Service Cloud is a customer service platform that helps businesses manage and resolve customer inquiries and issues. It provides tools for case management, knowledge base, omni-channel support, automation, and analytics, enabling companies to deliver exceptional customer service experiences.
$25
per month
Zendesk Talk
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Zendesk Talk is call center software built on the Twilio cloud communication platform that integrates with the Zendesk Support ticketing system. This allows customer service teams to provide phone support from the same platform they use to manage all other channels.
Salesforce is lightyears behind Zendesk. You have to be trained as a Salesforce admin to do anything, while Zendesk takes minutes to set up and is actually customer friendly. There are not native telephony options within Salesforce and the tools you use to integrate are …
Salesforce had the most flexibility, features and integrations. They were also so tightly integrated in with opportunity management and case management. I love having the ability to create custom objects to solve any kind of business problem. There is also a lot of …
It's natively built into the user experience, the others rely on outside apps to integrate into their platform. You can set up a Zendesk Talk account within minutes and have a phone number ready for customers to contact you.
Features
Salesforce Service Cloud
Zendesk Talk
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
Salesforce Service Cloud
8.8
77 Ratings
9% above category average
Zendesk Talk
-
Ratings
Organize and prioritize service tickets
9.475 Ratings
00 Ratings
Expert directory
8.553 Ratings
00 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications
8.663 Ratings
00 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation
8.260 Ratings
00 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission
9.375 Ratings
00 Ratings
Ticket response
9.174 Ratings
00 Ratings
Self Help Community
Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
Salesforce Service Cloud
8.7
72 Ratings
10% above category average
Zendesk Talk
-
Ratings
External knowledge base
8.463 Ratings
00 Ratings
Internal knowledge base
8.970 Ratings
00 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
Salesforce Service Cloud
8.7
77 Ratings
11% above category average
Zendesk Talk
-
Ratings
Customer portal
8.054 Ratings
00 Ratings
IVR
8.834 Ratings
00 Ratings
Social integration
8.947 Ratings
00 Ratings
Email support
9.276 Ratings
00 Ratings
Help Desk CRM integration
8.866 Ratings
00 Ratings
Contact Center Software
Comparison of Contact Center Software features of Product A and Product B
Salesforce Service Cloud
-
Ratings
Zendesk Talk
7.8
16 Ratings
6% below category average
Agent dashboard
00 Ratings
9.916 Ratings
Validate callers
00 Ratings
6.012 Ratings
Outbound response
00 Ratings
10.014 Ratings
Call forwarding
00 Ratings
8.915 Ratings
Click-to-call (CTC)
00 Ratings
10.013 Ratings
Warm transfer
00 Ratings
9.912 Ratings
Predictive dialing
00 Ratings
5.08 Ratings
Interactive voice response
00 Ratings
10.010 Ratings
REST APIs
00 Ratings
5.07 Ratings
Call scripts
00 Ratings
7.06 Ratings
Call tracking
00 Ratings
9.914 Ratings
Multichannel integration
00 Ratings
5.110 Ratings
CRM software integration
00 Ratings
5.09 Ratings
Workforce Optimization (WFO)
Comparison of Workforce Optimization (WFO) features of Product A and Product B
It is a helpful tool, but it can be a bit cumbersome to manage. It is also a bit expensive, but we already use CRM for Salesforce and it is convenient to be able to immediately tag contacts and accounts when the tickets come into the system and tie them directly to the account. I do know an integration with Jira is possible (we use Jira internally for our engineering team to escalate issues) but it is not configured right now so managing the connection between support tickets and Jira tickets is manual and hard to keep up with
Zendesk Talk is a great partner that helps us in the customer care area by managing every type of contact with customers (both phone calls and emails). I know there is also the possibility to have integration with instant messaging apps (like messenger and WhatsApp but I have never used them in my experience). In my opinion, the best scenario for Zendesk Talk is represented by a context with a high amount of contacts/requests where a unique platform could be a help both on the external side (customers) and on the internal side (a lot of colleagues who are working in the same area and have to work in a coordinate way). For customers, they could benefit from tailor-made answers, also based on past contacts for the same topic, and avoid waiting times during phone calls, with an immediate follow-up. For internal work management, operators don't overlap in a single request, and even if the same operator is not available the one who manages the request later has complete visibility of the entire topic from the historical point of view. Last but not least, I think that Zendesk Talk helps a lot in the context in which the request's speed is a KPI to manage constantly.
