Is Zendesk Worth It? A Comprehensive Guide to Its Value
Please note that the content of this blog post comes from years of experience using the software, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Zendesk. This content is not AI generated and reflects the views of the author at the time of writing.
Introduction
Is Zendesk worth it? I think most people in the customer service industry would generally say “yes.” There’s a reason why it’s one of, if not the most popular customer service infrastructure tool on the market. The average Zendesk customer doesn't walk away disappointed in the product itself. So, is Zendesk right for you and your business, specifically?
In this article, I’ll walk through Zendesk’s pricing model, features, learning curve, and some implementation tips to help you make an informed decision.
Zendesk Pricing: What you need to know
Understanding Zendesk’s Pricing Model: What’s Included?
Arguably the most important factor in determining if Zendesk is worth it for you is the price of the tool itself. In order to understand Zendesk’s pricing model, it’s important to first nail down a few things about your needs:
At a high level, what tools and features do you need access to? Do you just want to transition your emails to a ticketing system? Or do you need a robust, scalable solution at an enterprise level? This will determine the Zendesk plan level you should pick.
How many agents do you have? Zendesk charges by “agent seat,” so it’s important to know how many people are on your support team.
How many “end users” are you supporting? This doesn’t have a direct impact on the price unless you want to utilize some of Zendesk’s AI features, but could have an impact on the complexity of your workstreams or the features you need to access, which .
How do you see the above factors changing, if at all, in the next 6, 12, or 24 months? This will help you model the price of the tool over time.
Once you know the answers to the key questions above, head over to Zendesk’s pricing page. Take a look at the options available to you and the features included. Here are some key details to keep in mind:
Agents - how many people are on your support team, involved in handling tickets, management of the team, and admin operations? Each of these individuals will need their own “agent seat” in Zendesk. However, on higher plans, you do get access to a large amount of “Light Agents” seats, which are included at no additional cost but can have view-only permissions.
“Suite” pricing plans - the Zendesk “Suite” is a group of tools that Zendesk has bundled together because they all integrate seamlessly. Depending on the plan you go with, the Zendesk “Suite” includes some level of access to most of Zendesk’s products - Zendesk Support (ticketing system), Talk (telephony system), Messaging (automated bots and chat), Help Center (knowledge base), and Explore (metrics and reporting) being the main ones. However, if you already have some of these tools, or don’t need all of them, you can always build your own plan with the specific features you want. Just keep in mind that for most business use cases, the bundled “Suite” option will be cheaper and provide greater flexibility in the future.
Plan levels - whether you want a pre-built Suite of tools or build your own plan, you should understand Zendesk’s levels for its plan types:
Team level - just the basics. Often includes only the absolutely essential features for the tools you need but with a very minimal amount of customization options. I generally don’t recommend the “Team” level unless you are in the very early stages of developing your support process or are extremely budget-conscious. However, if you’re a small company or startup with a low budget, you can always start with a free trial or apply for Zendesk’s startup program for 6 free months.
Growth level - This level is where you start to get access to some new features and additional customization for features you may have already had on the “Team” plan, but you still won’t have the full range of customizable features that higher level plans get you. I’d recommend this for most support teams who are only providing support for one or two products and don’t need any complex customizations.
Professional level - This plan is where you can really start to scale your support. It includes access to nearly all of Zendesk’s features, most of which are fully customizable. I recommend this plan for most support teams with more than 5-10 agents, as this is the plan level where you get the most features and customizability at a reasonable price.
Enterprise level - No more holding back. This plan level has access to every feature of the Zendesk product in question, outside of some of the premium add-on features. Sandbox environments for testing new workflows, custom agent roles, and access to the full level of customization for each Zendesk feature is what you can expect on this plan level. However, it is expensive. In my experience the cost of Enterprise can range from $170-$400/agent/month, depending on if you need any add-ons, the number of agents you have, and your business’ specific use case. I’d only recommend the Enterprise level if you have a large team(s) supporting multiple products, are in need of significant custom integration work, or have unique or industry-specific requirements such as HIPAA or GDPR compliance.
Zendesk Features by Plan: Which Level Fits Your Needs?
