The Helpdesks: Desk.com, Freshdesk, Zendesk

We’ve added our Product Evaluation Report on Freshdesk to our library of in-depth, framework-based reports on customer service software. We put this report on the shelf, so to speak, next to our Product Evaluation Reports on Desk.com and Zendesk. The three products are quite a set. They’re similar in many ways, remarkably so. Here are a few of those similarities:

The products are “helpdesks,” apps designed to provide an organization’s customers (or users) with information and support about the organization’s products and services. Hence, their names are (alphabetically) Desk.com, Freshdesk, and Zendesk.

They have the same sets of customer service apps and those apps have very similar capabilities: case management, knowledge management and community/forum with a self-service web portal and search, social customer service supporting Facebook and Twitter, chat, and telephone/contact center. Case management is the core app and a key strength for all of the products. Each has business rules-based facilities to automate case management tasks. On the other hand, knowledge management and search are pretty basic in all of them.

The three also include reporting capabilities and facilities for integrating external apps. Reporting has limitations in all three. Integration is excellent across the board.

These are products that deploy in the cloud. They support the same browsers and all three also have native apps for Android and iOS devices.

All three are packaged and priced in tiers/levels/editions of functionality. Their licensing is by subscription with monthly, per user license fees.

Simple, easy to learn and easy to use, and cross/multi/omni-channel are the ways that the suppliers position these offerings. Our evaluations were based on trial deployments for each of the three products. We found that all of them support these positioning elements very well.

Small (very small, too) and mid-sized businesses across industries in all geographies are their best fits, although the suppliers would like to move up market. The three products have very large customer bases—somewhere around 30,000 accounts for Desk.com and Zendesk and more than 50,000 accounts for Freshdesk per a claim in August from Freshdesk’s CEO. Note that Desk.com was introduced in 2010, Freshdesk in 2011, and Zendesk in 2004.

Suppliers’ internal development organizations design, build, and maintain the products. All three suppliers have used acquisitions to extend and improve product capabilities.

While the products are similar, the three suppliers are quite different. Salesforce.com, offers Desk.com. Salesforce is a publicly held, San Francisco, CA based, $8 billion corporation founded in 1999. Salesforce has multiple product lines. Freshdesk Inc., offers Freshdesk. It’s a privately held corporation founded in 2010 and based in Chennai, India. Zendesk, Inc. offers Zendesk. This company was founded in 2007 in Denmark and reincorporated in the US in 2009. It’s publicly held and based in San Francisco, CA. Revenues in 2015 were more than $200 million.

These differences—public vs. private, young vs. old(er), large vs. small(er), single product line vs. multiple product line—will certainly influence many selection decisions. However, all three are viable suppliers and all three are leaders in customer service software. The supplier risk in selecting Desk.com, Freshdesk, or Zendesk is small.

Then, where are the differences that result in making a selection decision? The differences are in the ways that the products’ developers have implemented the customer service applications. The differences become clear from actually using the products. Having actually used all three products in our research, we’ve learned the differences and we’ve documented them in our Product Evaluation Reports. Read them to understand the differences and to understand how those differences match your requirements. There’s no best among Desk.com, Freshdesk, and Zendesk but one of them will be best for you.

For example, here’s the summary of Freshdesk evaluation, the grades that the product earned on our Customer Service Report Card. “Freshdesk earns a mixed Report Card—Exceeds Requirements grades in Capabilities, Product Management, Case Management, and Customer Service Integration, Meets Requirements grades in Product Marketing, Supplier Viability, and Social Customer Service, but Needs Improvement grades in Knowledge Management, Findability, and Reporting and Analysis.”

Case Management is where Freshdesk has its most significant differences, differences from its large set of case management services and facilities, its support for case management teams, its automation of case management tasks, and its easy to learn, easy to use case management tools. For example, Arcade is one of Freshdesk’s facilities for supporting case management teams. Arcade is a collection of these three, optional gamification facilities that sets and tracks goals for agents’ customer service activities.

• Agents earn Points for resolving Tickets in a fast and timely manner and lose points for being late and for having dissatisfied customers, accumulating points toward reaching six predefined skill levels.
• Arcade lets agents earn “trophies” for monthly Ticket management performance. In addition,
• Arcade awards bonus points for achieving customer service “Quests” such as forum participation or publishing knowledgebase Solutions.

Arcade lets administrators configure Arcade’s points and skill levels. Its Trophies and Quests have predefined goals; however, administrators can set Quests on or off. The Illustration below shows the workspace that administrators use to configure Points.

Freshdesk can be a Customer Service Best Fit for many small and mid-sized organizations. Is it a Best Fit for your? Read our Report to understand why and how.

Zendesk, Customer Service Software That’s Easy to Evaluate

Zendesk Product Evaluation

Zendesk is the customer service offering from Zendesk, Inc. a publicly held, San Francisco, CA based software supplier with 1,000 employees that was founded in 2004. The product provides cloud-based, cross-channel case management, knowledge management, communities and collaboration, and social customer service capabilities across assisted-service, self-service, and social customer service channels.

