Ask HN: startup customer support - Zendesk vs Jira | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: startup customer support - Zendesk vs Jira

I'm hoping the HN community can help me here with a debate I am having with my co-founder.

When I started our startup (before he joined me) I set up Zendesk as our customer support channel - partly because it's one of those companies that I've always admired and really wanted an excuse to use.

However, my co-founder has more experience with Jira and want to replace Zendesk with Jira. (He is technical, whereas I am non-technical).

We already run our dev tickets through Jira, and I know that Zendesk allows Jira integration, but he still doesn't see the point in having Zendesk in the first place.

We are essentially a B2B SaaS product. At the moment CS is low-level, but we expect it to increase once we start getting traction.

Anyone got experience of both of them as a CS channel? Anyone used the Zendesk Jira integration? Any arguments for one but not the other?

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Tools like Zendesk and Desk.com [1] are really overkill for an early stage startup. They're pricey and the ramp up time is a little killer. They are really built for people who spend the majority of day doing Customer Support.

If you're pre-launch, there really isn't a strong reason to do anything but email-based support. HelpScout is a good alternative to automate some of that.

Jira, on the other hand, can be very useful for internal task management. Exporting from your support platform to Jira automatically is useful in this case, but again, only if you have someone doing full time support. Otherwise just open your own tickets after you gather customer feedback and can write a coherent ticket that someone can use to write code against.

[1] I currently work at Desk.com, where we use Jira on the engineering team, but our own customer support team uses Desk.

We're a B2B SaaS product too. For customer support, we started with Zendesk, but we switched over time to Helpscout.

We felt that Zendesk was getting too large and complicated for our reasonably straightforward requirements. Plus, we really liked the image of our customers getting back a personal email rather than the "YOU HAVE BEEN ASSIGNED TICKET #238989438928992, PLEASE WAIT (24) HOURS FOR RESPONSE" kind of system.

Obligatory comment about early optimisation. If you find yourself having big debates about the optimal tools and integrations when you have nowhere near the quantity of support tickets that would justify spending any time on this problem at all, you may be focused on the wrong area.

We use Jira for dev tickets (two years) and Zendesk for customer support (one year).

I would not use Jira for CS, Zendesk is much more suitable for that task (imo).

No experience with the Zendesk<->Jira integration.

In that case it seems like you maybe should be using the integration.

Why do you think Zendesk is more suitable for CS than Jira? My co-founder reckons most startups use Jira for support - I reckon most use Zendesk.

Zendesk Jira integration is awesome

That's good to know, but why use Zendesk at all then?

Definitely Zendesk!

I love Zendesk too, but have you also tried Jira?

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