You can already restrict ticket access for agents in various ways - by organization, tickets assigned or group(s). You can also limit comment ability to private only. Would that cover your use case scenarious, Graham?

Yes, there is all the functionality already in place if you use/consume an Agents license. However, the point is that cost of this is disportionate to the value of restricting down the functionality.

If roughly $19/month is disproportionate to the value, then it can't be very valuable. 

Mikkel, I am not sure you see what graham is getting at....  My company only needs 3-4 active agents, but has another 4-5 parties that would benefit greatly from access to ALL the ticket info (public and private) for all organisations. To do that we will have to go from the 5 agent option to the 10 agent option - and maybe higher in time. Zendesk is a great product, but that changes the value equation significantly and brings other options into contention.

An additional role, as suggested, with a different license structure would help enormously.

Thanks.

Geoff, thanks but I think I understand it very well. Upgrading from the Medium plan level to the Large plan level is currently an extra $80 a month or roughly $19 per user. If this amount is disproportional to the value you gain, what would be a proportional value? 

I am thiinking more of the annualised cost of a externally hosted system  vs purchase/maint  cost of an internally hotsed system. There is always a premium to pay for internal control/hosing of a company's data/IP. When the cost difference between internal and external becomes less than that premium, the momentum moves to internal. Of course I have no idea of your business model, so am just giving you my perspective.

That said, Zendesk hits the mark very well for our current needs. My point is more about flexibility and responsiveness to the market. We all have to do it on a daily basis.

Hi Geoff, thanks for taking the time to answer.

My colleagues tell me my comments may come off a little harsh. So allow me to make my point clear.

I understand that you want to give people access to the system on a semi-agent level, and therefore feel that such access should cost less than full agent access. I appreciate why you feel that way. We have other customers that have two types of agents: 1st level agents that deal with 20 tix/day and 2nd level agents that deal with 20 tix/month. Why shouldn't the latter cost less than the former?

Technically it's not very complicated to set up various user-roles with various read and write access rights. You can already now restrict your agents in various ways. And it wouldn't be very complicated to have separate pricing points for various roles. But I'm not certain it would make things easier to understand or make our pricing more transparent. Actually I'm sure it would have quite the opposite effect.

And if we lose pricing transparency in order to allow some of our customers to save a few dollars per user per month, I'm certain it's not worth the while.

Our current $19/agent pricing is already very attractive. Even if we provided a 30% discount for semi-agents, total savings over three years would be $200 per agent. At that level the discussion seem somewhat more academic than functional.

kkel - your argument is better put and indeed makes sense and follows the Zen theme ;-). I see this not in the terms of applying customer pressure but rather feedback from organizations that have to obtain the budgets and want to engage a wider internal audiance.

For me, and probably others, its the perception factor that your not taking into account. A fairly significant factor in chossing Zendesk, apart from it being well defereniated, technically eloquent, .... is the pricing structure for end users. Our previous system charged on the basis of agents and end-uses. This caused problems, since we'd need to go to well too often to get more budget or play around with restricting the number of users. I so love now saying to customer that they can have as many users as they like and the self-service sign-up works a treat as the organization domains can be mapped.

Equally, I'd love to zen-like provide exposure to selected people within my company, not only the data summary, but the details as well. As mentioned on this forum a Salesforec.com integration and RSS offer alternatives on this theme.

I'll confess to a not so elequqnt workaround. Consume one agent license to set up a general user that these 'other parties' can access, but don't make this user part of any group. The downside to this is that these useses have to logon/off to different accounts to gain the extra visability. The tactic here is to engague and establish value.

This could all seem a bit petty, but don't underestimate human factors when it comes to justification. It's not always the cost or how great the product is.

The zen thing to do is to make things less complicated. Your probably right, adding complexity to the pricing structure isn't going to do this.

How about being able to nominate one Organization (likely the zendesk operating company), to designate end-users with visability rights on all tickets. This increases the value of Zendesk - is it worth compromising Zen for either the extra complexity or revenue?