Salesforce vs Zendesk for Support and Knowledge

John Bosch
John Bosch Member Posts: 26 Expert
First Anniversary First Comment
edited July 2020 in CS Technology

We are about to make a decision between Salesforce and Zendesk for our support system and knowledge base.  We have Salesforce as the CRM, and ChurnZero for the Success Team.  

Any recommendations or personal experiences would be helpful.  Thanks!

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Comments

  • Will Pagden
    Will Pagden Member Posts: 99 Expert
    edited July 2020

    I’ve seen Salesforce tried to be use as a support tool but it just didn’t match up to Zendesks capabilities. The company very quickly realised this and went with Zendesk. That said this was some years ago so SFs product has no doubt developed considerably. 

  • David Jackson
    David Jackson Member Posts: 36 Expert
    First Comment
    edited July 2020

    John,

    I used Salesforce service cloud and found it worked well, especially with community as a knowledge base and c2c sharing.

    Whilst functionality is important there is a second important consideration - single customer view.  We built just about everything in salesforce, partly because there was nothing else when we started but mainly because of the ability to connect data.  That included adopting Financial Force (built in the SF platform).  To put operational and financial data together easily took our insight to another level.  Integrations are good but they are often quite shallow from a data perspective. The thing is patterns and correlations are difficult to spot but when data is dispersed it becomes a real challenge.  I would gladly give up 20% of the functionality in exchange for great data.  

  • Kodak Maharaj
    Kodak Maharaj Member Posts: 8 Contributor
    edited July 2020

    Hi @John Bosch are you familiar with WixAnswers? They’re newer to the space and really emphasize the knowledge aspect of support. Might be something worth looking into?

     

    Just out of curiosity, what’s your primary goal for support and knowledge? Is it deflection, overall structure, something else?

  • Brian Hartley
    Brian Hartley Member Posts: 184 Expert
    10 Comments First Anniversary
    edited July 2020

    Hey @John Bosch we were in your exact same position about 8 months ago.  Had both SFDC and ChurnZero and were deciding between the two.  We ultimately went with SFDC as everything else is already in our stack.  I also had experience deploying this in a previous role as well.  I think it fits the bill well for us but I do think ZenDesk is best in class (or so I have been told).  The biggest gap for us is the inability to tie in knowledge/service deflection within our B2B app.  It can be done but only through consultants and extra work - nothing out of the box (vs. I believe Zendesk has this)

  • Alex Turkovic
    Alex Turkovic Member Posts: 61 Expert
    Second Anniversary
    edited July 2020

    I'm a huge proponent of ZenDesk as it is an incredibly flexible tool with a great reporting engine that can be (almost) infinitely configured to meet any odd/unique criteria you might want to implement across your ticket flow. 

    We even used to as our implementation project tracking tool to great success, which had the extra added benefit of our support group being able to openly see progress on in-flight services projects.

    While both SFDC and Zendesk require a fair amount of admin lift to configure and get spun up, you'll find Zendesk to be much easier to implement. Unless you're going crazy with integrations, etc - you might not even need a biz ops admin to help.

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