In today’s business economy, only two words keep customers coming: customer experience.
After all, where will your business end if your customer service falls short? For starters, your brand will not attract decent profits, general demand, much appreciation among customers.
Hence, choosing a robust software with all the essentials for delivering top-notch customer support is non-negotiable.
If you have been on the lookout for a platform that can help manage customer queries and service requests, you must have come across of Help Scout and Zendesk. While both are impressive options, you cannot have your foot in both camps, unfortunately.
Worry not! This comparison guide carries out a comparison of Help Scout vs Zendesk, covering their strong and weak points.
Read on to get a crystal-clear picture.
Help Scout is a popular cloud-enabled customer support software that helps organizations better manage their customer relationships. What makes it a strong competitor in the industry is the ease it offers with its centralized dashboard that enhances team collaboration.
Help Scout enables you to monitor customer engagements right from the moment your agent takes up a customer query/complaint to the moment they resolve it. As such, your customer service staff stays on the same page while helping your customers.
When you sign up for Help Scout, you get access to several robust customer support tools.
You can offer real-time assistance to your customers by installing Help Scout’s Beacon on your website. The embeddable widget recommends content from your knowledge base based on customer queries/complaints. Even if the query remains unresolved, people can start a live chat with your support agents in the same place they were reading the content.
Help Scout provides multiple categories of reports – email, chat, phone, customer satisfaction, and service. These reports are customizable based on pre-decided filters such as tag, folder, and mailbox. Moreover, you can view and edit these reports in real time.
Setting up automated responses to customer requests is a way to inform your customers that you have got their inquiry. Auto-replies often include information such as your team’s working hours, turnaround time, or links to additional sources that might help a customer.
This Help Scout feature lets your support agents exchange private messages before responding to customer requests. That way, you do not have to forward emails and ensure response accuracy. Plus, there is no fear of any internal communication accidentally sliding into customers’ inboxes.
Use tags in Help Scout to filter customer-facing conversations based on the type of query or its urgency. Knowing the category a query belongs to will help your support agents send tailored and accurate responses to those customer requests.
Help Scout works well for a fairly small customer support team serving a decent-sized client base. Plus, the customer service software fits well if you run a business in the education, manufacturing, e-commerce, and real estate industries.
Built to meet customers’ needs, Zendesk empowers your support agents to serve customers across multiple channels – from live chat to email to the knowledge base – under a single roof. It is highly sought-after among big brands that leverage this customer service platform for its AI-driven tools and advanced features.
Zendesk aims to be an integrated agent workspace by letting you deliver a faster, hyper-personalized experience to all customers. It offers all the critical features your support team needs to strengthen customer relationships, some of which are discussed below.
You can organize customer conversations using custom views, which categorize them into lists based on certain criteria like status, agent, and group. Accordingly, your support staff can prioritize conversations with high urgency.
Zendesk’s AI-based automation featuresstreamline repetitive support operations like notifying agents of a new request, closing inactive tickets, and gathering customer details. With a notable drop in recurring tasks, your support staff can solve customers’ issues in minimal time.
The built-in service-level agreement (SLA) lets you define benchmarks that everybody agrees with for offering support to your customers. Setting SLA targets helps you monitor customer support efficiency and meet service-level goals.
Zendesk Talk is a cloud-based phone system built into Zendesk customer support software. The integrated tool lets your support agents address customer queries via phone calls (online or phone) within the same interface.
The ticketing system centralizes all the inbound customer requests across multiple channels into a simple Zendesk shared inbox for your support agents to act upon. Moreover, your agents can route, share, and escalate queries/complaints based on region/language, communication channels, or the nature of requests. As such, there are minimal odds of lost customer conversations or request overload.
Mid-sized and large organizations catering to a massive customer base can go for the Zendesk tool. These companies primarily work in the gaming, financial services, education, and healthcare industries.
But if you want to dig deeper for well-informed decision-making, scroll down to learn more.
Help Scout
Help Scout provides a straightforward, email-like UI that will not take much time to get used to. As soon as your support agents register on the platform, they can easily toggle between chat and email conversations with a single click. Also, they can see new tickets added to the queue in real-time with just a simple scan.
