
Zendesk Products Overview
To fully understand how Zendesk works, let’s look into products and their features separately. Zendesk provides a wide range of tools to help companies keep up with their customer support demands. The platform offers a robust suite of products that makes it easier for customers to connect with businesses while also helping internal teams to manage interactions seamlessly and keep everything in sync all in one powerful package. Some of the core Zendesk features offered include:
Zendesk Support
Zendesk Support
Zendesk Support is designed to help customer service tools track, prioritize and resolve customer service issues through an efficient ticketing system. Basically, it acts like a shared inbox to collect all the questions and concerns from customers into one place regardless of the communication channel they’re connecting through. This way you can track all customer conversations and resolve all their concerns quickly without missing any.
Zendesk Help Center
Zendesk Help Center
The Zendesk Help Center helps businesses to set up a knowledge base that improves self-service for customer service agents. With the Zendesk knowledge base, you can create, organize and seamlessly share support content that is useful to both, internal teams and customers. It can be anything from simple FAQs to robust Wikis with valuable self-service information.
Zendesk Chat
Zendesk Chat
With the Zendesk Live Chat feature businesses can assist their customers by incorporating a live chat function into their website or mobile application. With this tool, customers can interact with a Zendesk chatbot for help or talk to a support agent to assist with urgent issues. Internally, this tool helps agents to attend to multiple customers at the same time with automated ticket opening and closing as issues are resolved.
Zendesk Talk
Zendesk Talk
This is Zendesk’s integrated call center software. Zendesk Talk empowers businesses to provide product support for customers over the phone as part of the enhanced omnichannel support they offer to customers.
Zendesk Sell
Zendesk Sell
The Zendesk Sell feature is designed to help improve the productivity of sales teams. The platform serves as a centralized Customer Relationship Management tool with features for enhancing sales processes, improving pipeline visibility, and boosting the overall productivity of your sales team.
Zendesk Sunshine
Zendesk Sunshine
With the Zendesk Sunshine tool, businesses can connect their data from external platforms to Zendesk and customize it accordingly. This assists with monitoring and assessment of performance.
Zendesk Pricing
Zendesk offers various pricing plans for companies based on their size, specific business needs and budget. This makes it a suitable option for both startups and enterprises.
Zendesk for Foundational Support Plans
Zendesk for Foundational Support Plans
● Support Team - $19 per agent/month billed annually
● Support Profesional - $49 per agent/month billed annually
● Support Enterprise - $99 per agent/month billed annually
● Support Profesional - $49 per agent/month billed annually
● Support Enterprise - $99 per agent/month billed annually
Zendesk for Suite Pricing
Zendesk for Suite Pricing
● Suite Team- $49 per agent/month billed annually
● Suite Growth - $79 per agent/month billed annually
● Suite Professional- $99 per agent/month billed annually
● Suite Enterprise- $150 per agent/month billed annually
● Suite Growth - $79 per agent/month billed annually
● Suite Professional- $99 per agent/month billed annually
● Suite Enterprise- $150 per agent/month billed annually
Zendesk for Sales Pricing
Zendesk for Sales Pricing
● Zendesk Sell Team-$19 per user/month billed annually
● Zendesk Sell Growth-$49 per user/month billed annually
● Zendesk Sell Professional-$99 per user/month billed annually
● Zendesk Sell Growth-$49 per user/month billed annually
● Zendesk Sell Professional-$99 per user/month billed annually
As there is no Free Plan currently available, you can still use a 30-day Free Trial to test the product with access to all Plus plan features for that period.
Zendesk Integrations
Zendesk Integrations
To further boost the usability of the Zendesk platform, it integrates seamlessly with a broad range of software and tools. These integrations are available as a built-in or on the Zendesk Marketplace where you can find various third-party tools and connectors. Some of the most popular integrations offered on this platform include:
Zendesk Salesforce Integration
Zendesk Salesforce Integration
Salesforce is a cloud-based software focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, analytics and more. Zendesk for Salesforce integration is one of the first in-built integrations on the Zendesk platform. With this integration, users can connect their Salesforce accounts to their Zendesk, allowing them to view Zendesk tickets in Salesforce. This integration will also make it possible to create and edit Zendesk tickets within Salesforce while syncing the organization's data across these platforms.
Zendesk Salesforce integration is available only to Salesforce users on Performance, Enterprise, Unlimited, Developer, and other plans with Salesforce API rights. You have to be an administrator on both platforms to set up these integrations. You can learn more about how to set up the Zendesk Salesforce integration here.
