Jeffrey Noles

@Chris, @Ryan:

Thanks for the terminology correction.  And thank you for your comments / insights.

Yes....it looks like we'll remain open to moving to ZD Talk, but for now the "solution" (channel consolidation) doesn't quite justify the difficulty of moving to Talk (lots more missed calls, hard outbound calling, tricky dashboard management for not-full-time agents).  We'll go back to manually entering tickets for the phone calls we're receiving so we're still capturing contact data.

I've signed up for alerts from this channel so hopefully we'll get some good news down the line.  

We are in the process of switching over to ZD Talk (we're about to port our number), and it's hard to shake the feeling that we made a *huge* mistake.  Perhaps we presumed too much, but in our trialling and testing we just assumed ZD Talk would have round-robin inbound calls.  We're a small company--2 agents on deck but on the phone ~60% of the time and every so often I help out....we need round-robin to see who's calling and then we make a judgment call on who's best to answer, and its usually not me.  We also don't have our headphones on 100% of the time, which is a secondary issue.  We're testing speakerphones to hear the ring when we don't have headphones on and then plug them in for the call, but the only solution that seems to work, Jabra, has poor sound quality in the "handoff" from speaker to headset.

From reading the threads, the PMs have a consistent message:  this software is for larger, inbound call centers.  Which is too bad.  We use ticketing and chat and wanted to unify all contacts through ZD by using Talk.  It's too bad the product, however, doesn't fit our small-business requirements.  We're debating internally about whether to go back to our old VOIP or forge ahead with ZD Talk.  It's not looking great for forging ahead.  Any comments / feedback would be appreciated since we only have a few days to decide.

Hi Maxime, thanks for your recent comment but it's hard not to think you're overshooting the mark.  For small companies--and I've been told by your colleagues that there are thousands of us (although I'm skeptical)--we just want control over the homepage.  We don't need all the fancy features you're discussing.  We just want to customize what we see.  I'm hoping you'll keep in mind smaller companies as you design the features.  Since we don't make as much money for Zendesk as bigger companies I'm not sure what else I can say.

We have been consistently surprised at how difficult it is for a small company to use Zendesk despite it's claims to be "user friendly" and "intuitive".  For example, a company with 1 or 2 agents who spend 95% of their day doing non-Zendesk tasks just wants to see everything from the "home" view.  We don't have time to noodle around with "views" and look at everything in detail.  For a big company, this makes sense--you want the worker bees only looking at their own home screen.  But it's hard to imagine that small users can't even configure their own home screen--arguably the most important dashboard--when there are dozens of features already in place we'll never even use.

It's equally surprising that Zendesk isn't listening to a community moderator (see Ben's note above).