IT Teams

  • 6 min read

Zendesk Vs Jira: Which Is The Better ITSM Tool

Rohit Rao

2nd April, 2023

SHARE ON:

Zendesk is primarily a customer service platform designed to help organizations manage customer interactions across multiple channels. It provides a unified view of customer interactions, making it easier for support teams to collaborate and resolve issues quickly.

Meanwhile, Jira is a ticketing and project management tool designed to help IT teams manage their internal IT and service operations. It provides a centralized location for tracking and resolving service requests, incidents, and problems. 

However, they also have other unique functionalities to look into before deciding which tool will be more apt for your business.

What will improve an organization's IT service delivery, quality, and efficiency? The answer to it is proper IT service management. How does it do that? It gives IT teams a structured system that helps streamline the IT processes. 

To be noted, here, the "service" term means managing IT services like ticketing management.

You can avail of the same benefits by searching for an ideal ITSM tool that perfectly fits your IT team's needs. Zendesk and Jira are such options that are available to you and are widely known for their ITSM capabilities. 

However, it depends on IT-specific needs and preferences, which will be more appropriate as both tools provide distinct features to streamline the IT service management process.

For example, Zendesk is often praised for its simple and easy-to-use interface, making it a popular choice for small to medium-sized businesses. Meanwhile, Jira Service Management has a more complex interface designed to offer greater customization and control, making it a popular choice for larger organizations.

In this article, we'll compare their core functionality, which will help you make the ultimate choice. 

Comparison Based On 5 Key Parameters

What are the factors that you need to consider while choosing one of these? What makes one better than the other? Well, this section is all about it. To help you make a decision, below we have listed some of the key parameters based on which you choose the one that fits your IT team’s needs the best way:

1. Types Of User Roles Available

• Jira is more suited for technical users, such as software developers and IT teams, who require high customization and integration with other tools. Its user interface is more complex than Zendesk's, requiring more technical expertise to use effectively. 
  
  Meanwhile, Zendesk's user-friendly interface is well-suited for non-technical users, such as customer service representatives and business users without technical expertise. Its interface is more intuitive and needs less technical knowledge to use.

• Also, Jira's focus is on collaboration between technical teams and stakeholders, ensuring they connect to the right support professionals and offering more robust collaboration tools for IT teams. 
  
  While Zendesk focuses on collaboration between customer service representatives and customers, offering tools such as live chat and social media integration for customer service representatives to interact with end-users.

In short, Jira is more suited for technical users who require a high degree of customization and integration, while Zendesk can be perfect for non-technical users who need a user-friendly interface and tools for collaboration with end-users.

2. Ticket Management Capabilities

• Zendesk provides a solid ticketing system and allows you to automatically convert your email, social media, live chat, and voice messages into support tickets. Also, end-users get notified whenever the IT support team receives their request or complaint. 
  
  To manage the conversations, it supports multiple channels in one place. Furthermore, you can easily track previously raised tickets by the customer to refer to the information, improving the quality of conversations. Moreover, functionalities like time tracking, routing, SLA, and more makes Zendesk a suitable ticketing partner. 

• Meanwhile, with Jira, you can showcase your services online, which the customers and employees can use it to contact you quickly. Also, you can tailor request forms to meet different customers' and teams' specific requirements. 
  
  It also receives requests through email, chat, and other channels, just like Zendesk. Furthermore, you can group tickets with similar characteristics, which will help IT teams as this organized system will save them time. Also, it can handle bulk requests, making it suitable for businesses with high support service demands. 

3. Knowledge-Base Management Capabilities

• Zendesk offers IT teams a help centre feature known as "Do it yourself service". This feature allows you to create a smart knowledge base, allowing customers to get the freedom to help themselves with their issues. 
  
  Customers can search for articles based on keywords, and Zendesk's advanced search algorithm will provide accurate and relevant results quickly. Eventually, this helps in reducing ticket volume, 24/7 assistance, and support costs. 

• However, Jira is one step ahead regarding the knowledge base capabilities, as it allows you to create AI-powered self-service portals for both employees and customers. This powerful search engine lets users quickly find relevant articles by searching for keywords or phrases.
  
  Also, users can provide feedback and ratings on articles whether the articles were helpful or not, this will help in sorting the articles that have solved more problems, queries, and requests, improving the quality and relevance of the knowledge base content.

4. Reporting & Analytic Capabilities

• Zendesk doesn't disappoint you when it comes to its reporting and analytic capabilities. You can easily identify areas for improvement, like the time taken to respond to end-users. You can also monitor the overall performance of IT teams, such as how effectively they can resolve any queries or issues.
  
