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Help Scout vs Zendesk: What are the differences?
Developers describe Help Scout as "A help desk for teams that insist on a delightful customer experience". With best in-class-reporting, an integrated knowledge base, 50+ integrations and a robust API, Help Scout lets your team focus on what really matters: your customers. On the other hand, Zendesk is detailed as "The leading cloud-based customer service software solution". Zendesk provides an integrated on-demand helpdesk - customer support portal solution based on the latest Web 2.0 technologies and design philosophies.
Help Scout and Zendesk can be categorized as "Help Desk" tools.
Some of the features offered by Help Scout are:
- No ticket #'s or robo-text
- Get up and running in minutes
- Outstanding support, no matter plan
On the other hand, Zendesk provides the following key features:
- Offer your customers a quick path to the answers they need with knowledge base and community features.
- Zendesk takes customer communication from anywhere—your website, email, phone, Twitter, Facebook, and chat—and turns it into a ticket.
- Zendesk simplifies your support team's workflow with custom automatic actions, meaningful organization, and streamlined systems for managing support content.
"Email based helpdesk" is the primary reason why developers consider Help Scout over the competitors, whereas "Centralizes our customer support" was stated as the key factor in picking Zendesk.
According to the StackShare community, Zendesk has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1845 company stacks & 183 developers stacks; compared to Help Scout, which is listed in 215 company stacks and 15 developer stacks.
We sell a high-touch, high ASP product (caskets) and have scaled to where we're adding several more customer service agents to our company. Customers often call or chat with us multiple times prior to the purchase and post-purchase, as these are emotional, time-sensitive purchases. Nearly every customer contacts us pre-purchase. We are a Shopify shop. Customer service is our brand.
We need a solution that allows whoever picks up the chat or phone to quickly see the history of that customer, their request, notes, and the status of their order. We need a powerful chat tool that can enable immediate engagement, have some basic automation, and allows users to drop in.
Finally, we also have some B2B customers (funeral homes) and expect this part of our business to grow significantly in 2021.
Hey Joshua,
Would recommend using Freshdesk as your tool of choice. It has a direct integration with Shopify and other tools including powerful B2B customer handling. It also satisfies all the requirements you’ve outlined including order history, interaction history, notes, tickets etc. Along with Omni channel integrations with chat (their own or other chat solutions), email, phone and so on.
My company, JindalX can help you set up your customer service automation and journeys along with helping handle any extra volume through our own customer service reps if required. Can provide you with a free assessment if needed? Let me know, I’m contactable at madhav.garg@jindalx.com
Best, Madhav
ActiveCampaign can do all of this for you. They have really great support. Their automation is second to none. They have a chat bot capability. They also have an integrated capability where you see everything related to the one customer in one spot - all their interactions with you, and can move the customer through your custom stages. If you do go with ActiveCampaign, I HIGHLY recommend that you take their paid training. It will really help you get up faster and understand the product deeper, and not waste time. I think they have the training every month. ActiveCampaign is difficult to learn on your own since it is so full featured. Sign up for a trial through a salesperson and then ask if it is possible to get in the class for less money. ActiveCampaign integrates with Shopify also.
If you don't go with ActiveCampaign, then Zoho would be my second choice. But their support and quality is not as good, they feel like a new product even though they have been in business a while. You keep having to get around their bugs, which you can, it is just annoying. ZohoOne may be less expensive than ActiveCampaign.
Both products are so full-featured that they both take quite a while to learn.
We needed a sophisticated help center solution as we provide extensive support with 3 support team tiers. Intercom is more about messaging and automation. We needed sub-tickets, tasks, reminders, SLAs, automation, and strong API connections. That's why we have chosen Zendesk and we are quite happy with that.
Pros of Help Scout
- Email based helpdesk19
- Great user experience18
- Reasonably priced10
- No helpdesk branding7
- Free plan for startups6
Pros of Zendesk
- Centralizes our customer support135
- Many integrations72
- Easy to setup59
- Simple26
- Cheap26
- Clean12
- Customization7
- $1 Starter Pricing Plan4
- Woopra integration4
- Proactive Customer Support3
- Charitable contribution to SF hospital for $20 plan1
- Full of features1
- Remote and SSO authentication with CMSs like WordPress1
- Integrations0