Zendesk Review and Pricing Plans

Why We Chose Zendesk as the Best CRM for Complete Customer Life Cycle

Zendesk began and grew as a complete service solution and ticketing platform. The company’s sales-focused CRM is built on the same philosophy of providing efficient, personalized customer experiences to grow revenue and enhance customer satisfaction. Features such as sales forecasting provide a clear picture of predicted revenue or the lifetime value of a new customer, helping you determine which opportunities to prioritize. 

The platform’s built-in phone and text messaging service, Voice, is available on all plans and helps you accelerate lead generation and nurture leads, while seamlessly logging the conversations in your CRM. At the same time, the generous data enrichment allowance enables you to instantly gather available contact information to identify decision-makers and concentrate your outreach efforts. Additional features, like sales triggers and sequences, can help you automate administrative work, freeing you to give your customers your full attention. 

We particularly liked how Zendesk Suite and Sell worked together to support lead generation, cross-selling and lead qualification. By integrating the customer service and CRM platforms, Zendesk enables your team to deliver a tailored sales experience and convert leads into loyal customers with an exceptional post-sales support experience.

Usability

The home dashboard’s drag-and-drop widgets make Zendesk Sell easy to customize for anyone with experience using a CRM for sales. If you’re new to this type of platform, you can use the many “Learn more” links in the widget selector to see more about each option and build the best dashboard for your requirements. In addition to selecting widgets for your home dashboard, you can resize them and add filters for a truly custom view. 

The Home screen also offers easy access to the Activity Feed, allowing managers to review the latest deals and lead updates at a glance. They can get a full overview or zoom in on specific updates using custom filters. 

Your daily sales workflow is built around your assigned tasks, which could include cold calling, follow-up emails or new deal creation. We like that instead of treating your tasks as a static to-do list, you’ll “play” them through the Task Player. This focused work mode provides you with all the context needed to complete your tasks for the day. The player automatically brings you to the lead, contact or deal card associated with the task, presenting key information like your lead’s active notes, experience with your product, and previous conversation history. 

Zendesk Features

Prospecting and Data Enrichment with Reach

Most Zendesk plans include a limited number of monthly prospecting and enrichment credits. You can spend these credits using the Reach tool to generate valuable data about an existing lead — such as the company size, phone number or market capitalization — to help build a comprehensive profile. There’s a minimum amount of information required to access this enrichment feature. To enhance a company profile, you’ll need its name and website, and to obtain more details on a lead, you’ll need their email address. You can also enrich your leads in bulk with up to 1,000 people or companies at a time.

If you don’t have any information about a specific lead, contact or company, or want to broaden your lead generation reach, you can use a prospecting credit. In this case, Reach will offer you a list of relevant companies, and you can narrow down the search by using filters to focus on a particular country, industry, business type or category, company size, or raised capital. You can then review the key prospects within the identified companies and select the ones you’d like to export into your CRM. Their profiles will be automatically enriched with the available data, making them ready to join your sales cycle. Reach is powered by Clearbit, a data engine for customer interactions that draws from more than 44 million businesses and 50 million prospect records.

Integrations

Zendesk has one of the largest app marketplaces, with nearly 1,500 available software integrations, and most are free to install and use. Although most of the integrations were introduced to bolster Zendesk’s service product, you’ll find numerous sales-specific apps to enhance your platform’s features across categories such as lead generation, quoting, billing, social media and productivity. While Zendesk Sell allows you to connect to just over a hundred apps, businesses can also use Zapier or the platform’s API to access the rest of their favorite tools easily. 

Smart Lists and Templates

Available with all plans, this feature allows you to save and reuse your custom filtered data lists across leads, contacts and deals. For example, you can filter your leads by the date they were added to the system, their place in your sales pipeline, their potential value as a customer or one of the many other criteria that are most valuable to your business. You can then save the filtered smart list to quickly access it from the Working Center in the future. As you generate new leads, your smart lists will automatically add the appropriate contacts based on the criteria you’ve selected. With an active lead-generation strategy in place, you can easily filter new leads and identify the hottest ones that deserve your immediate attention. 

