Help Scout vs Zendesk: Which is the Better Support Solution?

In the cutthroat world of AI, customer support solutions aren't just a nice-to-have—they're a must-have. Exquisite customer support keeps your clients coming back for more. Not only does it help your customers stay with you for a long time, but it also focuses on increasing customer satisfaction and improving their lifetime value.

So, if you want to reduce the load on your support team and make it easy for customers to contact you, this guide will help you navigate the best strategies to adopt.

Help Scout and Zendesk stand out as leading contenders in this arena, providing a range of features to streamline customer interactions.

Both of these platforms help you improve customer experiences incredibly, but the question is, which one wins the battle? To make things easier, we've included a quick overview of Help Scout vs Zendesk.

This blog highlights the key differences between these two popular help desk software, examining their key features, strengths, and potential drawbacks, to help you make an informed decision.

Overview of Help Scout

Help Scout is an intuitive customer service platform that allows teams to pool customer conversations into a shared inbox for better management and faster service. It offers various functionalities, such as private notes for internal communication and personalized and canned responses for sending quicker replies.

Features

Some of the Help Scout's major features as a customer support solution are:

1. Shared inbox

Allows teams to collaborate effortlessly, ensuring no customer query goes unanswered. It is an all-inclusive conversation destination that brings email, social, live chat, and voice conversation together so you and your team can work faster.

2. Knowledge Base

Help Scout’s knowledge base feature is called Docs. It is a published collection of documentation that includes answers to frequently asked questions, how-to guides, and whatnot, helping customers access support even during non-business hours.

Help Scout facilitates building your own self-service help center and makes the work of the customer support team effortless, as they can focus on core activities and other urgent issues.

3. Live chat

Help Scout's messaging tool is called Beacon. It provides customers with options to chat, email, or read help articles in real-time. Furthermore, this tool lets you offer instant support to your customers and encourages convenient customer self-service.

Pricing plans

1. Free Trial

2. Standard Plan- $22/user /month (limit 25)

• 2 shared inboxes with email, live chat, and social channels
• 1 Docs knowledge base
• Beacon help widget
• Automated workflows
• Custom reports
• API and 100+ integrations
• In-app messaging Add On
• AI drafts

3. Plus Plan- $44/user/month

All Standard features and

• 5 shared inboxes with email, live chat, and social channels
• 2 Docs knowledge bases w/ restricted access
• 25 free light users
• Advanced permissions
• Advanced tracking w/ custom fields
• Group users into teams
• AI summarize
• AI assist
• Custom reports w/ unlimited history
• Salesforce, Jira, HubSpot apps

4. Pro Plan- $65/user/month (10+ users)

All Plus features and

• 25 shared inboxes with email, live chat, and social channels
• 10 Docs knowledge bases w/ restricted access
• 50 free light users
• Enterprise security
• HIPAA compliance
• Tiered discounts
• Concierge onboarding services
• Dedicated account manager w/ account optimization reviews
• Quarterly team training
• Advanced API access

Who is Help Scout ideal for?

Help Scout functions as a customer service hub, primarily catering to small businesses and startups. It is primarily for businesses or companies looking for a basic functional design and user-friendly customer support operations.

Overview of Zendesk

Zendesk offers a comprehensive suite of tools for companies to communicate with their customers efficiently. It integrates numerous channels, such as email, live chat, phone, social media, and self-service, making it a powerful platform for businesses aiming to improve customer engagement.

Zendesk uses advanced AI to automate routine tasks, resolve issues swiftly, and offer accurate solutions. It provides everything a business needs to simplify customer communication.

Features

Here are some of Zendesk's dynamic features:

1. Ticketing system

Provides streamlined support with an integrated system that connects all the customer conversations in one place. It helps businesses to get a complete view of their conversation history with their customers.

2. Help center

Make it easier for your customers to find answers to their questions themselves, which reduces the support costs and deflects support tickets. As a result, agents can focus on more engaging parts of their job and offer meaningful support.

