Along with a customer support team, successful companies must ensure their support organization has the right tools, knowledge, and insights to effectively communicate and retain customers.
Along with providing the right resources, top management needs to be able to gather important insights about their business and users to optimize the customer experience and effectively run their team.
As Head of Product Marketing at Wix Answers, I'm at the forefront of the customer support industry and consistently speak to leaders within the space. In this post we'll compare two help desk solutions: Wix Answers, a new, modern approach to customer support, and the popular legacy option, Zendesk.
The right customer support solution makes it easy for businesses to better understand their customers, meet their needs, and increase overall customer satisfaction. As there are many help desk solutions on the market, use this post to identify which kind of platform is best for your business.
What We Looked At:
While Wix Answers is a new, innovative platform, Zendesk is the biggest legacy help desk software on the market. Both offer a way to communicate with customers, have insights and reporting features, and include multilingual support for scaling.
So how does a company looking to switch platforms know which is right for them? We compare the solutions so businesses can better evaluate which best suits their needs. Here’s a breakdown of what we considered:
A Brief Introductory Background:
When Wix.com needed a way to collect customers’ feedback, include their voice in the roadmap, and create a growth and retention source, they considered existing solutions, but nothing fit. With nothing on the market that met their needs, they built an in-house customer support platform for their 180 million users.
After it proved successful, Wix.com brought it to the market in 2017 to help other businesses retain clients. Today they count Getty Images, Sisense, Viber, and MyHeritage among their customers.
As one of the oldest customer support solutions on the market, Zendesk’s name is well recognized. In 2006, Zendesk’s founders created the software platform out of a loft in Denmark. Their mission was to simplify complicated ticketing systems and resolve customer service requests faster than customers shared their complaints. At first, Zendesk attracted customers by word of mouth, but the founders eventually grew the company to a 2.1 billion dollar business.
Here’s how they stack up against each other:
Usability
Wix Answers’ usability is unmatched.
Wix Answers
What makes Wix Answers stand out from other help desk platforms is that all the channels are already built in, decreasing the need for 3rd-party apps, APIs, or developer involvement. Their solution—which was made with support agents in mind— is also incredibly user-friendly, intuitive, and customer centric.
Notably, thanks to a simple, consistent user interface across all channels, agents can learn the system in less than one 8-hour shift and become operative. After onboarding, agents work on one system for all support channels, which means they don’t need to spend time jumping between tabs to solve an issue.
In terms of customization, Wix Answers’ easy-to-use product enables companies to create customer support workflows that fit their business strategy. Without development knowledge, users can set up automations for routing tickets, create their help center to match the company’s branding, and more.
Zendesk
Though it’s one of the most established and longest running help desk softwares, Zendesk’s usability is less functional. All apps and add-ons are separate, which means you won’t get all the products you need in a standard Zendesk package. Some tools will also need developer work, such as help center templates.
Agents are most efficient when they have all the information they need to resolve tickets in one place. With this view, they don’t need to ask the customer to re-explain their issue or search through a separate timeline for each channel.
On Zendesk, each support channel opens in a different browser tab and creates a separate ticket, which may make it harder for agents to get one cohesive view of the customer history. With a new ticket for each channel, agents may struggle to quickly and accurately address tickets.
Overall, Zendesk is built from siloed systems branded as one. Zendesk does offer plenty of customization options for their help center—Zendesk Guide—including design and themes to match your company's brand and for ticket dashboards.
It may take some time for companies to get used to Zendesk’s ticketing system, but once adjusted, any support team member can see all recently added or unsolved tickets.
If you’re looking for a scalable solution with a simple UI and minimum developer involvement, Wix Answers is your best bet.
Core Features
While Zendesk’s many features are separate from one another, Wix Answers’ solution has one multi-channel view.
Wix Answers’ Top Features:
- Ticketing System
- Knowledge Management
- Call Center
- Widgets
- Live Chat
- Insights
Ticketing System
Wix Answers’ ticketing system is an inbox of support requests from all support channels structured into a single view for managers and agents to manage. With a single inbox of tickets, agents can seamlessly move from one customer concern to another, streamlining ticket management and increasing agent productivity.
To respond to a ticket, agents are presented with one chronological timeline of the customers history, helping them respond quickly and accurately.
Knowledge Management
Research shows that up to 82% of customers use self-service as a support channel. In layman’s terms, self service is when customers are able to help themselves before needing to reach out to support.
To empower customers and employees, Wix Answers provides a robust knowledge management solution. Easy-to-use and deploy, the Wix Answers knowledge base can be used internally to support employees and externally to help deflect customer tickets.
