We kind of tried Zendesk maybe 8 years ago and even integrated the chat into our Electron app.
What put me off though is that support articles didn’t work off markdown, there was no way I wanted us having all our docs formatting and images locked up by them. We had already started using DocFX which was working pretty well for us.
As it happens, the integrated chat wasn’t that popular amongst our users anyway so we cancelled it not long after.
Fast forward to today, and it turns out that in the age of AI and LLMs that our Docs (which over time had become really good) are an enormous asset.
They allowed the AI integration in our product to work really well since the LLMs already understood a lot about our product from our Docs and they also behave as kind of marketing material as they organically show up in search results or LLM chats (we’ve gained a couple of clients who found us through ChatGPT).
A funny thing about our Docs, we always felt they were lacking and resigned ourselves to doing the best we could, even though it seemed they would never be good enough.
Then seemingly all of a sudden this year, we were almost surprised to find that they actually do seem to be quite good now.
I think it’s largely that we were continuously investing in them, but also that once we saw how LLMs could answer questions on our product really well, it became apparent that a lot of our customers just weren’t really looking at them, but now many of them kind of are, just via an LLM.