Do you have to use a guide every time you want to chat with or talk to your customers? Then it’s time to switch to Freshdesk for a better and refreshing customer support experience. Right from setting up the helpdesk, onboarding your team to scaling it as your business grows, Freshdesk wins over Zendesk. Every single time.
Here’s why we and many of our customers believe that Freshdesk is a better alternative to Zendesk.
Getting familiar with a new product, software, or tool can take time. While moving to a new helpdesk, it’s important that admins are comfortable in setting up in order to make the best use of a helpdesk. The more comfortable you are with a helpdesk, the more easy it is to make modifications as your support team scales.
With Freshdesk, a quick search in the admin panel will help you with suggestions to find what you’re looking for. You don’t have to worry about taking efforts to learn the interface. Moreover, you’ll the find the layout of the admin section more friendly to discover features and how they can help your team.
Imagine driving in a new city without the convenience of Google Maps. You’ll have to stop at every turn to refer to a paper map. That’s how navigating in Zendesk feels like. If you’re not certain where to set up a feature, you’ll need to find a guide with a map to the feature.
Ticket fields are used for collecting information from your customers and categorizing what they contact you about. They’re one of the features that support teams find the most helpful. With Freshdesk, you can create fields with a drag and drop.
Another example that demonstrates Freshdesk’s simplicity is how placeholders are added to email templates. Admins on Freshdesk don’t require any technical experience to make automatic emails dynamic.
Sandbox environments: They help in making changes to workflows without any risks. With the Freshdesk Sandbox, once you’re confident with the tests, it can be copied to your live Freshdesk account with a click of a button.In Zendesk, you would need to make efforts in documenting every modification made on the sandbox and carefully replicate them in your live account.
Assuming identity of agents: As support teams scale, managers can easily lose sight of agents' day to day problems. Freshdesk lets admins assume the identity of agents and view their accounts, so that they can put themselves in an agent’s shoes and easily remove bottlenecks and make work better for the team.
It is important that your support team finds it easy to manage support channels while implementing an omnichannel solution. With Freshworks' support solution, admins can set up a well orchestrated flow between email, phone, chat, and social media enquiries. Agents have a frictionless experience across support channels that enable them to deliver good support experiences to customers.
Because each product looks and feels different, the experience across Zendesk’s products is inconsistent for both agents and customers. You will have to spend time to learn each product from scratch and also figure out how they integrate with each other.
According to Forrester, 70% of customers prefer to use a company’s website to get answers to their questions rather than contact support.
Luckily, self-service doesn’t have to be restricted by a channel. With Freshworks’ elegant support solution, customers can help themselves from wherever they want on your website. Articles on Freshdesk can be accessed from the self-service portal, from your Facebook page, via chat and through suggestions from an AI bot.
Zendesk, on the other hand, requires you to sign up for a new product altogether to create a knowledge base. Since Zendesk Guide does not integrate with chat, customers on their chat are left waiting for a response even if they want to self serve.
While multitasking between customer conversations from different channels, it is important that your agents aren’t overwhelmed with the volume of enquiries. With Freshdesk, admins can conveniently route tickets, chats, and phone calls to the right agents from a single window. Unlike Zendesk, You don’t have to switch between three different products just to route customer conversations to one team.
Freshdesk dashboards give a holistic view of support metrics, irrespective of how your customers contact you. You can spot problems before they escalate and also measure consistency in performance across different support channels. While agents in Zendesk have to switch between three different products to get an idea of real-time performance in different support channels, Freshdesk users can operate and analyse from one place.
What if you can find out if a customer has spoken to someone from your support team already when they initiate a chat conversation? You'll have context of their problem and the progress on the issue. You can immediately pick it up from there and give them an update without asking them to explain the problem from scratch. Sounds ideal, doesn't it?
Agents on Freshdesk can have better chat conversations with customers as they’ll be able to see an overview of customers’ tickets without having to leave the chat widget. They can get more context without having to switch between two different products.
Customer enquiries are rarely resolved with the very first response. Agents are required to complete tasks, get inputs from different teams, or wait for issues to be fixed before they can provide customers with a resolution. Because of the different work involved in resolving customer issues, tickets go through different stages before reaching its resolution.