Zendesk’s pricing page includes a detailed breakdown of each feature that is included in each plan. However, I want to focus on a few key ones here and describe my experience using each on various plan levels, so you can see how Zendesk controls the level of customization within a given feature.
Ticket Forms/Fields - Ticket Forms in Zendesk, and by relation ticket Fields, are the building blocks of your agent and end user Support experience. When an end user reaches out to Support, they generally fill out “fields” relevant to their issue - name, email, relevant product, order ID, etc. The information your end user adds to these fields is then surfaced to your agents on the agent-side or can be internal-only fields that your agents use to track key pieces of information about a given ticket. A “form” is essentially just a grouping of end-user and/or agent-facing ticket “fields”.
On the Suite Team plan - You get access to only a single ticket form. This means that for every support use case you have, you will need to use the same set of ticket fields. This may be fine for more basic support use cases, but as you scale you may find that different products need different sets of information, and it may get difficult to enforce clean data etiquette across use cases or teams.
On the Suite Growth, Professional, and Enterprise plans - You can get access to more forms–up to 300 on the Enterprise plans. Note that if you only have Zendesk Support, but not a Suite plan, you will need to be on the Enterprise plan to have access to multiple forms.
Business Hours (Schedules) - Zendesk allows you to set different business hour schedules for your team and allows you to create triggers or automations that reference your business hours instead of calendar hours. This is important for ensuring your team is made aware of urgent issues during business hours only and aren’t receiving notifications on nights or weekends.
Suite Team plan - no access to this feature.
Suite Growth and Professional plans - access to one schedule. Useful for those with only one support team and one set of hours.
Suite Enterprise - ability to create multiple schedules. Useful for those with multiple support teams on different schedules.
Zendesk Explore - The Zendesk Explore tool is the custom reporting tool that Zendesk offers included in its Suite plans.
Suite Team/Growth - At the Team plan level, you have no customizability options and are only presented with pre-built reports on general metrics - things like total tickets submitted, how fast they are reviewed and resolved, etc. Any custom fields are not tracked by these pre-built dashboards.
Suite Professional - At this level you start to get access to Zendesk’s custom reporting and can build your own dashboards, reports, and metrics based on your unique use case. However, you don’t have access to every feature available, such as custom live data or full sharing permissions.
Suite Enterprise - Here you will get access to nearly all Zendesk reporting features, including real-time refresh rates (for certain metrics), the ability to share dashboards with anyone, scheduled reports/dashboards, and more.
How Much Does Zendesk Cost? A Look at Pricing by Plan
So what does Zendesk actually cost? I’ve broken down the price of each plan below, with the assumption of 10 agents and a yearly payment plan (if you plan to use Zendesk, I highly recommend a yearly payment plan to save ~25%). I’d also invite you to take a look at their pricing page here to get a more detailed view of each of the features available in each plan:
| Plan Level | Price/Year (10 agents) | Main Features | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Suite Team | $6,600 |
|
Basic implementation for one support workstream |
| Suite Growth | $10,680 |
|
Growing teams with multiple workflows |
| Suite Professional | $13,800 |
|
Established teams with advanced needs |
| Suite Enterprise | $20,280 |
|
Large-scale teams needing top-tier tools |
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It’s important to remember that lower Zendesk plans, while cheaper, will have limited or no access to some of the more important features for scaling your support model, such as business hours, ticket forms, and complex reporting. The above examples are good illustrations of this, but do note that it isn’t exhaustive, and Zendesk uses this “scaled” approach to many of their features.
If you are considering Zendesk, keep this in mind when asking yourself “Is Zendesk worth it?” I generally don’t recommend anyone be on a plan below Suite Professional for anything more than the most basic Support use cases, so using that price as a base instead of the Team or Growth pricing is generally a good bet. Even if you don’t need all the features now, in my experience, most businesses usually will use them in the future at scale.
How to Implement Zendesk: Time, Learning Curve, and Best Practices
How Long Does It Take to Implement Zendesk?
One of the biggest draws of Zendesk for me and many of my clients is the amount of “out-of-the-box” features it comes with. That is to say, for most people I work with, I can get a working “base case” up and running in a day, sometimes even just a few hours. Zendesk comes with an expansive feature-set, but does a great job of being ready on Day 1, too.