What’s more, you can create smart list templates to share with others at your organization, streamlining the sales process and boosting productivity across the team. 

Sell Voice

Zendesk Sell offers a built-in calling and messaging platform, Sell Voice, which makes it much easier to prospect and nurture leads, without leaving your CRM. Voice provides each sales rep with a unique phone number that can be used for direct calling, sending text messages and setting up a power dialer for accelerated outreach. As you can dial a lead directly from their contact card, you have all the essential information, like previous interactions, associated deals and team notes, at hand for an informed conversation. With Sell Voice, you can also record calls for future reference, log call results, add call scripts, start a conference call with another team member and create call lists to launch a power dialer. 

Each new Zendesk user starts with Sell Voice credit, equivalent to 50 minutes of talk time. After that, the standard call charges will apply. However, there is no limit on the number of text messages that can be sent from the app. 

Zendesk Suite integration

Zendesk Suite is a separate solution with an additional subscription cost, but in our opinion, it is well worth the added expense. Zendesk Sell and Zendesk Support (as part of Zendesk Suite) can be easily integrated to create a close connection between customer service and sales. The integration grants your entire team visibility into the customer journey. By reviewing customer pain points and latest sales requests, your service team can offer tailored support and boost customer satisfaction. At the same time, your sales and marketing teams can review the latest tickets and requests associated with a contact, allowing them to accurately time and tailor their upselling and cross-selling efforts. We found this combination helpful for both building customer loyalty and nurturing leads to grow your business. 

Zendesk Cost

Zendesk offers monthly and annual payment options for each of its four sales-focused CRM products, with discounts of around 20 percent for annual subscribers, depending on the plan you choose. In addition to Zendesk Sell, the company offers a basic email customer support platform starting at $19 per agent per month and an omnichannel service suite starting at $55 per user per month. While you cannot mix and match plans within your company, you can switch your plan at any time. None of the Zendesk Sell plans comes with a minimum or maximum number of seats.

If you want to combine Zendesk’s CRM capabilities with AI-powered customer service features to provide a full-cycle service, you’ll also need a subscription to Zendesk Suite. The good news is you can trial it alongside the CRM, easily switching between the two platforms. There is a monthly cost on top of Zendesk Sell, and the platform is available in the following plans:

• Suite Team: Priced at $55 per agent per month, the Team level of Zendesk Suite provides your business with a ticketing system, help center and an analytics dashboard, as well as AI agents, automated resolution reporting and AI-powered generative search capabilities that are well worth the price tag for businesses that want to get serious about omnichannel customer service. 
• Suite Growth: At $89 per agent per month, the Growth tier expands on Team’s core offerings with a customer self-service portal, multiple ticket formats, limited access agents, service level agreements (SLAs), and customer satisfaction ratings (CSAT), helping you better understand each customer as an individual and gather feedback on your agents’ performance.
• Suite Professional: For $115 per agent per month, Suite becomes a powerful tool that enhances employee experiences and includes collaborative issue resolution and smart routing for tailored support, community forums, access to Zendesk’s Sunshine messaging platform, and the option to enable the advanced AI add-on that helps streamline service workflows and provides teams with actionable insights and suggestions to enhance decision-making. This tier is also HIPAA compliant, making it suitable to use for healthcare organizations as their customer service platform.
• Suite Enterprise: At $169 per agent per month, this top service tier offers contextual workspaces that unlock dynamic, condition-based ticket interfaces, custom agent roles and permissions, real-time analytics, content blocks, sandbox environment, and access to the advanced data privacy and protection add-on for enhanced security.   

In addition to the core Zendesk Sell offerings, businesses can also benefit from a range of paid add-ons, including Copilot AI assistant, Zendesk Workforce Management solution, Zendesk Quality Assurance, Advanced Data Privacy and Protection, and Contact Center. 

Zendesk Setup

The average CRM onboarding and implementation process can take anywhere from a few days for a new business to more than a month for a large enterprise migrating a significant amount of customer and sales pipeline data. As with most other CRMs we reviewed, you can start by importing your existing sales data or choose to build your account, deals and leads from scratch. Zendesk offers helpful setup checklists and quick tutorials to accelerate the process.   

