What is Zendesk and what is its purpose?

Posted by
Natalia Zhontsa

February 5, 2020

If you’re not a complete novice in the help desk industry, most likely that you’ve already heard about Zendesk. However, managers, who only thought about Help centers for their businesses may ask: "What is Zendesk?"

It seems like Zendesk has been on the market since the time help desks were first invented. The other reason for its being such a huge figure is that it has a lot to offer, literally. There are a bunch of all kinds of applications you can choose from. So, it makes sense that people wonder what Zendesk is when there's so much rush around it. Well, that’s precisely why we’re here - to answer the question: "What does Zendesk do?"

What is Zendesk? About the company

Zendesk is a company that provides all kinds of software for customer support services that make it easier for companies to communicate and help clients. It was founded in 2007 in Copenhagen, Denmark, and was first run in a small loft. For now, it is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and it helps about 160,000 businesses to connect to their customers on different platforms and provide better service and experience. Over 5,400 employees work for Zendesk in more than 160 countries.

Among Zendesk’s clients, you can recognize such names as Airbnb, Bolt, L’oreal, Squarespace, Fossil, or Vimeo. Yes, all these loyal Zendesk customers have already improved their customer service with its high-quality products.

A fun fact: Zendesk takes its name after the word “Zen” - a state of total togetherness of the body and mind. Zen is one of the Buddhist schools, so the company’s first logo was presented as Buddha with a headset similar to the one that all customer support agents wear.

But as with the company’s growth, they changed the logo to a much more simple one. The redesign has a lot to do with basic shapes; however, each of them represents a distinct “personality” of each Zendesk Product. The interface of this platform is intuitive, and its functionality suits any business request and style.

General information

Let’s also take a look at some general information on some technical aspects of Zendesk:

What is Zendesk Top Feature?

Below are some top features that Zendesk offers for your business solutions:

Knowledge Base

Zendesk knowledge base helps share the support with the agents, customers, and the public. This is one of the numerous Zendesk features that allows you to create and organize your content to attract visitors. You can create FAQ sections or a bunch of different interlinked articles to guide your customers about the products and services you offer. How will it help you boost customer service? The key aspect is that the more your Knowledge Base is get updated, the more time agents get on comprehensive requests. Customers can search for the most common issue solutions in the Knowledge Base by themselves. On the other hand, agents speed up their work by using articles to answer questions.

An example of a Knowledge Base created with Zendesk

Ticketing System

Zendesk gathers all the customer queries and shows them on one screen in one place. You can manage and respond to customer questions easily and quickly. When all the queries from chat, email, and social media are heading to you in a single location, it will help you manage and solve problems straightforwardly. In Zendesk Support, all the tickets (requests) are located and ordered on one page called Views. There are a lot of customizable filters you can use to find necessary requests and sort out them by channel (email, What’s App, message, chat, etc.), ticket status (new, opened, pending, solved, closed, etc.), and other elements. Convenient, right?

Ticketing system

Automation

You can automate mundane tasks to avoid human errors and increase process speed. It helps you manage your workflow and improves customer satisfaction and performance. For example, it is possible to set up notifications for agents to inform them when the ticket is unresolved and the ticket requester (simply, your customer) is waiting for a response. You also can use automation to send automatic messages after the ticket gets closed to find out the quality of customer support work and ask for feedback. So, this option allows for setting up the time when the message will be sent and what information it will contain. This feature can become a good supplement for companies that implement customer service automation operations.

Automations page

Multi-Brand

It supports 300 brands, service tiers, products, or regions. It helps manage your work easily by centralizing data and activity into a single account. For example, you can create different brands in one Zendesk Support account and send messages from each of them. If you use email to respond to your customer, they will see the name and email address of the brand you selected inside the ticket area.

Brands Page

Guided Mode

Help agents in focusing and increasing the response time by automatically queuing tickets for them.

Zendesk Guided Mode

Pre-defining Ticket Actions

You can pre-define the responses to standard questions. For this, Zendesk has the Macros option. Agents use it to create responses in advance that can include not only the main text on the email/message but also the subject, brand, default/custom fields, and ticket status.

Default (Standard) Fields contain general ticket information, like the responsible agent, ticket requester, priority, tags, etc.

Custom fields in Zendesk allow you to set up additional ticket details. For example, they could be some notes, customer status, tracking number, product details, and so on.

Ticket Actions

The Zendesk Products

Zendesk offers a variety of products, all targeted at helping businesses improve their overall customer experience.

Support

Helps to organize incoming customer requests from multiple channels in one place. This way, customer support representatives feel more confident in their work as they do not need to monitor the company's communication channels to help customers. Zendesk Support has an advanced ticketing system developed to manage all the requests. It provides a bunch of customization options for agents to make the interaction with the platform smooth and convenient.

