HelpSpot vs. LiveAgent vs. Salesforce Agentforce Service

HelpSpot is well suited for streamlining support ticketing within the organization. By providing a single point of contact to email for support, we were able to increase response time and case resolution by approximately 30% through the increased efficiency of ticket routing via workflows and the ability for IT support staff to grab tickets from the queue instead of having them pile up in a mailbox that contains other emails as well.

Incentivized

LiveAgent is great for companies that want to help customers with their issues. It is also great for getting sales for our company. During our chats, if a customer is interested, we like to ask for the sale. It is too easy for the customers to say no. So it is nice that with LiveAgent, they have an automatic process where the customer can enter their item and address information and it is easy for our agents to get the sale.

Incentivized

I think Service Cloud is best suited for medium to large operations that require both proactive and reactive service. It’s a great fit for post-sales support. However, I wouldn’t recommend it for very small companies because it can be quite costly, and many of the features may go unused. Salesforce also performs best when you have a capable team managing it, so it’s important to consider your organization’s size and readiness before starting. Once you do, I recommend exploring other parts of the Salesforce ecosystem—Service Cloud works even better when integrated with Sales Cloud, since it allows better visibility across teams.

Incentivized

• HelpSpot was great for organization. Having different queues allowed each of my team members to organize their conversations with the customer and quickly retrieve the history of the ticket.
• HelpSpot is a fairly simple tool that has a friendly user interface. With it's more modern look, it made it easier for me personally to navigate and train team members on how to use it successfully.
• HelpSpot allowed our team to view the responses section, which allowed our team to cut down on the time we spent responding to a ticket.

Incentivized

• Having the ability to transfer tickets or chats has proven useful when we are working with a customer who has a specific type of inquiry - perhaps a sales question or an employment request. We’ve found it helpful to have the ability to transfer the chat to the online agent best equipped to answer the inquiry so we are able to serve our customers to the highest standard and with an immediate response.
• We find being able to add notes and labels to previous chats and tickets incredibly helpful in data collection and also in our ability to work as a dynamic team. By being able to sort our chats and tickets into an organized system that our company created, we can work cohesively to review old conversations for continuity, opportunities for growth, and with transparency between departments.

• Email to case is an interesting piece of it. The threading is very strong, sometimes too strong, but it does very well at handling the incoming emails.
• The omnichannel routing, using skill-based routing is really effective.
• Pathing. So making the workflow and helping the team understand what it is that they're trying to do, what they have to accomplish, those step-by-step pieces. That's really helpful.

Incentivized

• The UI is a little dated but to be fair, shows most of the pertinent information at a glance on a well designed dashboard.
• The UI can also be buggy at times with controls appearing in strange places. These glitches are usually corrected within a reasonable amount of time.

• LA doesn't provide you SMS integration.
• You cannot divert your phone call from your local carrier to LA agent directly. You need to get a third party number which is way much costly. Also, if you get a third party number to divert your calls from a local carrier to LA, then the callers have to wait more than the usual time in order to get them connected with the Customer Support Team.
• WhatsApp Integration also unavailable.

Incentivized

• We had a principle initially to try and use Omni as much as we can from the user experience perspective, but have found that fairly restrictive. It was very difficult to actually get the right customer experience and customer engagement going. So we're actually on a journey at the moment to replace all of our Omni with Lightning web components that gives us that flexibility. That's probably one area where we've had some challenges in terms of how we've used the product out of the box.

Incentivized

My current job does not use this platform as it is not necessary for my job function.

Incentivized

I am giving this rating as Live Agent is a very good software that is essential to any small or big business that provides customer support services. It gives you the possibility to manage any of your clients issues, answer questions and keep a good relationship with them by providing quick solutions.

Professional edition works best for a small company with lower call volumes and is very useful but as you grow exponetially I think it has limited ability to do all the things we want to - SLA management, defect, release management to name a few. Reports and dashboards being available in real time.

The initial setup, onboarding and training is easy. The system provides 2 graphic version of interfaces in black or white default colors. I would appreciate, if there were more. Some of the setup forms are not correctly resized. Overall, I'm always able to find what I am looking for in LiveAgent.

