Zendesk: Customer Service Management Powerhouse Looks to Expand Its Footprint
Zendesk has been a keystone vendor for external customer service management (CSM) for over a decade. It is now making a strong effort to expand into adjacent functional areas, with a heavy emphasis on IT and HR ticketing.
Founded in 2007, Zendesk is a popular point solution for CSM. Its products allow organizations to connect with customers through multiple channels, ticket requests, route tickets to the appropriate agent for resolution, and find the relevant contextual knowledge to help close tickets effectively. Zendesk’s intuitive solution and wide range of both technology and implementation partners has propelled it to be a market leader for CSM.
As Zendesk has grown, the company has looked to apply its expertise in resolution workflow management to other areas of the enterprise. A natural fit is internal service delivery: the core precepts of an internal IT or HR help desk are fundamentally similar to those of providing external customer care.
Zendesk’s internal help desk solution allows organizations to spin up a robust case management and self-service tool to assist employees with IT, HR, and facilities requests. Integrations with their app store partners also allow for lightweight asset management and tracking.
Zendesk help desk software at SoftwareReviews.com
While Zendesk is branching into internal support use cases, it has yet to become a market leader in this space as it has in external CSM. Competing effectively means it will have to take on significantly larger and better established players, such as ServiceNow.
Info-Tech recommends that presently Zendesk is still a stronger fit for external CSM than it is for internal help desk. However, organizations with lightweight internal help-desk requirements (and deeper external CSM requirements) should investigate Zendesk as a dual use-case solution in order to capitalize on the synergies present in consolidating to a single platform for managing both external customer care and internal service delivery.
Our Take
- Zendesk is a popular vendor in the CSM space.
- Because there are similarities between external customer service and IT and HR help desks, Zendesk is putting renewed emphasis on providing capabilities for the latter.
- Info-Tech recommends that organizations with a Zendesk footprint for external customer care should include Zendesk in their shortlist if they’re considering deploying or modernizing their ITSM applications.
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