Zendesk: SaaS Help Desk
Danish startup Zendesk is a SaaS delivered help desk solution that provides a backend service for small to medium sized help desks. It's been designed from the ground up as a pure play help desk solution and so it has features specifically for this use.
Like other SaaS offerings, Zendesk offers significant cost savings when compared to its more traditional installed competitors.
Zendesk is remarkably easy to set up. Being SaaS based there is no installation required, it is available on one easy monthly subscription and all hosting and upgrades are handled for users. I set up a trial help desk in literally a few minutes. In keeping with this week's theme, Zendesk is iPhone ready.
How it works
Zendesk is aimed to be used by call takers at the same time as they're talking to their clients - because of this it seems that they've taken lots of time to think about simplifying the user-interface. They make good use of a very simple Ajax user interface and have also included tagging on cases to allow for quick and easy problem classification and searching.
Zendesk has also made good use of API's and can be integrated with other web offerings (campfire, MS Active directory, CRM etc) as well as providing for e-mail integration.
Primarily Zendesk uses tickets as the work stream. A call generates a ticket which can be updated, tagged, searched and resolved all via the web interface. Some features of there offering include;
- Fully customisable tickets
- RSS feeds for both tickets and views
- Tagging of all helpdesk attributes
- Self-service portal for help desk users
- Tickets are email integrated
- Built in SLA tracking
- Resolved tickets can be automatically converted into solutions and added to the solution database
This last feature creates a great self-learning solution centre that, with time, results in a much quicker and more efficient support experience for users.
Pricing
The basic offering, for up to 50 end-users and one agent, is free. From there on Zendesk offers tiered solutions with their premium plan offering unlimited end-users and up to 25 agents costing $349 per month. Like other SaaS products Zendesk is a pay-as-you-go service with no contracts, sign-up or termination fees. Below is a feature highlight video from Zendesk
ReadWriteWeb giveaway
Zendesk's name is a play on the fact that help desk situations can sometimes get a little intense. Zendesk are trying to bring the spirit of serenity to this normally stressful environment. As a bonus for ReadWriteWeb readers, they're giving away 10 of their Zendesk Buddha machines to the first 10 people who email this address.
A guest post by Ben Kepes of diversity.net.nz, a blog that focuses on SaaS, cloud-computing and Web 2.0 for the real world.
Share
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
Hi Ben, welcome. What sort of traditional software does this replace and how does it compare price-wise? I have seen some SaaS players attack on the basis of ignoring the license sunk cost of the incumbent and simply charge what is the equivalent of the annual maintenance, hosting and system management fees. So the customer gets a modern system without any new capex cost? That assumes some functional advantage over the incumbents.
Bernard - thanks for the welcome. You're right - pricing strategy is a real issue for SaaS vendors - it's an issue I look at in an old post (link below).
To be honest Zendesk's primary value is that it's bringing a class of product to a demographic that formerly didn't tend to have access to it. The complexity of help desk solutions and the installation and configuration make it a difficult ask for SMBs.
From my assessment Zendesk does have a functional advantage in terms of the tagging and support database creation features.
Cheers!
Ben, it's not just a back end service as you have mentioned as it provides requester functionality for end users to raise tickets. I've tried the demo and have to say that this product was disappointing. The requester functionality was poor to say the least and it simply cannot be seriously considered a true help desk solution.
Just because it’s delivered by SaaS doesn't automatically make it a good product. Any modern day help desk should have at least some ITIL best practice based features but Zen Desk seemed to be lacking from what I saw. Sure they mention ITIL on their website but only from they point of view that they can call tickets Problems and Incidents. I'd label this as a primitive ticket management app with SLA functionality bolted on.
One SaaS based helpdesk solution that I'd recommend looking at is www.service-now.com for a true ITIL based ITSM solution. The only issue with Service Now is that they are aiming for the mid to high space. Unfortunately I have yet to see a decent SMB based SaaS helpdesk offering.
Great article Ben.
We have been using Zendesk for nearly 12 months now and can say that it has really made a huge improvement to our business. Not only were we up and running in no time but it has provided us with a platform that works really well for remote teams like mine. We are not always in the same location as each other and Zendesk provides the perfect central point, so we all know what our customers need, who from our team is looking after them and the history of previous communications in case we need to pick up where someone left off.