3. Live chat

Reach out to your customers instantly through web, mobile, and social media platforms on live chat and messaging. This feature also allows you to add a web widget to your website or mobile app with one snippet of code.

Pricing plans

1. Free Trial

2. Zendesk Suite Plans- Starting $19 (Build your own plan)

3. Suite Team- $55/agent/month

• Ticketing system
• Email, chat, voice, social messaging and more
• Help center
• AI Agents
• Prebuilt analytics dashboards
• 1,000+ apps and integrations
• Predefined responses (macros)
• Customized business rules (triggers and automations)
• Online support from the Zendesk team
• Digital onboarding and adoption resources
• Eligible for Workforce Management add-on
• Eligible for Quality Assurance add-on

4. Suite Growth: $89/agent/month

• Ticketing system
• Email, chat, voice, social messaging and more
• Help center
• AI Agents
• Prebuilt analytics dashboards
• 1,000+ apps and integrations
• Predefined responses (macros)
• Customized business rules (triggers and automations)
• Online support from the Zendesk team
• Digital onboarding and adoption resources
• Eligible for Workforce Management add-on
• Eligible for Quality Assurance add-on
• Multiple ticket forms
• Light Agents
• Service level agreements (SLA)
• Customer satisfaction ratings (CSAT)
• Multilingual support and content
• Self-service customer portal
• Business hours

5. Suite Professional: $115/agent/month

• Ticketing system
• Email, chat, voice, social messaging and more
• Help center
• AI Agents
• Prebuilt analytics dashboards
• 1,000+ apps and integrations
• Predefined responses (macros)
• Customized business rules (triggers and automations)
• Online support from the Zendesk team
• Digital onboarding and adoption resources
• Eligible for Workforce Management add-on
• Eligible for Quality Assurance add-on
• Multiple ticket forms
• Light Agents
• Service level agreements (SLA)
• Customer satisfaction ratings (CSAT)
• Multilingual support and content
• Self-service customer portal
• Business hours
• Customized and live analytics
• Side conversations
• Skills-based routing
• Integrated community forums
• Data location options
• HIPAA enabled
• Access to Sunshine Conversations
• Eligible for Advanced AI add-on

6. Suite Enterprise: Contact sales

• Ticketing system
• Email, chat, voice, social messaging and more
• Help center
• AI Agents
• Prebuilt analytics dashboards
• 1,000+ apps and integrations
• Predefined responses (macros)
• Customized business rules (triggers and automations)
• Online support from the Zendesk team
• Digital onboarding and adoption resources
• Eligible for Workforce Management add-on
• Eligible for Quality Assurance add-on
• Multiple ticket forms
• Light Agents
• Service level agreements (SLA)
• Customer satisfaction ratings (CSAT)
• Multilingual support and content
• Self-service customer portal
• Business hours
• Customized and live analytics
• Side conversations
• Skills-based routing
• Integrated community forums
• Data location options
• HIPAA enabled
• Access to Sunshine Conversations
• Eligible for Advanced AI add-on
• Eligible for Advanced Data Privacy and Protection add-on
• Sandbox
• AI-powered Content Cues
• Content blocks
• Customized agent roles
• Dynamic, contextual workspaces

7. Suite Enterprise Plus

Contact sales team to create a comprehensive plan that meets your business needs.

Who is Zendesk ideal for?

With its advanced AI functionalities, Zendesk is a perfect solution for large organizations,  or those requiring advanced customization, extensive integrations, and complex support workflows. Its cutting-edge features provide in-depth analytics on customer data and behavior for better management.

Feature-by-Feature Comparison

To understand the difference between Help Scout vs Zendesk better, we have compared them based on some of their best support solution features. Let's jump in:

1. User interface and experience

After comparing Help Desk with Zendesk for ease of use, here is what our analysis was-

Help Scout

Help Scout has a clean and functional design, making it ideal for an organization's basic customer support needs. Its dashboard provides agents with quick access to their tickets, customer profiles, and histories. Help Scout Knowledge Base also comprises helpful articles for every FAQ that solve specific customer queries.

