What is Zendesk and what is its purpose?

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 was 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’s 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 service. It was created in 2007 in Denmark and was first run in a small loft. Years have passed, and nowadays, it helps about 160,000 businesses to connect to their customers on different platforms and provide better service and experience. More than 4,000 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.

Zendesk old logo

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.

Zendesk logo

General information

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

DeploymentCloud-based 
Supported languages:60+ including English, German, French, Dutch, Chinese, Swedish, and Turkish. 
Supported devices:Windows, Mac, Linux; Android and iOS for mobile devices
Apps and Integrations:600+
Available support channels:Phone, email, live chat, Twitter, Facebook, help center, website widget, mobile SDK, and various channel integrations. 
Available pricing models: Free, Monthly payment, Annual Subscription.

What is Zendesk Top Feature?

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

Knowledge Base

Zendesk knowledge base helps in sharing support contact with the agents, customers, and the public. This is one of 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.

Zendesk Knowledge Base

An example of a Knowledge Base created with Zendesk

Ticketing System

Zendesk gathers all the customer queries and requests and shows you on one screen. You can manage and respond to customer questions in an easy and quick way. When all the queries from chat, e-mail, and social media are heading to you in a single location, it will help you in managing and solving the problems quickly.

Zendesk ticketing system

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 by notifying an agent when the ticket is not resolved.  It also helps in finding abandoned tickets. This feature can become a good supplement for companies that implement customer service automation operations. 

Zendesk nps automation

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.

Multibranding in Zendesk

Brands Page

Guided Mode

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

Zendesk guided mode

Zendesk Guided Mode

Pre-defining Ticket Actions

You can pre-define the responses to standard questions. You can also change the status of the tickets.

Zendesk auto ticket actions

Ticket Actions

The Zendesk Products 

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

Support

It is a comprehensive software solution to empower the customer support representatives of a company through the import of customer interactions from a variety of channels, customization options for support agents, and deep analytics for better customer understanding, and much more.

Zendesk support

Support's home page

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 to 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

Zendesk Guide

Chat

This service is as simple as it sounds i.e. providing live chat support to customers. Greet your customers as soon as they land on your website and assist them with their queries immediately.

Zendesk live chat

Zendesk Chat

Talk

Zendesk talk is specifically for call centers. The aim is to empower call center agents by allowing them to view customer interactions from all the channels and base their conversations with customers on that information 

Zendesk talk

Zendesk Talk

Sell

It is the CRM side of the software that gives sales teams a deeper insight into the sales pipeline to improve processes, and as a result, boost productivity.

Zendesk Sell

Zendesk Sell

Explore

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

Zendesk explore

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 provide them with a way to say their minds about your business.

Zendesk gather

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 formats of communication with your customers i.e. chat, phone, email, SMS, web, etc.

Zendesk Connect

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 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 is a variety of 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 the features that you need. Here are the plans that Zendesk offers with features and pricing so that you can make your decision easier.

Essential Plan

The essential plan is especially for small businesses and start-ups. This plan helps you in providing unlimited emails and connects your system with Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail, etc.  This is a basic setup and helps you in providing solutions to your customer’s problem. To upgrade to a better plan you need to check out other plans. 

How much is Zendesk per month?

It costs $5 per agent each month.

Key Features:

  • Support for self-service from Zendesk
  • Help center
  • Social channel and email support
  • Mobile SDK and website widget

Team Plan

The price of this plan is $19 for one agent every year. Normally, this plan is for mid-sized businesses looking for control and flexibility. Along with the features of Essential Plans, this plan includes customization of your help center and reporting is made through the Dashboard of Zendesk Support Performance and Google Analytics.

How much is Zendesk?

The price of this plan is $19 for one agent every year.

Key Features:

  • All the features of the Essential Plan
  • Performance dashboard
  • Business rules
  • Email Support from Zendesk at business hours
  • Public applications and integration

Professional Plan

This is helpful for large businesses in handling a huge volume of support requests globally. You can create Customer Satisfaction Surveys for collecting feedback, offer multi-language support to customers, and build a Knowledge Base for Internal Agents, which can help your agents resolve problems faster. A time-tracking system helps in the customization of the dashboard to generate faster insights and can track and analyze the time spending of agents while solving issues. It also offers 24 hours phone and email support for customers during the business week.

How much is Zendesk per month?

Zendesk’s cost of the Professional Plan is $49 for each agent per month. 

Key Features:

  • All the features of Team Plan
  • CSAT survey
  • Customization of dashboards and customer reports
  • Multilingual Content
  • 24-Hour email and phone support from Zendesk during working days

Enterprise Plan

A large business can have complete control of customer support services with this plan.  Zendesk team will assist you personally with implementations by getting access to the Launch Guidance Program. Zendesk will provide you their built-in Guided Mode. This feature automatically assigns and queues tickets to every agent, which can help in improving response time. This can help you in creating five different helpdesk centers. You can customize ticket forms and agent roles.

How much does Zendesk Enterprise cost?

This plan costs $99 every month for each agent.

Key Features:

  • Professional Plan
  • Custom roles for agents
  • Launch guidance
  • Multibrand support
  • Satisfaction prediction
  • Skill-based Routing
  • Multiple ticketing forms
  • 24/7/365r email, live chat, and phone support from Zendesk

Elite Plan

This is an update for the Enterprise plan. It helps you in fully relying on Zendesk at scale. The elite plan provides a 99.9% uptime SLA guarantee, one-hour response time, HIPP compliance assistance, and unlimited light agents. 

How much does it cost?

Elite plan costs $199 every month for each agent.

Key Features:

  • 1-hour SLO or Service Level Objective
  • Location of data center
  • Advanced security and encryption
  • 99.9% SLA uptime
  • Unlimited Light Agents (agents can view or comment on customer tickets but cannot reply)

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.

Comprehensive Zendesk customization services

Enhance your Zendesk appearance and functionality

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