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)
Webex Contact Center
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Cisco Webex Contact Center is a cloud-based omni-channel (e.g. voice, email, and chat) contact center solution providing customer / agent matching, customer service self-service agent, and built-in chat and voice for collaboration between agents.
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Pricing
Kustomer
Webex Contact Center
Editions & Modules
Enterprise
$89
per month (billed annually) per user
Ultimate
$139
per month (billed annually) per user
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Kustomer
Webex Contact Center
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
All plans require an annual subscription and 8 users minimum.
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!
I would say I'm probably between a seven and an eight. It depends on what the customer wants for. If the reporting is a big issue to them that they can't just report on any calls that are made from the phone, that might not be a solution fix for them. But for the most customers, especially if they're traditional based contact centers, it is a good fit for them. With the digital channels that come in that they can now start taking chat messages or SMS texts or emails or whatever like that, there's some advantages to having those channels. For that scenario, as long as the customer understands well, we have a couple of these, what I don't call one-offs or caveats, until we get those figured out, I am good with taking customers through that product and I think they'll have a good experience customer. The big customer I just brought, they love it. They absolutely love the product. They have the integration with, they use Google text to speech, so they can type out their prompts, they can change their prompts, menu options on the fly. They can type out what they want to say and the Google text to speech reads that message to the callers so they don't have to record the prompts and that stuff. That's something they absolutely love and I think it's been a good fit for them. Retail is one because of the digital channels, I think I've already mentioned well suited for, and I think we definitely got customers that fit that really well. I think it will fit customers that have distributed stores or distributed branch offices. I think that's a real good fit for them from a cloud-based system or people that work from home in a hybrid and work environments, contact centers, working from home, all good fits. Where I don't think it fits real well right now is when you've got customers that depend on that phone system being up. We lose our internet connectivity now I can't get to my cloud-based WebEx, cloud-based contact center. I have to switch to some other way to get out to the internet or customers that the business model says I cannot buy company policy, put my stuff in the cloud and there's limitations and I've got a customer like that that needs it on-prem and WebEx Contact center is not going to be a fit for them or WebEx calling or any of those. Cloud-based systems are not going to be a fit for them. And we need on-prem solutions for that.
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.
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.
Better highlighting of the call flows so you can better follow when troubleshooting.
Unless already available, it would be great to have a test number to call into and have the call flow light up to indicate your current position in the flow.
We are happy with the product, with Cisco as a partner and the roadmap looks mightily impressive. Webex Contact Center is one of our growth areas so we're keen to get more agents on the platform, we want to get more customers on it and we want to make use of all the features and functionalities it offers, so that we can help our customers do what they do best.
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.
It is great to use Webex Contact Center as it delivers the call routing and workflow for agent and call routing. In addition to this the noise reduction helps to focus attention on the call and with the client. The notes feature and the ability for the transcription really helps with translation and language barriers.
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.
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.
Webex Contact Center feels the most modern of the solutions we evaluated. It is an all in one package which required no capital expenditure up front. Webex Contact Center was able to integrate with the AI packages which our IT team investigating for future use. Webex Contact Center was also able to integrate with the CRM packages which we use internally (without the use of a 3rd party connector).
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.
Increasing the number of channels agent can reach out to customers, especially text has shaved off a lot of hours from calling , leaving voicemail and waiting for customers to call back.
Less Downtime. No Upgrades or certificate Renewal, so fewer overtime hours.
Adoption of new features is now so quick, I don't have to worry about upgrading the Software or even hardware to get new features deployed.