Anyone brand-new to using Help Scout or customer support in general can kick-start immediately without much (if any) training.
Even though Help Scout is easy to use, its limited customization options irk users. One of the verified users complained that “Limits are set pretty quickly when trying to personalize reports or be proactive with clients.”
Zendesk
Zendesk’s interface is also exceptional, particularly when it comes to ticket handling. The automated ticketing system lets you effortlessly monitor, prioritize, and address customer requests.
Besides, the collaborative tools allow for “side conversations.” Your support agents can work across teams and fix customers’ issues without leaving support tickets.
While Zendesk is a powerful customer service software, but with that power comes added complexity. Configuring the platform can get overwhelming, “particularly when customizing the platform to suit their unique requirements” according to one of the users.
Moreover, a steep learning curve awaits you when you sign up for the software.
Help Scout
Help Scout enables you to serve your customers via live chat, email, and in-app messaging – free for up to 2000 unique viewers. However, it does not offer the phone support feature, which can be a turnoff for some organizations.
While Help Scout does provide in-built integration with Facebook Messenger, you need to bring in a third-party tool like Sunshine Conversations for other channels such as SMS or WhatsApp.
Zendesk
Apart from what Help Scout provides, Zendesk has in-built connections with Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp to let your support agents manage both private messages and public posts. With the optional Talk feature, you can add text messages as well.
Help Scout
Help Scout’s support team helps all customers out via live chat or email 24/6. Unlock the premium plan, and you will have a dedicated account manager and quarterly team training.
Nevertheless, Help Scout offers an extensive knowledge base to help your agents get started right away. The knowledge base contains a rich collection of help articles on diverse topics, including Reporting, Account Management, Mobile Apps, and Integrations.
Further, you can register for live training and demos or access comprehensive walkthroughs, jumpstart videos, and best practice deep-dives for free.
Zendesk
Zendesk beats Help Scout when it comes to supporting its users. You can contact a Zendesk agent directly from its website to clear price- or product-related queries.
Unlike Help Scout, Zendesk houses a huge collection of FAQs that cover nearly every topic you can imagine.
Plus, Zendesk has an online community forum where like-minded people interact with each other, shoot queries, answer questions, and keep up with the latest updates or features.
Help Scout
Within Help Scout, you will find most of the must-have categories of integrations – CRM, analytics, communication, and marketing. These include Slack, Aircall, Salesforce, and the oft-necessary Zapier. However, you might not find the exact names you are hoping for.
Further, Help Scout has an API to build your own custom integration if necessary.
Zendesk
The Zendesk tool offers integrations with thousands of business apps to extend their functionality. Businesses often build direct integrations, which shows in Zendesk’s marketplace.
Admins install the integrations, which vary in complexity based on the tool and the plan you have chosen.
Help Scout
Help Scout offers three different packages for customer support teams:
Help Scout’s pricing structure is transparent, and you can save 20% on the plans (except the Pro package) if you renew them once a year.
The Standard subscription provides the features that serve most small business needs like automated workflows, two mailboxes, a Beacon help widget, and a limit of 25 seats. But as you grow, you will need features like light users, advanced permissions, custom fields, and CRM integrations. At that point, you are on the Plus plan.
Further, if you have a big support staff managing multiple products, you can choose the Pro subscription and enjoy unlimited docs sites, unlimited mailboxes, a dedicated account manager, and enterprise-level security.
Zendesk
You can choose from Zendesk’s following plans for your support operations:
Zendesk offers a 20% discount for users renewing their subscriptions annually.
All Zendesk packages include essential features: automatic ticket creation, call recording, unified agent workspace, customized responses (macros), and integration with third-party business tools.
As your brand grows or is already a large organization, you will likely want the Suite Enterprise package, which offers audit logs, AI-powered content cues, and contextual workspaces.
While the plans are feature-rich, the high price tag can be a deal-breaker for small- and mid-sized businesses.
Now, here’s how you can decide.