With Freshdesk, you can customize ticket statuses based on how your customer support team works with tickets. Starting from making every day work easy, automating tasks, to analysing data, custom statuses strengthen your support capabilities.
Tickets that are pending for different reasons in Zendesk have a common status “on-hold”.
Agents will be able to easily keep track of tickets that are on ‘on-hold’ for different reasons. As an example, a ecommerce support team might be waiting on their billing team’s for inputs on some tickets. Some tickets might be about a website issue that needs to fixed. When the status clearly defines the ticket stage, it becomes easy for agents to work on tickets that require a follow-up, reminder, or a response.
Using the support portal, customers can see the stage at which their ticket is in. They will have an assurance on how their request is being processed by your company. As an example, a status “refund initiated” or “Issue being reviewed” will give them better context on the progress of their issue.
On a daily basis, having a clear view of the status of unresolved tickets will help managers troubleshoot problems before they escalate. Similarly, historic reports will help supervisors understand what stage in a ticket lifecycle takes the longest time. As an example, an ecommerce support team may identify that waiting for refund related issues to be fixed by their billing team causes delays. Using this data, you can drill down further to identify and fix an issue, enabling faster response times.
Automations and SLAs in Freshdesk are strongly integrated with custom statuses, making it easy to set up workflows that are unique to your organisation. Updates, reminders and notifications based on a ticket’s lifecycle can be automated to make an agent’s everyday work more easy.
Ticket views on a helpdesk are comparable to folders that email clients like Gmail and Outlook let users create. A basic feature that even email clients offer should not be restrictive when you move to a helpdesk.
Agents on Freshdesk enjoy virtually no limit on the number of ticket views they can create. They find this particularly helpful when teams scale and it becomes necessary for agents to have access to different ticket queues. Freshdesk users also create ticket views on the go for temporary use. As an example, an agent may have to keep an eye on another agent’s queue while she/he is on leave. While agents on Freshdesk can work flexibly, Zendesk users struggle with a limit of 12 ticket views per agent.
Agents on Freshdesk can create inbox views on the fly without any dependencies on an administrator. If your team receives a lot of tickets about the same issue on a particular day, agents can create a dedicated inbox view and send responses in bulk to customers. The dependencies on an admin and the complicated procedure of setting up a ticket view can cause delays in Zendesk.
Like email inboxes, Zendesk shows the number of tickets on each ticket view. Since the number also considers resolved tickets, you will be alarming agents with numbers that don’t matter.
With Freshdesk, you can project the number of tickets in ticket views that are of importance using customizable dashboards. When there is a surge in the number of tickets, you don’t have to depend on your agents to take notice. You can customise the dashboard with alerts every time a number in a ticket queue exceeds a threshold.
Irrespective of size and industry, support teams need to collaborate with multiple other teams to be able to provide meaningful, timely responses to customers. As an example, an ecommerce support team will need the billing team’s help in resolving payment dispute queries. Support teams at product companies often need their developers’ assistance to resolve technical issues.
With Freshdesk, you can efficiently communicate with different teams and manage dependencies which will help you improve the quality and the speed of responses to your customers. You can collaborate better regardless of whether the dependency is on a different team within your company or on a third-party, whether you need to share complete context or whether you're required to keep your customer conversation private.
With Zendesk, however, an option to collaborate is available only as a paid add-on in it’s higher plans. Moreover, it will fail to work for larger teams as it’s limited in functionality.
An easy method to communicate is works sufficiently only if the teams you’re dependent on are available to help you on time. In day-to-day scenarios, people are rarely able to help immediately.
With Freshdesk, you can set up a simple process for collaboration between two teams by sharing ownership of tickets. Agents don't have to worry about following up, as internal teams will have deadlines by which they are required to help the support team.
Using reports you can get insights on how long different teams take to get back to your support team. If you need to start a conversation with a different team to improve their speed of response to your team, you’ll have the data to support your request. Shared ownership in Freshdesk not only makes communication easier between teams, it also makes relationships better.
Zendesk restricts internal collaboration between departments by having chat as the only option for communication. While agents on Zendesk have to worry about following up with stakeholders and escalating delays, the different teams that collaborate using Freshdesk can work in harmony.
