ZenDesk pricing has always confused me. They always pitched themselves as 'for the small smart guys' with all the 37s type philosophies that were popular at the time.
And I looked at the product and thought "Wow, this product is actually quite nice!".
But we had 5 staff and only one full time support person, but everyone needed an account. The starting price was a bit rich for how small we were and I met the head evangelist and told him I thought the pricing was a bit off.
I said it was too much for the small guys, and not high enough for the big businesses who pay ridiculous amounts of money for software services (Joel Spolsky has a post on this somewhere...).
His response was "Oh, you guys can have it for free for 6 months!", and I said "But then we'll be locked in, and have to pay heaps in 6 months time."
We ended up using eSupport (which is a complete piece of shit) and now we have a different set up of support users, we could justify the cost of ZenDesk given the current size and set up of the company but now we're locked in to eSupport!
If they just had lower prices for the little guys they'd have got us. They're bloody mad, I tell you.
"We ended up using eSupport (which is a complete piece of shit)"
Whenever I read something like this I can't help but think "Here's a potential customer to whomever can get this right and at the right price". It seems like there's still a huge opening in this market for someone to come in and take all of ZenDesk and eSupport's customers.
Yep I agree completely. We painstakingly trawled through a very large number of support products and in the end it wasn't a case of picking the one that was the best but picking the best of a worst bunch.
I do believe there is a gap in the market for a good but well priced product, but it wont be a simple little ticketing app, the creators would have to understand how support grows out of a one man job into a 50 man job.
eSupport offers a lot of tricks (well hidden in their horrific UI and UX) that save you time, you also have to handle that not just make a 'Oh a Customer has many Tickets!' ROR app with a nice logo.
Weve been with esupport for about 1.5 years now. I find it somewhat cumbersome to do certain things, and there are 2 minor things that really piss me off, but overall, it being a piece of shit, sounds a little of an over statement. I wouldnt exactly rant and rave about it, but it seems to do its job and its not that expensive. Maybe im missing something...
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ZenDesk pricing has always confused me. They always pitched themselves as 'for the small smart guys' with all the 37s type philosophies that were popular at the time.
And I looked at the product and thought "Wow, this product is actually quite nice!".
But we had 5 staff and only one full time support person, but everyone needed an account. The starting price was a bit rich for how small we were and I met the head evangelist and told him I thought the pricing was a bit off.
I said it was too much for the small guys, and not high enough for the big businesses who pay ridiculous amounts of money for software services (Joel Spolsky has a post on this somewhere...).
His response was "Oh, you guys can have it for free for 6 months!", and I said "But then we'll be locked in, and have to pay heaps in 6 months time."
We ended up using eSupport (which is a complete piece of shit) and now we have a different set up of support users, we could justify the cost of ZenDesk given the current size and set up of the company but now we're locked in to eSupport!
If they just had lower prices for the little guys they'd have got us. They're bloody mad, I tell you.
"We ended up using eSupport (which is a complete piece of shit)"
Whenever I read something like this I can't help but think "Here's a potential customer to whomever can get this right and at the right price". It seems like there's still a huge opening in this market for someone to come in and take all of ZenDesk and eSupport's customers.
Do you really think so?
It always struck me that there was 1001 support desk providers out there... is there really that much space?
(cos if so it's going on my list of maybe projects :))
There's always space for someone who does it better and/or cheaper than the competition.
Yep I agree completely. We painstakingly trawled through a very large number of support products and in the end it wasn't a case of picking the one that was the best but picking the best of a worst bunch.
I do believe there is a gap in the market for a good but well priced product, but it wont be a simple little ticketing app, the creators would have to understand how support grows out of a one man job into a 50 man job.
eSupport offers a lot of tricks (well hidden in their horrific UI and UX) that save you time, you also have to handle that not just make a 'Oh a Customer has many Tickets!' ROR app with a nice logo.
Our company was actually just looking into licensing eSupport and we thought it looked pretty good.
Why is it a "complete piece of shit"?
Weve been with esupport for about 1.5 years now. I find it somewhat cumbersome to do certain things, and there are 2 minor things that really piss me off, but overall, it being a piece of shit, sounds a little of an over statement. I wouldnt exactly rant and rave about it, but it seems to do its job and its not that expensive. Maybe im missing something...