The lag on the phone is by far the most annoying thing with Zendesk talk due to the voice over IP.
Using the Reporting feature in Zendesk has never been a walk in the park. We have to customize a lot of fields and when something doesn't seem to add up, it at times feels like pulling teeth to get to the final answer of what went wrong.
Professional edition works best for a small company with lower call volumes and is very useful but as you grow exponetially I think it has limited ability to do all the things we want to - SLA management, defect, release management to name a few. Reports and dashboards being available in real time.
I had Salesforce experience prior to using Service Cloud which made it a little easier to learn and navigate, but overall my team (some who had no Salesforce experience) caught on very quickly and found Service Cloud to be easy to use.
Everything about it works, as I have previously detailed. Coming from different companies and using other tools like Twilio or Aircall, those are VOIP tools that are built to be plugged into other tools, Zendesk Talk is natively built into Zendesk and feels correct in the user experience of Zendesk
Salesforce's Trust Center clearly communicates occasional issues to anyone who subscribes, down to an organization's cloud instance. Bundled sandboxes ease updates, and seasonal upgrades are seamless, scheduled well in advance with plenty of information about what's coming. Support agents have noticed intermittent Omni-Channel disconnects due to internet connections, and these are clearly notified.
The Salesforce Service Cloud generally has very good performance, however the overall new Lightning user experience can bring that down. For example, if you have too many tabs open, then it can take a while for the Lightning UI to load. This UI is probably not well equipped to handle loading of all of that information at once, but Users tend to leave their tabs open all day long. It can also be fickle depending on which browser you use, what extensions you have installed, and whether you've cleared your cache. This can be the downfall with any software as a service though, not just Salesforce
Salesforce offers support, although it generally gets routed to overseas support teams first, and once they are unable to help, it gets escalated up the chain to higher tiers. Frequently, the answer back from support is that there is no native solution, and we either have to turn to the AppExchange for some solution provided by another developer, or custom build our own solution.
In our experience, we have had to go through many support people then ultimately getting frustrated enough to go directly to our point of contact who then doesn't always seem to be able to assist. We tend to get the support we need when it is escalated up to me and I reach out to our point of a contact person to express our frustration.
Our in-person training was provided by our implementation partner and it was quite good. This was in part because we were already working with them and so it naturally leant itself to a good training relationship. And because they were building our customizations and configuring things, they could then provide training on those things naturally.
Trailheads are great but it was often unclear what actually applied to our organization. This made it difficult to get a whole lot out of it. Part of it is that because the basic Salesforce features didn't quite work for us, we had to add customizations, which then nullified a lot of the training.
I would go through an implementation very differently knowing what I know now. It was difficult coming from systems we liked in post-sales service and having to adapt to the clunky and underwhelming feature set in Salesforce. I would trim back our expectations
Salesforce service cloud is more configurable than Zendesk and Freshdesk. It has its own inbuilt AI chatbot also which further improves service agent efficiency. Salesforce is more integration agnostic and has pre-built connectors with multiple 3rd party systems. However, in terms of pricing it is priced at a premium compared to the other solutions
Slack and Zoom phones cannot compare because they have no ticketing systems. Zendesk Talk was the only option we considered because we were already using Zendesk for our email ticketing with customer concerns. We then expanded to using Zendesk's chatbot and then the Zendesk Talk system to keep it all integrated and streamlined.
Because this is a cloud service, the security, implementation framework and feature list is very mature and you don't have to develop these during implementation.
The larger the implementation programme the better the licensing arrangements
Free developer toolkit for proof of concepts or showcasing features
We were able to reduce global headcount by 20% in our call centers.
Allowing customers to leave voicemails creates the personal touch needed and really increases our customer connectivity score. We saw increases in our CSAT scores after the implementation of this solution.
Call handling time and case reopen rates both decreased. Y/y it decreased 18% and 60%.