Zendesk and Gladly — Comparing CX Platforms

With more customer service platforms to choose from now than ever before, navigating the crowded market can be a challenging task. Zendesk and Gladly are two of the more popular options companies opt to use, with each offering its own take on how to best help brands manage their customer-facing operations.

But how do the two platforms compare regarding features, pricing, and scalability? Which one is better for your brand? We’ve got the answers right here.

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Zendesk and Gladly — An Introduction

What is Zendesk used for?

Zendesk is a multichannel customer support platform that aims to work as well for complex organizations and large-scale enterprises as it does for emerging small retailers. Not only does it offer ticket-based customer service solutions, such as messaging tools and help centers, but it also dabbles in the sales space by providing brands with CRMs.

What is Gladly used for?

Gladly, on the other hand, takes a more focused approach, helping business-to-consumer (B2C) brands level up their customer service operations by treating them like people, not tickets. With Gladly, all channels, from voice to messaging to self-service, are natively built-in, giving service heroes a centralized place to communicate and respond to customer requests in a single view.

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Zendesk and Gladly — Features

Zendesk and Gladly both offer powerful workflows, automations, and integrations that you’d expect from any leading customer service platform, including knowledge bases, reporting and analytics, and automated responses. However, they have different strengths when it comes to the features and the value customers can access from base plans.

According to Info-Tech research, Gladly was rated higher than Zendesk, Kustomer, and Salesforce in the Reliability category.

Zendesk Features

While Zendesk and Gladly both provide brands with automated live chat, Zendesk limits the number of answers you can set, unless you purchase their top-tier Suite Enterprise package.

Similarly, voice support requires additional add-ons for Zendesk users, while this is freely available to all Gladly customers, showing that Gladly values all businesses, regardless of size.

Gladly Features

Additionally, it’s crucial to remember that having a customer service platform built around tickets doesn’t translate to good customer service.

While systems like Zendesk are built around tickets, Gladly is built around customers. When a customer reaches out, support heroes see key customer details that help them deliver a radically personal experience, like their name and order details, with conversation history across all channels with a modern UI that customer service heroes love.

“It’s amazing to be able to quickly scroll up and see what I said previously to a customer. It allows me to understand the customer’s history with our brand.”

Alexa Adler

Head of Customer Experience, Jupiter Haircare

Zendesk and Gladly — Ease of Use

One of the most important considerations when choosing the right customer support platform is how quickly your team will be able to acclimate to using the provided tools. While Zendesk and Gladly both offer robust features, they aren’t equal when it comes to ease of use.

Zendesk UI

Zendesk’s UI separates channels by tab, with additional channels added as you purchase more services. While this may seem like a helpful way to differentiate by channel, it leads to an overall cluttered UI experience that requires agents to have multiple tabs open per ticket in order to fully understand a customer and their history.

According to Info-Tech research, Gladly was rated higher than Zendesk, Kustomer, and Salesforce in the Ease of Implementation category.

Gladly UI

Meanwhile, Gladly’s UI uses a modern messaging interface to provide a simple but effective view of customer conversations for agents to communicate with ease. This helps team members focus on essential customer tasks while still having all the necessary tools at the ready. With this seamless UI, brands can onboard agents with Gladly in a matter of hours, not days or weeks.

This ease of use provides better service for customers, but it also empowers agents. With access to a user-friendly interface, agent efficiency increases by 20% to 30% and leads to higher agent retention. For this very reason, Gladly has been ranked as the No. 1 easiest-to-use customer service software based on customer reviews.

According to Info-Tech Research, Gladly was rated higher than Zendesk, Kustomer, and Salesforce in the Security Protects category.

Zendesk and Gladly — Which One’s Right for You?

Who should use Zendesk?

If you’re looking to manage your customer service better, Zendesk and Gladly are solid options. However, it’s clear that to reap the vast benefits of Zendesk’s complex offerings, you’ll need the requisite resources, including a large budget and a full onboarding and implementation team. If you don’t have this infrastructure or expertise, expect a steep learning curve, as Zendesk products come with limited training, resources, and accessible customer service for new users.

[Read more: Change Management for Transitioning Support Platforms]

Who should use Gladly?

On the other hand, Gladly’s intuitive platform and simplistic design make it easier for support agents to turn customer frustrations into new opportunities. That’s why switching from Zendesk to Gladly can increase agent efficiency by up to 40%. Not only is Gladly rated the No. 1 easiest-to-use help desk software, but if you run into any hiccups, Gladly’s support team is there to provide industry-leading Customer Success, Service, and Support.

So, if your business prioritizes maintaining customer loyalty, empowering support agents with the best tools, streamlining processes, and keeping costs low, Gladly is the perfect partner.

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