Twilio vs. Zendesk Suite

Twilio is well suited to sending SMS reminders to prospects on the lead-up to sales appointments. This has helped us improve attendance rates for these meetings. We also use Twilio to communicate with these prospects post-meeting to make offers on products and services and for feedback on their meeting.

Incentivized

Benefits of Zendesk Suite:
Support across channels In the case of a retail company with chat, email, WhatsApp and social DMs all piling up together, agents do not have to change tabs - everything comes into one screen in the Suite.
An example could be a representative for this e-commerce company on a sale weekend when they have live chat up, and also must deal with emails and complaints on social. Zendesk Suite handled all of this interaction seamlessly.
Knowledge base + self service: A SaaS platform receiving constant flow of "how do I reset my password" questions. You set up a help centre once, and are able to deflect hundreds of tickets for months and years.
Even better when combining with Answer Bot, where the bot begins suggesting articles without even a human interacting with the tickets.
Scaling customer service teams: A startup that has just expanded from 5 customer service representatives to 50 customer service representatives. Zendesk Suite automates routing, SLAs, macros, and analytics, when it could never work with Google Workspace + sticky notes.
This is especially helpful when managers want to be able to report or analyze ticketing conversations to see trends in perhaps their backlog, or a customer service representative is running into consistent workflows.
Globalization: A company with support teams that are spread across time zones and languages. Zendesk Suite enables for business hours, language packs, and localized help centers. It even comes with routing either by skill or region

Incentivized

• Easy to see my team in one place, when they log in and out and what call status they are in.
• Twilio is a simple, user friendly way to log in and out of work activities.
• Excellent services and support.
• The omnichannel feature which allows agents to get request from all channels.

Incentivized

• UI/UX; mature macros and automations, slick and well thought out UI.
• Reporting, reporting, reporting. With user, org, and ticket level tags, we can track every aspect of our ticket flow.
• Extensibility; the app marketplace is a great resource for expanding functionality from the baseline offering.

Incentivized

• Authy does not support the "push button" multi-factor authentication from your application's native apps. This means if you want to use Authy, you still need to use TOTP based codes.
• Not really a shortcoming of Authy, but it does nothing to help with multi-factor authentication using text messages - those are still sent to your platform's messaging app.
• Authy doesn't always display how much time is left before your current token expires, making it difficult to know how much time you have left to enter the current code.

Incentivized

• The development of messaging out of the earlier Chat module is clunky and still has limitations for multi language flows.
• When creating queries in Explore, you can't search for 'or' conditions, only 'And', meaning you have to build multiple queries and manually add them.
• You can't download the charts in the reports, they come down as tables and then you have to make your own charts.

Incentivized

We are happy with Twilio because the price per message is low. The API is not difficult to implement and the documentation is very complete. Twilio as a company keeps you well informed of issues that happen. They also offer free online workshops or conferences to make notices of new laws, etc.

Incentivized

Zendesk is super easy to use and navigate. I really enjoy the sleek layout, the ability to tailor tickets, the macro option, and the quick key guide they have to make your use of time even more effective. My whole team loves working with Zendesk and rarely ever has problems.

Incentivized

Overall the product API is extremely well documented so it is very easy to build a product with their technology. The website is a little bit cumbersome to use as they have greatly expanded the number of products that they have over the years, but the dashboard UI has not been improved much since.

Incentivized

I used to work without a ticketing service, and everything was handled on an email provider, this made it very difficult to track, no integrations to the software complicating the use of internal tools or other software like Guru, Zendesk Suite wasn't hard to learn, in fact it was very easy, very straightforward, and I was an admin learning to use several tools at the same time.

Incentivized

In the past year, I'd say I have only noticed maybe two hours total of downtime in my own usage. Very minimal.

The problem tends to be us, the user, rather than Twilio. We don't reach out to support fast enough (spend time struggling), but when we have, they've solved our issue immediately. We are rural, so there are signal issues to accommodate, however, we find that a few staff on a few cellular networks can triangulate where we all have signal to put up a sign.

Incentivized

There has been minor performance degradation on a very few days out of the two years I have been using the product.

Good interface to connect with different API systems for communication through different channel[s]. Twilio has good market coverage of the client across the globe for generating revenue through multi-channel approach. It works with [a] programmable feature that makes life easy for every user. Automated call is one of the advance[d] feature[s] of this tool.

Incentivized

We rarely need to contact their support team, but when we do they are responsive. However there have been notable times when communication between myself and the support rep was challenging despite me providing clear explanation of the issue, screenshots, and a thorough explanation of the goal we hope to achieve. It took several back and forth attempt, on a few occasions, to get resolution on an otherwise simple request

Zendesk has tons of available material for training - videos, webinars, articles, etc. The only reason this is not a 10 is because it can be hard to figure out how to navigate to these things and find what you are looking for.

The developer APIs and SDKs are super easy to follow.

Incentivized

There is not a lot of implementation, it's all setup and you just start using it. We did do some email to ticket setup and that worked really well. The only thing that didn't work for us was the Salesforce integration, maybe your mileage will vary.

We have looked at some of Twilio competitors, like Infobip, Sich and Bandwith. Prices on all of them for voice minutes and SMS are way cheaper than Twilio. But none of them seem to offer as many features and ease of use as Twilio. Specially from an API point of view

Incentivized

Even these two have a ticketing system but that I also used previously but Zendesk Suite has a very clear ticketing system - it does not take much time to understand and use it, the interface is easy and the automation system also works up to the expectation, it is not just easy for the users but for us from the backed support as well, it is so user-friendly.

Incentivized

WHY we will use Zendesk in HR and PD internally

Incentivized

• We found that associates who had the opportunity to respond to a survey about their assigned job were 37% more likely to return to a job site
• We were able to reduce the number of resources required to manually respond to associates using Twilio Studio, so those resources could have more time to complete other tasks
• We were able to scale the number of associates who received survey messages at least by a factor of 8 without increasing our resource demand

Incentivized

• Customer Success looks at ticket resolution surveys as part of their CSAT scores and either thanks their customer for a positive review or reaches out if it's a negative review.
• Sales uses Zendesk to make sure their new prospects are getting POCs properly set up quickly and fix any issues while they do a trial of our tool.
• Onboarding uses Zendesk to quickly make sure new customers implementations and user access are set up to help them start implementation faster.

Incentivized