Customer Service Management Showdown : ServiceNow vs Zendesk

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Customer service is important to an organization because it is often the only contact a customer has with a company. Customers are vital to an organization. Some customers spend hundreds and even thousands of dollars per year with a company. Consequently, when they have a question or product issue, they expect a company's customer service department to resolve their issues.

Helpdesk softwares are most commonly used to streamline and automate customer service processes. Zendesk is one of the leading cloud-based customer service software provider. Zendesk helps businesses to offer structured customer support. As and when these small business grows typically they tend to look out for other software solutions or Zendesk extensions to manage their complex support processes such as Field Dispatch, Assets and Contracts Management, Configuration and Change Management etc. For such companies, ServiceNow Customer Service Management application may prove a viable alternative.

With Geneva release, ServiceNow has introduced an entirely new customer service management application. The ServiceNow Customer Service Management application enables you to provide service and support for your external customers. it offers complete set of features needed to manage and execute customer service operations.

Neither of these two applications is necessarily "better" than the other. Both offer industry-leading features and a scalable platform, as well as the ability to custom-build a unique solution with optional modules and add-ons from their online stores. This article simply compares Zendesk with newly released ServiceNow Customer Service Management application and lists down additional features offered by ServiceNow.

Key Differentiators

ServiceNow

Like any traditional Help Desk application, ServiceNow CSM helps you in managing customer problem ("issue Management") using cases, knowledge base, self-service portals and other relevant features. Where it excels is its ability to resolve underlying problem ("issue Resolution") with the help of other ServiceNow — Service Management Applications such as Field Service Management, Facilities Service Management, Change and Release Management etc. Below are some of the key differentiators -

• Better Account and Contact Management - Zendesk helps in capturing basic customer and contact information. ServiceNow Account and Contact Management captures more detailed information such as customer locations, relationships, hierarchy.

• Product and Asset Management - ServiceNow Product and Asset Management helps in capturing information of the products and services sold to your customer.
• Contracts and Entitlement Management - Contract Management helps in managing service / support contracts, entitlement and coverage.

• Chat and Phone - Chat and Phone are Add-ons and are sold separately by Zendesk. ServiceNow Customer Service Management has inbuilt support for Chat and Phone

• Completeness of solution - ServiceNow Customer Service Management also includes below list of applications to execute end-to-end customer service     -

- Field Service Management

- Incident Management

- Problem Management

- Change Management

- Release Management

- Asset Management

All these additional application modules help in effectively resolving customer issue.

Zendesk

• Popular and reliable - Zendesk is proven cloud-based customer service application. Many customers trust Zendesk including some of the world's leading brands for customer support.

• Integrations - Zendesk offers easy integrations with multiple leading software solutions such as Salesforce, Box, Google Apps, JIRA, Microsoft Dynamics, Office 365 etc.

• B2B and B2C support - Zendesk is designed to offer support for both businesses (B2B) and consumers (B2C)

• Social support - Zendesk out-of-box supports social channel to create cases. Customers can submit a case through Twitter or Facebook.

For more detailed feature analysis and comparison, please visit my blog here.