Customer.io vs. Zoom Contact Center

Talking from the perspective of a marketer at a SaaS with average. 50K email subscribers, Customer IO has been an excellent tool for us. Our requirements include sending users newsletters, marketing emails, and transactional emails, running lead-nurturing campaigns, and more. For a comprehensive use case like ours, CustomerIO is great. While it also has a learning curve, when you have such requirements, it’s worth it. I don’t think CustomerIO is the best fit if you have basic requirements like only weekly newsletter emails.

Incentivized

The Contact Centre is fantastic for our festival environment; these systems are rarely accessible to an arts organisation without a significant premium. However, that's not the case with Zoom Contact Centre. It may be tricky initially if you don't have an IT Company to help you with the integration, but they have a great Professional Services Team (PSO) to guide you through the process. Be prepared for the transition to take a few months; I wouldn't recommend it if you need something set up today. Moving phone numbers from other Telcos takes time, and the PSO can provide a custom solution that takes time to develop.

Incentivized

• Managing users, attributes and events. You are easily able to modify any user, based on their ID, and add or remove attributes, assign events to them. That makes it very easy to segment later and to assign them to several campaigns based on behavior. Just a warning: this integration isn't so easy (at least it wasn't for us).
• Creating workflows of campaigns is very easy. You can quickly create behavioral campaigns based on attributes, segments and add elements to the workflow. You can send an email, then wait, then send another, then exit the campaign if they converted, etc. The workflow is easy to configure and very powerful for automation.
• We don't use many email templates (we make them in MJML) but it's very easy to add senders, to change templates and in general to test designs.
• Deliverability works very well, at least for us. It sends emails pretty fast and without issues.
• Exporting is very quick and easy. Importing wasn't a feature until recently, but it works well too.
• Seeing activity it's also useful. In general, logs are awesome (be it of a customer, of activity on the site, email sends, etc.).
• We don't use environments, but it might be very useful for a bigger company.

Incentivized

• Easy to change behavior of a call queue
• Easy to modify call flow (normally this is very difficult and cumbersome in other contact centers)
• Language that is not esoteric to phone technicians (e.g., no "Hunt Group" or other inside baseball terms)
• Easy to see the overview of what is currently going on in the phone system and what people are doing right now
• Easy to add licenese, change changes, add phone numbers, change p#s, etc.

• Price is quite expensive for Premium or once you get into high volumes of contacts.
• Depending on how you'll use it, it may require some help from developers to set up.
• Despite the support being great, you have to email them, there's not chat feature.

• Go deeper into a true separation of parameters, reporting, management, etc. so you could have multiple business units with very different needs, independently work. Some sort of "Multi-Tenant-Like" capabilities like the one seen in Zoom Phone Locations. In situations like these where you need "location/team isolation" is challenging, if not impossible to implement with Zoom Contact Center.
• More pre-canned integrations and ready-to-go examples to implement thins like the "InApp-Chat" channel for the Zoom Client Itself. This could be a great addition, especially when you use the ZCC to service your own company.
• ZCC is meant to be an independent solution that could interact with Zoom and non-Zoom products, but the capability to allow a tight-integration with Zoom Phone is really missing: Having the capability to make/receive calls between ZP and ZCC using just extension numbers should have been a given from the get-go; it really limits the use cases of Zoom Contact Center with its other star product Zoom Phone. I heard something is coming to address this, for lack of a better word I call "shortcoming", so I am really looking forward to see what is "being cooked" on this regard.
• Licensing Tiers: ZCC is really missing an Admin-Only Role from the licensing perspective; you have to "waste" a license to add Administrators, which is particularly bad when you have a fairly large organization with multiple admins.

Everything was pretty intuitive to use if you've used an ESP before. The only thing that was confusing is Campaigns vs Newsletters - some of their naming conventions aren't straightforward. But their docs, support and AI agents are all super solid.

Incentivized

First and foremost for our results, the omnichannel approach and ease of use on the internal side (agents, supervisors and administrators) have made adoption very simple, we have managed to reduce response times (SLA) and internal communication has become very fluid. We get good feedback from our clients for having implemented ZCC in the company to serve them.

Incentivized

My experience with their support team has always been great. Very quick to respond, have an online chat, and are very helpful. They helped me resolve any issues I've had every time in a professional and knowledgeable manner. We've now switched to another tool, and I can't even compare the service level we get there to customer.io

Incentivized

Customer.io was really the first pure, full-featured drip email program on the market and as far as I know, it's still the simplest and best overall for that specific function. SendGrid has also added drip campaign features, but I would seriously evaluate Customer.io against any other drip email provider because they really have all the key elements you need to make it work.

Incentivized

There are options and ways to get to specific feature sets that are similar to what Zoom can offer. Many of the Zoom included features are add-ons for the RingCentral offering. So cost goes up and can also be an add-on difficulties/deployment costs as well. When we reviewed the features needed and the cost comparison, Zoom was less than half the cost with many of the features baked in as opposed to add-ons

• Positive impact on the sales side. I'm not sure about the specific ROI (you have to include the designer and the time it takes to set up) but you certainly get back the investment in a few months, once you are able to scale your email marketing.
• Customer experience is way better by having more segmented, contextual and accurate messages sent to them.
• Integration is costly and it will take several days or weeks to be fully achieved. Expect to invest some money on this.

Incentivized

• We migrated away from a telephony system that was antiquated and almost unusable for what we wanted to do, so Zoom has been a huge improvement for us!
• We're continuing to roll out new channels of contact for customers -- Calls, chat, video, email, etc.
• We're still getting our sea legs from a reporting perspective, and that could always be better, but so far the biggest improvement was for our staff actually using the software. They really enjoy the simplicity and robustness of the software.