We evaluated Zendesk against our Evaluation Framework for Customer Service and published our Product Evaluation Report on October 22. Zendesk earned a very good Report Card—Exceeds Requirements grades in Product History and Strategy, Case Management, and Customer Service Integration, and Meets Requirements grades for all other criteria but one, Social Customer Service. Its Needs Improvement grade in Social Customer Service is less an issue with packaged capabilities than it is a requirement for a specialized external app designed for and positioned for wide and deep monitoring of social networks.

Evaluation Framework

Our Evaluation Framework considers an offering’s functionality and implementation, what a product does and how it does it. It also considers the supplier and the supplier’s product marketing (positioning, target markets, packaging and pricing, competition) and product management (release history and cycle, development approach, strategy and plans) for the offering.

We rely on the supplier for product marketing and product management information. First we gather that info from the supplier’s website and press releases and, if the supplier is publicly held, from the supplier’s SEC filings. We speak directly with the supplier for anything else in these areas.

For functionality and implementation, the supplier typically gives us (frequently under NDA) access to the product’s user and developer documentation, the manuals and help files that licensees get. In this era of cloud computing, we’ve been more and more frequently getting access to the product, itself, through online trials. We also read any supplier’s patents and patent applications to learn about the technology foundation of functionality and implementation.

In addition, we entertain the supplier’s presentations and demonstrations. They’re useful to get a feel for the style of the product and the supplier and to understand future capabilities. However, to really understand the product, there’s no substitute for actual usage (where we drive) and/or documentation.

Our research process includes insisting that the supplier reviews and provides feedback on a draft of the Product Evaluation Report. This review process ensures that we respect any NDA, improves the accuracy and usefulness of the information in the report, and prevents embarrassing the supplier and us.

Ease of Evaluation, a New Evaluation Criterion

Our frameworks have never had an Ease of Evaluation criterion. We’ve always figured that we’d do the work to make your evaluation and selection of products easier, faster, and less costly. Our evaluation of Zendesk has us rethinking that. We’ve learned that our Product Evaluation Reports can speed and shorten your evaluation and selection process but that your process doesn’t end with our reports. You do additional evaluation, modifying and extending our criteria or adding criteria for criteria to represent requirements specific to your organization, your business, and/or application for a product. Understanding Ease of Evaluation can further speed and shorten your evaluation and selection process.

So, beginning with our next Product Evaluation Report, you’ll find that Ease of Evaluation criterion in our framework.

Zendesk Was Very Easy to Evaluate

By the way, Zendesk would earn an Exceeds Requirements grade for Ease of Evaluation. We did a 30-day trial of the product. We signed-up for the trial online—no waiting. During the trial we submitted cases to Zendesk Support and we used the Zendesk community forums. In addition, Zendesk.com provided a wealth of detailed information about the product, including technical specifications and a published RESTful API.

Scroll down to the bottom of Zendesk.com’s home page to see a list of UNDER THE HOOD links.

Looking at the UNDER THE HOOD links in a bit more detail:

• Apps and integrations is a link to a marketplace for third party apps. Currently there are more than 300 of them.
• Developer API is a link to the documentation of Zendesk’s RESTful, JavaScript API. It lists and comprehensively describes more than100 services.
• Mobile SDK is a link to documentation for Android and iOS SDKs and for the Web Widget API. (The Web Widget embeds Zendesk functionality such as ticketing and knowledgebase search in a website.)
• Security is a link to descriptions of security-related features descriptions lists of Zendesk’s security compliance certifications and memberships.
• Tech Specs is a link to a comprehensive collection of documents that describe Zendesk’s functionality and implementation.
• What’s new is a link to high-level descriptions of recently added capabilities
• Uptime is a link to info and charts about the availability of Zendesk Inc.’s cloud computing infrastructure
• Legal is a link to a description of the Terms of Service of the Zendesk offering

We spent considerable time in Tech Specs and Developer API. We found the content to be comprehensive, well organized and easy to access, and well written. The combination of the product trial and UNDER THE HOOD made Zendesk easy to evaluate. And, we did not have to sign an NDA for access to any of this information.

Many suppliers make their offerings as easy to evaluate as Zendesk, Inc. made Zendesk for us. On the other hand, many suppliers are not quite so willing to share detailed information about their products and, especially their underlying technologies. Products and technologies are, after all, software suppliers’ key IP. They have every right to protect this information. They don’t feel that patent protection is enough. Their offerings are much harder to evaluate at the level of our Product Evaluation Reports.

Consider Products That Are Easy to Evaluate

We feel as you should feel that in-depth evaluations are essential to the selection of customer service products. You’ll be spending very significant time and money to deploy and maintain these products. You should never rely on supplier presentations and demonstrations to justify those expenditures. Certainly rely on our reports and use them as the basis for your further, deeper evaluation, including our new Ease of Evaluation criterion. Put those suppliers that facilitate these evaluations on your short lists.