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Zendesk Review and Pricing
Table of Contents
- Zendesk allows everyone to work from the same live customer database, with synced ticket updates and a full history visible in the dashboard. That means faster handoffs, less repetition and quicker resolutions.
- The platform's AI usage is very impressive and significantly reduces workload. For example, it can route inquiries automatically based on intent, sentiment and language.
- Zendesk is truly omnichannel, supporting phone, email, SMS, social media and chatbot communication. You can also run outbound campaigns on these channels via plug-ins.
- Zendesk isn't the most affordable solution. To unlock advanced features like side conversations and self-service portals, you'll pay more.
- There's no direct way to contact Zendesk's customer support; you must do so via a ticketing system and wait for a response.
- There's a limit to the number of application programming interface (API) calls you can make monthly. If you use too many, your subscription fee may increase.
Zendesk for Customer Service helps businesses tackle the service issues that frustrate customers the most, like long wait times and being passed from one rep to another. As a customer service-focused customer relationship management (CRM) platform, it’s designed to make support smoother at every stage — not just for your customers, but also for your team. Beyond its broad feature set, Zendesk stands out for how well it brings teams together to solve problems collaboratively. If one person misses something, a manager or teammate can pick it up, ensuring no issue falls through the cracks. After reviewing dozens of CRMs, we found Zendesk to be the best solution for teams that need to collaborate and keep service experiences consistent and connected.
Zendesk Editor's Rating:
9.5 / 10
- Pricing/value
- 9.4/10
- Features
- 9.7/10
- Customization, add-ons and integrations
- 9.2/10
- Ease of use
- 9.6/10
- Customer service
- 9.5/10
Why We Chose Zendesk as the Best CRM for Cross-Department Collaboration
Team collaboration and knowledge sharing are built into Zendesk’s highly functional, easy-to-use platform. When a customer reaches out, agents can loop in colleagues for advice, bring them into the conversation and share responsibility to keep issues moving forward. We also like how Zendesk reviews past tickets to suggest solutions. If multiple tickets cover the same issue, teams can merge them into a single shared thread to avoid duplicate replies and confusion. Zendesk really shines when it comes to helping teams work together seamlessly, whether that means solving problems collaboratively or keeping everyone aligned on a centralized source of information.
Zendesk also makes it easier to run a call center operation with helpful call center features. All customer profiles, conversation history and live context appear in one place, so teams don’t waste time searching for information. Managers can route tickets by urgency, language or sentiment and even forecast staffing needs to maintain service levels. The platform supports true omnichannel communication, allowing teams to connect with customers via phone, email, SMS, chatbots and more. Zendesk also supports outbound marketing campaigns, which adds further value for businesses.
For all these reasons and more, Zendesk is our choice for the best CRM for cross-departmental collaboration.
Ease of Use
We were pleased to see that Zendesk is easy to use out of the box. Getting started on Zendesk is much faster than on many platforms we reviewed because so much functionality is built in. Here are a few of Zendesk’s ease-of-use factors that impressed us:
- Zendesk is browser-based: The Zendesk CRM system is entirely browser- and app-based. No downloads are required (except for its mobile phone apps).
- Zendesk prioritizes usability: When accessing the platform, it was clear to us that Zendesk made usability a priority. Its straightforward, uncluttered appearance gives quick and intuitive access to the system’s primary features.
- Easily personalized dashboards: Personalizing your dashboard is straightforward in Zendesk. It’s easy to create new widgets (for example, a chart or graph that tracks KPIs in real time) and add them to your dashboard.
- Easy app downloads: The Zendesk marketplace boasts more than 1,200 apps. It’s easy to search the store, find apps and download them. The marketplace has 16 app categories, over 140 themes and 127 commercial partners in North America.
- Access help when needed: Zendesk offers paid training on customizing your system for those with more complex needs. However, we feel most businesses will get up and running without extra help. You can access extensive supporting information in the Zendesk online knowledge base at any time.
Zendesk Features
Zendesk excels in six key CRM features that facilitate cross-departmental collaboration.
Team Collaboration Tools
Zendesk helps teams work together so they can get through their workloads faster and improve the chances of successful resolutions. Here are four team collaboration features that particularly impressed us.
