Zendesk Support has gone downhill
I've been a zendesk customer for 10+ years and am on an enterprise plan. I noticed that zendesk has gone away with any type of 24/7 support anymore. No longer can you call in, you must use the subpar "zendesk bot" for everything and it's horrible to use.
Phone support went away yet it's part of my subscription AND it's on the pricing page:
Beyond frustrating how support has gone downhill. My entire company is down right now because I need to wait for "Z bot" to respond. Calling the support number gets me a message that phone support isnt' offered. There is nobody watching the support lines on 8AM on a monday morning when most businesses start work.
Extremely frustrated. It also looks like from the several downvotes on the new post about the "Z Bot" that everyone hates this as well.
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Official comment
Hey all,
Thank you for sharing your feedback and experiences with us. We’ve shared all of it with leadership in our support organization, and I’m pleased to announce that we are making improvements to our Customer Support experience based on your feedback. The most recent round of updates are outlined here: We’re continuing to improve your Zendesk Support experience. we will be updating this article with each round of changes we make going forward, so you should be sure to follow it. . This article will also include a summary of the feedback we’ve heard from you so far and how that’s resulted in the improvements we are implementing
We have a dedicated team working diligently behind the scenes to address your concerns around the overall support experience. It is clear that collecting your feedback via the community and within article comments has not been the best experience for you, and that as a result of that you felt you weren’t being heard. To improve on this experience, forward, we will be collecting all feedback and concerns around the Customer Support experience via this feedback form. This form will provide us with a better way to accurately collect and track your feedback, with the option to follow up with you directly to chat further. This should result in better responsiveness to your concerns.
Since the above form will be the primary channel for collecting your feedback, we will be closing this post for comments and look forward to hearing from you through that survey. Thank you all again for your patience as we get all our ducks in a row to make sure we’re providing the best experience possible.
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I completely agree. 19 out of 20 tickets I put in the agent who responds to my ticket has to wait for a 'specialist' to respond. Basically, it feels like I'm talking to a T1 agent who in turn has to wait in queue for a senior agent to respond to their questions.
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I'm unfortunately having to jump on this bandwagon. I usually don't need their support, but recently with changes made behind the scenes, I've had to open a good amount of tickets with Zendesk support. As someone in IT support, my clients want to be able to get in touch with me, which is why we offer phone support. Zendesk being as large as it is should 100% offer that. It resolves things faster than waiting for the Z-bot to not help me and then having an agent tell me I need to enable Account Assumption, only for them to not understand what I'm trying to say via a text message, me having to send a video, them not understanding again.
This could be solved with a 3-minute phone call, and it turns into an hour ordeal of back and forth.
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To give more context, I am on Support Enterprise, and have been with ZD for 10 or so years. I had phone support as it was part of my subscription. I no longer can call in and they basically have a message "use our new in product messaging" which is basically a clunky widget that tried to vet your question and push you to 3 unrelated help desk articles. As an owner of a company I don't want that. I spend a lot of money with Zendesk and have a plan labeled "Enterprise" for a reason, we're an enterprise. Being in healthcare, I cannot wait for hours for a new Tier 1 guy who's fresh off training to try to understand my question and we chat back and forth for 45 minutes while one of my team members is trying to assist a doctor who cannot perform patient care because we have a zendesk issue. Again, this is why we chose Enterprise.
For some reason that feature was removed from my plan. It is also advertised on the website for phone support too?
Since the new "zendesk messaging widget" was enabled, it's been a lot slower, the response time is significantly slower as well. The bot is clunky and was released a little too early. I am feel like being an enterprise customer we're getting the same support level as any joe shmo on a basic plan, and that's not okay as we're paying for enterprise service.
Zendesk has also disabled the email updated now, they instead of when someone replies to a ticket, you this annoying message:
So it forces you to have to go the computer, log into the UI and see what the update was. What happened to old fashioned email that everyone has and everyone checks? Why are you forcing people to HAVE to log into the app to view an update?
