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The History and Background of the Two Helpdesks
Freshdesk and Zendesk are two of the most popular cloud-based CRM systems that help companies and organizations with customer relationship management. Both of these systems were created to help companies improve the customer experience and improve communication between the sales team and customer support.
Here are other powerful solutions:
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Zendesk was founded in 2007 in Denmark and then moved to San Francisco. Its creators were three friends: Mikkel Svennungsen, Alexander Ackerman and Morten Protschjan. They came up with the idea for Zendesk after they began to encounter problems with appeals and feedback in their own businesses. Their goal was to create a system that would allow companies to reach customers through multiple channels of communication: email, chat, phone, and social media.
Freshdesk was founded in India in 2010 by creator Girish Mathrubootham. It launched the same year as Zendesk. Unlike Zendesk, which was built for small businesses, Freshdesk was aimed immediately at mid-sized companies and provided more customer experience management tools. The company received its first investment from Accel Partners in 2012 and has since become one of the most popular customer experience management systems in the world.
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Both systems have a wide range of functionality and provide tools to manage customer inquiries, automatically respond to requests, and monitor and analyze customer request data. However, Freshdesk, thanks to more tools that fully integrate the work of salespeople and technical support teams, has become a more popular system for companies working in the B2B segment. At the same time, Zendesk has become more popular among small and medium-sized companies in the B2C sector.
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Freshdesk Overview
What is Freshdesk?
An effective solution for handling customer requests is Freshdesk. It can be used for a variety of things, including the creation and tracking of support requests, real-time customer chat, automatic distribution of requests among professionals, and much more. It is one of the examples of a high-quality and convenient life insurance CRM.
You may quickly and easily build up your support workflow with Freshdesk. Through email, chat, or social media, you can create tickets, assign individuals to tasks, define priorities, and deadlines.
In addition, Freshdesk offers insights that aid in enhancing customer service. You can keep tabs on customer satisfaction scores, expert response times, and more.
With Freshdesk, you get a reliable tool for managing customer calls that helps you improve your support team's efficiency and quality of service.
In addition, Freshdesk supports integration with other popular platforms such as Slack, Salesforce, and Zapier. This ensures a smoother workflow and simplifies customer interaction. For example, Freshdesk allows you to communicate with customers via social media, messenger apps, and other communication channels. In summary, Freshdesk is a powerful customer service and technical support management tool that helps businesses deliver high-quality customer service and increase customer satisfaction.
Starting price
Freshdesk provides several pricing plans for its services. Freshdesk's starter plan is called Sprout and is available for free for small teams of up to 3 agents. Fuller plans start at $19 per month for the Blossom plan for teams of up to 10 agents, up to $109 per month for Enterprise for large companies with many agents geographically distributed around the world. It's also possible to discuss a customized plan.
Standout features
Freshdesk is a customer support management software that provides the following distinctive features:
- Integration of many communication channels: Freshdesk allows you to integrate email, chats, social media and phone calls in one program.
- Automated solutions: Freshdesk uses machine learning to automatically identify the topic of the appeal, search for answers in the knowledge base and automatically direct the request to the appropriate operator.
- User-friendly interface: Freshdesk user interface is user-friendly and intuitive, which makes working with the program easy and pleasant.
- Analytics and Reporting: Freshdesk provides an extensive set of analytics features that allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of your support as well as watch other parameters.
- Multi-channel helpdesk: Freshdesk knows how to handle calls from different channels (email, social media, phone calls), and combine them so that you can respond to all emails from one platform.
- Easy implementation: Freshdesk can be implemented quickly and easily, and it only takes a few minutes to create a new system for tracking appeals.
Best for
Companies of all sizes and in all sectors can use Freshdesk to manage client calls and assistance with an effective and user-friendly platform. In order to deliver excellent customer service and enhance communication with customers, Freshdesk is especially well suited for businesses with complicated client relationships, contact centers, online retailers, CaaS platforms, and other corporate organizations. Businesses can use Freshdesk to accomplish their objectives of raising productivity, streamlining procedures, and enhancing client interactions.
Zendesk Overview
What is Zendesk?
Zendesk is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform that helps companies communicate and interact with their customers across multiple communication channels.
This system is used to handle requests, handle notifications, manage tickets, and keep track of social media sites and other internet services.
Customer behavior can be analyzed and tracked using Zendesk's solutions for managing customer interaction information. Additionally, it enables you to make customised templates for customer service responses, call alerts, and task automation.
Moreover, Zendesk provides APIs that enable it to expand its capabilities by integrating with outside programs. As a result, it is beneficial for many industries, including retail, finance, healthcare, tech support, and others.
Zendesk is a reliable, secure and scalable platform that can meet the needs of companies of different sizes and activities.
Starting price
The cost of the Zendesk starter version is $5 per operator per month (if paid monthly). This price includes basic features such as working with request lists, automatic responses, setting task due dates, and others. However, if you need additional features (e.g. Chat feature), you will have to choose a higher level package and pay more. The exact price depends on the number of operators and the selected package.
Standout feature
Distinctive features of Zendesk:
- User-friendly interface and intuitive system to manage customer requests.
- Integration with many social networks and messengers such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and others.
- Flexible customization: the possibility to create your own appeals templates, customizable feedback forms, as well as integration with other services.