  It allows you to generate data reports on every conversation that has taken place during the interaction between the end users and IT teams. That can be used as a reference to resolve the same issues that can arise in the near future.
  
  Furthermore, IT teams can schedule and share reports with stakeholders and teammates, keeping them in the loop about key insights and trends.

• Meanwhile, Jira needs to catch up in a few situations, like it doesn't allow you to generate separate reports for every end-user service channel. Though you can set multiple SLA policies and track SLA breaches, you can use customer satisfaction reports to understand and identify what customers want. This will help in improving the overall customer experience.
  
  Furthermore, you can create and share reports with the operation, development, and other departments by using templates. This helps track follow-on actions and mitigate incidents in the future.

5. Automation & Integration Capabilities

• Jira provides a more robust workflow automation engine than Zendesk. IT teams can create custom rules and workflows to automate repetitive tasks, such as assigning tickets to specific agents or teams based on particular conditions. Zendesk also offers workflow automation, but it's not as powerful as Jira Service Management. 

• When it comes to integration capabilities, Jira Service Management integrates seamlessly with other Atlassian tools, such as Jira Software and Confluence, making it an ideal choice for IT teams that already use Atlassian tools. On the other hand, Zendesk integrates well with other tools, such as Salesforce and Slack, making it a preferred choice.

After comparing its capabilities closely, you might have understood which tool will be apt to manage IT services in your organization. However, one more efficient tool, Zluri, offers excellent features to streamline IT operations and can replace Zendesk and Jira, which you can consider opting for. What is Zluri? What types of features does it offer? Here's a quick brief.

Zluri: An Alternative Solution to Manage Ad-hoc App Requests

Are you tired of manually going back and forth to manage the app requests? If you want to mitigate this challenge, we have a perfect solution for you: Zluri. Zluri is an efficient SaaS management platform that streamlines the IT service management process efficiently and effectively, allowing IT teams and employees to improve their productivity. How does it do that?

Let's take an example, the organization hired an employee to join the finance department, upon provisioning, he was given access to Quicken and TurboTax to proceed with his work. However, now the employee must access Mint to track expenses and get alerts on overspending and payment deadlines. But, he has to wait for quite a few days to get access approval from IT teams, as the app request goes through several processes which take days to complete. 

So here’s where Zluri comes in place, it offers Employee App Store, which is a self-serve model. It gives freedom to the employees to choose any SaaS apps present in the EAS. Now they need to submit an access request simply, and within no time, they will gain access to the application. 

With Zluri, IT teams get alerts whenever a ticket has been raised by employees, allowing them to respond to it quickly. IT teams verify their role, designation,  department, or whether there is a need for that application in the employees' work, and more; with just a few clicks, IT teams can grant them secure access to the SaaS applications. 

This helps improve the employee experience and increase productivity by eliminating the waiting period. 

However, one more question arises: what if the employee wants access to an app not available in the EAS? They can simply request it, and the IT team will view all the app-related details, such as risk level, threat score, compliance, and more. Once the application meets the checklist, IT teams forward the app request to the procurement team. With Zluri’s SaaS buying capabilities, the procurement team negotiates for the best offer and then purchases the application.

Now the procured applications return to IT teams, and then they grant the app access to the employee.

But, the IT teams can deny the app request if the app is not secure enough, and the status of the same will be notified to the employees. IT teams provide employees with other substitutes to the app present in the organization's SaaS stack

This was all about how it benefited the employees, now we will see how it benefits the IT teams. It eliminates the repetitive app request management task through automation, making it easier for IT teams to manage ticket requests effectively. They can view all the raised tickets in a centralized dashboard, and with just a few clicks, they can grant access to multiple employees at a time. Also, they get notified whenever a request or ticket is being raised, so no more missing out on requests.  

Additionally, with Zluri, IT teams have complete control over which applications will view the EAS and can customize it according to specific requirements. This will mitigate security and compliance risks, as employees won't be able to view the apps, which can hamper the security system.

Now how are you going to keep track of the approval workflow? With Zluri, you can conduct timely audits and generate reports and analytics on ticket resolution rates, time taken to approve requests, and more, helping streamline the approval workflow process.  

If you want to see how it works in real-time, make sure to book a demo now. Check out Zluri's other excellent features, like asset management, ULM, IAM, and more, that can perfectly fit your IT teams. 

About the author

Rohit Rao

Rohit works in the Community and Marketing Team of Zluri and is a strong advocate of community led growth.