Over the last few months, we saw a lot of Zendesk Chat customers switching to Freshchat. Interestingly, there seemed to be a core set of common themes as to why people chose to make the switch. So, we thought we will write a post listing our observations on this aspect.
- It’s all about the user experience
At the outset, Zendesk Chat is a good tool in its own right and has proven its mettle. However, technology and user expectations evolve continuously. For instance, we are in an era where we are moving towards modern messaging than traditional live chat. So, would users still like to use traditional chat tools with no response time expectations?
Zendesk Chat as of now still offers a traditional chat experience whereas Freshchat clearly scores ahead by offering a seamless messaging experience between support agents and customers.
2. The whole point of using a chat tool is to be conversational
Let’s get this straight—no one wants to be marketed to, no one likes to fill up a form. I would like to have a conversation with someone than being treated like a “sales lead” or a “support ticket”. So, when you get onto the website of an organization using Zendesk Chat, you’ll see that a form gets in the way of you and your support agent. In this era of modern messaging, does it really make sense to gate your chat with a form?
If you compare the experience of the same situation on Freschat, it’s a breeze. There are no forms. Either it’s a live agent conversing with you right away or an intelligent bot kicks in, asks the right questions, and assigns you to an agent automatically. Next thing you know—an agent gets in touch with you, with the context of what you need, and possibly even a solution to your issue.
3. Context is the key
Now, let’s look at the experience from the eyes of a customer success specialist. You would need contextual information about a customer or website visitor to enable them at the right touch points.
With Zendesk Chat, you can get information on the time spent on a specific page of your website or even the number of pages visited. Though this information is good to have, it’s not actionable.
Imagine how meaningful your conversation with a prospect would be if you had all the information on what whitepaper she downloaded from your website? Say, you knew that someone is live on your website and has added a product worth $1000 on the cart—you could offer them discounts to enable them complete the purchase. In fact, this is one feature that made a lot of e-commerce customers switch to Freshchat.
4. The scope to personalize user experience
Given the amount of context you get from Freshchat, you can also send personalized messages to your customers based on behavior, usage, demographics, and more.
5. Ease of connecting with the right support team
Let’s say, a customer placed an order on an e-commerce portal and is facing issues with billing. When they get on a chat, they don’t want to be talking to a sales rep. They would want to connect with the billing department right away.
The experience on Zendesk chat:
They connect with an agent (mostly sales), explain the issue. Only it’s discovered to be a billing issue, the customer is transferred to the billing department.
The experience on Freshchat:
You have in-app channels where you can directly choose whether you want to connect to billing or sales or any other support channel.
6. Sometimes, even eagles need a push
Not all businesses are built equal, especially when you take user-experience into consideration. I’m sure we all have experienced times where the support agent asks us to navigate a few menus and make a few clicks to initiate a request, and we found it difficult to even locate the menus.
Freshchat has a solution to this problem with its co-browsing feature where the support agent can obtain access to your screen from within the chat widget and do it for you.
7. Distribution of traffic
Freshchat has a cool feature called “IntelliAssign” whereby you can auto-assign conversations to the right team members based on their current workload or even skill levels. You can free your team members from reeling under the pressure of having to periodically pick conversations, or supervisors from having to keep a tab on which conversations your team members are engaging in.
8. Reducing the resolution time
The last thing you want to do is frustrate your customers by keeping them waiting. It’s much easier to use Freshchat to identify and respond to conversations based on the ones that need immediate attention or due a response for long.
9. Freshworks ecosystem
The advantage that Freshchat as a product has is the ecosystem that Freshworks offers. It’s much easier for customers to build their complete customer experience stack by adding FreshSales (CRM) and Freshdesk(helpdesk) subscriptions. Given the apps in their marketplace, you have the ability to integrate with your existing systems and hit the ground running. Whereas for Zendesk Chat, while they have their own helpdesk, they have only recently acquired a CRM tool to compete with Freshworks. And it doesn’t integrate with the CRM yet.
10. Mobile SDK
Lastly, you can take your messenger to your mobile app with inbuilt channels and native FAQs.