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Let me chime in here - the Z Bot is worse than no support because in addition to giving no serious answers, it also wastes our time.
If I got that right, it uses artificial intelligence.
My experience is that today, in Customer Support, human stupidity outperforms artificial intelligence by a wide margin...
I know, Zendesk does need less time to support their customers this way. And with the stupid customer going to supported systems, they might save even more time.
May I suggest that you not only take a look, but have an ear on the pulse of your customers before it is too late.
Sorry to post that negative - but, as Josh said, it is beyond frustrating to see what happened to Zendesk's own customer support.
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My new favorite is when messaging back and forth (leave message, not live), I get "Since we haven't heard from you in a while......
I have nothing better to do than wait with baited breath for ZD to "finally" respond to my request. Seems rude to me.
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I totally agree. It's completely frustrating trying to get a response to anything.
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Definitely agree with this thread, I can't believe ZD has decided to go all-in for the chat bot for its primary form of support. My company and I are pretty new to Zendesk, and getting help for configuration and trouble shooting has been near impossible. Obtaining quality support has been so bad that we're not even a week into our new configuration and starting to wonder if we should bail on ZD entirely. We chose the basic plan to get our feet wet and I'm really glad we did- we're definitely learning that maybe ZD isn't the tool it's advertised to be.
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It even says phone support for all plan levels on their pricing! See their website:
(cant seem to insert a screenshot here)
But - It is false advertising.
I understand the push for automation and shoving people to use a help desk article, but REMOVING phone support or any other form is frustrating for someone who pays your highest tier plan. Then, if someone doesn't reply to you within the widget, zendesk will send you an email when they do (days later) and it says "you've been updated, log into zendesk to see what it says!" which is annoying. No, I want to read my email and reply to it like a normal ticket. You chose to make this widget that might work for you, but it doesn't work for the customer.
I asked my account manager about this and was told it was "by design" to send a bland email with no context.
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Completely agree with Josh. The fact I have to go to a computer, sign into Zendesk, and open the widget is not a great experience. The fact that I can't reply to the messages I get after hours because Zendesk still doesn't support mobile is really rough. The articles it serves so far have not helped and there's no short cut to an agent. I don't think this product was ready for prime time (as evidenced by the fact Message doesn't have its Explore metrics yet either)
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Zendesk was always the gold standard for what I consider my use case - not anymore!
I recently moved across and to say that the level of support is lacking, is being polite. I'd move back to my previous platform if I could, Zendesk is broken. Email handling and the UI are seriously in the wrong decade, I wonder if there is a culture and leadership problem considering the news about the failed merger!
Hopefully, they will sort things out, but I can't play around with 'my' customer support waiting for Zendesk.
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Hey Josh,
Thanks for taking the time to share this with us and I do apologize for any frustration this has caused you.
Is this issue related to the SSL certificate on your account? I was able to track down an existing ticket you have open with us and it looks like one of our Customer Care agents was able to get you all taken care of but just want to confirm here as well.
I'll also be sure to pass your feedback regarding your overall support experience to the relevant teams for review.
Let us know if there's anything else we can help with in the meantime!
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Hey everyone,
First, thanks again for sharing your experience with us when it comes to reaching out to to our Customer Care team. I'm going to follow up with our teams internally to make them aware of these concerns and potentially reach out to you in a separate email. It helps to gather some examples so we can improve our processes to be as efficient as possible when you reach out with your questions. If the issue is long wait times, rest assured your feedback and examples helps us get a better understanding of where these delays are coming from so we can make those improvements. If the issue comes down to agents not understanding why you're reaching out, this provides us with a great opportunity to improve our training resources available and close those knowledge gaps.
We've already started to see improvements to response time when chatting with an agent compared to when we launched this new support experience and that's because of the feedback/concerns you've shared with us. We definitely have more work to do so keep sharing these concerns as they come up and we'll be sure to investigate and follow-up with you.
Cheers!
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