Zendesk is software as a service that offers CRM and IT help desk solutions for businesses. Zendesk simplifies help desk ticketing and external and internal sales communications for small to large companies. It also provides custom API solutions for developers that want to pull all their customer data together, even data stored outside Zendesk.
Zendesk business products
Zendesk serves enterprise and small business customers with tools that easily integrate with other third-party customer service and sales applications.
Read more on how to choose the best customer relationship management (CRM) platform for your business.
Zendesk customer service
Through help desk software, companies create and customize a Help Center for their website. The Help Center is a knowledge repository that gives a business’s customers resources to help themselves, such as FAQs and how-to articles.
The IT help desk integrates with Slack and Teams, so that businesses can sync the software with two of the most popular team collaboration tools and automate notifications when a customer creates a new ticket.
The Answer Bot, an AI-powered program, answers basic customer help desk questions that it recognizes and connects customers with help desk agents. It’s available 24/7.
Zendesk Sell
Sales representatives track and contact leads by adding notes to a lead info board and sending emails from a selection of pre-written templates, depending on the lead’s stage in the sales pipeline. 
Visualized sales pipeline stages allow sales employees to change and track deals.
Sell integrates with other sales software, such as email marketing applications, to provide added CRM functionality.
If a help desk client starts inquiring about Zendesk products or solutions, software users can automatically make them a lead.
Zendesk Sunshine
Sunshine is a CRM platform built on AWS and modernized so that businesses don’t have to use legacy CRM software. In-house developers can design custom applications to integrate data from non-Zendesk software, so all customer data lives in one place. Developers use Zendesk’s custom data APIs to pull data objects from AWS.
Read more: Best CRM Software and Tools
Marketplace
Zendesk’s Marketplace has an extensive app store, where businesses can download third-party applications to use within Zendesk. These integrations are ticketing and support, chat, and sales CRM apps. The Marketplace also includes Help Center theme templates that allow businesses to customize their company’s Help Center page. Users can also search a list of business partners—software and service providers whose solutions work with Zendesk—and contact them for more information on their offerings.
Zendesk alternatives
Other CRM applications might be better suited to your business depending on your needs. Zendesk alternatives include:
- Salesforce
- HubSpot
- Microsoft Dynamics
- Zoho
- SAP
- Netsuite
- PeopleSoft
- Infusionsoft
- Freshdesk
- Insightly
- Nimble
- Copper