Not only does Zendesk work as a great customer service centre but we also use it to track and store email error reports from our web applications. Now our developers have one central location for all system management, alerts and support. Using the built in trigger process Zendesk keeps us focused on what’s important and needs our attention.
We are also massive users of basecamp and find Zendesk to be just as simple and easy to use. I think that like 37 Signals Zendesk have successfully pulled off another less is less web 2.0 application that makes customer service easy, just as it should be.
Simon, I'd have to refute your assertion that Zendesk is not serious help desk system. IMHO it represents a fresh cutting edge approach based on simplifying yet being enabled with some very powerful and flexible capabilities.
Of particular note is its rule engine that can be used to implement all manner of process patterns to suit how you want your support desk to work.
Custom fields have been recently added and can be exposed to users on ticket requests. It's all down to how you configure it. We've also been impressed with the rate at which enhancements and new features arrive and how responsive the team are to feedback.
We use Zendesk as our front-end customer & partner interaction point, and we have a distributed approach to our agents structure i.e. not just a small number of help desk agents that use a specialized application. As such we need it to feel simple to use. On first sight our CTO thought it might be limited, he now understands more it's depths.
We also want to follow ITIL, one of the most important aspects being the separations of concerns (Incidents & Problems). Although Zendesk is still a little rudimentary in this area, we have faith that it will expand it's support at a price point below mid-range packages and without loosing too much of that simplicity touch.
In regard to SaaS, it's a non brainer. We have some on site systems and having to look after them & upgrade them is a pain. We also believe that SaaS is a whole paradigm shift, the onus on the vendor to manage migrations is highly significant. It's really move the design of high quality software forward.
Hi Simon,
Thanks for trying out our demo. I'm sorry Zendesk is not what you're looking for, but we cannot be everything to everyone.
I'd like to explain our background to you. Most of the Zendesk crew has spent quite a while selling, implementing, customizing and running large Remedy projects and hold at least the ITIL Foundation certification.
Zendesk is a conclusion of our observations from that time. Zendesk is inspired by the ITIL paradigms, which we find a healthy source of inspiration. Implementing a true ITIL help desk with CMDB, bells and whistles, is an fully grown IT/process project in it's own, bogged down in hairy mapping processes and procedures. We definitely do not want to expose our customers to that.
We want simple. We want transparency. We want cheap. We want on-demand. We want to focus heavily on what people request the most - incident management. And we want to do this for the businesses that cannot (or will not) afford (price, effort and pain) to go into products like service-now.com - just take a look at their screen shots, pictures do say more than a 1000 words.
We're driven to help our customers support their customers in the fastest and most efficient way, not to implement a full ITIL specification for the sake of implementing it.
Br,
Morten
Hey Ben, and thanks for writing about a product. Zendesk has been a huge help in our own efforts at instituting a robust customer service structure and we love it.
As a startup in our own infancy (about 10 weeks out of the box), we recognize the need for timely and accurate responses to support requests. We started using ZD while still in Beta and have continued using it as we have grown to 3,500 registered users.
As of this morning we have received over 1,300 help requests and they have all been handled through Zendesk to great effect. We receive compliments every day on the quality and responsiveness of our help and we attribute this in large part to the great application which ZD has bulit.
For startups ad other small businesses with limited capacity this is a great service and we applaud what the guys at ZD are doing.
Best,
Mike Samson
co-Founder
crowdSPRING
Thanks all for your comments - it seems there are a number of people out there using zendesk and finding it great for their situation.
To me SaaS is close to the perfect embodiment of user-centric design - it leaves aside much of onus of technicality on users, but provides them with a simple, readily implemented, cheap and accessible solution.
It's a topic I spend much time dwelling on my own blog where, as well as product reviews, I try and focus more on the business case for SaaS - both from a vendor and a customer perspective.
Once again thanks for all your comments.
I really should have known better. If Zendesk was sponsoring this post with free giveaways then of course they were going to respond en-masse on any negative criticism. So really I was on a hiding to nothing by criticizing this product.
The main reason for my initial comment was this statement in Ben’s post:
“Like other SaaS offerings, Zendesk offers significant cost savings when compared to its more traditional installed competitors.”
What traditional products are being compared here? Is it basic trouble ticket systems or fully featured ITSM solutions? This type of statement should really be backed up with price and feature comparison tables. Cost savings are great providing you don’t lose any functionality. The business isn’t going to care about saving a few $$$’s if the quality of service they receive drops. Moving to a SaaS solution shouldn’t just be about reducing costs.
