Looking for Zendesk alternative for SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365?
Probably you were browsing the internet with a simple search query like “Zendesk alternative”. Maybe you are already using Zendesk or maybe you’d like to switch to something new, in this article you will find the comparison of Zendesk and Plumsail HelpDesk for Office 365. Not in a shy way, both solutions are great but it’s crucial to keep in mind that hardly any customer support app will be an ideal solution able to match all the requirements of all company types, sizes, and industries.
Plumsail HelpDesk and Zendesk take all of your customer complaints and feedback under one roof. It’s a ticket-style system where agents can access everything through one help desk interface. Both tools are ridiculously easy and set-up process takes minutes. So, let’s take a look which one will fit better.
Integration into Office 365
One of the perks of using Plumsail HelpDesk that it is fully integrated into SharePoint and Office 365 suits. That means that you get all power of SharePoint within your ticketing system. So, if you are already into SharePoint, Plumsail HelpDesk will perfectly complement it. Zendesk doesn’t offer such a deep integration into Office 365 and SharePoint.
Pricing
Plumsail pricing offers you simple but flexible options with 3 plans — $39 for 5 agents per month, $69 for 10 agents per month and $129 for an unlimited number of agents per month. An unlimited number of help desk instances and all features we have, including SLA, triggers, forms customization, web widget and many others, are available for every plan. The only limit is the number of agents and comments. We don’t offer a free plan, but you can get a 30-day free trial of all-included-package. And one more thing — all updates are free! You don’t need to buy extra hours of support to stay up to date with all features: one click and you have it all.
Zendesk’s pricing allows you tons of options with 5 plans ranging from $5 for one agent per month to $199 per agent per month but all plans have a different set of features. They don’t offer a free plan, but you can get a 30-day free trial of Zendesk’s best package.
So, the simplest Zendesk support plan will cost you $25 dollars per month but you can pay only $4 more and get many more features with Plumsail’s solution. It is a deal, isn’t it?
Add-ons
Plumsail’s ticketing system is built on top of Office 365 and SharePoint, so in the first place, you get all the power of these solutions. Plumsail HelpDesk has a really deep integration into Office 365, that means its great ability to dramatically extend SharePoint Online or On-Premises and customize solution according to your requirements. For example, SharePoint Online fully integrated with Flow, Microsoft online workflow service that enables you to work smarter and more efficiently by automating workflows across the most common apps and services. For example, you can send SMS notifications from help desk with Microsoft Flow and Twilio. So, if you are already using SharePoint, you will get a fully integrated solution and you will be able to reuse your existing infrastructure and expertise.
Zendesk offers their clients more than a hundred different APIs for you to integrate with. But in fact, in Zendesk’s Marketplace, you can find dozens of ready solutions for every need, so you don’t need to develop them. It’s really simple and nice if you are not into SharePoint.
Reports and analytics
Reporting plays the main role in every business nowadays. It gives companies insights into where their agents are failing and succeeding, about common ticket types, customer satisfaction, and a number of other metrics.
In Plumsail solution, you can track tickets by state, customers’ satisfaction, tickets by category, active requesters and tickets by agents. Reports are built on top of SharePoint lists and they are quite customizable. Thus, users are not limited by reporting on tickets, but can extend this according to your business processes. To get more from reports, you can use our additional solution Dashboard Designer to customize charts.
Zendesk offers a powerful reporting tool that analyzes quite the same data as Plumsail HelpDesk — tickets, agent performance, channels, and customer satisfaction.
In both systems, most of these reports are fairly dynamic, meaning you can use filters and responsive dashboards to manipulate data and built better analytics.
But Zendesk advanced plans offer customers an ability to compare their team and customers to industry and global benchmarks. This is a nice feature but it has very little to do with improving actual performance of a team.
Ticket Management
Ticket management is the backbone of help desk support, so the solution you choose should be comfortable for every user.
Plumsail ticket management builds around the mailbox and works like this — customers submit tickets by writing to your email address and a ticket is created automatically in your help desk. That’s all. Customer and agent sets up a back-and-forth exchange until their issue is resolved.
In terms of actual features, Plumsail is very similar to Zendesk, offering automation rules, triggers, collision detection, and SLAs. But Zendesk has more various channels where requests are made — like phone calls or social media. In both systems agents can set fields on the ticket to see ticket status, who is working on the issue, due date, priority and so on. In both systems, all team members can add private notes and tag requests with custom labels. But only Plumsail offers their users a rich text editor for sending easy and beautiful replies.
If you have a lot of similar questions, you will love Plumsail’s ability to merge or split tickets that report the same issue.
Transparency
Both apps allow you to control the display of ticket details, status, and other key information that you need to share with customers and your team.
In Plumsail, users have a bunch of configurable views which can be customized according to needs of every team member. Ticket forms are customized as well with the help of built-in solution called Forms Designer.
For people outside your organization, Plumsail offers a special widget. With the widget, you can provide a UI for internal users without giving them access to all tickets. Providing an intuitive user experience that empowers your users by making it easy for them to get service, support, and information no matter where they are.
In Zendesk you can configure different views that everyone gets to see what they need to see, and nobody sees what they shouldn’t.
Conclusion
Summarize all that above, it’s difficult to say which help desk does ticket management better. If you are Office 365 user and you are looking for really simple and affordable solution, if you like a personal effort in support, Plumsail HelpDesk is the best option. If you need to provide multichannel support, Zendesk is the greatest.