Both Help Scout and Zendesk are a hit in specific aspects and miss out on others. So, make the final call based on your budget, team size, and business goals.
Help Scout is a winning platform if you:
Zendesk suits well if you:
How about having a one-stop customer service software boasting features that suits businesses, and their budgets, at every stage? You can have it all with Helpwise.
In a nutshell, this is the comparison of Help Scout vs Zendesk and how they fare against each other:
| Help Scout | Zendesk | |
| Features | Live chat Reporting Auto-reply Notes Tags | Customer views Automation Zendesk Talk SLA management Ticketing |
| Pricing | Paid plans starting at US$25/user/month | Paid plans starting at US$59/user/month |
| Ease of use | Minimal learning curve; limited customization options | Complex UI due to an overdose of features |
| Integrations | With most popular tools, available only in the upper-tier plans | With most popular tools; available in the basic plan itself |
| Customer support | 24/6 live chat and email support; dedicated account manager and quarterly team training on higher-end plans | 24/7 digital support; dedicated account manager and SLAs in higher-end plans |
| Customer reviews | 4.4/5 on G2 | 4.3/5 on G2 |
Being a platform for strengthening customer relations, Helpwise offers the power you need to scale your support to new heights: a well-oiled knowledge base, powerful analytics & reporting, unlimited automation rules, and custom integrations.
Perhaps this is your lucky strike? Let’s compare Helpwise with Help Scout and Zendesk in key areas.
Help Scout does not let you set up reminders for customer-facing conversations you might want to follow up on later. As such, you can miss conversations, leaving customers frustrated. Contrarily, with Helpwise, you can easily create reminders using Snooze for conversations you want to manage in the future.
Zendesk is a considerably hard-to-use tool with tons of different features in the first place. For time-crunched teams, it ends up being a complication. Thanks to its intuitive interface and refined feature stack, the learning curve for using Helpwise is minimal. You will be up and running in just 5 minutes and be a power user by the first week itself.
While Help Scout is available 24/6 to serve during and after-sales support, Zendesk does the same 24/7. However, the latter offers this feature as an add-on.
Fortunately, Helpwise’s support agents are up to tackle your issues/queries 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You do not need to pay extra for that.
While Help Scout’s subscriptions fit well into your budget, you could miss out on some critical features and integrations. Similarly, Zendesk’s feature-heavy plans and robustness can spoil the party for businesses with limited resources..
That is why most organizations turn to Helpwise for its ease of use and setup and reasonably priced packages. They start at US$15/agent/month on the basic Standard plan all the way up to US$50/agent/month on the higher-end Advanced plan. Besides, you can request a customized quotation for the Enterprise plan.
Helpwise is a trusted customer support software for 5000+ users across continents. See how happier they are while using our platform:
Wish to try out the platform and see for yourself? Sign up for free 14-day trial here.
Help Scout has cheaper plans but offers limited advanced features. Zendesk is pricey but well-serve users with feature-packed plans.
Help Scout’s interface is easy to use: you do not need much training to get started. On the contrary, you need to undergo training to get a complete hang of the Zendesk tool. Plus, the interface is not overly complicated but is not immediately intuitive.
Help Scout is ideal for start-ups and small businesses serving a decent-sized customer base. Zendesk goes along well with mid-size and large firms having customers spanning globally.
While both Zendesk and Help Scout let users tailor the dashboard, the former offers more extensive customization options.
With its basic plan starting at US$25/user/month, Help Scout is a better choice for budget-constraint small businesses than Zendesk, which offers its basic plan at US$59/user/month.
While customers have lauded Help Scout for its user-friendly interface and affordable plans, some complained about its limited customization and channel support.
On the other hand, Zendesk has gained positive customer reviews for its exceptional ticket management and collaborative tools. But the platform’s steep learning curve and complex dashboard have annoyed some users. Not to mention Zendesk’s pricey subscriptions.
Help Scout offers integrations with over 50 business applications. However, you may not find the exact one you are looking for. Zendesk has an entire ecosystem of tools to integrate with other apps. So, whatever native tool you use, Zendesk will most probably blend with it.
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