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Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt

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Re: Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt

#51

Post by troels »

jhancock wrote: post #43
ahoyhere wrote: post #17

I think anyone who uses ZenDesk will know that they don't love their users, or treat their tool like a serious business. (More like a cashcow.) Their software is horrible. There are 6 different ways to view the single table of incoming messages, and it's nondeterministic which one you will come to at any given time. And the first time you accidentally send an internal message to a customer, instead of your team - sin…

I need to setup a helpdesk system next week. Any recommendations? Our key requirement is to be able to reassign incoming tickets and have simple notification to the person it was reassigned.

I don't recall if RT from Best Practical has the particular feature, but otherwise it's a well-rounded and battle proven solution. It's ugly as hell though.

Re: Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt

#52

Post by mecton »

jhancock wrote: post #43
ahoyhere wrote: post #17

I think anyone who uses ZenDesk will know that they don't love their users, or treat their tool like a serious business. (More like a cashcow.) Their software is horrible. There are 6 different ways to view the single table of incoming messages, and it's nondeterministic which one you will come to at any given time. And the first time you accidentally send an internal message to a customer, instead of your team - sin…

I need to setup a helpdesk system next week. Any recommendations? Our key requirement is to be able to reassign incoming tickets and have simple notification to the person it was reassigned.

JTrac

Re: Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt

#53

Post by donw »

jhancock wrote: post #43
ahoyhere wrote: post #17

I think anyone who uses ZenDesk will know that they don't love their users, or treat their tool like a serious business. (More like a cashcow.) Their software is horrible. There are 6 different ways to view the single table of incoming messages, and it's nondeterministic which one you will come to at any given time. And the first time you accidentally send an internal message to a customer, instead of your team - sin…

I need to setup a helpdesk system next week. Any recommendations? Our key requirement is to be able to reassign incoming tickets and have simple notification to the person it was reassigned.

We're not quite ready for prime-time, but my startup (Mad Wombat) is developing a helpdesk application called Tracker, which might suit your needs, provided you don't mind us still being early in our beta.

Tracker is a very tightly focused piece of software; it doesn't have public forums, or a wiki, or a knowledgebase. It just tracks problems, which can be submitted via email, via the web interface, or via the REST API.

Now keep in mind, it's still early in our beta. The major features all work, but there are plenty of bugs, which we're fixing as fast as physics allows. Although we do use Tracker as our own customer support and bug-tracking application, so we've got a lot of motivation to make sure that it works.

Shoot me an email if you're interested: don@madwombat.com

Re: Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt

#54

Post by ghshephard »

jhancock wrote: post #43
ahoyhere wrote: post #17

I think anyone who uses ZenDesk will know that they don't love their users, or treat their tool like a serious business. (More like a cashcow.) Their software is horrible. There are 6 different ways to view the single table of incoming messages, and it's nondeterministic which one you will come to at any given time. And the first time you accidentally send an internal message to a customer, instead of your team - sin…

I need to setup a helpdesk system next week. Any recommendations? Our key requirement is to be able to reassign incoming tickets and have simple notification to the person it was reassigned.

Jira. It's an issue tracker that:

  o Our legal team uses to track contracts
  o Our helpdesk uses to track 20-30 requests a day.  With SLA Timers.
  o Our Project Teams use to track $20-$30 Million Dollar Projects, 
    with 30-50 subtasks each with independent dates.
And, oh, Yes.

  o Our engineering team uses to track software defects (It's original purpose)
The 4.0 product is mind blowingly awesome, particularly with it's _super_ fast full text query (thanks Lucene). And, you can't beat the price for small shops - $10 for 10 users. (It goes up quickly after that, but the inexpensive buy in is great for small companies.)

Re: Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt

#55

Post by ledger123 »

troels wrote: post #51
jhancock wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need to setup a helpdesk system next week. Any recommendations? Our key requirement is to be able to reassign incoming tickets and have simple notification to the person it was reassigned.

I don't recall if RT from Best Practical has the particular feature, but otherwise it's a well-rounded and battle proven solution. It's ugly as hell though.

I love RT. Real solid product with great hackers behind it. And you did not mention that it is open source and takes hardly 1-2 hours if you know your way through CPAN and Apache.

The latest 3.8 is not that bad with new theme.

I can even do a free install/setup for any non-profit.

http://bestpractical.com/rt/

And don't forget the http://hiveminder.com/ from same company.

EDIT: Added links.

Re: Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt

#56

Post by pak »

troels wrote: post #51
jhancock wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need to setup a helpdesk system next week. Any recommendations? Our key requirement is to be able to reassign incoming tickets and have simple notification to the person it was reassigned.

I don't recall if RT from Best Practical has the particular feature, but otherwise it's a well-rounded and battle proven solution. It's ugly as hell though.

+1 for RT. It's gotten a little prettier since 3.8:

http://blog.bestpractical.com/2008/07/today-were-rele.html#s...

Incredibly powerful, free, customizable. Expect to learn a little Perl if you want to integrate with external systems, as you can write Perl scripts to handle any transaction.

However, it has both the features that the GP wanted out of the box.

Re: Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt

#57

Post by PanMan »

jdrock wrote: post #32
ahoyhere wrote: post #24

Anybody here successfully raised prices without a major blowback? I'd love to hear how you did it (as opposed to these clowns).

We increased prices at 80legs from on-demand ($2.00 per million pages) to subscription + on-demand (starting at $99 per month + $2.00 per million pages). It was a success for us. Here's why: 1. It was early on - just a few months after our public launch. 2. We offered a limited free version in conjunction with the price increase. 3. We lost some customers, but they were only worth max $10 per month. We were able to w…

Well, it might have been a success from your point, but I liked your service a lot better on the previous level. I haven't had the need to scraping LOT's of pages yet, but one the previous plan, I felt like I could experiment with it for almost free. Now it's too expensive for that...

Re: Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt

#58

Post by ryan-allen »

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.

Re: Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt

#59

Post by Kaizyn »

ghshephard wrote: post #54
jhancock wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need to setup a helpdesk system next week. Any recommendations? Our key requirement is to be able to reassign incoming tickets and have simple notification to the person it was reassigned.

Jira. It's an issue tracker that: o Our legal team uses to track contracts o Our helpdesk uses to track 20-30 requests a day. With SLA Timers. o Our Project Teams use to track $20-$30 Million Dollar Projects, with 30-50 subtasks each with independent dates. And, oh, Yes. o Our engineering team uses to track software defects (It's original purpose) The 4.0 product is mind blowingly awesome, particularly with it's _sup…

JIRA is horrible. Don't use it if you can avoid it. While it kind of works once it's setup, the software really is terrible.
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