Customer service is becoming more and more complex year after year, so the demand for quality customer service software products is also constantly growing.
There are many tools on the market, but the dominant players are Freshdesk by Freshworks and Zoho Desk, a product of Zoho Corporation. Both of these tools are in the same price segment and have similar functionality. We'll compare these products' features, functionality and pricing to help you understand which software is ideal for your business processes.
Freshdesk
Freshdesk is a product of Freshworks, which was founded in India in 2010 by Girish Matrubtam
Freshdesk is a SaaS service that is affordable, easy to implement, and designed to meet the needs of end users.
This tool helps unify conversations across email, chat, phone, help center, social media, and more, and allows you to address customer queries and concerns in a timely manner. You can encourage self-service among your audience, automate repetitive tasks, and improve team collaboration.
Zoho Desk
Zoho was founded in 1996, and since then the company has released a wide range of software products to meet the needs of modern businesses.
Zoho Desk - is a multi-channel customer service solution that allows companies to easily manage customer support operations. Managers can assign, customize, and monitor help desk notifications, track customer satisfaction, and build a loyal customer base
To make the most of this customer service tool, it can be easily linked to other business applications your team uses and add customizable capabilities through API.
Comparison criteria
To compare tools, you need to identify some commonalities between them. How user-friendly is their interface? What is the pricing policy? What reporting or automation features are provided?
To answer these and other questions, the criteria by which these products will be evaluated have been defined:
- Type of users
- Interface
- Functionality
- Support Service
- Prices
Freshdesk vs Zoho Desk: type of users
Freshdesk
Freshdesk has some big brands (Bridgestone, Hamleys, 7-Eleven) among its customers, but it is also interesting for small and medium-sized business customers. The unlimited free plan makes Freshdesk a good option for freelancers or small startups.
Freshdesk is easy to use and allows users to get up and running quickly. Also, it is possible to integrate Freshdesk with popular business tools such as Jira, MailChimp, SurveyMonkey, DropBox, Shopify and others.
Zoho Desk
Zoho Desk - Customer service software used by leading brands such as McAfee, Godrej, Rogers, Cummins and many others.
Like Freshdesk, Zoho Desk also offers a free plan and hence can be an ideal option for startups, small businesses or some freelancers who want to offer quality service to their clients.
For mid-sized businesses that need powerful automation capabilities, Zoho Desk can also be a good option.
Even if your business has a large customer base, Zoho offers you the same features as Freshdesk, but at almost half the price (for the enterprise plan).
There are ample opportunities to integrate Zoho Desk with all Zoho Community products or other popular applications such as Jira, Trello, Slack, Salesforce, Mailchimp, etc.
Freshdesk vs Zoho Desk: interface
Freshdesk offers a user-friendly and beautiful interface, users won't have a hard time finding important features.
All requests or complaints from customers can be stored in one place. Easy sorting and filtering of customer service requests is available with multiple indicators on the right side of the screen. User can sort and categorize requests by priority, tags, source, date and so on.
All submissions generated from chats, calls, emails, social media, etc. can be found right on the main dashboard.
Zoho Desk Offers a simple and easy to use interface. When opening a support ticket, there is an option to view the entire conversation thread and check attachments, statements, tags, history and more.
Users can also easily access communities, chats and social media accounts at the top of the screen.
Comparing Zoho Desk and Freshdesk, it can be noted that Zoho provides more opportunities for customization and interface customization. For example, you can personalize small details - apply your company logo to the domain, create custom fields to store additional information, and create your own chat or email templates.
Freshdesk vs Zoho Desk: functionality
1. Management of appeals
Freshdesk:
Freshdesk offers a simple yet effective call management system that can help your customer service team respond online.
With the discovery feature, the manager can see who else is currently viewing or responding to a request from a customer. This is a great feature that avoids having to share multiple responses with a single customer. You can also merge similar requests together to increase efficiency.
Freshdesk allows you to create service standards so that employees clearly understand their deadlines. Employees can receive reminders or notifications when requests go unanswered, and requests can be automatically escalated to a manager.
