Why Zendesk?

Zendesk vs. competitors at a glance

To create a successful customer service team, you need several key ingredients. Checking every box is difficult for many teams, as their features and tools force them to make tradeoffs.

For example, legacy enterprise systems—like Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Pega, and ServiceNow—provide tools that help personalize the customer experience and scale with growing businesses. However, they come with high costs and low agility.

On the flip side, emerging support platforms—like Freshworks, HubSpot, Intercom, Help Scout, Gladly, Kustomer, and Dixa—offer agile tool sets at lower price points but fall short with personalization and scalability.

Zendesk is built for customer service and intended to scale and adapt to businesses of all sizes, so our platform’s resume speaks for itself. But how does Zendesk compare to the competition?

Use the comparison chart below to see how Zendesk stacks up against legacy enterprise systems (like Salesforce, Microsoft, and SAP) and SMB support tools (like Freshworks, HubSpot, and Kustomer). Check out the software tools and features at a glance and discover which platform is the best customer service software for your business.

How Zendesk beats the competition

What is the best customer service solution, and why is it Zendesk?

Zendesk is more than a team competing for a trophy in customer service excellence. Zendesk strives to separate from the competition and stand alone as the authority in the industry. Here are a few ways Zendesk outshines competitors.

• Exclusive focus on the customer experience

If you want to create the best customer experience, you want a platform made specifically for customer service. Built with a focus on CX, Zendesk empowers your customer service team with the right tools to deliver personalized experiences across the customer journey.

Zendesk provides businesses with a unified, integrated omnichannel solution that allows them to build meaningful connections through rich conversations on any channel. These channels—like social messaging apps, phone, email, and SMS—are available out of the box so you can meet customers where they are with fast, convenient service. You can also deploy AI-powered chatbots that can engage with customers and provide a unique interactive experience.

• Fast time to value at enterprise scale

When time is money, seamless implementation of a new customer service platform is crucial. Zendesk offers a low cost of ownership due to its quick and simple setup, ease of use, thousands of out-of-the-box and customizable integrations, and minimal administrative needs—allowing you to see the value of your investment immediately.

Flexible software that adapts to business growth and evolving customer needs is imperative for success. Zendesk is an open platform built to grow with scaling businesses. Investing in Zendesk can help you level up your customer experience and enhance the employee experience with the right tools that set them up for success.

• Consistently highest ROI

To build a loyal customer base, combine great customer service with a solution that helps your team provide that high level of service. Zendesk offers an omnichannel solution that gives you the tools to improve customer support and boost your ROI.

In a 2021 study by Forrester, Zendesk for enterprise increased the ROI of some businesses by 286 percent over a three-year period. They were able to achieve this through:

• Cost savings from deflected tickets and reduced handle time
• Balanced staffing due to improved agent efficiency
• Faster integration and time-to-value savings
• Additional annual revenue

As a trusted leader in the customer service industry, Zendesk can help your teams deliver an immersive CX experience that keeps customers coming back. Our flexible and agile platform provides AI-powered chatbots, self-service portals, a unified agent workspace, and other features to foster a great experience for employees and customers. Easy, convenient support means less customer churn, higher customer satisfaction, and stronger customer loyalty—the ingredients of a consistently high ROI.

Learn how Zendesk can increase your ROI with our ROI calculator.

• Best total cost of ownership (TCO) at scale

The total cost of your customer service software is often more than your monthly subscription price. Many platforms have hidden costs that can include:

• Implementation costs by a third-party consultant or internal resource
• Training costs to get your agents up to speed on a new system
• Maintenance costs for bug fixes and software updates
• Add-ons or upgrade costs
• Staffing costs to fill the gaps from missing features, like automations
• Downtime costs for unstable systems

Zendesk is simple to set up and has several out-of-the-box features that allow you to jump right in on day one. The intuitive interface makes it easy to use, shortening the agent learning curve. It also comes equipped with self-service options, reporting and analytics tools, and a marketplace full of apps and integrations so you can build the best system for your business.

• Seamless omnichannel customer experience

The best customer service solutions eliminate all barriers for customers to get the help they need. Using Zendesk, you can truly create a seamless omnichannel customer experience that enables agents to quickly resolve issues, deliver personalized experiences, and build customer relationships.

