Functionality | 7 <p>As a product tailored to e-commerce brands, Gorgias offers a fairly robust range of features. It offer support for all the channels you'd expect including email, live chat, phone, text and socials. Additionally, you'll also find a decent help centre offering and AI agent functionality provided natively too. Though Gorgias does not excel in any one particular area, we did find each feature to be relatively well executed.</p> | 3 <p>Ada’s positioning as an AI agent for customer support does mean that its overall feature set as a stand-alone customer support platform is lacking. Though Ada’s AI agent acts as a strong and easy to configure first line of defence, you’ll still need to manage handoffs to real agents elsewhere (which often means paying separately for other helpdesk platforms such as Zendesk). Additionally, you’ll find other common features, such as the ability to build your own help centre/knowledge base, missing in Ada. It’s something which you’re expected to build elsewhere, and provide as a source of training material into Ada. </p> | 8 <p>Founded in 2015, it’s not surprising that Crisp offers a mature, well-rounded and complete feature set as a customer support tool. We found all the basics features to be present such as a strong live chat offering, a deeply customisable help centre and very complete omni-channel support. We also appreciated some less common, but nevertheless powerful touches such as the ability to ‘co-browse’ with a customer via live chat to enable an agent to troubleshoot customer issues right on their screen.</p> | 9 <p>Intercom provides most of the essential support functionality needed by SMBs, covering a wide range of communication channels (excluding Twitter, Slack, and Discord) and offering industry-leading live chat capabilities. It also includes advanced AI, automation, and reporting features. However, some features that larger teams may find valuable, such as approval workflows, community forum management, and advanced telephony capabilities (e.g., group routing and overflow handling), are not currently supported.</p> | 10 <p>Zendesk packs all the essential support tools most SMBs—and even enterprises—could ask for. It stands out with the most comprehensive range of support channels in our curation, making it easy to manage seamless cross-channel communication with customers within a single ticket. Plus, its advanced automation, AI capabilities, and robust reporting features are hard to beat.</p><p>In our experience, Zendesk tends to be the go-to platform for companies looking to level up their customer support as they grow.</p> |
Ease of Use | 5 <p>Though individual screens were generally well presented, we did find the sheer breadth of features slightly overwhelming at times. Gorgias' sidebar navigation system is non-standard which initially made it hard to navigate between core features swiftly (like between inboxes and analytics pages).</p> | 3 <p>Given its AI-centric focus, we found Ada to be relatively easy to use on initial set up. It would take an average SMB employee a few hours to be complete the initial configuration and create a functional AI chatbot. However, when progressing to more advanced features, such as setting up processes for an AI agent to execute, we found Ada to be filled with unclear terminology and often confusing UI. Whilst this may be a byproduct of the relative novelty of configuring AI chatbots, we find Ada unintuitive to use if you’re looking to get the most out of the platform.</p> | 6 <p>Due to its rich functionality and customisability, we found Crisp to have a moderate learning curve but is generally straight-forward and intuitive to use. An average SMB employee can become proficient with the platform after 1-2 days and some guidance. The interface is simple, making daily use straightforward for most team members. </p> | 7 <p>Due to its rich functionality and customisability, Intercom has a moderate learning curve but is generally user-friendly. An average SMB employee can become proficient with the platform after 1-2 days and some guidance.</p><p>The interface is intuitive, making daily use straightforward for most team members. </p> | 2 <p>Zendesk has one of the steepest learning curves we’ve seen. The interface can feel overwhelming, with settings spread out across different areas like Zendesk Chat and the Admin Center. If you don’t have an admin with prior experience configuring and managing Zendesk, getting up to speed can quickly become frustrating.</p> |
Look and feel | 6 <p>Overall, we found Gorgias to be relatively well designed and intuitive to use. Most interfaces were modern and fast to load (load times < 2 seconds). However, some interfaces did lack refinement or were hidden away in settings - for example, creating chatbots with the same interface used to generate other rules/workflows in the product presented some challenges - a simple drag and drop interface would have been preferable here.</p> | 5 <p>We find Ada’s high-level navigation to be modern and easy to use. However, chatbot configuration interfaces were often confusing and unclear with a less modern, dated feel to them. Additionally, whilst the web app was generally fast, some pages take 2-3 seconds to load.</p> | 5 <p>Though we found its web app and live chat offerings to be fast, responsive and easy to use - Crisp’s web app and customer facing widgets/help centres felt a little bit dated from a design perspective. If you’re looking for a more modern design aesthetic, both from an agent and customer facing perspective, you’re better off looking elsewhere.</p> | 7 <p>We find Intercom's interface modern, sleek, with just the right touch of colour. However, page load times can be a bit slow, sometimes taking 2-3 seconds.</p> | 4 <p>From both an agent and admin perspective, Zendesk’s interface feels plain, and some pages can come across as cluttered and overwhelming. But on the bright side, page load times are quick.</p> |
