We're a franchise network — 17 locations across four provinces, each its own business, all supported by one shared team. That structure breaks most helpdesks. Zoho Desk maps onto it almost exactly: one department per location, each with its own support address, its own agents, its own business hours and SLAs. Customers keep emailing the address they always used, and our team sees everything in one queue instead of jumping between separate portals. The per-department business hours matter more than I expected with locations spread across Pacific, Mountain and Eastern time, and the multilingual help centre covers our Quebec locations without affecting the rest. It also sits inside the wider Zoho stack we already run — Mail, Cliq, WorkDrive, Sign — so it's one organisation, one login, no integration work to keep alive. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The multi-location capability is the whole reason a business like ours picks Desk, and you have to be on Enterprise to actually get it. Free gives you one department. Professional gives you ten — which sounds generous until you're a franchise with seventeen locations and realise the one feature you're buying the product for is the feature that runs out. There's no sensible middle tier for a multi-unit operator who isn't enterprise-sized. The limits also aren't obvious upfront; I found the department cap by hitting it. Two other things worth knowing before you build: departments can't be deleted once created, only disabled, and disabling forces an irreversible transfer of agents and mail servers — so a naming mistake stays with you. And on the free tier, the 3-agent limit stops working the moment staff cover more than one location, because seats duplicate across every portal they touch. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.