Kintone is a customizable digital workplace platform used to manage data, tasks, and communication. The no-code drag-and-drop interface can be used to create custom applications.
$120
per month for 5 users (minimum)
Kustomer
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Kustomer is a customer service CRM platform built for managing high support volume by optimizing experiences throughout the customer service journey. Kustomer was acquired by Facebook in late 2020, but spun out in 2023 and re-launched as an independent entity, Kustomer, LLC.
$8,544
per year for 8 users (minimum)
Pricing
Kintone
Kustomer
Editions & Modules
Professional Subscription
$24
per month per user
Enterprise
$89
per month (billed annually) per user
Ultimate
$139
per month (billed annually) per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Kintone
Kustomer
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
Minimum requirement of 5 users. Kintone offers a free prototype to build with using existing process.
All plans require an annual subscription and 8 users minimum.
Kintone is great if you want a software that will help you in managing your data, and keep track of which tasks are assigned to whom. It also helps to streamline communication and information in one central place. However, it is not for you if you are looking for something complex that has to manage a lot of data.
I would say the greatest strength of Kustomer is its flexibility. In the hands of a skilled admin, it can be adapted to tons and tons of different use cases. I've been able to make custom displays for different groups of agents, produce complex cross sections of users, draw interesting data relationships combining marketing contacts and customer-initiated contacts. For example, there's really no other data source in our company which could tell you which users received a specific promo code and checked out with it, received their delivery within 14 days and then can related that to the number of times they contacted us about using our product. At the intersection of communication, marketing, data, and relationship-management, Kustomer shines at the center. I would say it falls short when you are trying to coordinate multiple "side conversations" with multiple sources to resolve an issue. This is a tough task for any type of platform, but if you're maintaining 3 different email chains with a 3PL partner, the customer, and a separate internal conversation, it would be confusing anyway!
All customer data (past orders, communication with customer service, rewards account data) is in one place. This helps agents avoid confusion and reduces the number of tabs they need to open.
The Knowledge Base (or K Base) is very helpful. Any time we roll out a new policy or have a limited-time promotion, we can add all the relevant information and worksheets there for the convenience of the agents. That way they can stay in a chat while looking up the answer to a question.
We can seamlessly move from chat into email if the customer leaves or the queue times are too long. All the interactions will stay on the customer profile page, so they are kept up to date.
I feel that Kintone is not well enough known yet. This means that other apps/APIs are not necessarily easy to connect with Kintone. Yes, you can use Zapier though for interfacing with other apps.
It would be great if it could give more customized options to change the look and format of certain things. You can make price quote apps, for example, but have to rely on 3rd party apps or programming skills to customize the look and fields.
If you make a table as an input field, it cannot connect to other internal Kintone apps for lookups and such.
I think there is more potential to make more customized data graphs.
For our team, the feature that defaults all notes to begin in "done" status is difficult. Throughout each day we need to have notes open and assigned back and forth to different teams, and we have to remember to manually "open" each note. There is too much room for human error with this setting, and it is easy for important notes to be missed if a user forgets to open the note.
Similarly, it can be hard to remember to assign emails/notes to a particular team in addition to a user. We almost exclusively work out of team inboxes, and if someone on Care writes an email to a customer, the email will automatically be "done" when it is created, and it will be assigned to the user who wrote it, but not also to the user's team. There are instances where an email needs to be snoozed for several days/hours with further action needed, and unless the user remembers to assign the email to their team it may "awake" from the snooze and not be visible to anyone except the user who created it. Similarly to my first comment, this leaves a lot of room for human error and is not very intuitive.
Personally, I do not love that all tickets/emails/notes are jumbled together in the same inbox. While this gives visibility to everything on the "to do" list at the same time, it can be visually overwhelming. We have created unique folders for certain types of projects or categories of work, but have experienced tech glitches or just the awkwardness of another step to manually read the note, determine what type of category it is, and then manually assign it to another folder. Would love to have things auto-sort and take out this manual lift.
I love the idea of the autopilot setting, but we have not been able to use this for our work because it sorts items based on time, and not based on priority. In our line of work, we may have an urgent situation arise that needs attention before an email that was sent in 60 minutes ago. The autopilot feature would push the email to my associates sooner than it would the urgent situation from 5 minutes ago. Due to this, we manually monitor inboxes and assign work to ourselves and others.
We have been quite happy with our use of Kintone thus far. We looked at several options before choosing Kintone and believe it had the best value and best features, while allowing for complete customization, rather than being locked into preformatted apps that may not address exactly what we need or be more than what we need.
Kintone is agile app and most of the time we can easily come up with new apps. However, there should be more feature-based drag and drop and or a visual-based usability, as we all want to minimize the number of clicks and dropdown menu selections as much as possible. Thanks.
There is a learning curve, but it is more than worth it, especially to have a dedicated resource pointed at Kustomer and any other software it interacts with. The basic implementation is useful, and powerful - certainly a MASSIVE upgrade over taking care of your customers in an email inbox or shuffling between multiple windows and applications! It is also set up really well to grow and reconfigure with your business. I'm a big fan.
I have had very specific questions about different aspects of the software, and I have always been able to get a hold of someone who could help. If my sales rep didn’t know the answer, he would get me in touch with someone who did know the answer. The whole team is very ready to help. It definitely feels like they view my success as their success, which is so important with this type of software.
I did not reach out to Kustomer support when we had an issue. Still, whenever we provide feedback to our manager regarding what can improve based on our experience using Kustomer, our manager always comments that Kustomer support always replies with some positive feedback based on our suggestions.
Everyone has their own tastes of things and way they want to work. Asking them to adapt to the changes with the new tools or apps is always difficult. We would want to start with a very small but best example within the organization, which in our case was that the employees will not be bothered by the bosses by being asked to find the documents, status of the progresses, or major things/requests/projects.
Kintone is the easiest product to create from and the cost is the lowest I believe. In addition, reconfigurability and extendability are great. If you look for a low code tool, you can try Kintone. But as same as another low code tool, don't expect too much.
Apps like Intercom, Zendesk, and Gorgios all treat customer inquiries as tickets, just tracking that one issue or interaction with a customer. Kustomer treats each customer as an individual, which allows us to provide top-notch customer service. Customers love that we're able to be more conversational and informal, while still solving their issues quickly. It also helps us build relationships with customers and increases repeat orders.
We’re getting so much positive feedback — which is not something you traditionally associate with a customer care team — because we’re making it effortless for customers to deliver both positive and negative feedback, and we can now resolve the bad feedback really really quickly.
Primarily from our increased efficiency with Kustomer, we’ve seen a significant reduction of $3 to $4 for every cost per contact.