- Optimization of work and automation of processes: Zendesk allows you to automatically categorize appeals, determine the priority of appeals, use response templates, etc.
Best for
Companies that work in customer service are recommended to use Zendesk. Also Zendesk suits companies that focus on interaction with customers through various channels of communication, such as social networks, messengers and phone.
How the Platforms Stack Up
Platforms like Freshdesk and Zendesk are made to make it easier to manage client calls and enhance the user experience. This is a comparison of their various features, integrations, and customization options.
Integrations:
Both platforms have a wide range of integrations with other applications and services such as Salesforce, Slack, Jira and Google Analytics. Freshdesk is somewhat easier to use for integrating with other applications, but Zendesk offers more out-of-the-box integrations than Freshdesk.
Personalization:
Freshdesk has strong customizing capabilities, enabling users to design unique fields and forms for submissions or tickets. Also, it is possible to designate several degrees of therapy with various levels of data access. Here, Freshdesk clearly performs better in terms of customization than Zendesk.
Security:
In terms of security, both platforms offer a high level of data protection and privacy. In addition, both platforms are compliant with regulatory requirements such as GDPR and HIPAA.
Data and analytics:
Freshdesk provides additional analytics features to help better understand customer needs. This can include analysis of customer portal usage, response time statistics and more. Zendesk has similar analytics features.
Knowledge Bases:
Both platforms are adept at creating knowledge bases to answer frequently asked questions and inform users about new features or updates. Freshdesk offers more flexibility in customizing knowledge bases, while Zendesk offers more out-of-the-box templates.
Channels for contacting customer support:
Freshdesk and Zendesk allow their users to contact the technical support department via email, chat, phone, social media, etc. Some of these channels are only available in paid versions.
Operational efficiency and work cycle performance:
Freshdesk is faster and smoother in performance. Zendesk has a number of tools that can make ticket processing more efficient, but sometimes the process slows down due to heavy usage.
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Customer Service Provided by Freshdesk and Zendesk Themselves
Both Freshdesk and Zendesk provide an extensive set of reporting tools, automation, and bots to improve the customer experience.
Reporting tools:
Key customer service performance measures including response time, resolution time, customer satisfaction levels, and more are tracked using dashboards and reports offered by Freshdesk and Zendesk. These products let you design unique reports and dashboards that are tailored to your company's requirements.
Automation and Triggers:
Freshdesk and Zendesk allow you to automate routine tasks related to customer service, such as sending autoresponses to emails, creating tasks to handle requests, and others. Both tools also allow you to create triggers that can be automatically triggered under certain conditions, such as receiving a request from a customer or changing the status of a request.
Bots:
Freshdesk and Zendesk also provide the ability to create bots that can help process customer requests. Bots can be used to automatically answer frequently asked questions, to provide information on the status of a request, or to redirect customers to a suitable technical support operator.
Overall, Freshdesk and Zendesk provide an extensive set of tools that can help improve customer service. However, the choice between them depends on specific business needs and the budget for customer service tools.
Zendesk vs Freshdesk Pricing Comparison
Freshdesk and Zendesk pricing depends on several factors, such as the number of support agents, functionality, and additional services such as telephony and analytics.
Freshdesk offers several pricing plans, including:
- Sprout: a free plan for small teams that includes basic features such as email and phone support;
- Blossom: a plan for small teams starting to use the functionality of the ticketing system, starting at $15/agent/month;
- Garden: a plan for medium-sized teams that includes advanced features such as knowledge management, chat, and analytics, cost starts at $35/agent/month;
- Estate: plan for larger teams, including more advanced features such as multi-branding and SLA, cost starts at $49/agent/month;
- Forest: an enterprise plan that includes advanced features for integration with other systems, such as CRM and IP telephony, starting at $99/agent/month.
The cost of Zendesk also depends on several factors, including the number of agents and functionality. Zendesk offers the following rate plans:
- Essential: starts at $5/agent/month and includes basic features such as email and phone support;
- Team: starts at $19/agent/month and includes advanced features such as chat and reporting;
- Professional: starts at $49/agent/month and includes features for knowledge management, multi-channel support and automation;
- Enterprise: starts at $99/agent/month and includes advanced features such as multi-branding and API integration;
- Elite: for large enterprises, starting at $199/agent/month.
Both Freshdesk and Zendesk tools also provide free trials that allow you to evaluate functionality before you buy.
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Our Verdict
When it comes to choosing between Freshdesk and Zendesk, it ultimately depends on your specific needs and budget. Both tools offer a wide range of features to handle customer inquiries, automate tasks, and manage knowledge.
If you're running a small or medium-sized business with a tight budget, Freshdesk might be the better option. It offers a more reasonable cost and even has a free plan available for small teams. Freshdesk's affordability doesn't compromise its functionality, as it still provides all the necessary tools to effectively manage customer service.
On the other hand, if you work for a large organization that requires sophisticated capabilities and a high level of system integration, Zendesk might be the better choice. Zendesk is known for its scalability and ability to seamlessly integrate with other systems, making it ideal for enterprises with complex needs.
In summary, both Freshdesk and Zendesk are excellent options for managing customer service and handling customer requests. It's important to carefully consider your specific requirements and choose the tool that best fits your needs. Whether you prioritize affordability or advanced features, both tools can help elevate your customer service experience.
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