Zoho Desk:
The request management system in Zoho Desk contains multi-channel capabilities. It is possible to collect support requests from multiple channels, such as email, phone, chat, social media, etc., and organize them in a single interface.
Comparing Freshdesk with Zoho Desk, it should be noted that the Zoho product simplifies the work with customer requests. For example, it is possible to filter support requests by urgency, customer type, priority or request status. Once the filter is applied, relevant requests will be displayed at the top so that employees can easily prioritize their tasks.
Moreover, by integrating Zoho Desk with Zoho CRM, employees can get up-to-date customer information directly in the call management system.
2. Live chat (live chat)
Freshdesk:
Like other customer service products, Freshdesk allows you to assist customers online via chat. It is possible to send proactive chat messages to customers to let them know that an operator is on the phone and ready to help.
Apart from chat, Freshdesk also helps to improve social media messaging. Thanks to the integration of WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat and Facebook, it is possible to keep track of all social media messages in one place and respond faster.
It is possible to set up chatbots to help customers with their basic queries and direct conversations to employees with relevant expertise.
Zoho Desk:
Zoho Desk, in addition to the standard functionality, has an option to embed a chat window directly into the help center. If customers can't find what they are looking for, they can quickly contact the chat operator.
If more time and competencies are required to resolve an issue in chat, Zoho allows you to convert them into tracked conversions.
Comparing Zoho Desk and Freshdesk, there is another very important difference. When all chat operators are busy, Zoho allows you to set a wait time after which the chat is automatically converted to a call, ensuring that no conversation is missed.
To increase brand awareness, it is possible to create distinctive chat widgets for different brands.
3. knowledge base
Freshdesk:
Freshdesk enables a multilingual knowledge base that supports around 42 languages and simplifies the management of a global customer base. Employees can view each other's support content, publish videos, images or attachments to the help center and encourage self-service.
Freshdesk helps to save time of employees with the help of mass actions, for example, you can make necessary changes to several categories, articles or folders at once.
It is possible to publish SEO-optimized content, track the effectiveness of articles and get feedback from your audience right in the publication.
Zoho Desk:
Unlike Freshdesk, Zoho Desk allows you to fully customize your knowledge base with individual reference content for each brand.
You can even map your newly created knowledge base to a domain and make it a true brand extension. It is possible to share your support content publicly, or for security reasons, only share information with users who have registered accounts.
You can also allow your audience to submit requests directly from the knowledge base if they can't find the relevant information.
4. reports and analytics
Freshdesk:
Built-in Freshdesk reports allow you to get a complete picture of customer service. The interface of reports is minimalistic, you can easily find the necessary indicators. Reporting is easy to customize, employees can simply drag and drop widgets from the widget library and create custom reports.
Freshdesk allows you to see unallocated requests so that operators can see which requests are pending. Support managers can track the average first response time and the percentage of requests resolved according to service level standards.
Zoho Desk:
Detailed reports are built into Zoho Desk to evaluate and improve team performance. The reports dashboard looks simple, clear and contains useful data for decision making.
With the help of the analytics tool, you can track support service KPIs in real time and visualize incoming request templates.
Customer service agents can quickly view their pending or pending calls from the last week and see how they were rated by customers. Support managers can analyze and understand which channels are preferred by customers and compare response and close times for any given time period.
In addition, using the SLA Metrics Dashboard, it is possible to view standards violations by carrier, time or channel.
5. Automation
Freshdesk:
Freshdesk offers automation powered by Freddy AI. The tool allows you to optimize workflows, automate manual and repetitive tasks, prioritize requests and assign them to the most appropriate employees, learn from past requests and automatically suggest fields or tags for new ones.
AI-based chatbots are programmed to instantly and accurately answer questions posed by potential or existing customers.
Zoho Desk:
Zoho Desk helps you customize and automate the process of routing requests, assigning rules so that the right requests get to the right operator or department. This will save managers' time and energy so they can focus on important tasks.
Zoho Desk also operates artificial intelligence technology Zia, which can communicate with customers, send out articles from a knowledge base, automatically highlight appeals and set up automated responses to frequently asked questions.
