Comment by ineedasername

5 years ago

What happened to ZenDesk? (And I mean that literally, not a rhetorical question)

I remember when they were the breath of fresh air in terms of online support, the disruptor.

Did they get worse? (Apart from prices increase) or did the expected standards increase and pass them by?

16 comments

ineedasername

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edoceo  5 years ago

Classic cycle. Enter market, disrupt, get fat and lazy, raise prices, drop quality, create space for next organism.

Circle of life.

  • unclebucknasty  5 years ago

    >Enter market, disrupt, get fat and lazy, raise prices, drop quality

    Exactly this. But, it's funny how a brand's image sticks. I selected Zendesk for a business I ran years ago. And it was the slow-boiling frog experience, where it takes time to ultimately realize the rift between where you started and where you are. But we hobbled along due mainly to switching friction.

    Still, I instinctively reached for them when evaluating support solutions recently, based on name and familiarity alone. But, with fresh eyes, it was immediately obvious that they were a complete nonstarter.

    MailChimp's the same. They may not have ever been the lowest-priced solution, but time was they made it easy to get started and the value was there for a startup/small-biz. Now, they're trying to be quasi-enterprise with an over-priced bloated feature set.

    These guys start disrupting by aiming for simplicity in a value-priced, pro-small customer offering. Then, in the pursuit of endless growth, they raise prices and become staunchly anti-customer in favor of their own economic objectives.

    Would be nice to see companies continue to maintain their disposition to original customers and ethos, but pursue growth through new options that are truly optional and not subsidized by the entire user base. That, and adding new, complementary product lines that still retain that original ethos.

  • PragmaticPulp  5 years ago

    Can you cite specific problems with ZenDesk? Or name competitors that do things better?

    Or are you making a general comment on software, not specifically ZenDesk?

    • atatatat  5 years ago

      > Or name competitors that do things better?

      The ones that don't have VCs pressuring them to turn what should have been a super successful lifestyle business into the next unicorn moonshot.

    • edoceo  5 years ago

      Not ZenDesk specific. Not software specific.

      It's a general business/market life-cycle pattern.

blakesterz  5 years ago

I work on ZenDesk all day every day, and it's the ONLY thing that I've fought to keep. As far as I'm concerned, it's awesome, and I think I'd only say that about maybe one other thing, GitHub. Of course, I don't pay for it, but it does what I want it to do, it functions perfect for what I need, and I can't say that about many other things. I don't think anything has happened to it, been a happy user for 7 years now.

  • unclebucknasty  5 years ago

    >I work on ZenDesk all day every day

    >I'd only say that about maybe one other thing, GitHub

    Curious: what's your job function that has you both "working on ZenDesk all day" and also using GitHub?

    Are you using the Jira integration to track tickets/bugs?

    • blakesterz  5 years ago

      I'm a... jerk of all trades I guess? I do a bunch of different things, the biggest are support and sys admin stuff. I guess it's a devops/support job. So I deal with support in ZD and then do the work in GH. As much as I love ZD, I hate Jira an equal amount. Thankfully I don't need to do much in Jira.

    • eat_veggies  5 years ago

      I won't speak for them, but some jobs that might need both are internal IT or some kind of support engineer.

hiyer  5 years ago

Last 2 companies I worked at, we used zendesk for support tickets, and the support folks were pretty happy with it. However pricing is definitely an issue - at both these companies us engineers did not have individual zendesk accounts as it was deemed too expensive. So we couldn't check the ticket ourselves for details. Jira-zendesk integration mitigated this to some extent though.

  • laurent92  5 years ago

    Why not full Jira? Jira Service Desk + Jira Software, because as long as things are tickets, even if you are not an “agent”, you can still see the JSD tickets.

    • hiyer  5 years ago

      That's a good question. I would guess it's because we started using zd before jira launched servicedesk, and there was too much inertia to move.