Image by vectorjuice on Freepik
Zendesk is one of the biggest customer service platforms in the world.
Everyone knows that it’s a major player in the CX space and that it includes a wide range of features and functionality. Across email, chat, phone, and social media, Zendesk enables businesses to streamline their customer communications and to deliver customers the help they need in an efficient and consistent manner.
But Zendesk can’t do everything. It’s a great tool, but it’s not great at everything.
That’s why Zendesk apps are so important.
These third-party tools expand the native functionality of Zendesk, making it even more powerful than it would be on its own. They’re power ups that empower support teams to do their best and most efficient work.
There are thousands of apps available in the Zendesk App Marketplace, capable of doing almost anything you could imagine.
But these are the ten Zendesk apps that virtually every support team on the planet could benefit from.
The best Zendesk apps for customer support teams
Zendesk offers over 1,500 apps that make customer support teams more productive and efficient. But, 1,500 is a lot to sort through, so below is a short list of the best Zendesk apps to use with your customer service team.
Swifteq Zendesk Apps
Swifteq offers a variety of apps and add-ons to enhance your customer support workflows. Like a Swiss army knife for Zendesk, Swifteq gives support teams several no-code solutions for improving productivity, making your whole team more efficient in minutes.
Support teams around the world are using Swifteq apps to manage their help center content, understand how it's performing, to automate ticket tagging and routing, and to translate customer support tickets.
Each Swifteq app is available on its own, meaning you’re able to pick and choose the apps that will best suit your team and your customer base. Given the wide variety of ways Swifteq’s apps can help, it’s a great place to start your journey into Zendesk apps.
Key features:
Merge duplicate Zendesk tickets automatically
Find and replace across all help center articles, fix broken links and images
Translate help center articles automatically with AI
Zendesk integration with ChatGPT to help automate ticket workflows
Remove attachments from Zendesk, automatically or in bulk
Zendesk Marketplace link: Swifteq Zendesk Apps
Salesforce integration app in Zendesk
Salesforce is known as the world leader in the CRM space, helping businesses keep track of sales data and organize customer interactions. It’s an extremely robust platform offering a wide range of features for sales and support teams.
With the Zendesk Salesforce app, you can connect Salesforce accounts to Zendesk giving you a holistic view of customer data and keeping your sales and support teams in sync. The app allows Zendesk tickets to be viewed within Salesforce, and Salesforce data to be viewed inside of Zendesk. This keeps sales and service teams aligned whenever a high-value customer needs support with their product or service.
Key features:
Give agents access to Salesforce profile data such as job title or plan tier
Powerful automation like reassigning tickets based on loyalty status score
Enhanced Salesforce reporting using Zendesk ticket data
Zendesk Marketplace link: Salesforce Zendesk App
Jira Zendesk app
Keeping your support and product departments in sync is critical to the success of software teams. Businesses around the world use Jira to manage projects and keep track of features or bugs that your team is working on. Jira helps service teams prioritize tasks and closes the gap between customer-reported bugs and feature requests with the development team.
With the Jira Zendesk integration, support teams can easily create Jira issues within Zendesk. Software development teams can then view ticket details in Jira to get more context from the customer interaction. This enables support, sales, and product teams to work closer together, allowing you to complete the feedback loop with customers when bugs are fixed or features are shipped.
Key features:
Create a new Jira issue from within Zendesk
Link Zendesk tickets to existing Jira issues
Give engineers a complete view of customer conversations
Choose exactly what info you want to show from Jira in Zendesk
Zendesk Marketplace link: Jira Zendesk App
Attachments Plus
Some support tickets drag on for several messages that go back and forth between the customer and the support team. Sometimes there might even be multiple agents touching the same ticket. Within those messages, several links, files, and images might be shared and eventually buried within the conversation thread. That’s why this clever Zendesk app helps agents easily parse through files, images, and links within a support ticket.
Attachments Plus provides a quick view of images, files, and links that help expedite the troubleshooting process and enable support teams to resolve tickets faster. You can easily search through attachments and images, sort them, and then download them with this handy app.
