Before we talk about Zoho Desk let’s do a quick history lesson. Having grown up in the Call Center Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry as a second gen has provided me a front row seat to back office technology. I have used technologies like Wilke and Astute to Right Now Technology and NetSuite all trying to be the best tool possible. Each of these companies brought a new unique opportunity to businesses and customers. Then in the majority of cases bought or merged into other technologies and became a lesser version of themselves. Then from these companies came a solution that I was a HUGE fan of for a long time, ZenDesk. 

ZenDesk became my chosen replacement for Right Now Technology when they were destroyed by their acquisition by Oracle. I helped countless companies get set-up on ZenDesk with success for their CX team. The problem we quickly discovered through was with cross data comparison for customer success mapping. The solution ZenDesk provided early on was through their partnerships with Sugar and SalesForce, but that just led to massive cost issues. That final piece is what put me on the hunt for something new, and this little tool on the Zoho Desk website is where I found my solution.

The world of customer experience is a hard place to demand budget. Most businesses still, incorrectly, view customer service as a pure cost center of their business and do everything possible to cut costs. That is why many of us CX executives have learned quickly to always look to find the best tools we can at the best price. I think the image above speaks for its self on why I had to look at Zoho Desk for my team.

Beyond cost savings Zoho was quick to push to me their standard list of things they do better which I have shared above. But, for me though this was great the real win came from a creative question we asked that changed the way our whole company operates. The question I asked was, “how do you guys use Desk internally?”

I learned long ago when you can find out how a software company eats their own dog food you can find the key to use the software to the full potential. Zoho did not let me down when the sales engineer shared with me that they use it for both internal and internal support tickets through department separation. 

Now I know this may not mean much to most of you, but the ability for internal team members to put in tickets on a customer that can be tracked and managed separate from external tickets is a HUGE opportunity to become “PROACTIVE”! A term that is very rare in the CX world as most of CS is reactionary. 

We can get proactive in CX through internal ticketing as many times most issues are discovered prior to a customer even knowing they exist. The problem is most businesses do not have an easy way for internal staff to enter these issues and route them to the people who can fix them quickly and effectively. On top of all that most case management systems expose the full history to companies whereby exposing a company’s dirty laundry when most of us would prefer to handle that without anyone seeing it. Plus, the ability to tie all this back natively into my CRM for a full customer record allows for Business Intelligence data like never before.

Yes, I know you can do all this with ZenDesk but where my issue came in was the cost and time to integrate is all. When I take the costs of ZenDesk at $149 ($89 for basic) plus Salesforce $150 ($30 or $75 for basic) I am not at $300 /user and not even gotten into my agent’s telephony needs. In the end I was looking at a price tag closer to $400 per agent vs. $35 per agent with Zoho One. Let’s just be real there was no discussion I could have in the world that would get my executive team to not go Zoho.

To Your Success & Prosperity,

Michael McMillan