Compare Freshdesk Vs. Zendesk Vs. Zoho In 2024

Have you ever encountered days when your inbox was flooded with hundreds of unread and unresolved messages? This is common for businesses in the IT industry. If you offer after-hours customer service, you might have had days when you couldn’t understand which customer query should be prioritized.

The saying “A customer is a King” applies to all sizes and types of businesses. Whether they raise a simple question or ask you to resolve a technical matter quickly, each of their concerns should be addressed as soon as possible. That’s what helps businesses achieve customer retention.

A clear user interface, a variety of customer management features, and customization and integration capabilities are some common things to look for in a customer support solution.

Freshdesk, Zoho, and Zendesk are the three names that often pop up when it comes to the most competitive and feature-rich customer relationship management solutions. Each platform shares a few common things.

For instance, each has transparent pricing plans, a robust ticketing system, and a neat and intuitive interface with straightforward navigation.
In this comparison guide, we’ve picked the three highly-regarded CRM providers that have dominated the IT sector for years. Let’s see which one is the best.

Freshdesk aims to deliver a stellar customer support service. The software developer believes that customer dissatisfaction is caused by delayed service and lack of proper support. Its key features include automation, especially in workflow and customer management.

To ensure that your customers leave your doors fully satisfied, Freshworks has developed this powerful, all-inclusive customer relationship management tool for businesses of all sizes.

Like a typical CRM solution, Freshdesk has a ticketing module, reporting and analytics, and multichannel support that enables your clients to contact your support agent through their preferred communication channel.

Its most prominent and widely appreciated feature is its simple user interface. Despite being loaded with a wide variety of features, Freshworks has kept the platform straightforward. Plus, the navigation is a breeze.

Compared to Zendesk and Freshdesk, Zoho Desk is easy to set up. Offering 24/7 support services via phone and email, Freshdesk stands out in the CRM market. It takes a proactive approach to handling customer queries.

Its ticketing module has some advanced features, such as Internal Notes (which allows your agents to discuss different tickets with each other without involving customers), Shared Ticket Ownerships, @Mentions, and Team Huddles.

Key Selling Points

• Remarkable collaboration features
• Easy setup and navigation
• Scalable solution with plans designed for small-scale, mid-sized, and large-scale companies.
• Compatible with third-party integrations
• Gamification that boosts your employees’ motivation and productivity

Supported by Slack, Uber, and other popular names, Zendesk has become one of the market’s leading customer relationship management solutions. The specialty of the product is its ticketing system. It’s neat, easy to understand, and supports multiple communication channels.

Its strength lies in its ticketing interface, which efficiently manages all your customer queries. Irrespective of the communication channel your customer uses to raise their concerns, all queries are organized in a single place.

Zendesk allows businesses to deploy a knowledge base consisting of articles, help guides, FAQs, and community forums, all of which make it possible for your customers to get quick help without contacting your support team.

Of course, it supports live chat, which connects your customers with an available agent. Live chat support is handy for those facing issues that require immediate attention.

Zendesk’s priority is its customer support service. While it does have a few sales and marketing tools, it mainly focuses on offering its users the best-in-class support service.

Key Selling Points

• Excellent customization options
• Multiple integration options
• Robust monitoring and analytics tools
• Bets collaboration features

Like Zendesk and Freshdesk, Zoho is a CRM provider. The company’s prime focus is streamlining workflow and customer management. It’s a scalable and full-featured software.

Zoho is known for its multiple social media channel integration and automated ticket routing, which frees up your agents’ time by reviewing each query and manually assigning it to the available and most qualified agent.

However, its specialty is also one of its major drawbacks. The extensive list of features means a steep learning curve for new users.

Zoho’s customization is its another specialty. The customization options are available for nearly every user, including those who have signed up for the lowest-tier plan.

Zoho has an intelligent AI-powered chatbot called “Zia”. The tool offers excellent analytics and reporting, giving valuable insights into your key business metrics.

For instance, it tells you how many customers opened your email, when is the best time to contact a certain user, who answered your call, and how many customers visited your website.

Zia also connects with your users and helps them find answers to their queries. If a customer has a complex concern, the tool automatically redirects them to the available agent.

Key Selling Points

• Robust Zia dashboard for valuable insights
• Extensive list of features
• Supports multiple social media sites
• Feature-rich ticket management solution

As you can see, each solution has its strengths and weaknesses. Some specialize in offering customizable dashboards for analytics, ticketing, and other modules, while others have a simple user interface and affordable pricing policy.

Let’s get to the comparison.

It supports an efficient ticket management module with excellent automation capabilities. The software offers automated ticket routing, in which tickets are assigned to the most skilled agent and escalated to the supervisor or an IT expert if left unresolved for a long time.

Agents can prioritize tickets based on factors like their complexity and status. The ticketing system also has an internal collaboration feature. It’s designed to help agents communicate within the ticket, share it with their team, discuss the top concerns, and solve them together.

Zoho also logs in all the tickets raised from different communication channels and organizes them into a single dashboard, giving your agents a clear view of all user inquiries.

The centralized ticket management system supports excellent automation features. Like Zendesk, Zoho converts customer inquiries into tickets and assigns them to the available agents based on their qualifications.

