Kustomer vs. Zendesk Sell

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!

Incentivized

Zendesk sell is best for organizations that want a clean and simple, yet powerfully effective CRM tool. It's intuitive, extremely user-friendly, supplies lots of video tutorials and access to the California team for FAQ's, and has all the features other, more complicated, expensive CRM's have. Great for institutions that have a need to tailor their database to fit your needs; and track sales, tasks, and pipeline projects in graphic form. It's affordable and has a great app for mobile phones that allows access to contacts, notes, tasks, and a workable platform while on the go in real time. It's simple to teach new users how to navigate and utilize. Adding or deleting users is simple, and access to the CRM information can be limited/private or made public for the entire team to access. Not as costly as some of the competing products, so if you are on a tight budget this may be the tool for you.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• My favorite piece is the Tasks connected to the Clients OR the Deals themselves that keep the process moving with the right steps, and helps our team from doubling our work, or missing a piece that is crucial for the completion of the sale.
• The email integration helps to keep all things housed in one place also, so that you're not bouncing back and forth in multiple platforms to stay on top of the orders.
• Customizations are a HUGE part of why we use Base CRM right now. We can make sure we are recording all of the right information, and not wasting time by having to fill in or skip over content that doesn't apply to our business model.
• I also like the ability to tied Deals to multiple people, especially as Referrals come across, so we don't forget how we got in touch with different clients.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• There was no ability to add prospects from a company domain or email to auto-fill any data.
• You had to type in all of the data you gathered about that prospect.
• The default only gave you two phone numbers for the company, too few.

Incentivized

Because there's no other tool like Kustomer

Incentivized

The integration with the other Zendesk products is key. Allows other people in the company, such as support, to be involved in the sales process.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I received about two hours worth of training on Zendesk Sell (formerly Base CRM). I will say it's a clean look and the ability to change views is extremely helpful. I do wish there were other features that allowed the views to be more simplistic. Some views can be overwhelming to look at. Nevertheless with the minimum training, I am still able to navigate through Zendesk Sell (formerly Base CRM) successfully due to the ease of usability.

Incentivized

Because Kustomer is available when you need it

Incentivized

Always available and easy connection from Zendesk Support

Incentivized

Because ages load quickly, reports complete in a reasonable time frame, given their complexity

Incentivized

Never any latency issues

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Due to the ease of the product, I have not had the chance to reach out to support yet. I’ve had no reason. The resources provided to clients are extremely helpful and detailed. So far my questions have been pretty basic and I generally just ask my colleague or teammate. They're able to assist with the answer.

Incentivized

Because they are very hands-on in training us and very approachable

Incentivized

It was very easy to understand.

Incentivized

This product has a great backing of users, but needs more options direct from Base CRM on all operations of the software. YouTube videos do a great job of helping implement, and the back end support is a great help as well. The CRM is a great free option, and should be treated as such.

Incentivized

Nothing really because it is easy to use. After an hour of using it, we're already getting the hang of it.

Incentivized

Simple, and straight forward.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Simpler than most CRMs, which can be good if your sales team is not very tech savvy. We switched to HubSpot which provides a lot more value than Base did, but it isn't right for everyone. HubSpot is focused on capturing in-bound leads and has its own flaws and limitations, but overall it's a better fit for our needs.

Because customer is flexible and scalable

Incentivized

Always on, always available.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Using Base has allowed us to double the number of active sales and partner engagements that we can keep track of and make progress on.
• This has led to us being able to follow up on many smaller deals that were falling through the cracks.

Incentivized