- Ticket sharing: Teams can set up shared threads across departments without forwarding emails or taking screenshots. Sharing partners get synced copies of every interaction, including status updates and agent comments, to prevent duplicate work.
- Related tickets: Zendesk suggests tickets that can be merged when similar issues come in. It also highlights how past problems were resolved, so agents can apply proven fixes and reduce response times.
- Agent collision detection: Agents see an eye icon or presence badge if someone else is already working on a ticket. Managers can also enable Play Mode to automatically skip open tickets and avoid duplicate assignments.
- CCs and followers: You can tag colleagues as CCs to bring them into the conversation or as followers if they just need to stay informed behind the scenes.
These features will improve the speed and quality of customer service. They’ll also help managers hit their KPIs and reduce the number of tickets they need to micromanage.
Customer Communication Tools
We were particularly impressed by Zendesk’s inbound communication functions that improve team collaboration and information sharing:
- Side conversations: Agents can loop in colleagues using threaded side conversations that sit within a ticket. These chats can take place via email, Microsoft Teams or Slack, and you can even create a new internal ticket for follow-up. Replies remain visible only to agents, keeping everything organized without exposing internal discussions to the customer.
- Light agents: When agents need behind-the-scenes input from colleagues who aren’t handling the case directly, they can add them as light agents. Light agents can leave private comments inside the ticket — visible only to the support team — to maintain discreet and efficient collaboration.
- Presence: Agents can mark themselves as online, away, offline, or only available for transfer calls, ensuring customers are always routed to someone available to help in real time.
- Notes: After a customer interaction, agents can add summaries or observations to brief the next rep. These notes might include key issues, preferred contact methods, or even customer tone, such as whether they expect faster replies or prefer email over phone communications.
- Details: Agents can add general summaries and observations about a consumer or business customer to help future reps tailor their approach and avoid repeating past mistakes.
While Zendesk for Customer Service doesn’t include built-in outbound calling tools for lead generation or email marketing campaigns, Zendesk does offer a separate solution called Zendesk for Contact Center. It supports inbound and outbound calls, intelligent call routing and performance tracking. Businesses running a large support operation may want to explore that option or review our guide to the best call center services for more comprehensive outbound dialing solutions.
Unified Customer Database
Successful cross-departmental collaboration requires the ability to access centralized, accurate and real-time customer data. We found that Zendesk shines in this area with the following features:
- Structured customer profiles: Every Zendesk profile contains a set of standard fields, including name, email, phone number, language, time zone, role and organization. You can also add custom notes, such as a lookup field that links an employee to a company’s decision-maker. This gives agents clearer context about who they’re dealing with and gives decision-makers visibility into how well your team is handling their issue.
- Custom tagging and segmentation: Agents can tag customers to make it easy to find and segment specific user types. For example, they can tag high-spending consumers as “VIP” or add job titles (like “manager” or “CEO”).
- Conversation and call history: Zendesk stores full chat histories and transcripts that display discussion details, prior issue resolutions and frequently discussed topics. The platform securely stores call recordings and links them to the relevant ticket. Depending on your setup, the system can add a transcript and summary after each call. These records help managers identify performance gaps to address in training. Notably, the AI copilot tool saves agents time by writing up call notes, and the Zendesk QA browser extension flags quality assurance issues to team leaders.
- Instant customer context: The Zendesk context panel, displayed alongside every ticket, shows everything an agent needs to know, including customer identity, previous conversations and solutions attempted on related tickets. Agents can also search the “History” tab using keywords, tags, dates or customer information to find past interactions, even when they’re outside the ticket window.
Together, these features, combined with Zendesk’s centralized database, give every agent and manager a real-time, collaborative view of the customer, so nothing gets missed, repeated or delayed.
AI-Enabled Customer Services
We like that Zendesk offers AI-powered tools designed to improve service operations and enhance the customer experience. Some features are part of the AI copilot (available as an add-on for higher-tier plans), while others are included as built-in functions or separate AI-related add-ons. Together, these tools help service teams work more efficiently and deliver smarter support.
