Zendesk Voice: A Complete Overview for 2025

Let's be honest, even with all the chatbots and email tickets in the world, sometimes you just need to talk to a person. When a problem gets complicated, picking up the phone is often the quickest way to a real solution. It seems customers agree; according to one study, a huge 80 percent of them still prefer phone calls for customer service.

This is where tools like Zendesk Voice come into the picture. It's one of the most familiar names for building a call center right into your support desk, promising one clean, unified workspace for your agents. But is it still the best choice for your team in 2025?

This guide is a straightforward look at Zendesk Voice. We’ll cover its features, what its AI can (and can’t) do, its slightly confusing pricing, and some of the key limitations you won’t find on the sales page. By the end, you'll have a much clearer idea of whether Zendesk's native phone system is a perfect match or if a more flexible AI tool might be a smarter move.

What is Zendesk Voice?

Zendesk Voice is essentially Zendesk’s built-in phone system, which used to be called Zendesk Talk. It lives directly inside the Zendesk Service platform, and that integration is its biggest selling point. The goal is to let your support agents handle phone calls in the exact same place they manage emails, live chats, and social media messages.

This setup creates a single history for every customer interaction. When a call comes in, a ticket is automatically generated, and the agent can see the customer's entire backstory. It’s designed to mix traditional call center features, like call routing and IVR menus, with more modern AI tools that can summarize calls or even handle simple queries.

One thing to know right away is that Zendesk Voice isn’t a standalone product. You can't just buy the phone system by itself. It has to be paired with a Zendesk Service Suite subscription, which is just the first piece of its multi-layered pricing puzzle.

Key features and capabilities of Zendesk Voice

Zendesk Voice has a lot under the hood, blending the kind of call center tools you’d expect with a newer layer of AI. Let's dig into what you actually get.

Native Zendesk Voice integration and call management

The main draw of Zendesk Voice is how neatly it fits into the rest of the Zendesk world. When a customer calls, a new ticket pops into existence instantly. If they've contacted you before, their full conversation history appears on the agent's screen. No more asking, "Could you remind me what we talked about last time?"

Here are some of the core features that make this happen:

• Call routing: You can set up rules to direct calls to the right place. Send billing questions to the finance team, urgent calls to senior agents, or route calls based on business hours.

• Call queues and callbacks: Instead of forcing customers to listen to hold music for ten minutes, you can offer them a callback that saves their spot in line.

• Quality assurance tools: Managers can listen in on live calls to monitor quality, whisper advice to agents that only they can hear (known as call barging), and pull up recordings later for training purposes.

• Transfers and conferencing: Agents can do a "warm transfer" (where they introduce the customer to the next agent) or easily loop in a third person for a conference call.

Having everything in one system keeps things organized, which is a big plus for teams that are already all-in on Zendesk.

AI-powered support features

Zendesk has been working more AI into its voice product to automate some of the grunt work. For instance, after a call, AI automatically creates a transcript and a short summary. This is a nice little time-saver that frees agents from having to type up detailed notes.

They also offer AI agents for voice, which they’ve built through a partnership with PolyAI. These bots are meant to handle common questions and can supposedly resolve over half of incoming calls by authenticating callers and answering basic questions before routing them.

For managers, there’s Zendesk QA, which uses AI to analyze all conversations and flag things like negative customer sentiment or potential churn risks. While these AI features sound impressive, there's a big catch: they work best with information that’s already inside Zendesk. This becomes a real issue if your company’s knowledge is spread out across tools like Confluence or Google Docs.

The limitations and challenges of Zendesk Voice

While Zendesk Voice gets the job done, its all-in-one design comes with some big trade-offs in cost, flexibility, and overall control. It's important to know what you might be giving up before you sign on the dotted line.

A complex and layered pricing model

Trying to figure out what Zendesk Voice will actually cost you can be a headache. The price isn't a single number; it's a stack of different fees that can make your monthly bill feel like a bit of a lottery.

You have to pay for:

1. A Zendesk Service Suite plan: This is your base subscription, which starts at $59 per agent each month.

2. A phone number: You have to rent a number from them, which comes with its own monthly fee.

3. Usage costs: You get charged per minute for every inbound and outbound call.

4. Add-ons: If you want to send texts, that's another fee for every message sent.

This model makes your costs unpredictable. A busy month could easily lead to a surprisingly high bill. This is a completely different approach from platforms like eesel AI, which offers clear monthly plans without charging you per resolution. You know exactly what you’re paying, which makes budgeting a whole lot easier.

eesel AI's transparent pricing page, offered as a clear alternative to the complex Zendesk Voice pricing model.

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A closed ecosystem limits knowledge and flexibility

Zendesk's AI is smartest when it’s learning from knowledge bases and tickets that live on its own platform. But what if your most critical, up-to-date product info is in a Confluence wiki? Or what if your internal processes are all documented in Google Docs? The AI’s helpfulness takes a nosedive.