It is also possible to share automated messages with customers to keep them informed of the progress of their requests.
Freshdesk vs Zoho Desk: Help Desk
Freshdesk:
Freshdesk offers a dedicated email address and customer support contact number.
Freshdesk users can access a knowledge base that features interactive videos on topics such as creating knowledge base articles, customizing a multilingual knowledge base, using ready-made answers, and more.
For new Freshdesk users, there is an opportunity to register customer service operators in Freshworks Academy, where they can hone new skills and get certified. In the Freshworks community forum, you can ask questions, post tips or communicate with other users.
Zoho Desk:
Zoho Desk offers 24/7 support, but only 5 days a week, which is a certain problem for 24/7 operators. To get premium or enterprise support (24/7), you need to pay an additional 20% to 25% of the license fee. In addition, you will get a technical manager only with the Enterprise plan.
In addition to the support team, there is a free Zoho Help Center that provides information on major topics - documentation, integrations, webinars, and to find the latest product or feature updates.
If you don't find the right answers, you can write an email to the dedicated support email. Users can also explore Zoho through their social media accounts on Twitter, YouTube, Meta, LinkedIn.
Freshdesk vs Zoho Desk: prices
FreshDesk:
- Free: free plan (up to 10 operators)
- Growth: $15/user/month
- Pro: $49 /user/month
- Enterprise: $79/user/month
Freshdesk comes with a 21-day free trial that allows you to test the interface and full functionality of the tool and see if it meets your business needs or not.
The basic Growth plan starts at $15 per user per month and offers basic features like reporting, compliance, app integration, time tracking and more.
While the basic plans start at a low cost, Freshdesk's most comprehensive plan called Enterprise can be quite expensive at $79 per user per month. For that price, you can get features like competency-based carrier routing, an email bot, article suggestion, social messengers, artificial intelligence, and more.
Zoho Desk:
- Free: free plan (up to 3 operators)
- Express: $7/user/month* (up to 5 operators)
- Standart: $14/user/month*
- Professional: $23/user/month*
- Enterprise: $50/user/month*
* when paid per year
Like Freshdesk, Zoho Desk also offers a free plan with a limit of up to 3 operators. There is a 15-day free trial to familiarize yourself with the product functionality.
In addition, for small business customers, Zoho Desk offers an Express plan for $7 per user per month (up to 5 users) with a basic set of essential features (call handling, social channels, analytics)
Zoho's basic plan called Standard starts at $14 per user per month and includes features like social and community channels, service level agreements, customer satisfaction ratings and more.
With the Enterprise plan ($40/user/month) you can get Zia - artificial intelligence, multi-brand help center, scheduled reports and more.
In this comparison, you can see that Zoho is more affordable than its counterpart. For an enterprise with advanced support needs, it is more cost-effective to choose the Zoho Enterprise plan, which costs less than half of the same Freshdesk plan.
So which one is the best?
There is no absolute winner in this comparison of Zoho Desk and Freshdesk. Both products are market leaders and offer almost identical functionality. However, there are situations where you may choose one over the other.
| Functions | FreshDesk | Zoho Desk |
|---|---|---|
| Free trial version | 21 days | 15 days |
| Price | From $15. | From $7. |
| Target audience | Medium and large businesses | Medium and large businesses |
| Chat | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Customer surveys | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Knowledge base | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Chatbot and AI | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Real-time analytics | ✔️ | ✔️ |
When to choose Freshdesk?
Freshdesk is a versatile customer support tool that offers an easy-to-use interface at an affordable price. In addition to some must-have call handling features, there is the option to get powerful automation and reporting capabilities. However, some Freshdesk plans can be cost prohibitive.
When to choose Zoho Desk?
Zoho Desk is identical to Freshdesk in terms of features. It is ideal to use this tool in integration with other Zoho applications such as Zoho CRM, Forms, SalesIQ, etc.
Moreover, for a large company, the Enterprise plan from Zoho Desk costs almost half the price and will be a powerful tool for quality customer service to a large customer base