The amount of time it takes for a full implementation of Zendesk tends to depend on a few factors:
Complexity of your use case - how many agents do you have? How many products? Do your support needs change for different products? How many clients/end users? Are there any third parties you or your agents need to talk with to resolve support cases? Do you have custom integration requirements? The complexity of your company’s support use case is probably the most important factor for determining the implementation time.
Support channels - how do you want your end users to be able to reach out? Email? Phone call? Live Chat? Socials? Something else? A basic email setup can take a day or two for a motivated admin with experience, but adding and testing an omnichannel approach can take a bit longer.
Agent tools - what tools do you want to give your agents to quickly resolve tickets? Views, macros, triggers/automations, AI tools, 3rd party apps, or custom built integrations all have an impact on build complexity and time.
Reporting - what are your goals with this Zendesk implementation? Improving CSAT (customer satisfaction score)? Or just moving from email to a more robust support system? No matter your goals, keeping in mind the metrics you want to track and improve long term will help you set up an implementation that scales.
Your Zendesk plan - we discussed this extensively above, but your Zendesk plan impacts the features and customizations to those features that you have access to and will have a significant impact on your Zendesk implementation time.
On the whole, Zendesk generally recommends 4-6 months for a full implementation, depending on all of the above factors. In my experience as a consultant, Zendesk implementations can take anywhere from a few weeks for simple implementations using mostly out-of-the-box features, to a few months for complex integrations with many agents, workflows, integrations, and reporting requirements.
Zendesk’s Learning Curve: Is It Easy to Use?
For Agents:
First off, “Agent” in this context refers to your team members on the “frontline” who handle incoming ticket volume every day. In my experience, support agents are able to pick up Zendesk pretty quickly once they understand how it works. It does depend somewhat on their background and what they are used to. If they come from a long background of using other tools, then they will take some time to acclimate to the new system. However, if they are fairly new to customer support or have experience with many other tools, I’ve found that Zendesk is generally pretty easy to pick up for them. The agent interface is intuitive, and for the most part, tools, customer information, tickets, and apps, and any other context your agents need can be easily found in the agent interface after a few hours of getting used to the system.
For Managers:
Managers or Team Leads also need to use Zendesk for monitoring their team, handling escalated cases, setting up basic workflows using triggers/automations/views, reporting, all in addition to ticket handling. The manager or team lead needs to learn a bit more about Zendesk’s backend to be able to perform these functions. For these basic admin functions, Zendesk’s Admin Center is also quite intuitive, however, your managers will need to have some experience understanding support workflows to be able to pick these responsibilities up quickly or will need to spend some time reviewing Zendesk’s extensive Help Center documentation.
For workforce management and custom reporting, I think Zendesk could do a bit better. However, they recently released add-ons for quality assurance, WFM, and are currently on rolling out a new dashboard creation tool, so improvements should be made in these areas very soon.
For Administrators
Zendesk Administrators are users of the tool who should have an intensive understanding of Zendesk’s backend. For many companies, your “admins” and “managers” may actually be the same role. Administrators need to have a strong understanding of the permissioning systems, more complicated automation tools, understanding of integration options, and advanced knowledge of your unique business use case. I won’t sugar coat it, the learning curve to become a strong Zendesk admin can be high, but it’s about as high as the curve to become an expert in any highly customizable enterprise software.
For everyone who can, I always recommend designating at least one person on your support team as a Zendesk administrator. Ideally, they should already have some knowledge of your support workstream, and I often recommend it as a career growth opportunity for someone on the support team, the manager of the team, or someone on an IT or internal operations team. Zendesk also provides some Zendesk admin training courses, which are highly recommended to ensure you’re implementing the tool in the best way possible.
Is Zendesk Any Good? Final Thoughts and Recommendations
I hope this post gave you valuable insights into whether Zendesk is the right choice for your business. In my experience, companies who invest the time to implement it properly - whether by learning it themselves, leveraging internal expertise, or hiring a consultant - usually sing its praises. While some competing tools may offer more value for niche use cases, there is no company out there that can claim they are “better” than Zendesk in any other category than price.
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