Morten, I’m not affiliated with Service-now in any way, but hassling them about their screenshots is a bit silly considering they offer a fully fledged demo with the ability to explore multiple user roles all without having to first sign up (unlike Zendesk). In addition, you said that you are focusing Zendesk on what customers want the most – Incident Management, but what good is that if you aren’t tracking changes? Having a best incident management system in the world won’t reduce the number of incidents that are raised. As I’m sure you’ll know the majority of incidents are caused by change. How can problem management and process improvement be done effectively with no visibility of the changes that have occurred?
I realize its early days as can appreciate that SaaS products evolve over time and agree that throwing every ITIL concept into a young product isn't viable, however in all honesty at your price point I expected a fair bit more. I genuinely hope you can eventually pack some more features into the product as apart from open source hosted options there are not many offerings in the SMB space.
@Simon - to tell you the truth the part about cost saving was a later edition by the editor. Primarily I see SaaS solutions as being more about adding value than saving money. It's an issue I wrote about some time ago over here.
It seems that the comparisons to Service-now are pointless from both sides of this argument (disclosure - I'm on neither side of the argument - merely adjudicating) - by everyone's admission Zendesk is a different offering and also it seems that it has no real competitors in the SaaS space for SMBs.
So maybe we should turn this around and look at it as a market research experiment for Zendesk to determine what features their users really need...
Cheers Ben,
I think the cost savings thing hit a note with me as there was nothing on Zendesks website comparing it to traditional installed software - something I think is really helpful when gaining buy-in when switching to a SaaS solution. I'm sure you've seen Xero's excellent comparison: http://www.xero.com/overview/compare/
And don't get me wrong I love the SaaS model and use a number of SaaS services, but Zendesk was the first SMB helpdesk offering that I'd stumbled across (thanks to your blog a while back) but was just a little disappointing that it wasn't as mature as I would have liked. I'm not saying they should go full on ITIL, but as I said in my previous comment a few additional features like change management would start to add real value.
Interesting debate. Admittedly, I'm another happy Zendesk user here. And work for an SMB at that! (at least, I think a 40 person company would qualify as an SMB). Ben Kepes earlier quote is what struck a chord with me:
"The complexity of help desk solutions and the installation and configuration make it a difficult ask for SMBs." - Kepes
Our organization had actually used Microsoft Sharepoint's Service Desk site template before switching over to Zendesk. One year, after the server crashed and we discovered that our IT team had failed to backup the content database properly, it became clear to us that the TCO was more than we had thought. That's when I started shopping for a SaaS solution. *BUT*, I was still looking for a product that was not only comprehensive, but *simple* to implement; minimal training; and, of course, affordable. Zendesk fit very well.
Don't get me wrong, I would always welcome more features in just about all of the products we use (and many of those feature over-lap, but, I won't open that can of worms). But, IMHP, it's still about an old concept; Value. For example, let me give an example of where I think SaaS has gone wrong. Salesforce.com...
When we adopted Salesforce, we were in need of not only a lead management system, but one that could create price quotes / orders, and be integrated (rudimantarily) into our accounting system. We moved to Salesforce from an installed, custom developed application. At the time, we were paying about $5,000 per year for Salesforce. We now pay close to $40,000 per year and are continually running out of storage space. It's so ridicullous that we are investigating an Apex app that stores all attachments outside of Salesforce, like Amazon/s3 or our FTP server... *just to save money*! It's complexity has grown into a barrier for on-boarding new employees for us. We are missing that old custom, installed app right now.
To get back on subject, I think new SaaS startups like Zendesk, Highrise, Google Apps, etc. are getting pricing / feature mix right... at least for now. ...a very inexpensive monthly fee that can be scaled up, or a free way to try out the base feature set (with ads in Google's case, and then you pay to remove the advertising). I think this kind of pricing is very SMB friendly.
In the mean time, anybody know of an elegantly simple, cheap CRM SaaS system that's not just a lead management system, but, has decent quote and order features? :-)
As many others, we are a very happy customer of ZenDesk. We have been using it for a few months thus far and are quite pleased with the uptime, new features, and general responsiveness from the company.
We are a growing startup in terms of employees and customer base - and our customers love the tool. It's ease of use is similar to how our own platform is built.