- Intelligent triage: Zendesk’s intelligent triage scans each new ticket to detect the customer’s intent, language and sentiment. You can input specific instructions — for example, prioritizing refund requests, flagging upset customers or routing Spanish-speaking customers to the right agent. Managers can also track how many complaints relate to specific issues, such as billing, and follow up with remediation actions.
- On-screen prompts and call summaries: Zendesk’s AI provides on-screen prompts that help agents better understand customer needs and craft more effective responses, increasing the likelihood of solving their issues the first time they reach out. It also automatically transcribes and summarizes voice calls, saving time and making sure important details don’t get missed.
- Chatbots: We were pleased to see that you can add Zendesk-powered AI agents to your website, help center or mobile app using a single messaging widget. These bots understand what customers want, handle issues before passing them to a live rep, and even present articles related to the issue that might help. If there’s a handoff, the agent sees the full context, making it easy to pick up the thread quickly. This saves agents time on routine questions and frees them up to focus on more complex issues.
- Automated service tickets: Customers can create tickets by phone, email, chatbot and even on social media. With AI’s help, managers can set up triggers and rules to automate ticket distribution, prioritization and escalation.
- Track and improve KPIs: Zendesk tracks how each service ticket is handled, helping managers assess team performance with AI-powered insights into customer retention, loyalty, satisfaction levels and overall behavior. These insights help businesses establish and track KPIs for ticket management and measure their performance.
- Workforce management: Managers can avoid being understaffed by analyzing expected future demand against historical service volumes, allowing them to address coverage gaps before they impact service quality.
Analytics Tools
Zendesk’s reporting and data analytics tools impressed us. We appreciate how easy the platform makes it to share and schedule relevant dashboards and reports with team members. You can also share the latest data-driven trends and insights to spot issues early, identify workflow inefficiencies and improve team performance.
You can track performance across eight key areas, including:
- Support: Improve handling times and maintain consistent service levels by tracking ticket creation, assignment and resolution. You can also measure response speed and agent workload and identify what’s holding up case resolutions.
- Backlog and SLA (Service-Level Agreement) performance: These metrics help identify issues such as queue buildup and delayed response times. You can run reports on unresolved ticket volume, average ticket duration and which teams consistently meet or miss SLA standards.
- Messaging and live chat: Zendesk uses historical data and AI to advise you on how many agents you’ll need to keep response times low, factoring in seasonal spikes.
- Omnichannel productivity: Track how agents spend their time and how many tasks they complete across email, chat, voice and messaging. Use this information to assess how effectively they manage their workdays and whether assigned workloads are realistic.
- Voice: Get detailed information on call volumes, durations, wait times and agent performance. Phone support remains the most popular channel, so it’s important to avoid missed calls and long wait times.
- AI and automation: Zendesk uses AI and automation to reduce repetitive, manual tasks, helping you scale service without adding staff or sacrificing support quality.
- Knowledge and self-service: If you set up a knowledge base for staff and customers, you can track which articles are most viewed, which ones agents rely on and what customers search for but don’t find. Use these insights to fill content gaps, improve article quality, and reduce avoidable support requests.
- Community: If you launch an online community, you can track what customers are discussing, how they interact (especially on issues your service team typically handles), and key forum activities, such as posts, comments, votes and engagement. Use this data to spot emerging topics, identify what’s confusing customers most and recognize your most helpful contributors.
- Dashboards and reporting: Zendesk’s built-in dashboards help teams and managers track performance and spot pressure points in real time, which is ideal for maintaining service levels and acting quickly when performance dips. You can build reports by dragging any of the above data groups into charts and graphs that track activity over specific date ranges. Managers and admins can also add live widgets to agent dashboards to highlight the most relevant updates.
Customization and Integrations
Businesses need flexible CRM software that can adapt to unique needs. We like how Zendesk helps you customize workflow automations and functionality to suit your operations.
- Integrations: Zendesk has one of the largest app marketplaces among the solutions we reviewed, with approximately 1,500 third-party plug-ins, ranging from productivity and time-tracking tools to knowledge and content management apps.
- Developer tools: Zendesk also supports developers. Its Sunshine open platform, available as an add-on, is designed for in-house and third-party development. You can build advanced conversation tools that pull data from multiple communication channels and sources via APIs to guide AI- or human-driven interactions. This lets you create highly tailored workflows based on the nature of each customer query.