Integrated throughout the support product, customers can search the knowledge base, tutorials, and FAQs within help widgets on the website or product as part of their user journey. Agents can respond to customer concerns with AI recommended articles.
As a core part of Wix Answers’ customer support platform, the Spotter Automation tool helps customer support leaders and teams save time and resources by eliminating manual and repetitive tasks, increasing the operational efficiency, and improving the customer experience in real time.
As the only real-time automation engine, the Spotter Automation tool can: immediately act on a negative CSAT score, activate and customize different scenarios in an instant without developer involvement, and take action for any primary entity — whether it’s an agent, queue or article.
Unlike other automation engines, Answers’ automation has a quick and easy setup with out-of-the-box templates for common flows and notifications. Another advantage lies in the consistent UX/UI experience when customizing these scenarios — making it possible for non-developers or experts to set any given business rule. Business rules and triggers for all platform entities are managed and activated from a single area.
Wix Answers also offers Control room, a live dashboard for all channels with real-time visibility into your agents’ capacity. This allows support leaders to better manage their team and ensure agents meet their goals and prevent potential risks.
Insights
One critical area where Wix Answers shines is the Top Insights product, which allows support organizations to identify their customers’ most common pain points, even when volumes are high. Companies that utilize this functionality keep their customers' voice front and center, giving them a role within the evolving business and a voice on product roadmaps.
Zendesk’s Top Features:
- Ticketing System
- Knowledge Base
- Community Forums
- Security
- Live Chat
Zendesk has a tremendous features list. Businesses with more resources can choose the comprehensive help desk platform plan that comes with live chat, a knowledge base, a call center, and a community portal. For smaller budgets, Zendesk offers a basic module where companies can add features to the platform for additional costs. The main downside here is that businesses may end up paying more for crucial features.
They have a powerful ticketing system with a wide range of features and plenty of customization options. Features are often separate from one another, however, and may require developer involvement to get them up and running.
Setup And Ongoing Support
It’s difficult to get a hold of Zendesk’s support—Wix Answers wins for timely, helpful responses.
Wix Answers
Both help desks offer support, but Wix Answers goes beyond addressing pain points. 24/7 support makes it easy to get a hold of agents and Wix Answers operates with a ‘no generic responses’ policy. Support-wise, Wix Answers has a leg up as they support customers throughout the entire journey. Businesses won’t need to deal with disappearing providers after signing the contract.
Beyond support quality, the platform is intuitive with easy-to-set-up workflows. A wide array of customization or adjustment options better enable scaling, without needing dev involvement.
Zendesk
Zendesk’s setup necessitates more expert knowledge, so those looking to run this solution on their own may struggle to onboard efficiently. Additionally, as an enterprise, Zendesk’s support operations are stretched thin, making it difficult to receive fast and thorough service.
Pricing
Wix Answers’ pricing suits any business.
Wix Answers
Wix Answers unlocks all features and capabilities immediately, so businesses won’t face costly add-ons. All businesses get access to new features and updates as soon as they’re released. Without needing to carry on additional negotiations, companies can scale more easily. Wix Answers offers a free 2-week trial to try out the full solution.
Zendesk
Zendesk built out multiple tiered plans that increase in price the more features teams wish to add. Higher levels of support/additional features come with a free trial, though the lower ones do not. Voice calling and live chat cost extra, so costs can add up quickly with Zendesk’s pricing systems.
Ultimately, Zendesk may not be cost-effective for all businesses—feature prices apply per agent per month, so if you have a larger team and need many additional features, expenses will rise.
Though their ticketing is strong, it may be harder to scale with tiered prices. Companies will need to pay more for access to features not included in the lower level tier. One consideration is that businesses could end up purchasing the ‘next level’ but not using or needing every feature included.
Choosing Between Modern, Innovative Solutions And Legacy Systems
Providing a high-quality customer support experience begins with understanding customers and being able to effectively communicate with them. To help shape their support strategy and retain customers, many businesses have looked towards customer support solutions that help agents provide proactive support, as well as give agents access to knowledge and customer insights that help them resolve issues efficiently and accurately.
Though Zendesk has an impressive array of features and a range of plans, it’s potentially better suited for businesses that have resources to pay for Zendesk’s administrators or extra development resources to set up and adjust the solution to their needs.
Looking for a modern alternative to customer support platforms? Test out Wix Answers free for 14 days and see the tools in action.
Related Read: Customer Support Automation: Benefits, Challenges And How-to