Zendesk vs Messagely
Zendesk was founded by Morten Primdahl, Mikkel Svane, and Alexander Aghassipour in 2007. The company raised $500,000 in seed funding in 2008, and an additional $6M series B round in 2009. After acquiring live chat software Zopim in 2014, Zendesk went public on the New York Stock Exchange.
Today, Zendesk has 2,000 employees and serves 119,000 paying customers in 150 countries and territories. While the company is headquartered in San Francisco, it has offices across the world, including Australia, Brazil, Ireland, Thailand, Philippines, Japan, India, and Germany.
Zendesk is one of the biggest players in the customer support space, and they wield plenty of market share in this industry. That said, is Zendesk the best tool of choice for companies who want to improve upon their customer support efforts, or will companies find more value in a Zendesk competitor, such as Messagely? Read on to find out more.
Should you switch from Zendesk? Factors to consider.
Price
Chatbots
Personalized support
Zendesk is a powerful tool that can help teams supercharge their customer service efforts. Unfortunately, it falls short in some areas, such as providing a full range of functionality (including chatbots) and allowing reps to offer personalized support.
If you want to delight your customers and win them over for life, choose Messagely. This Zendesk alternative is a robust, feature-rich tool that can help you do more with less.
Price
For most B2B buyers, price isn’t the most important factor to consider when choosing a tool. After all, you’d rather pay more for a tool that’s effective, and actually works, rather than go for a cheap tool that doesn’t live up to its promises. That said, you’d still want to take price into consideration when shortlisting and evaluating potential tools; here, it’s important to make sure that the platform you eventually sign up to use offers transparent pricing plans, without any hidden costs.
When you look at Zendesk’s pricing page, you’ll see that Zendesk offers a wide range of plans, including Support, Guide, Chat, Talk, Connect, Explore, and Sell. There’s also a Zendesk Suite plan that comes with several items bundled together (Support, Guide, Chat, Talk).
Here’s where it gets confusing: firstly, not all plans can be purchased individually. Some plans (for example, Guide and Talk) are add-ons, meaning that you need to purchase the Support plan to use in conjunction with these plans. Also, the pricing options for each plan vary widely; the Support plan, for example, ranges in pricing from $5 to $199 per agent per month. Simply put, Zendesk could do with simplifying its plans, so that it reduces the barrier to entry on their customers’ end.
In comparison to this, Messagely offers just three pricing tiers ($29, $49 or $79 per month). Additional users are charged at $15, $20, or $25 per month. Let’s do a quick comparison between Zendesk Suite ($149 per month per agent) and Messagely ($79 per month for one user, plus $25 per month for additional users). Assuming you have 10 users who need access to the tool, you’ll pay $1,490 per month for Zendesk Suite, or $304 for Messagely. Crunching the numbers, this means that Messagely costs just 20% of Zendesk Suite, even though it comes with chatbots and added functionality.
Chatbots
Take it from us: chatbots are an absolute godsend to sales, marketing, and customer support teams. These bots help to automate all the tedious, manual tasks that, quite frankly, aren’t worth your effort. This frees up your time, and allows you to focus on fine-tuning campaigns and improving strategies.
While Zendesk offers a wide range of plans, none of these plans come with chatbots (not even the Sell plan, which is said to “enhance productivity, processes, and pipeline visibility for sales teams”). If you use Zendesk, you’ll either have to pay for a standalone chatbot tool, or miss out on the huge benefits that chatbots bring to the table.
Messagely, on the other hand, comes with chatbots which help to acquire and support customers. To capture more leads at the top of your funnel, use Messagely’s sales bots to qualify prospects and schedule meetings. To keep your existing customers happy, set up a support chatbot on your site that can answer customer enquiries, 24/7. Now that’s what they call working smart.
Personalized support
When companies try to optimize their customer support, they typically focus on the quantity of interactions — number of tickets resolved, number of calls answered, etc. While this is important, it’s equally crucial to focus on the quality of support offered. More specifically, consider whether you’re offering your customers personalized support, and making them feel like you care.
When it comes to personalized support, Zendesk and other customer support platforms that are built on ticketing systems don’t fare well. Think about it: when you require your customer to register and sign into a support ticketing system, you’re making things easier for your reps at your customer’s expense. This speeds things up and optimizes the workflow for your team, but inconveniences your customer.
On top of that, when you label your customer with an automatically generated case numbers (as ticketing systems do), this depersonalizes the interaction, and tells your customer that you’re treating them as a ticket. Your customers might not complain outrightly or leave feedback, but you can bet that this will have an impact on their overall satisfaction levels.
To sum it up: because Zendesk relies on a ticketing system, it’s impersonal and non-engaging. Messagely, on the other hand, is built with the capabilities of a customer service ticketing system, but takes case numbers and other complications out of the picture. This means that your support team can enjoy a streamlined workflow on the backend, but still provide your customers with the personalized conversations that they enjoy and deserve.
Zendesk is a powerful tool that can help teams supercharge their customer service efforts. Unfortunately, it falls short in some areas, such as providing a full range of functionality (including chatbots) and allowing reps to offer personalized support.
If you want to delight your customers and win them over for life, choose Messagely. This Zendesk alternative is a robust, feature-rich tool that can help you do more with less.
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