Zendesk Pricing
Zendesk offers several products, but for this review, we focused on Zendesk for Customer Service, its primary platform for support teams and the solution most similar to a traditional CRM. Pricing varies based on features, team size and support needs.
Plan | Pricing | Features |
|---|---|---|
Support Team | $25 per agent, per month ($19 per agent, per month, billed annually) |
|
Suite Team | $65 per agent, per month ($55 per agent, per month, billed annually) | Everything in Support Team, plus:
|
Suite Professional | $149 per agent, per month ($115 per agent, per month, billed annually) | Everything in Suite Team, plus:
|
Suite Enterprise | $219 per agent, per month ($169 per agent, per month, billed annually) | Everything in Suite Professional, plus:
|
Additional pricing considerations include the following:
- Add-ons: A slew of helpful add-ons is available, including the AI copilot, advanced AI agents, quality assurance, Zendesk Workforce Management, advanced data privacy protection, and a Workforce Engagement bundle. However, additional services can significantly increase your price; you’ll need to contact the company for the exact costs.
- Free trial: The company offers a 14-day free trial to test the platform.
- Startup free version: Zendesk provides six months’ free access to the platform for startups through its Zendesk for Startups program.
- Enhanced support: You’ll pay extra for 24/7 support, customized training and other options.
Onboarding and Implementation
Zendesk is browser-based, so there’s nothing to install. Onboarding still requires a few steps; however, compared to CRMs like Salesforce and Oracle, the setup itself doesn’t take long.
The interface is intuitive, but setting up workflows using IF/THEN-style commands may take time if you’re not confident with Excel-like logic. We were impressed by the platform’s training options, especially the five short courses tailored to roles such as admin, agent or developer, as well as Zendesk’s “university,” which offers badges and certifications.
Customer Support
We like that Zendesk’s team is available 24/7 and offers direct telephone support. However, you must submit a support request ticket from the Zendesk platform to receive a callback from a customer service agent. There’s an active user community where you can ask questions, although you’re not guaranteed a response. You can also access extensive online documentation via the Zendesk Help Center.
Zendesk also offers tiered, paid support programs that let you tailor the platform to your needs and access enhanced help services. Pricing depends on your selected support level and the number of agents in your organization.
Limitations
Zendesk’s platform is impressive, but we did identify a handful of limitations:
- Expensive, functional plug-ins: Contact center features cost an extra $44 per agent, per month, and you may face additional AWS charges on top. Other useful add-ons, such as the AI copilot and Workforce Management, also carry steep price tags. Check out our review of monday.com CRM to learn about a more affordable option with extensive features.
- Delayed customer service response: Although Zendesk excels in customer service, many users prefer to call or converse via live chat for immediate help. The company’s ticketing system works well, but it would be even better if customers could consistently get real-time responses.
- Limited API calls: We appreciate Zendesk’s API system. It’s very thorough, and you can use it to add additional functionality. However, API usage is capped monthly, and repeated overages may require an upgrade to a more expensive tier.
Methodology
When evaluating the best CRM software, we conducted a detailed comparison of top CRM solutions on the market. Our testing process included communication with customer support and sales teams, feature and platform comparisons, and reviews of tutorials, webinars and help resources. We also considered pricing. When looking for the best CRM for cross-department collaboration specifically, we focused on central databases, seamless communication tools, AI enhancements, customization options and integrations. We also looked at contact management, sales automation, reporting and analytics functions. Our goal is to help you find the right CRM for your business.
Zendesk FAQs
Bottom Line
We recommend Zendesk for …
- Businesses that want to improve their customer service and post-sale support.
- Companies looking for better cooperation between departments so actions are more aligned.
- Organizations that want to manage support, messaging and knowledge bases from a single platform without switching between tools.
We don’t recommend Zendesk for …
- Businesses that need a CRM with a free plan.
- Companies on tight budgets, as most advanced Zendesk features are locked behind higher-tier plans or only available as add-ons.
- Businesses that don’t want to pay extra for 24/7 or premier support.