Zendesk

Zendesk offers a highly customizable agent workspace, but it must be said that this tool does not provide an intuitive user experience. Its complexity may overwhelm users, and new support agents might face a steep learning curve with Zendesk's ticketing. Furthermore, it offers personalization and customization, but only for enterprise-level plans.

2. Ticket management

This is one of the most essential parts of the customer support system; let's analyze which platform wins this race-

Help Scout

Help Scout enables the automatic distribution of tickets to specific agents or teams based on predefined rules. It combines chat and email so that agents can respond and track tickets quickly in real time.

The best thing about this platform is that it transforms incoming customer emails into organized support tickets within one shared inbox.

Zendesk

Zendesk uses AI to analyze the tickets and assigns them to the most appropriate agent or department. It can also categorize and filter tickets to monitor team effectiveness.

This tool's ticketing system is designed to increase productivity and ensure that every customer issue is promptly and efficiently addressed.

Furthermore, Zendesk is designed to scale up your customer support, especially for larger organizations, as it offers many advanced features that support expansive teams and high ticket volumes, unlike Help Scout.

3. Automation

When comparing automation, both have different USPs. So, here is everything about automation to understand which one is better for you-

Help Scout

Help Scout provides customizable workflows that help automate repetitive tasks. It allows users to customize, assign, and prioritize tickets based on predefined rules.

This platform also offers the ability to create and use canned responses. These responses are pre-written answers to the most frequently asked questions, which can tremendously speed up response times and ensure consistency in communication.

However, most of Help Scout's AI features are in beta, so there might be some inaccuracies.

Zendesk

Zendesk offers automated ticket routing. It considers factors like agent availability, expertise, and employees' current workloads, which helps allocate support tasks effectively and improve response times.

Zendesk offers trigger-based actions, which means it automatically sends a response when a ticket is received, escalates it if no action is taken, and informs the supervisor about any urgent matters.

Other automated features include real-time language translation and sentiment analysis, as well as a knowledge base that aids self-service.

4. Integration and compatibility

This is one of the most crucial features to consider when comparing Help Scout vs Zendesk, as you need to check if it works with your existing tools or not-

Help Scout

While Help Scout offers 90+ pre-built apps and integrations, it has quite fewer integrations than Zendesk. This can be a major drawback for large businesses with numerous technology stacks, making it difficult for them to integrate custom options in their customer service solutions.

However, Help Scout integrates numerous voice and text communication tools into the shared inbox. Its primary benefit is that all calls and text communications are managed centrally. This implies that the team will not have to search for previous customer queries at different locations.

Furthermore, it also allows businesses to manage social media platforms from their inbox, which ensures consistent and seamless communication.

Zendesk

Zendesk provides 1,000+ pre-built apps and integrations, which can be a game changer in achieving customizability unique to your company's needs. Some of the popular integrations include WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram, Shopify, Slack, Asana, HubSpot, WooCommerce, etc.

It also integrates with conventional and VoIP telephony by offering features such as call routing and recording. This feature is helpful for managing complex or urgent issues that need quick attention.

It also allows businesses to integrate Zendesk's support features into their mobile apps and websites, providing users with a consistent support experience across all channels.

Zendesk’s integration and compatibility with numerous platforms make it a perfect choice for businesses looking for a comprehensive, all-encompassing customer support platform.

5. Knowledge base and self-service

A self-service knowledge base offers users a quick and easy way to get the necessary information. Comparing which one excels in this feature-

Help Scout

Help Scout's knowledge base feature is designed primarily for customer self-service, which eases the burden on the customer support team. This feature operates 24/7, which means customers can resolve their queries even during non-working hours.