Support's home page

The most appealing of this platform is that a lot of companies all around the world develop integrations exactly for Zendesk Support. We are also not an exception! With Proactiva Campaigns, Email Tracking, and GDPR Compliance for Zendesk Support, you can send mass email campaigns, track if customers read your emails, and delete or anonymize users' data and tickets to comply with GDPR.

Guide

This part of the software “guides” businesses in the right direction through a knowledge base of all customer complaints, frequently asked questions, their resolutions, and more in one place. Businesses can create better-targeted marketing campaigns by obtaining data from their knowledge base.

If you're already using Zendesk Guide, we recommend you consider customizing your Zendesk help center. Just in case, our GrowthDot offers free Zendesk themes installation, so make sure to check it out!

Zendesk Guide

If you have already been using Zendesk Guide, we would like to offer you a substantial update on the Help Center you have. Zendesk provides only one theme for Guide that is not actually can fit all businesses, especially if you want to outstand and take care of the brand perception. The GrowthDot team developed awesome Zendesk Themes that have different sets of functions, and all of them are fully customizable. Check them out!

Chat

This service is as simple as it sounds. Zendesk Chat provides live chat support to customers who visit your website and need help. So, greet your customers as soon as they land on your website and assist them with their queries in real-time communication.

Zendesk Chat

Talk

Sometimes, messaging and emailing are insufficient to understand the customer’s request. Therefore, Zendesk Talk is specifically for this case. It works best for call centers as customer support can view customer interactions from all the channels and converse with customers relying on that information.

Zendesk Talk

Sell

Zendesk Sell is the CRM side of the software that gives sales teams a deeper insight into the sales pipeline to improve the overall workflow, close deals, and boost productivity. This software has a lot of functions to manage sales; however, it is more considered a separate platform.

Zendesk Sell

If you are looking for a similar tool for a lower price, try the CRM and Deals app for Zendesk Support. This application assists agents in managing sales pipelines and deals. Besides, you can message customers right from the application and make necessary notes or set up reminders. There are a lot of customization features that help you convert leads and prospects into active customers on a lifetime basis. If you have any doubts, just install a 7-day free trial and test it to the max.

One more benefit for you. The application, as well as our other apps, are free to use on Zendesk Sandbox accounts.

Explore

Data is the new fuel, and Explore is there to allow businesses to power their engines with it. Moreover, businesses can better serve their customers with detailed, actionable, and visual reports.

Zendesk Explore

Gather

Gather is a forum for businesses where they can let customers interact and provide feedback about company products and services. It is a great way to engage with customers and give them a way to say their minds about your business.

Zendesk Gather

Connect

Connect helps businesses design their outbound marketing campaigns. It can help your business design, analyze, test, execute, and measure the performance of your marketing campaigns. It supports all communication formats with your customers, i.e., chat, phone, email, SMS, web, etc.

Zendesk Connect

Other customer service software

Want to extend your Zendesk’s capabilities using Zendesk apps? Zendesk offers applications for both its own and its partners, so you can choose and install the most appropriate for you. Go to the Zendesk marketplace, read the client's reviews, and find the best one.

What is Zendesk Pricing?

Zendesk can help your business in improving with the effective tools that it offers. As there are various tools, it comes in different Zendesk pricing plans depending on the functions that your business may require. You should choose which plan suits your business better depending on your budget and your needed features. Here are the plans that Zendesk offers with features and pricing so that you can make your decision easier.

Migrate to Zendesk

If you decide to migrate from any other help desk platform to Zendesk, we want to help make this process for you as easy as possible. Manual data migration is a time and effort-consuming process that requires, in most cases, coding skills. HDM is a product that minimizes the risks of missing the imported data, do the migration quickly, and you are free from coding! The Help Desk Migration can move not only tickets, customer information, and organizations (companies/groups) but also default and custom fields and Knowledge Base materials. Contact the HDM team for more information and try the demo migration for free.

Conclusion

Zendesk is the best tool for customer support. It helps you in connecting with your customers through one centralized platform and assists them with their needs. The helpdesk helps your customer support team in:

• Creating support tutorials and materials
• Tracking document problems and bugs
• Responding to customers with detailed answers
• Closing tickets faster

So, whether you are an established enterprise or a growing startup, you can rely on this complete suite of software to offer top-level customer support and beat your competitors. By the way, GrowthDot’s developers create great Zendesk Apps to make the most out of your Zendesk. Also, try our Zendesk themes and services.

Craft email automation in Zendesk!
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