Zendesk for employee service

Let’s be honest, your employees’ expectations for internal support have changed. The days of clunky portals and waiting a week for an IT fix are over. People now expect the same speedy, easy-to-use help from HR and IT that they get from their favorite online brands. A forgotten password or a simple question about benefits shouldn't derail their entire day.

Zendesk, a big name in the customer experience world, noticed this trend and adapted its platform to tackle internal support with its Zendesk for Employee Service solution. It's a well-known tool with a lot to offer, but is it the right move for your team?

In this guide, we'll walk through what Zendesk actually brings to the table for internal support. We’ll look at its main features, break down the pricing, and, most importantly, talk about some key limitations you should know about. While it's a powerful platform, it isn't the only way to build a great employee experience. Sometimes, smarter AI tools that work with the systems you already have can be a more flexible and effective option.

What is Zendesk for Employee Service?

Zendesk for Employee Service is a set of tools built to help departments like HR and IT streamline how they handle internal requests. The idea is to apply the same principles of great customer service, speed, self-service, and good communication, to support your own team.

The goal is to create one organized place for every employee request. Instead of questions getting lost in emails or random Slack threads, everything gets funneled into a central system. This helps automate common tasks, answer the same questions over and over again instantly, and empower employees to find their own answers. This frees up your HR and IT teams to focus on more important work.

At its core, Zendesk for Employee Service uses the same technology that made Zendesk a leader in customer support, just tweaked for internal needs. The main pieces include:

• A solid ticketing system to track every employee request from the moment it's made until it's resolved.

• An internal knowledge base (or Help Center) where employees can look up answers anytime they need to.

• AI-powered bots and automations that can handle common questions without needing a human to step in.

• Reporting tools to see how well your internal support is actually performing.

• A specific "Employee Service Suite" that adds features like a Service Catalog for handling requests like new hardware or software access.

Key features of Zendesk for Employee Service

Zendesk has a lot of features for managing internal support. It’s easiest to understand them by breaking them down into three areas that shape the employee experience.

AI agents and automation

Zendesk’s AI agents are basically the front line for your internal support. They come pre-trained on tons of common HR and IT topics, so they can usually understand and answer questions about payroll, benefits, or software access right away.

The main job of these AI agents is to deflect routine tickets. When an employee has a question, the bot can find an answer in your knowledge base and deliver it on the spot. You can put these agents wherever your employees are already working, like in email, a web widget on your intranet, or through integrations with tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams. Beyond just answering questions, Zendesk’s automation can also route tickets to the right person, flag them by priority, or kick off simple workflows, helping to organize the usual chaos of internal requests.

Self-service portal and knowledge base

A great employee experience often means not having to ask for help in the first place. Zendesk's self-service portal is built for exactly this. It’s a central spot where employees can find company policies, how-to guides for common IT problems, or onboarding documents on their own time.

Zendesk also uses AI to help you keep this knowledge base useful. By looking at the questions employees are asking, it can spot gaps in your content and suggest new articles to write. This helps make sure your help center stays up-to-date. You can also set permissions to restrict access to certain articles, so sensitive HR or financial info is only seen by the people who are supposed to see it.

Service catalog, tasks, and approvals

For requests that are more involved than a simple question, Zendesk recently added an "Employee Service Suite" with some useful new tools. The Service Catalog is a big one. It’s like a menu of services that employees can request, such as a new laptop, a software license, or access to a particular system. When an employee picks one, it automatically creates a ticket with all the right information, so you don't have to go back and forth asking for details.

To manage these requests, Zendesk also added Tasks and Approvals. These tools let you create step-by-step workflows for things you do all the time. For example, a new laptop request could automatically create a task for a manager to approve, then one for the finance team, and a final one for IT to set it up. Each step has to be checked off, which helps ensure these multi-step processes are handled the same way every time and nothing gets missed.

Limitations and challenges of Zendesk for Employee Service

Zendesk offers a comprehensive, all-in-one solution, but that approach comes with some real trade-offs in flexibility, setup, and cost that are worth considering.