Help Scout's knowledge base is called Docs. Using it, you can create articles, form collections, and build categories. It also allows you to add images, videos, and GIFs alongside specifying the keywords so that your article ranks better.

Zendesk

With Zendesk’s advanced management tools, businesses can easily update and scale their help center. It offers numerous self-service options, such as round-the-clock customer support and a comprehensive knowledge base, which helps reduce your team's workload to a great extent.

Its knowledge base helps your customers find answers to common queries, reducing the volume of direct support requests.

It also offers a knowledge base software called Zendesk Guide, which is an ideal match for customer self-service and also acts as a leg-up for service agents.

Zendesk Guide offers a modern text editor that allows you to publish your blogs easily. It provides multilingual support and numerous customization features.

6. Customer support

Many professionals might overlook this feature. However, it's vital to check the platform's customer support quality so that you can get instant help if any issues arise.

Let's see which platform wins the customer support race-

Help Scout

Help Scout offers round-the-clock support six days a week. Although their response time is not defined, they are pretty quick, responding usually within an hour. The major drawback of Help Scout customer support is that it does not offer a phone callback option for elite plans.

Zendesk

The customer support you get from Zendesk varies from plan to plan. For example, brands opting for basic plans find it challenging to access vendor support. Conversely, businesses with subscriptions to top-tier plans get advanced and instant support.

This can be a massive drawback for small businesses or startups that have a limited budget and opt for the basic plan.

The worst part is that Zendesk’s response time is two days, and they do not offer phone support. Furthermore, their guides are very confusing, as the terminology they use is quite complex, making it challenging for new users to find the right one.

They provide specialized customer support service as well, but for that, you will have to pay a price of around $1500 to $2,800. It is quite unfair to pay such a substantial amount for customer support on top of the subscription price.

7. User reviews and testimonials

When it comes to reviews and testimonials, users adore both tools. Here is the social proof-

Help Scout

Help Scout has a 4.4/5 rating with more than 400 reviews on G2.

It has a 4.6/5 rating with more than 200 reviews on Capterra.

One of the Help Scout customers said,

"It's a good basic system. If you are looking for a ticket system, this is a great choice."

Zendesk

Zendesk has a 4.3/5 rating with more than 5,000 reviews on G2.

It has a 4.4/5 rating with more than 3,900+ reviews on Capterra.

One of the Zendesk customers said,

"Ease of use, implementation, and integration with a great variety of possibilities."

8. Strengths and weaknesses

Let us compare the strengths and weaknesses of these two leaders in the customer support industry-

Help Scout-

Strengths

• In-app messaging for customer support
• Email integration options
• Offers a tool for creating a knowledge base
• Reliable tool for managing customer service emails

Weaknesses

• Help Scout does not have UK or EU servers
• Does not have the ability to snooze or schedule an email or response

Zendesk-

Strengths

• Its knowledge base enables it to establish a self-service customer service
• Offers email, phone, and live chat support alongside training programs, and multi-lingual support requests.
• Provides reporting and analytics tools to assist customers with a better experience
• Its robust FAQ-creating tool allows you to save your visitors the 'most-asked question'

Weaknesses

• Data is occasionally erased or lost for no reason
• Requires a significant amount of time and effort to get familiar with the software

9. Analytics and reporting

Now, it's time to compare both tools based on their analysis and reporting capabilities-

Help Scout

Help Scout offers various types of reports, such as email reports, chat reports, phone reports, happiness records, and company and user reports. The reports it offers have diverse functionalities, such as conversation drill-downs, filtering options, popover definitions, calculation of the email report, and more.

Zendesk

Zendesk provides unified reporting, which means you can integrate data from different channels and measure customer interactions with your brand.

This platform offers advanced reporting capabilities. It lets your agents analyze customer data using charts and graphs, making it easy for the customer service team to understand current customer trends and behavioral patterns.

Using Zendesk, you can get in-depth reports on everything from the average response time to total callback calls and voicemails.