I had Salesforce experience prior to using Service Cloud which made it a little easier to learn and navigate, but overall my team (some who had no Salesforce experience) caught on very quickly and found Service Cloud to be easy to use.

Incentivized

Working on an application that caters to customer needs requires a platform that acts as a mediator between the actual person and the client. This mediator handles the customer and resolves many of their doubts, helps them map through the entire process, and automates the processes. Such a platform is Salesforce Service Cloud. For queries that cannot be serviced by the platform, it creates a separate ServiceNow ticket for us, and it is assigned.

Incentivized

The Salesforce Service Cloud generally has very good performance, however the overall new Lightning user experience can bring that down. For example, if you have too many tabs open, then it can take a while for the Lightning UI to load. This UI is probably not well equipped to handle loading of all of that information at once, but Users tend to leave their tabs open all day long. It can also be fickle depending on which browser you use, what extensions you have installed, and whether you've cleared your cache. This can be the downfall with any software as a service though, not just Salesforce

Incentivized

The one time that I contacted the customer support at LiveAgent, they were very quick to help me out and the customer support representative walked me through every thing that I needed to know to set up what I needed. Over all, the support staff at LiveAgent were perfect.

Salesforce offers support, although it generally gets routed to overseas support teams first, and once they are unable to help, it gets escalated up the chain to higher tiers. Frequently, the answer back from support is that there is no native solution, and we either have to turn to the AppExchange for some solution provided by another developer, or custom build our own solution.

Our in-person training was provided by our implementation partner and it was quite good. This was in part because we were already working with them and so it naturally leant itself to a good training relationship. And because they were building our customizations and configuring things, they could then provide training on those things naturally.

Incentivized

Trailheads are great but it was often unclear what actually applied to our organization. This made it difficult to get a whole lot out of it. Part of it is that because the basic Salesforce features didn't quite work for us, we had to add customizations, which then nullified a lot of the training.

Incentivized

Implementation was quick and when not counting a bug on our website, it took a couple hours. It was mostly done on our end or with the assistance of LiveAgent's live chat support team. We recommend to check out LiveAgent's tutorial videos on their youtube channel or browsing their knowledge base - we've almost always found answers to our queries there.

I would go through an implementation very differently knowing what I know now. It was difficult coming from systems we liked in post-sales service and having to adapt to the clunky and underwhelming feature set in Salesforce. I would trim back our expectations

Incentivized

HelpSpot appears to be more of an old-school product but much of the recent technology is running under the surface. It has much of the compexity and customization available with Jira in tandem with the easy communications interface, not unlike Zendesk ,and some of the potential archival intelligence (in the works) of Fogbugz

Before making the decision, we evaluated many tools, but none of them met all of our needs or the costs we could bear for them, until we found LiveAgent. The implementation process was super simple and supported by the LiveAgent support team, who are excellent!

We selected this product because we already had some competencies in Salesforce. We own a Salesforce partner with expertise in this area, and on top of that, Salesforce purchased it — it was originally called Velocity. When Salesforce decided to acquire it, that finalized the decision for us.

Incentivized

The product has scaled up with our company growth just fine. No issues here other than slowness in clicking around and running reports

Incentivized

• Improved ticket response time
• Workload reporting to upper management
• Ticket category reporting to identify training opportunities

Incentivized

• Less expensive than having multiple individual email accounts.
• LiveAgent has helped decrease our errors since it's more straightforward than sharing a traditional inbox with multiple team members.
• Sometimes the emails sent from LiveAgent end up in our customer's spam/junk folder because the auto-generated alpha-numeric ticket looks suspicious.

• We have cut our service team in half over the past 5 years due to the efficiency of the tool
• The amount of direct inquiries to our technical team is less than 10% compared to the number support tickets that get entered in the system for them to work in a more organized manner
• Responses are 100% more timely because tickets can be responded to by any individual in the queue or on the team, as opposed to direct emails to just one person

Incentivized