To get the most out of it, Zendesk basically pushes you to move all of your knowledge into its system. That’s a massive, time-sucking project that most teams just can't take on. It’s the classic "walled garden" problem.

In contrast, modern AI platforms like eesel AI are built to connect to the tools you already use. It plugs directly into your current tech stack and can pull knowledge from over 100 different sources, including your past Zendesk tickets, without making you migrate a single file.

An infographic explaining how eesel AI unifies knowledge from multiple sources, a key advantage over the closed ecosystem of Zendesk Voice.

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Lack of self-serve setup and granular control

If you browse Zendesk’s own help center, you'll see long, detailed guides on setting up the voice channel. It’s not exactly a plug-and-play experience; it takes a good amount of configuration and technical comfort.

And once you’re set up, you’re pretty much locked into Zendesk's way of doing things. Customizing how your AI sounds, what specific tasks it can perform, or which types of tickets get automated can feel rigid.

This is where a tool like eesel AI really stands apart. It’s designed to be incredibly simple and self-serve, letting you get up and running in minutes, not days. It also gives you a powerful workflow engine to define custom AI actions (like checking an order status in Shopify) and includes a risk-free simulation mode. You can test the AI on thousands of your past tickets to see exactly how it would have performed before you let it talk to a single customer. That’s real control.

The eesel AI interface for setting customization rules, demonstrating the granular control that is a key alternative to the more rigid Zendesk Voice system.

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Zendesk Voice pricing explained

To really wrap your head around the cost of Zendesk Voice, you have to look at both the software plans and the usage fees. Here's a quick breakdown.

First, every agent taking calls needs a Zendesk Service Suite plan.

Plan	Annual Price/Agent	Monthly Price/Agent	Key Voice-Related Features Included
Team	$49/mo	$59/mo	Basic call recording, automatic ticket creation.
Growth	$79/mo	$99/mo	Up to 100 AI answer bots.
Professional	$99/mo	$125/mo	IVR, call monitoring & barging, conference calling, skills-based routing.
Enterprise	$150/mo	$199/mo	Call offering time limit, 99.95% uptime SLA.

But that's just the entry fee. On top of that, you have these mandatory usage costs:

• Phone Numbers: Usually start around $2 per month for a local number.

• Inbound Calls (US/Canada): About $0.037 per minute.

• Outbound Calls (US/Canada): About $0.022 per minute.

• Texting (Add-on): Roughly $0.009 per text.

As you can see, the costs can pile up. This multi-part structure is a real pain for any business that needs to know what its bills will look like month to month.

This video provides an introduction to Zendesk's integrated voice software and how you can use it to speak directly with your customers.

The better way: Enhance Zendesk Voice with a dedicated AI layer

So, what's the alternative? Instead of locking yourself into a single, pricey ecosystem, you can add a specialized tool on top of what you already have. You can keep Zendesk for its fantastic ticketing system and connect it to a dedicated, more flexible AI platform like eesel AI.

This approach gives you the best of both worlds. You get to keep the workflows your team already knows in Zendesk while plugging in a smarter, more adaptable AI that learns from all your knowledge sources, not just one.

Here’s how they stack up:

Feature	Zendesk Voice (Native AI)	Zendesk + eesel AI
Setup Time	Days or weeks of configuration.	Live in minutes through a self-serve dashboard.
Knowledge Sources	Limited mostly to Zendesk Help Center.	Unifies 100+ sources (Confluence, Google Docs, past tickets, you name it).
Customization	Rigid, pre-defined workflows.	Fully customizable AI persona, prompts, and custom actions via API.
Rollout	Often "all or nothing" for certain features.	Risk-free simulation on past tickets and a gradual, controlled rollout.
Pricing	Complicated fees (plan + number + usage).	Transparent plans with no per-resolution fees. Predictable costs.

For teams that want to use powerful, custom AI without getting stuck with a single vendor, an integration-first platform like eesel AI is clearly the more modern way to go.

Final thoughts on Zendesk Voice

So, what's the verdict? Zendesk Voice is a solid, deeply integrated call center solution, but it really only makes sense for businesses that are already 100% committed to the Zendesk ecosystem. For everyone else, its closed-off nature, confusing pricing, and lack of flexibility can create some major headaches. Modern support teams need to be agile, pulling knowledge from everywhere, not just from what’s stored in one help desk.

A dedicated AI layer like eesel AI offers a smarter, more cost-effective way forward. It enhances the investment you've already made in Zendesk by giving you a more powerful AI, complete control over your workflows, and a setup process that takes minutes instead of months. You get to unlock the power of AI without the pain of migrating all your data or dealing with surprise bills.

Ready to see what a truly flexible AI platform can do for your support team? Integrate eesel AI with Zendesk for free and start automating support in minutes.