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Kayako vs Zendesk: What are the differences?
Developers describe Kayako as "Kayako is a customer service platform that saves your team time so they can focus on building better customer relationships". Kayako a customer service platform that helps businesses connect with their customers and deliver a better customer support experience over the web, email, live chat and phone. Kayako is available in the cloud and on-premise. 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.
Kayako and Zendesk can be categorized as "Help Desk" tools.
Some of the features offered by Kayako are:
- Support ticketing with email integration
- Live chat widgets for your helpdesk and your website
- Real-time visitor monitoring
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.
"Unlimited custom fields on forms" is the primary reason why developers consider Kayako over the competitors, whereas "Centralizes our customer support" was stated as the key factor in picking Zendesk.
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 Kayako
- Easy to customize3
- Possible to host on your own3
- API access3
- Module based extensions3
- OS independent frontend3
- Customers can use it easily3
- Unlimited custom fields on forms3
- Simple, powerhouse and scalable.2
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
