Despite being a little more than 10 years old, Zendesk has emerged as an industry favourite when it comes to contact centres and customer service management. Zendesk went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014 and now boasts of approximately USD 598 million in revenues. Also, the company has customers in 160 countries across the globe, positioning it squarely among the world’s leading contact centre providers.
Zendesk has a number of applications in its suite, including self-service, customer support, live chat, sales automation, analytics, and marketing campaigns.
Today, we are going to review Zendesk’s specialised call centre software – Zendesk Talk.
Inside Zendesk Talk
Zendesk covers all the basics required for contact centre telephony, as well as text messaging compatibility, robust reporting, and a host of useful integrations. Importantly, Zendesk is built on Twilio’s Cloud Communication infrastructure – a company that’s behind the operations at Walmart, Coca-Cola, and Salesforce, to name a few.
Let’s now review Zendesk Talk’s bevvy of features in greater detail:
- Basic calling functionalities – Zendesk Talk offers both toll-free and local numbers from 40+ countries; you could also port in an existing number if you have one available. There are unlimited inbound calls, automated tickets from voicemail, and customised greetings for every brand or department. These features make Zendesk really easy to use for everyday contact centre activities
- Call control and governance – With Zendesk Talk, you don’t need a telephone or separate hardware to connect with customers. The central console provides complete ownership, with built-in routing, call hold, mute and unmute. You can create a blacklist so that fraudulent callers are automatically disconnected. There’s also features for improving the call experience – agents can use warm transfer to consult a colleague before handover, or they can even loop in a supervisor via conference calling
- Routing and queuing – Multi-level interactive voice response (IVR) guides customers to the right call channel, and even offers ready answers to frequently asked queries. If you’re not sure about the right agent to take a call, you can opt for group routing where the customer is directed to a specific team on Zendesk. Maximum wait times and queue size ensures that your agents are never overburdened, and any interaction beyond a threshold is sent to voicemail. Finally, there are pre-set business hours to limit workloads and after-hour routing so that you can distribute calls better across a global agent-employee base
- SMS support – Like telephony, you can choose either a toll-free or local number. We liked that customers can send even images, videos, and emoticons – and you can respond without missing a beat. This is extremely useful in case of product complaints where a buyer might want to send you a screenshot. Zendesk Talk also comes with advanced capabilities such as macros, triggers and other business automation, simplifying scalability
- Monitoring & reports – call metrics are available in the form of both real-time and historical dashboards. There’s advanced analytics to evaluate the role of voice calls in your overall customer service strategy. You can also use real-time dashboards to maintain call quality, promptly “barging” into calls, if quality dips below a certain threshold
Why Zendesk Talk Makes a Difference
Like Salesforce in sales automation or HubSpot in outbound marketing, Zendesk, in many ways, has become synonymous with call centre technology. Apart from Talk, there’s a host of other products that can be easily integrated to build a robust infrastructure for your contact centre. And when it comes to functionality, we must say that Zendesk covers the ground extremely well. We particularly liked its real-time dashboard support and MMS compatibility. And the fact that it’s built on Twilio means service availability will never be an issue.
Zendesk comes with stellar customer support with a sizable library of online resources to help you get started. So, whether you’re already in the Zendesk ecosystem or looking for a business telephony solution that can be easily scaled up, implementation will be a breeze.
What We Think
Zendesk is backed by years of experience and over 3,000 employees across the globe. It’s used by 145,000 businesses around the world – which means you’re in good company.
Zendesk Talk is competitively priced starting as low as £0 per agent per month (you only pay for the minutes used) and goes up to £69 per agent per month, where you get an enterprise-grade offering and 99.95% SLA assurance. Like all other solutions in Zendesk’s kitty, Talk is a compelling tool if you’re young, ambitious, and fast-growing.
