Zendesk vs. Zoho

Zendesk features a unified omnichannel workspace that enables support teams to provide a consistent customer experience across web, social, email, voice, live chat, and messaging. The interface, called the Agent Workspace, consolidates past support interactions and customer data, so agents can deliver fast and personalized support no matter how a customer reaches out.

However, Zoho’s ticketing system has limitations when it comes to omnichannel capabilities.

1. Zoho has different agent interfaces for chat, phone, and ticketing. That means agents have to toggle between the channels instead of an ongoing conversation in a single view.
2. You must buy an add-on subscription to Zoho Voice or integrate with a third-party app to get a voice channel. If you choose a third-party voice partner, the selection is limited.
3. Zoho has limited social messaging integrations. For social messaging apps, you need to get an add-on for Zoho Social.

Zendesk offers customer service reporting and analytics software for businesses of any size or industry. With our metrics tools, you get:

• Pre-built, omnichannel dashboards that work right out of the box so you can run reports from day one.
• Highly-customizable dashboards and metrics (with point-and-click configuration), allowing businesses to tailor their reports in minutes.
• Real-time dashboards so you can react and adapt in the moment.

Zoho’s canned reporting and dashboards only provide basic customer service metrics. There’s no real-time reporting and their siloed omnichannel analytics force you to run separate reports per channel.

You’re also unable to drill into the numbers to better understand the metrics, and there are no attribution or correlation capabilities. It has a few customization options but nothing dynamic. It's mostly just manipulating columns.

For access to advanced reporting, you’ll need to buy an add-on.

With Zendesk, you can provide 24/7 support to your customers via self-service options like:

• Chatbots
• Customer portals
• Community forums
• Help centers and knowledge bases

You also have access to knowledge management software that makes it easy to keep help center articles updated. For example, Content Cues uses AI to identify and flag content gaps and outdated information in articles.

Like Zendesk, Zoho Desk offers a multilingual knowledge base and a customizable help center to match the look and feel of your brand. However, Zoho lacks useful features that streamline updating content, like content blocks and Content Cues. This means you’ll most likely have to invest time and money into manually keeping your content up to date.

Based on trillions of data points from real service interactions, Zendesk AI is fine-tuned and optimized for customer service excellence. It learns from every interaction, continuously improving over time. It's accessible to anyone, working from day one, and is ready to go in minutes. No need for developers, heavy IT spend, or months of lead time.

Here are a few features of Zendesk AI:

• Advanced bots: Enhanced bots for messaging and email that leverage customer intents to deliver personalized and accurate responses.
  
• Intelligence in the context panel: Agent-facing panel in the Agent Workspace that displays AI-powered insights and suggests the right prewritten responses to apply to solve the customer’s issue.
  
• Intelligent triage: Detects customer intent, language, and sentiment to classify incoming requests and allow teams to power workflows based on these insights.
  
• Macro suggestions for admins: AI-suggested macros that can make agents more effective.

Zoho offers an AI-powered personal assistant called Zia. Zia performs routing and automation tasks and can interpret human language to respond appropriately. However, many customer reviews on G2 cite Zia has difficulty with complex or ambiguous queries, limitations with integrations, and lack of customization options.

Zendesk offers more than 1,300 pre-built apps and integrations in the Zendesk Marketplace that enable you to customize our software and streamline data. Third-party integrations with Zendesk help you align your support team with the rest of your business, providing a 360-degree view of the customer.

For example, you can integrate our support software with your sales CRM, marketing automation tool, and more, so you can view key customer information across sales, service, and marketing all in one solution.

Zoho hosts a limited marketplace for third-party apps. A common issue that customers describe is learning that Zoho offers useful integrations with its own suite of products, but finds challenges and limitations integrating with third-party tools.

Zendesk features robust collaboration tools, such as side conversations, a tool that helps agents collaborate directly with other agents, management, or departments on tickets directly within their workspace. Side conversations are exactly that—a conversation on the side without being added to the main ticket conversation. The conversations are kept separate, allowing employees to brainstorm solutions without cluttering the ticket or keeping discussions about specific parts of the ticket organized.

Zendesk also seamlessly integrates with tools like Slack and Zoom, allowing agents to quickly connect with managers or teammates to collaborate on a solution.

Zoho’s native collaboration tools work with their own suite of tools, but they have difficulty with common collaboration apps, like Slack. The Slack integration does not allow live conversations, only automated notifications. Additionally, external contributors must be contacted through email.

Zendesk features live chat software that enables agents to engage with customers in real time and provide immediate support to customers. Customizable templates allow you to create responses to common phrases for faster replies and a consistent brand voice and tone. You can also customize pre-chat web forms that collect data, enabling agents to personalize the interaction and boost sales.

Zendesk also offers a complete messaging solution that enables proactive and personalized support. You can add messaging to your website or mobile app, popular social channels like WhatsApp Business or Facebook, and business productivity tools like Slack to deliver instant support for customers, business partners and employees. Get ahead of your customers with outbound notifications and connect all parties with group messaging.

Users experience issues with Zoho’s live chat and messaging system, reporting delays in the chat. They also describe chat support not being helpful with their issues.

With Zendesk, you can automate macros, or prewritten responses, from customizable templates to keep customers in the loop, boosting agent efficiency and saving time. Support teams can also set up conversation routing to streamline workflows by automatically directing tickets to the right agent or department quickly and efficiently. You can configure scalable routing models based on:

• Agent availability, workload, and skill
• Conversation priority, request type, or channel
• Intent (what a customer is about) and sentiment (if a conversation is positive, negative, or neutral)

Additionally, Zendesk allows you to set alerts and notifications that prompt agents to address ticket escalations or tickets at risk of not meeting service level agreements (SLAs) and operational level agreements (OLAs).

On the other hand, Zoho workflows and automations have certain restrictions. For example, Zoho has limited SLAs and no OLAs (unlike Zendesk), making it difficult to see if you’re meeting internal and external support standards.