An omnichannel customer experience is about more than simply providing multiple communication channels for customers. It’s about delivering a richer experience by creating connected and consistent customer interactions across channels.

For example, an agent can invite a customer to join them on an alternative channel that can enhance the experience, like switching to voice when messaging back and forth is taking too long. The conversation history and context travel with them from channel to channel, so they can pick back up right where they left off.

Our complete messaging solution provides a convenient way to maintain a continuous conversation with your customers. Zendesk features messaging tools that work right out of the box so you can meet customers wherever they are. They’re customizable, too—with low or no coding—so you can tailor them to fit your business needs.

Zendesk also makes it easy to add channels to your website or mobile app. These messaging options include:

• SMS and WhatsApp for Business
• Social messaging channels like Facebook Messenger
• Business productivity tools like Slack

• Frictionless agent experience

Zendesk creates a frictionless agent experience by empowering teams with a complete and unified toolset. A frictionless agent experience begins with an intuitive interface that lets you connect easily with your customers, no matter the channel.

The Zendesk Agent Workspace is a customizable interface with tools and customer conversations all in one place. Agents can access the information and customer context they need when an interaction begins, allowing them to maintain relevant, personal conversations. All departments have the same view, too, breaking down data silos and fostering better collaboration across the business.

Automating repetitive tasks helps streamline workflows, and self-service options deflect tickets, keeping the workload more manageable for your agents. Simply put, our support platform makes it easier for agents to do their jobs, allowing them to spend less time navigating different systems and apps and more time providing a seamless customer experience.

• 360 customer view

A 360-degree view of the customer means facilitating data and integrations across the entire business and tech stack in one place. This unified view helps you align customer support with the rest of your business. It gives anyone touching the account the context they need to better serve the customer and provide a more personalized experience.

Zendesk comes equipped with a 360 customer view that gives team members better visibility into the entire customer journey—like previous interactions, order history, channel preferences, behaviors, resolved issues, and open tickets—instead of only showing the current customer request.

With all information in one place, your agents don’t need to waste time toggling between systems and apps to find important customer data. This improves the agent experience and boosts the customer experience by eliminating a major pain point for customers: repeating themselves.

Additionally, integrations with collaboration tools like Salesforce, Shopify, JIRA, and Slack make internal communication easier. Meanwhile, the Zendesk API lets you add functionality to boost the agent experience—you can create automations for migrating ticket data, make bulk edits, create custom tickets, and more. Zendesk customers and industry leaders are leveraging the Zendek API and the wealth of integrations from the Zendesk Marketplace to form a tailored, 360-degree view of the customer across their business.

• Deep operational and product insights

Zendesk offers robust reporting and analytics software that allows you to capture the insights you need to make informed decisions. Our tools show you where your business excels and where you can improve—whether that’s your business operations, customer service, or product performance. For example, you can see which help center articles are the most effective with self-service for a particular issue or measure the efficiency of AI at solving tickets across channels.

Our native analytics tools come with pre-built dashboards for every channel, so you can see valuable information in real time, out of the box. Zendesk allows you to customize reports, metrics, charts, filters, and dashboards with point-and-click configuration, so you can easily create a tailored experience.

Your solution should permit you to drill into your data to better understand what contributes to the metrics you see. The best customer service software should also allow you to store user profile attributes so you can personalize every customer interaction and improve the overall experience.

• CX best practice expertise and community

With Zendesk, you can leverage world-class experts to help you build the best customer experience. With our active online community forums, Zendesk empowers customers to connect, collaborate, and share their expertise. We also feature partner programs that offer customer onboarding and support training.

Customer experience best practices evolve with changing customer preferences and behaviors—Zendesk helps you stay on top of trends so you can position your business as a CX-pert. Zendesk will also be with you throughout your customer journey to help you get started, fine-tune your CX, and guide you through transitions as your business grows.

• AI

Zendesk is on the cutting edge of technology, using AI and machine learning to create a great experience for customers and employees. Zendesk uses chatbots that employ natural language processing (NLP) to engage with customers across channels. Zendesk also features intelligence in the context panel that offers agent assistance, skills-based routing, and intelligent triage to simplify agent workflows.