Sometimes, you might need the help of a third party in order to resolve tickets. Instead of having to manage multiple email threads, agents in Freshdesk can have private conversations with both a third party and a customer within a single ticket. Agents can also easily keep track of tickets that require third party inputs by using custom statuses. These functionalities are core features of Freshdesk and do not require you to install a third party app or pay for an expensive add-on.
Freshdesk makes it incredibly easy for your agents to send canned responses and solution articles, just by using the keyboard. In two simple keyboard strokes, you can enter email greetings, phrases that you use often, canned responses and knowledge base content.
A helpdesk shouldn’t have to ask agents to go back to cluttered email inboxes. Notifications on Freshdesk are as simple as the notifications you get on Facebook or Twitter. Agents can even enable browser notifications to get notified instantly while using different tabs.
Agents on Freshdesk don’t have to depend on an admin to configure features that make work easy for them. They can create canned responses, scenario automations, and ticket views on the fly.
When you need the help from someone to respond to a customer, you can give them instant access to all relevant information in Freshdesk. Agents don’t have to worry about ensuring stakeholders have the all details in order to help. This way, collaboration becomes easier for all parties involved and issues can be fixed sooner. On the other hand, with Zendesk’s collaboration add-on, agents spend time and effort switching between apps to provide links, screenshots and in copying data.
Agents typically spend time in getting information from customers in order to solve their issues. With Freshdesk’s Session Replay, you will be able to see a video of your customer’s journey on your website or app. Agents will be equipped with all the information they need to resolve customer issues without having to ask them to explain their problem. Delighting your customers with a quick and perfect resolution is that simple. Unlike session replays, Zendesk’s priced add-on shows limited visibility of a customer’s journey.
Zendesk gives you a basic overview of data on its lower plans, that can’t be filtered according to any ticket property. On its higher plans, it integrates with a data intelligence product called Good Data to generate reports. You will need to work on a platform that looks and feels entirely different from Zendesk to view relevant data.
While data is crucial, it’s more important to understand the reason behind the numbers you see to make decisions. Using the different reporting modules in Freshdesk, support teams can understand performance, outliers, customer happiness, ticket lifecycle, and more. Every reporting module can be filtered and drilled down to a ticket level.
In addition to having access to pre-built reporting modules, supervisors can create customized dashboards to monitor performance on a day to day basis. If some metrics are of higher importance to your team, you can simply ask Freshdesk for answers!
If you are required to use a business intelligence tool, you can easily schedule data to be exported a different tool using Freshdesk’s APIs. You’ll have the convenience of choosing a BI solution of your choice. Moreover, it’s very likely that an integration between Freshdesk and a BI tool will cost you less than a Zendesk plan that has Good Data’s reports.
Basic features that are crucial to providing good support come at an extra cost with Zendesk. Some features in a helpdesk are crucial for support teams, without which they will be unable to improve the experiences for both agents and their customers.
Using a helpdesk without SLAs is similar to using an email inbox for support. SLAs serve as a deadline or a benchmark by which agents are expected to get back to customers. Without SLA policies, support teams will not be able to prioritise customer enquiries or evaluate their performance.
All support teams have dependencies with different teams to help customers with their questions. It is important to have a simple and efficient way to collaborate, without which agents will have to struggle to send responses quickly
Opening up a platform for your customers to talk to each other provides value for both customers and agents. Your customers can help each other with their problems while your company gets deeper insights on customer issues.
When a customer on chat needs to send an attachment to explain their problem, imagine having to ask them to send the file over email. Customers are likely to get frustrated. A frictionless chat experience for both the agent and customer enables faster resolution of issues.
When you face a problem with your helpdesk, you need to be able to fix it as soon as possible. Else there is a risk that your customers take notice and your brand’s reputation is at stake. That’s why it’s important that you can get help 24x7 regardless of the helpdesk plan you choose.
Paid apps shouldn’t be a solution to product deficiencies. When you’re unable to solve a problem with Zendesk, you will have to depend on an app built by a third party. These third party apps requires you to learn a new product and get support from the app builder. For instance, features as simple as automatic ticket assignment on round robin, forwarding emails, data migration are built by a third party.
Freshdesk’s APIs makes it easy for companies to build custom apps to modify helpdesk workflows or to integrate with a different product. Our marketplace partners are able to build custom integrations for a far more affordable and transparent price.