Zendesk Salesforce integration is available only to Salesforce users on Performance, Enterprise, Unlimited, Developer, and other plans with Salesforce API rights. You have to be an administrator on both platforms to set up these integrations. You can learn more about how to set up the Zendesk Salesforce integration here.
Zendesk Slack Integration
Zendesk Slack Integration
Slack is one of the most popular business communication platforms that help to streamline team collaboration and manage workflows. By integrating Slack with the Zendesk Support platform, businesses can better manage all their customer support interactions or communications from within Slack.
This improves the overall efficiency of your customer service team. With this integration, teams will now be able to use message actions in Slack to create tickets and add comments to tickets. This integration converts a team’s Slack channel into an active tool for delivering an improved customer service experience to users while also making it easier for teams to find and manage important customer issues. Learn more about installing the Zendesk Slack Integration app here.
This improves the overall efficiency of your customer service team. With this integration, teams will now be able to use message actions in Slack to create tickets and add comments to tickets. This integration converts a team’s Slack channel into an active tool for delivering an improved customer service experience to users while also making it easier for teams to find and manage important customer issues. Learn more about installing the Zendesk Slack Integration app here.
Zendesk Jira Integration
Zendesk Jira Integration
Atlassian’s Jira is an IT service management, bug, and issue tracking tool. By integrating this platform with Zendesk, users will be able to empower their project teams and coordinate development efforts more seamlessly.
This integration makes it easier to connect customer support tickets created in Zendesk with Jira issues. This ensures that critical info is always available to the engineering team and that they’re not missing anything or leaving any bugs behind. This Zendesk integration provides a holistic view for support teams and helps them collaborate better to solve issues. The steps for installing Jira integration with Zendesk are highlighted here.
This integration makes it easier to connect customer support tickets created in Zendesk with Jira issues. This ensures that critical info is always available to the engineering team and that they’re not missing anything or leaving any bugs behind. This Zendesk integration provides a holistic view for support teams and helps them collaborate better to solve issues. The steps for installing Jira integration with Zendesk are highlighted here.
Zendesk Hubspot Integration
Zendesk Hubspot Integration
Hubspot is a Customer Relationship Management platform that serves as an integrated tool for managing marketing, sales, and customer service for enterprises. This inbound marketing tool helps companies manage the process of attracting prospects, converting leads, and closing sales.
By linking Hubspot and Zendesk, users will now be able to see customer information generated from Zendesk issues and apply them easily to their activities on HubSpot. How to set up integration read here.
This integration will better equip marketing teams to better pivot toward customers by leveraging information and tags from Zendesk tickets. This way, they get to deliver a more targeted experience to customers.
By linking Hubspot and Zendesk, users will now be able to see customer information generated from Zendesk issues and apply them easily to their activities on HubSpot. How to set up integration read here.
This integration will better equip marketing teams to better pivot toward customers by leveraging information and tags from Zendesk tickets. This way, they get to deliver a more targeted experience to customers.
Zendesk Power BI/Tableau Integration
Zendesk Power BI/Tableau Integration
Power BI and Tableau are leading players in the business intelligence software market, enabling deep data analysis with a comprehensive set of data visualization tools. Both tools enable you to work with a large amount of data and create and customize the dashboards according to your requirements.
By exporting Zendesk data to Power BI or Tableau users will be able to analyze their essential Zendesk data and make smarter decisions with fast, flexible, easy analytics.
To perform this integration you can use Zendesk connectors by Alpha Serve. There are Enterprise-grade apps that allow the export of all Zendesk Support data as well as Zendesk Sell data to your BI tool. Both connectors are available on the Zendesk Marketplace, or you can check them directly from the links below:
By exporting Zendesk data to Power BI or Tableau users will be able to analyze their essential Zendesk data and make smarter decisions with fast, flexible, easy analytics.
To perform this integration you can use Zendesk connectors by Alpha Serve. There are Enterprise-grade apps that allow the export of all Zendesk Support data as well as Zendesk Sell data to your BI tool. Both connectors are available on the Zendesk Marketplace, or you can check them directly from the links below:
Zendesk Alternatives
The following are some of the platforms you can consider as an alternative to Zendesk.
● Help Scout
● Zoho Desk
● ServiceNow
● Freshdesk
● Gorgias
● HubSpot Service Hub
● Customer
● Front
● Help Scout
● Zoho Desk
● ServiceNow
● Freshdesk
● Gorgias
● HubSpot Service Hub
● Customer
● Front
● HappyFox
Final Words
Zendesk is the go-to tool for businesses that want to supercharge their customer support experience. It provides an easy-to-use and centralized platform to meet your customers across the various platforms they use. On top of that, the integration possibilities of this platform make it even more robust for sales and customer service.
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