Battle of the Helpdesk Platforms: Freshdesk vs. Zendesk

Zendesk’s beginnings can be traced back to 2007 in Copenhagen, Denmark.Mikkel Svane was working as a consultant charging companies large sums to install bulky, on-premise customer support software. The process was long, expensive and inaccessible for most businesses. He knew a Web-based solution would fix things, so he got got Alex Aghassipour and Morten Primdahl on board and the three created the first iteration of Zendesk from a small loft. After launching to its first few customers, the team moved to America in 2009.

Freshdesk has a unique origin story. After reading a Hacker News thread in 2010 reporting that Zendesk had raised its pricing by 300 percent, Freshdesk’s soon-to-be founders got to thinking. Two days later, they quit their jobs to start the company.

Basics

Freshdesk offers a consolidated inbox, support for self-service and a ticket management system. It includes an automated categorization and prioritization module, known as the Dispatch’r. Incoming tickets are automatically categorized and assigned to an agent or support group.

You can customize the Dispatch’r to do a lot of cool things. Here are a few examples:

1. Assign tickets outside of business hours to a specific team
2. Tighten your spam filters
3. Prioritize tickets from a specific contact or company

Once tickets have been assigned, agents can take advantage of the Supervisor, another module that runs on an hourly basis evaluating business rules against tickets and notifying agents when a ticket needs attention. For example, an unresolved ticket where the customer has had more than three interactions with the helpdesk can automatically trigger an email to a manager with the ticket’s details.

A third tool, the Observer, is a monitoring tool to monitor incoming messages, changes in statuses or other events that require an agent’s response. For example, if a VIP customer re-opens a ticket, the Observer can trigger automatic escalation of that ticket to assign it to a help desk manager.

Zendesk has a laser focus on enabling and managing communications with customers and other support constituents. The application interface integrates communications from email, social media, phone and chat services.

Of course, collecting requests in a single area is just part of the solution. Zendesk includes support for automation rules and triggers that respond to events in the help desk system. It also provides for self-help portals that can be branded according to your needs.

Another useful feature of Zendesk is the ability to share tickets with other companies who use Zendesk. This can be especially powerful for companies that offer products or services that integrate with multiple vendors and providers.

Both platforms allow you to change the address of your support website. By default, the URL is mycompany.zendesk/freshdesk.com but you can change the address to a subdomain of your own website, such as support.mycompany.com.

Gamification

The biggest difference between the two platforms – the feature that Freshdesk claims sets it apart from the rest – is the “gamification of customer service”.Gamification is the craft of deriving all the fun and addicting elements found in games and applying them to productive activities.

“We believe customer support should be fun, which is why we integrated a gamification component for our customers’ internal service agents,” says Girish Mathrubootham, Freshdesk’s founder and CEO.

Freshdesk’s “Arcade” is an achievement system, with specific goals for support reps and leaderboards that keep track of points they accrue. Managers can create custom objectives for their teams, too. The gamification feature could help prevent the burnout that come with supporting customers all day, replying to complaints and answering queries from irate customers.

Although Zendesk doesn’t have an official gamified feature, users can integrate third-party apps.

Self-service

Recent studies tell us that more and more customers prefer self-service over contacting a support agent; in fact, a whopping 91% say they would use a knowledge base if it met their needs. Both Zendesk and Freshdesk include the following features in their self-service arsenals:

• Knowledge Base
• Community/forums
• Customer portal
• Social self service

So what distinguishes the two? For one, Zendesk has a renowned search function that lets customers find any information you have put in your knowledge base. (Check out how you can best optimize your knowledge base for search).

Not to be outdone, Freshdesk lets you tag articles with metadata to make information in your support portal easy to find with Google.

Chat

Anyone who’s ever called their cable or internet provider can tell you that the typical phone support experience sucks. These days, it’s important to offer live chat so customers can instantly get help, without having to suffer through terrible hold music, or irrelevant phone-tree options.Freshdesk’s live chat feature, Freshchat lets you help customers in real-time (available inGarden and Estate plans). Chat transcripts can be converted into tickets, or even added to existing ones.

Zendesk just acquired live-chat software company Zopim to integrate a new set of features into their existing chat. All Zendesk plans will include the Zopim Lite plan when the new integration is launched in May 2014. The Zopim widget is customizable and allows you to pull customer data to your CRM solution.

Both chat widgets can be embedded into your website or application.

Reporting & Analytics

Internal reporting is helpful to understand how well your support team is performing relative to your standards and expectations.On the Regular plan (and up) in Zendesk, you have access to a basic key performance indicator dashboard. Zendesk Benchmark, which collects data from over 16,000 Zendesk customers so you can compare your performance to others along metrics such as scale, efficiency and satisfaction is available with all plans

Advanced Analytics are available on the Zendesk Plus and Enterprise plans, which includes dashboards, reports, ad-hoc analysis, and collaborative business intelligence. You can also view a search analytics dashboard so that you can review knowledge base search terms for the last 30 days.

Freshdesk gives you “At-a-Glance” reports for Blossom, Garden, and Estate plans, which let you quickly take the pulse of your entire helpdesk. You can also identify your best agents and check out how everyone is performing against key metrics like average response time or rate of first call resolutions.

Apps & Integrations

Both Zendesk and Freshdesk feature extensive APIs, enabling developers to manipulate tickets, requests, users, groups, forums, topics, audit logs, triggers and many other help desk functions.But to extend and customize your system, you don’t necessarily have to program anything. Both companies have a substantial number of apps that integrate with their platforms, ranging from analytics and reporting, to time tracking and productivity tools.

It’s worth noting that as of April 2014, Zendesk’s app store is a bit more developed than Freshdesk’s. Some of our favorite Zendesk integrations include SugarCRM, Pivotal Tracker, JIRA, and Box.

Pricing

Zendesk also has a “white glove” Elite Enterprise for $195 per agent/month. Both platforms offer discounts if you pay on an annual basis rather than monthly.