How Zendesk creates data silos

One of the biggest headaches of using Zendesk for Employee Service is that it often forces you to run a completely separate system from your customer support. This means you could end up managing two different Zendesk instances: one for customers and another for employees.

This creates a few problems. First, it doubles the administrative work for your team. Second, it walls off your data, making it tough to see the full picture of your support operations. Finally, it creates a disconnected experience. Insights from your customer support team can't easily be used to improve employee support, and the other way around.

Instead of adding another platform to your tech stack, it often makes more sense to make the tools you already have smarter. eesel AI works with your existing helpdesk, whether that’s Zendesk or something else. This unifies your support by letting you manage both customer and employee requests from the same place, just with better AI behind the scenes.

Limited knowledge sources

Zendesk's AI works best when it's pulling information from its own knowledge base. But let's be real, a company's internal knowledge is rarely stored in one neat place. It's usually scattered across tools like Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, and who knows how many shared drives.

Getting all of that information into Zendesk so the AI can use it can turn into a huge, manual migration project. Or you have to rely on integrations that can be clunky and don't always pull everything over. This leaves your AI with blind spots, unable to answer questions if the information lives outside of Zendesk.

This is where eesel AI really shines. It was built to connect to all your scattered knowledge from day one. With one-click integrations for over 100 sources, it can securely pull information from all your company's documents and apps. It even trains on your past support tickets to understand your company's specific quirks, so the answers it gives are accurate no matter where the info is stored.

An infographic showing how eesel AI connects to various knowledge sources, a key feature of Zendesk for employee service alternatives.

Complex setup and rollout

Zendesk sometimes promotes its employee service solution as a "zero code" setup, but the reality can be a bit more complicated. While the basic features are pretty straightforward, setting up advanced tools like the Service Catalog or custom approval workflows can be tricky and time-consuming.

What’s even more of a challenge is testing new automations safely. Zendesk’s Sandbox feature, which lets you experiment without breaking anything in your live environment, is usually only available on their most expensive enterprise plans. This makes it risky to roll out new AI workflows, since a mistake could create major problems for your employees.

In contrast, eesel AI is designed to be easy to set up yourself, letting you go live in minutes, not months. Its simulation mode is a huge help, you can test your AI on thousands of your past tickets to see exactly how it would have performed. This lets you build confidence and tweak its behavior before it ever talks to an employee. When you're ready, you can roll it out slowly, starting with certain teams or types of questions, and scale it up as you go.

A screenshot of the eesel AI simulation feature, which allows for safe testing of Zendesk for employee service workflows before rollout.

Zendesk for Employee Service pricing

Zendesk’s pricing for its employee service plans is based on how many agents you have, billed per month. While that sounds simple, the costs can add up fast, especially as your internal support teams get bigger.

Here’s a quick look at their standard plans, which are typically used for employee service:

This pricing structure is pretty different from eesel AI's pricing model. eesel AI offers clear and predictable plans based on the number of AI interactions, not how many human agents you have. This means you aren't penalized for growing your team. All the main features are included in every plan, and there are no per-resolution fees, so you won't get hit with a surprise bill after a busy month.

A screenshot of eesel AI's public pricing page, illustrating a transparent alternative to Zendesk for employee service pricing.

Is Zendesk for Employee Service the right choice for your employees?

Zendesk for Employee Service is a capable and well-established platform. For large organizations that want an all-in-one system to bring structure to their internal HR and IT support, it can definitely work. Features like the Service Catalog and robust ticketing are solid.

However, its biggest strength, being a single, self-contained system, is also tied to its biggest weakness. By locking you into its ecosystem, it can create annoying silos that separate your employee support from your customer support. It has trouble tapping into all the knowledge that lives outside its own walls, and the per-agent pricing with expensive add-ons can make it a costly solution to grow with.

For companies that prefer flexibility, speed, and a unified approach to knowledge, there's often a better way. Instead of ripping out your current systems and replacing them with one giant platform, consider making them smarter. eesel AI integrates with the helpdesk you already use to provide a more connected and cost-effective solution for employee service. It works with the tools you already have, delivering value right away without all the overhead.

This video provides a deep dive into the features and benefits of Zendesk for Employee Service.