Zoho desk has time tracking functionality, which captures an agent’s time on each ticket, the total time it takes for resolution, and the response rate. This ensures efficiency in managing customer queries.

Freshdesk also offers a comprehensive ticketing solution with all the features of Zoho and Zendesk. Its intelligent routing feature creates, categorizes, and assigns tickets automatically, saving your agents time in manual ticket assignment.

Its specialty is the Collision Detection feature. This feature ensures that two agents do not work on the same tickets or make different changes to one ticket, preventing unnecessary work duplication.

There’s also a ticket merging feature, which consolidates tickets featuring the same content and status into a single ticket thread for easier management.

Lastly, it has a round-robin ticket assignment function that ensures equal workload distribution among your team.

Since each CRM solution has an advanced ticketing module and automation capability, there’s no clear winner in the ticket category.

Zohodesk offers a few extra tools, like custom-based SLAs and Blueprints, but each delivers excellent customer service performance.

Zendesk has implemented automation in its ticket routing. Customer queries are automatically converted into tickets and assigned to specialized agents based on their expertise and availability.

It also has Trigger-based automation, which performs certain actions based on the predetermined criteria.

When these criteria are met, an automated action will be triggered. For instance, tickets that are left unresolved for 2-3 days can be automatically escalated to the seniors, or the ticket’s status will be changed once an agent resolves it.

Zoho’s Blueprint feature supports excellent automation and collaboration between teams. The feature collects and records your entire business infrastructure into the CRM, thus handling customer management efficiently.

Like Zendesk, Zoho supports automated ticket routing, escalation, updates, notifications, alerts, and ticket assignments.

The company has deployed Macros, which consist of a predetermined series of actions. It allows your agents to send predefined responses for common customer queries.

Freshdesk offers the same automation functionalities as the other two CRM solutions but with a few add-ons. It supports time-based automation, which triggers a specific action within the predefined timeframe.

For instance, the platform automatically sends a follow-up email to a customer who hasn’t responded or connected with you after your initial message. You can also set a duration for when the unresolved tickets will be assigned to another agent.

Freshdesk also uses AI-powered tools to integrate smart suggestion capabilities into its ticket management module.

It helps agents gather relevant information about tickets, previous interactions with customers, and their contacts. This enables them to respond faster and improve their ticket resolution rate.

Although each CRM solution offers great automation tools, Zoho Desk is a clear winner in this category. Its Blueprint, SLA automation, trigger-based automation, time-based automation, and custom workflow ensure that most mundane and repetitive tasks are streamlined.

Zendesk has integrated AI-powered bots that send automated responses to common customer queries. These bots use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to send a personalized response to your customers.

These bots redirect your customers to the knowledge base, including the relevant articles, FAQs, help guides, and other helpful content.

If you have a complex concern that requires personalized and professional assistance, the chatbots will connect you to a live agent who will offer real-time assistance.

Zoho has advanced AI chatbots that greet and interact with website visitors and offer comprehensive reporting and analytics based on user interaction with your website.

Zia AI is its AI assistant, which gives your team insights into your agent’s performance, ticket management trends, and areas for improvement.

The tool can be integrated into the reporting and analytics, Zoho Desk, and Zoho CRM. This integration allows you to gain valuable insights into your customer behavior on your website, their interaction, ticket response and resolution rate, and other crucial metrics.

Zoho also has SalesIQ Chatbots, which enable your company to launch chatbots that welcome visitors and initiate personalized interactions with them. These chatbots guide your visitors to the self-service portal or connect them to a live agent if needed.

Freshdesk has its own virtual assistant called Freddy AI. Developed by Freshworks, Freddy AI allows your team to initiate a real-time conversation with your customers, answer their questions, and help them navigate your website effortlessly.

Like the above two, Freddy AI answers your customers’ questions and guides them to the relevant articles when needed. The main goal is to free up your agent’s time by allowing your customers to get self-help.

The chatbot can create tickets and route them to the live agent if necessary. Additionally, the chatbot integrates seamlessly with other Freshworks products, including Freshchat and Freshsales, thus providing a unified customer support service experience across all platforms.

Each platform has a powerful chatbot solution that uses Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to generate automated responses to user queries.

These bots can answer questions, help with navigation, provide detailed information about your products, and guide customers throughout their journey on your website. However, Zoho outperforms Zendesk and Freshdesk with its Zia and SalesIQ chatbot.

Zendesk offers four plans, including Suite Team at $55, Suite Growth at $89, and Suite Professional at $115 per month per agent for each plan. You can get a customized plan, i.e., Suite Enterprise Plus. Contact their support team to get a quote for this plan.

Freshdesk has a free plan that offers all the basic functionalities of the tool. Its paid plans start at $15 per month and go up to $69.

Similarly, Zoho has a free plan that supports small-scale businesses with basic CRM requirements. Its paid plans start at $14/user/month, and the Professional plan goes up to $23/user/month.

Freshdesk is your best bet if you want an extensive range of CRM features for free. Its paid plans are also affordable.

When choosing the best CRM software, it’s important to take your business requirements and customers’ preferences into consideration. Each solution has its unique selling points and weaknesses.

While some excel in ticketing management, others offer robust reporting and analytics features. Zoho Desk is your best bet if you want a customer relationship management system that doesn’t exceed your budget yet comes packed with advanced AI capabilities and essential features.