Key features:
3-tab view of files, links, and images
Ability to download all attachments
Search attachments by name
Zendesk Marketplace link: Attachments Plus Zendesk App
Stylo AI Assistant for Zendesk
The Stylo AI Assistant makes support teams more productive via automation and content generation. Stylo suggests responses to support tickets, including providing knowledge base articles related to what the customer is saying. It’s different from a typical chatbot though — Stylo’s AI Assistant only gets involved when it has a really high confidence that it knows the right answer.
Stylo also has a sentiment tracking tool that analyzes the text in the support case to understand how the customer is feeling throughout the ticket lifecycle. This makes it easier for managers and team leads to identify quality issues and additional training opportunities.
Key features:
Generates suggested responses
Automatically create responses from knowledgebase articles
Translate messages to/from any language
Standardize agent tone of voice through sentiment scoring
Zendesk Marketplace link: Stylo Zendesk App
Geckoboard
The Geckoboard app increases your team’s visibility into key support metrics so your support managers and agents are aligned on your department’s goals. Agents and managers see real-time metrics on response times, chat duration, ticket volume, chats in queue, and much more.
This gives support teams the insights needed to make quick decisions and prioritize efforts in the right places.
Key features:
Automatically refreshes data
Powerful data filters
Display custom reports and dashboards using Zendesk data on a large screen
Zendesk Marketplace link: Geckboard Zendesk App
PandaDoc for Zendesk
Pandadoc simplifies the process of creating professional documents. This is useful if your support team is fielding requests from prospects and your goal is to convert them into paying customers.
With the PandaDoc Zendesk app, agents can populate documents with Zendesk support data like tickets and customer details. PandaDoc templates make it easy to quickly spin up a new document and request an e-signature, all from within Zendesk.
Key features:
Auto-populate fields with customer data
Leverage built-in Pandadoc templates for quick document generation
Follow and track the status of a document with real-time tracking
Seamless collaboration with real-time commenting and approval workflows
Zendesk Marketplace link: PandaDoc Zendesk App
Nicereply
Nicereply is one of the most used customer satisfaction survey apps. It enables service teams to monitor metrics like CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), NPS (Net Promoter Store), and CES (Customer Effort Store).
Integrating Nicereply with Zendesk gives agents and managers a quick view of survey responses directly within the support ticket. Surveys can be sent after resolving a ticket or within each message to the customer (which can often increase your survey response rates)
Key features:
Measure CSAT, NPS, or CES
Collect qualitative data (comments) from customers
View survey data in a sidebar widget
Customize surveys
Delete spam to keep data clean
Zendesk Marketplace link: Nicereply Zendesk App
Hide Ticket Fields app for Zendesk
This simple app lets support managers configure the exact fields that are displayed on the ticket screen. Agents then have a clean and simple view of the ticket without any unnecessary information crowding up their space.
You might find this app useful if you have fields on a ticket that don’t need to be seen or updated by an agent. For example, maybe fields are being updated by a trigger, the Zendesk API, or another app. These fields can now be hidden so your support agents focus on only the most relevant information.
Key features:
Select which fields to display on the ticket view
Create a custom and simple view of tickets for agents
Zendesk Marketplace link: Hide Ticket Fields Zendesk App
Read Receipts
This Zendesk app shows agents which messages were read by their customers as well as when they were read. Even more useful, you can create custom views of this data based on read/unread status and then configure automatic follow-ups or notifications for unread tickets.
This ultimately increases sales and reduces ticket resolution times because you’re giving support tickets (and customers) the attention they need and deserve. As a bonus, the read receipt includes the browser type and operating system metadata, which helps support agents troubleshoot user-specific issues.
Key features:
Automatically tag unread tickets and build a view of that tag
Generate notifications or auto-responses for faster resolution
Metadata such as operating system and browser type
GRPR compliant (no storage of end-user customer data)
Zendesk Marketplace link: Read Receipt Zendesk App
Empower your support team with great Zendesk apps
Zendesk is a broad platform that helps customer-facing teams do great work. It’s powerful on its own, but it’s way more effective when you customize your Zendesk instance with the Zendesk apps that make sense for your team and your business.
If you’re not sure where to get started, it’s almost a guarantee that one of the many Swifteq apps can help your team. Check them out here and start your 14-day free trial today!
Written by Jake Bartlett Jake Bartlett is a writer for tech companies and customer-centric businesses. He has 13 years of experience working in customer support and success, across various roles. You can find out more about Jake on his website. |