Zendesk
A customer service platform for managing support tickets, live chat, and customer communications — standard at companies with dedicated support teams.
Zendesk is the leading helpdesk and customer support platform, used by support teams to manage tickets, automate workflows, and track customer satisfaction metrics. It's required at customer success, customer support, and operations roles at most SaaS companies and e-commerce businesses with active support functions.
Typical time to job-readiness: ~1 week.
Learning Zendesk
Beginner
Manage and close tickets, use macros and canned responses, and set up basic automations and triggers.
Intermediate
Build custom views and SLA policies, configure a help center, and use reporting to track team CSAT and first-response time metrics.
Advanced
API-based integrations with CRM and product tools, multi-brand/multi-language portal architecture, and advanced routing logic. Assessed through operational metrics, not just tool familiarity.
Key concepts
- Tickets — the core unit; every customer interaction becomes a trackable ticket
- Triggers and automations — rules that fire when conditions are met (e.g., auto-assign by topic)
- Views — filtered queues for organizing tickets by status, assignee, or priority
- SLA policies — time targets for first response and resolution by ticket priority
- CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) — post-ticket survey sent automatically after resolution
- Macros — saved response templates for common issues to speed up ticket handling
Common interview topics
- How would you set up a Zendesk workflow for a new support team
- Explain the difference between triggers and automations in Zendesk
- How do you measure support team performance in Zendesk
- What is an SLA and how would you configure one
- How would you use Zendesk reporting to identify the top customer pain points