To help reduce the learning curve for setting up and running your CRM, Zendesk offers an in-depth catalog of on-demand training resources, courses and certification programs. The materials are organized by role for admins, agents, developers, customer experience analysts and sales teams. For $350, the company also offers a Digital Launch Package that includes a curated set of learning paths and training materials, as well as access to a consultant-led live training session. This offer can be particularly helpful for small and medium-sized businesses looking to get up and running with the platform quickly. Large businesses can speed up the process with the Professional Services add-on, which includes data migration and configuration, with a custom price quote.

Zendesk Customer Service

All Zendesk Sell plans come with online access to customer support during business hours, as well as an option to request a callback. When we reached out via online chat, the representative got back to us within 15 minutes, quickly and competently answering all of our questions. 

Zendesk also offers a paid Premier service plan available in three tiers: Essentials, Support and Enterprise. All Premier plans come with 24/7 support, a one-hour response time guarantee and priority routing. The Support tier also includes a designated Premier Support Engineer (PSE) for ongoing performance monitoring, monthly health checks and key event management. The top-tier plan adds a designated Technical Account Manager (TAM) to bring consistency across your technology projects, including a roadmap to optimize your CRM, as well as access to Zendesk certifications.

For large corporations, the Professional Services add-on provides platform configuration, solution design and consulting services for data migration, and custom apps. Zendesk does not list the pricing for its service add-ons and plans.

Zendesk Drawbacks

Zendesk’s limited customer support options fall short of those offered by its competitors, which often provide 24/7 customer service with their middle- and upper-tier plans. Meanwhile, even on the Sell Enterprise plan, users will have to purchase a separate add-on to access 24/7 phone support — a feature that is usually standard with most other top-tier CRM plans. Without transparent pricing for these service add-ons, it’s difficult to accurately compare Zendesk with other platforms in this area. 

Additionally, analytics and reporting features offered on the entry-level Team plan are limited compared to the competition, with users having access to pre-built sales reports only. Team users also have to wait 24 hours for data to be refreshed and cannot share their dashboards with other users. The tier is also missing key reporting tools, like goal tracking and scheduled report delivery.

Most notably, while the integration with Zendesk Support (as part of Zendesk Suite) offers a company-wide visibility into customer data and enhances communication between sales and support teams, the contact information is not synced between the apps. This creates a risk of duplicate efforts and outdated information, which can negatively impact customer communication.  

Methodology

Our editorial team and contributing writers considered all of the major CRM software providers for our review. After performing our initial research into each platform, we selected 13 of the leading CRM solutions based on what they’re best for, and took a deeper dive into the following available today for small businesses: Salesforce, monday Sales CRM, Freshsales, Zoho, Oracle NetSuite, HubSpot, Pipedrive and Zendesk. After spending many hours participating in live product demos and testing each platform, we identified the best use cases for 13 providers to help small business owners and managers choose the best CRM for their needs. We also took a deeper dive with nine of our top performers, providing greater insight into the CRM features and tools that separate these CRMs from the competition. 

Zendesk provides businesses with the tools needed to reach more qualified prospects in less time, enrich contact data to identify the decision-makers, automate email sequences to engage with prospects efficiently, and follow up with post-sales support to build loyalty and turn leads into lifelong customers.

Overall Value

We recommend Zendesk for …

• Businesses that already use Zendesk Support or Zendesk Suite to manage their customer service requests and want to implement a CRM for a full-cycle customer experience.
• Sales teams that spend a large portion of their time making phone calls.
• Sales teams that want to quickly grow their contact database and identify decision-makers with AI-powered prospecting and enrichment tools. 

We don’t recommend Zendesk for …

• Large businesses that don’t want to pay extra for 24/7 customer service and phone support.
• Small businesses that want more than very basic, pre-built reports and analytics with an entry-level service plan.
• Businesses whose customer support and sales teams want to work off a unified and synced contact list.  

Nadia Reckmann contributed to the reporting and writing in this article.