Zoho Desk
OR Zendesk

Whether it is helping your customers make quick purchase decisions, your employees find the right answers or your customers get post-purchase support Zoho Desk can help in every instance. You can embed a help center widget on any of your websites, empowering your customers with access to knowledge base articles, chatbot support, and live chat assistance in one place.

To streamline various support activities, such as payments, and returns and refunds, you can create separate departments for each process. You can also restrict one department from accessing another department's data by setting up permission levels.

Managing multiple departments, brands, or service activities can be difficult with Zendesk. While you can create a separate help center and manage incoming requests from multiple brands, you cannot restrict one brand from accessing the other brand's tickets. You will have to create a view for each department just like you would for unassigned tickets. This can make managing your help desk more complicated and cause confusion and frustration among agents.

Zoho Desk helps you achieve your objectives by offering integrated AI, automation, and analytic capabilities—eliminating the need for multiple applications. It equips your agents with the context to deliver personalized service, empowers them to send quick replies with AI-powered suggestions, and facilitates the resolution of complex issues through team collaboration within tickets or secure spaces like team feeds.

Zendesk provides productivity-enhancing features that are typically considered standard—round-robin ticket assignment, time tracker, and parent-child tickets—as add-ons. It further restricts its advanced AI add-on only to customers on higher editions and belonging to specific industries, which negatively affects agent productivity and customer satisfaction levels. Additionally, the platform requires extensions to use collaboration features, such as broadcast messages.

With Zoho Desk, you can support your customers on all these channels at no extra cost. Its user interface resembles channel-specific apps, making it simple for agents to learn and use. You can also choose to manage requests from 10+ channels either in one central location or in dedicated modules for live chat, social media, and messaging apps.

Zendesk unifies conversations across these channels in one place. While its UI allows you to switch between channels from the reply window, it limits agents from performing channel-specific actions, such as liking a post on Facebook. As a result, you'll need to maintain and navigate between multiple platforms to provide effective social support in a social media-driven world.

Whether you have in-house tech experts or prefer low technical barriers, Zoho Desk has the right set of functionalities for all your needs. You can customize Zoho Desk effortlessly to your needs with its out-of-the-box functionalities such as custom layouts, custom ticket status, multi-lingual support, and custom functions. If you're looking to orchestrate complex workflows and unify your business operations by integrating with other applications, or require other advanced customizations, Zoho Desk offers a wide range of no-code, low-code, and pro-code developer tools.

Zendesk can be challenging to configure and begin using. Although it provides a variety of customization options, some users find the prebuilt customizations somewhat limited. While complex customizations require technical proficiency.

Zendesk and Zoho Desk provide integrations with various applications, such as Twilio, RingCentral, Microsoft Teams, and Slack, allowing for the efficient unification of business operations. If your technology stack includes Zoho's applications, you can easily and securely combine your business operations with Zoho Desk.

We understand that data security is not a choice but a necessity, which is why we don't provide it as an add-on but as a built-in feature. With us, you have complete control over your data: Choose the nearest data center from the 16 available locations and set access permissions within Zoho Desk for users, roles, and departments. We are also compliant with relevant data regulations, such as GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA.

Zendesk adheres to data protection and security regulations to allow your business to operate without interruptions. Nevertheless, controlling access permissions within applications for different departments or brands can be challenging. The platform has a total of seven data center locations, but you can only select your preferred one if you are using one of their higher-priced editions.

Zoho is a trusted platform that has been embraced by over 100 million users globally. We've been private, profitable, and reliable for over 27 years. Our commitment to prioritizing product development over aggressive marketing tactics has allowed us to deliver valuable software to our users consistently.

Zendesk has been a major player in the customer service software market since its inception, aiming to simplify customer service processes. However, its focus shifted from customers to investors, resulting in increased complexity for users. Despite consistent losses, heavy spending on sales and marketing, and other events, it was acquired by a group of private equity firms in 2022. Since then, there have been layoffs, multiple acquisitions, and rising concerns about increased prices among customers.