Zendesk

I really wanted to like Zendesk. The demo looked excellent and the Shopify integration was one of the main reasons I started a trial.
Unfortunately, the setup experience was so poor that I gave up.
I installed the official Zendesk Shopify app, connected it to my Zendesk account, and initially received a “failed to connect” message even though the connection had actually been created. I then tried to install the Shopify Support sidebar app so we could view order information inside Zendesk tickets.
That repeatedly failed with:
“Failed to install your Shopify Support app. Try again later.”
I followed Zendesk’s own troubleshooting instructions, disconnected the store, removed/reinstalled the Shopify app, approved the requested customer, order and Online Store permissions, re-entered the Zendesk subdomain, re-authenticated successfully, and reconnected the store.
Authentication completed successfully and the Shopify storefront showed as connected in Zendesk, but the Support sidebar app still failed to install with exactly the same error.
On top of that, finding basic administration settings was unnecessarily difficult. The product itself looks extremely capable once configured, but for a small business I simply cannot justify spending this much time trying to get a standard, officially supported Shopify integration working.
If the onboarding and integrations are this troublesome before we have even started using the system properly, it doesn’t inspire confidence in moving our customer service operation across to it.
A real shame, because based on the demo I thought Zendesk might have been exactly what we were looking for.