I was contacted by someone today asking for more information about why I chose to implement both Zendesk and Get Satisfaction within our customer care department. He wanted me to be specific as to what I saw as the benefits and shortcomings of each system.  I believe that, while they share similarities, both are unique yet also compliment each other. In case others have read my past posts and have the same question, I thought I'd share my reply to him.

Our customer base is a bit unique in that they are all within law enforcement. Some issues need to be handled more securely, so we need to work with customers in a closed environment. Also, by contract, we can only offer support to specific individuals within each agency. To meet these requirements, we use Zendesk. The major negative issue we have with Zendesk is that you cannot edit or delete a comment on a ticket once it is logged. If one of our customers accidentally includes an individual’s name or some other sensitive information when logging or commenting on a ticket (remember, we’re talking law enforcement) we need to expunge that information for privacy reasons. Right now, we have to completely delete the ticket and start over. Also, we’re an ISO registered company and the level of reporting and the built-in SLA targets within Zendesk don’t meet our requirements. We have to do a lot of data review outside of the system.

I mentioned that we limit service to a select group. However, we wanted to create a self-help and knowledgebase area for all of our users. That’s where Get Satisfaction comes into our workflow. My agents and our customers love that system! It really creates a feeling of community and we’ve been able to make a lot of people really happy by providing quick solutions to issues that were nagging them as an end user. The only down-side is that, in Get Satisfaction, you can’t assign a topic to a specific individual and all topics are open to the entire community. If we could assign topics and make them visible to select people, we could probably forgo Zendesk. The people at Get Satisfaction practice what they preach and provide top-notch service. I really enjoy working with them!