Or opt for Botsonic, a More Suitable Alternative!

Botsonic by Writesonic is a no-code AI chatbot builder that allows you to customize the chatbot's appearance, behavior, and responses according to your brand voice. It is powered by GPT-4 and prioritizes security, offering a zero-retention data policy for LLMs.

Here are some of its significant features-

1. Budget-friendly

Compared to Help Scout and Zendesk, Botsonic is reasonably priced and is packaged with all essential features. It offers varied price plans that can cater to different business needs. The plans start from $40.83/month, and you get an array of advanced features that you might not get on other platforms.

2. Round-the-clock support

Provides 24/7 support, ensuring that your customers get a quick response even during non-working hours. This can help increase customer satisfaction as it eliminates wait times with immediate support.

3. Integration

Seamlessly integrates with numerous applications, ensuring a better workflow and user experience. Some of the well-known platforms it integrates with are Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Salesforce, Telegram, Slack, Zapier, Calendly, and more.

4. Customizable

Allows you to customize chatbot according to your brand's tone and the target audience. It also ensures that your chatbot and website complement each other. Botsonic's user-friendly drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to set up and create a custom AI chatbot.

5. GPT-4 powered

Uses the most advanced technology, GPT-4, to custom-train the AI chatbot on your own data. Using this technology, you will be able to build a faster and more efficient AI chatbot. With GPT-4 powers, the results can be magical.

Also read: How to build an AI chatbot like ChatGPT?

Making the Right Choice for Your Business!

Why is finding the right support solution important? Apparently, to improve customer satisfaction and drive growth. Right? How about mastering these building blocks of your strategy with a potent AI builder that can help you start a chain reaction to reduce costs, save time, and increase productivity? Impressive, isn't it?

Here are a few things to consider when choosing the best customer support solution for your business-

1. Needs assessment

The first step in selecting a customer support solution is assessing your business requirements. Analyze these factors-

• Company size
• Growth plans
• Geographical areas that you cover
• Types of support you wish to provide
• Who is your target audience

2. Feature prioritization

The next important thing is the features that the platform offers. Always check business requirements and see if it offers those features or not. Here are some of the basic features that you must look for-

• Ease-of-use
• Omnichannel compatibility
• Real-time reports
• Natural language processing
• Integration
• Security
• Customization

3. Budget considerations

Budget plays a vital role when choosing a support solution for your business. It's always a good idea to compare the features that various tools offer according to their pricing and analyze whether they are complete value for money. Then, compare the pricing with the ROI and see if it's worth investing in.

Which Tool is Better: Help Scout vs Zendesk?

Both tools are equally good and have numerous advanced features. However, Help Scout's straightforward, user-friendly approach makes it an excellent choice for smaller businesses or those prioritizing ease of use.

Zendesk, with its extensive features and customization options, is better suited for larger organizations or those requiring a more sophisticated, scalable support solution.

Level Up Your Customer Experience with Botsonic!

After exploring Help Scout and Zendesk, it can be quickly concluded that they lack the standard AI capabilities required in a support solution.

In contrast, Botsonic outshines both of these platforms and takes care of the key areas of AI agent development and deployment.

Not only is Botsonic user-friendly, but its natural language processing (NLP) capabilities understand user input and formulate the most accurate response to a query. Knowing the user's search intent ensures every interaction is more relevant and engaging for your users.

The noteworthy point is that it allows you to feed the data by uploading documents in any format, such as PDF, PPT, PPTX, DOC, or DOCX, or you can also just paste the website link.

It also supports both HTTP and HTTPS links in URLs and sitemaps.

Furthermore, Botsonic offers multi-language support, allowing you to reach a global audience. This platform adapts automatically to the user's input language and removes communication barriers.

Thus, if you are looking to harness personalized customer support solutions, look no further than Botsonic. Get ready to elevate your customer experience and propel your business to new heights.