Zendesk AI is an advanced bot that comes pre-trained to understand the top customer service issues. It can understand customer sentiment, intent, and language and continuously learns to provide better CX. It sets up quickly with almost no technical support required, so you can start reaping immediate benefits.

With automation, self-service, and AI on the rise, leveraging these features can help you deliver high-quality support while establishing yourself as an industry leader and expert.

• Self-service

According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2023, 37 percent of customers get frustrated when they can’t complete simple tasks on their own. Zendesk offers a variety of self-service tools that provide customers with convenient support on demand. These self-help resources include:

• AI-powered chatbots
• Customer portals
• Help center articles
• Community forums

Self-service options are also beneficial for your support team because they help deflect tickets, reducing agents’ workload.

Additionally, Zendesk bots enable you to provide 24/7 customer service, so buyers can get help even when agents are offline. Bots can immediately greet customers to deliver proactive support and provide knowledge base content (such as help center articles and FAQs) to help customers find quick answers.

Customer stories

Making the switch is easier than you might think. Check out the companies that switched to Zendesk and see how their business and customer base benefited.

Limeade: From Salesforce → Zendesk

It’s hard to make Limeade when your customer service software keeps serving you lemons. The employee well-being software pioneer needed an agile customer support solution to help the team understand customer pain points and where they could make improvements.

Limeade first tried Salesforce, but the product’s complexity and inability to adapt without help from a developer made it difficult for the company to achieve its goals. Ticket management with Salesforce was complicated to prioritize, too. The analytics tools only provided limited metrics and information the team needed to create solutions for customer pain points.

Zendesk provided a seamless implementation process over the course of only three weeks. Since switching to Zendesk, Limeade’s user base has increased by 60 percent—and it didn’t have to increase its customer support staff. Limeade now has six branded knowledge bases with feedback loops that help the team boost their overall CX.

“Moving to Zendesk is going to save us money in the long run,” says Ryan Putnam, Limeade’s director of customer service. “With more repeatable processes, macros, automations, triggers, and better insights, we can reduce our incoming volume. And with the translation and localization capabilities supporting our global strategy, it will pay for itself.”

Read more about Limeade’s success with Zendesk.

Clutter: From Kustomer → Zendesk

Clutter, formerly MakeSpace, is an innovative storage space service that originally used Zendesk as its customer support solution. After some staff changes, Clutter switched to Kustomer, which promised lower pricing, a simple interface, and a personalized experience. Kustomer did not fulfill these promises and even became unresponsive to communications.

Sean Benedict, CX operations manager at Clutter, wanted to move from Kustomer to an experienced company with proven long-term success, like Zendesk. “The thinking was, if we’re going to move, it should be to Zendesk because I don’t want to move to another younger company, another startup, and then just be in the same position that we’re in two or three years from now.”

Clutter sent Kustomer packing and returned to Zendesk. The company seamlessly picked up where it left off, made additional upgrades, and even had Zendesk build a custom app. Since switching back to Zendesk, Clutter has seen an 11 percent improvement in CSAT, a 63 percent increase in agent efficiency (year over year), and a 28 percent improvement in first reply time.

Read more about Clutter’s success with Zendesk.

Monese: From Intercom → Freshdesk → Zendesk

For Monese, the third time was the charm. The creators of the banking app that makes it easy for people to transition their finances when relocating to another country rely on their customer service for success. Monese initially used Intercom as its live chat provider. But Monese quickly learned that it needed a single platform that could centralize conversations and adapt as the company scaled.

Monese tried Freshdesk but had issues integrating the Intercom live chat software and received spotty service that tanked the quality of its customer service.

“We were having some difficulties with the Freshdesk call side,” said Lauri Haav, Monese’s head of customer loyalty. “We had massive problems with call drops, mixed calls—calls would just mysteriously disappear, never actually reaching the agents. The Freshdesk voice product wasn’t good enough for us.”

After two strikes with customer service software, the company switched to Zendesk. Zendesk provided Monese with fast, reliable API and strong omnichannel support. With Zendesk, Monese saw a 10 percent increase in CSAT and a 59 percent decrease in first response time.

Read more about Monese’s success with Zendesk.

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