As experts in innovative customer support, our team is knowledgeable about a wide range of support products (not just Service Cloud). In fact, we’ve worked with many fast growing companies who started out with a lightweight support tool like Zendesk when they only had a handful of agents.
Many of those same companies have come back to us as Zendesk fails to scale with their growth and increasingly complex support needs. Why do our clients end up moving from Zendesk to Service Cloud? Read on for details from our implementation experience (looking for a comparison of Service Cloud and RightNow? Check out our post on moving to Service Cloud from RightNow).
Having completed many end-to-end migrations, here are three common reasons for a support organization to choose Service Cloud over Zendesk:
- 360 Customer View
- Service Cloud is fully connected to the rest of the Salesforce platform – allowing companies to build a truly 360 degree view of their customers, with sales, support, marketing and all other data in one place.
- Zendesk is 100% support focused. While integrations to CRM systems like Salesforce exist, they are limited and require development resources to modify or extend.
- Customization
- Whether it’s developing fully branded customer experiences or taking agent efficiency to the next level, the Force.com platform offers an unparalleled level of customization and development options.
- Zendesk provides many well designed features out of the box, but when companies grow and need to modify their public knowledge base or portal (for example) they find they are limited to basic CSS changes.
- Enterprise Class Support
- Service Cloud provides a host of features to support both SMB and Enterprise. From a streamlined view of interaction history with the Case Feed to complex Entitlements and SLA tracking, Service Cloud supports organizations of all sizes.
- Managing anything beyond a few ticket views, simple routing logic, and a limited number of queues, becomes cumbersome and painful in Zendesk. The system also lacks basic features critical to enterprise level support (3rd party CTI support, guided scripting, KCS, the list goes on)
In short – while Zendesk offers great out of the box support features, many of our clients end up quickly hitting a wall. Having scalability challenges of your own? Leave us a comment or get in touch!
Have you seen any customers from ServiceNow move to Salesforce Service Cloud? ServiceNow seems to be tackling a lot of the enterprise needs and could be a better comparison to Service Cloud.
I think it depends on which ServiceNow application you may be referring to and size of the company. With the announcement of the GE Digital acquisition of ServiceNow from a field service position, yes that changes things. Zendesk customers are often smaller support organizations that experience rapid growth and need the connection to other Salesforce solutions.