Customisability | 6 <p>At present, Gorgias offers a fairly standard set of customization options for both internal and external interfaces. For its live chat widget and help centre, you can customize the usual elements including logos, colours and titles. For internal facing screens we appreciated the ease of saving custom views or adding custom tags to tickets to suit your specific business needs.</p> | 7 <p>At present, Ada’s primary customer facing feature is its AI chatbot. Within which you can configure basic elements such as logos, buttons and colours. However, there are additional layers of customisation available in terms of the tone, greetings and responses of the chatbot itself. These are deeply customisable and offer businesses a way to set their chatbots apart from the typical responses you’d expect from first time interactions with non-AI chatbots from competitor platforms.</p> | 7 <p>Crisp offers a huge amount of options when it comes to customisability of just about everything - help centres, live chat widgets and analytics dashboards. Almost every element of customer facing widgets and sites can be customised - including the basics you’d expect such as logos, colours and header/welcome messages. It’s internally facing features are also fairly customisable - for example, you can create custom analytics dashboards to help you find the metrics you care about most more easily on the fly. </p> | 9 <p>Intercom is one of the most customisable Customer Support we've come across. User-facing elements (e.g. live chat, help centre) allow for deep customisation in appearance and layout.</p><p>Intercom also allows you to create custom data objects and track custom events about your customers to create highly personalised proactive messages and workflows.</p> | 10 <p>Zendesk offers a high level of customization for both internal and external pages. Externally, you can deeply customize the style and layout of your Help Center (supporting over 40 languages), even using custom code to make it uniquely yours. Internally, the agent workspace is also highly flexible—you can tailor the layout and how information is displayed, with dynamic updates based on the content of each ticket.</p> |
Ease of Setup | 7 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Gorgias offers a simple self-serve free trial for their platform. We found the initial setup to be simple, taking less than 30 minutes. Setting up your first channels is also a simple process - for example connecting your email can be done with just a couple clicks instead of needing to set up email forwarding manually. However, some features do require some up-front investment to get the most out of such as their AI agents feature as well as any ticket-routing automations you might want.</span></p> | 4 <p>It's clear that though Ada does provide a self-serve free trial, that the product is designed to be experienced via a demo call. As such, we found the initial setup to be a little confusing, taking around 15 minutes or so. However, given its AI focus, we did appreciate the ease of certain features, for example, adding base knowledge is just a matter of pasting in links and Ada will parse and extract the relevant information.</p><p>To really get the most out of the platform, users will need to spend some time on configuring everything from tone to greetings of the chatbot - as such, full customization can take a week to put together.</p> | 7 <p>Crisp offers a simple self-serve free trial for their platform. We found the initial setup to be very simple, taking less than 10 minutes. Setting up your first channels is also a simple process - live widgets involve pasting a simple script into your website and email integrations can be achieved in just a few clicks. However, when it comes to deeper customization, Crisp's sheer breadth of features means that you can spend a number of days tweaking appearances of widgets and setting up help centres.</p> | 7 <p>Intercom offers a simple, self-service free trial for their platform. Initial setup is relatively simple, taking less than 10 minutes to complete. Connecting your initial channels is fairly simple too with simple scripts for live widget integrations and easy email connection options. However, when it comes to deeper customization, there are a number of rabbit holes within which you could spend days e.g. setting up FinAI or customizing help centre appearances. </p> | 3 <p>We found Zendesk's onboarding process to be clunky and a bit overwhelming. Configuring even a basic setup can take over 30 minutes, largely because the interface feels disjointed, with settings scattered in different places. Connecting your first channels can be especially frustrating—for instance, linking external emails requires manual configuration unless you’re using Gmail. And because the platform is so customizable, it’s easy to spend an entire week fine-tuning everything to fully unlock its potential.</p> |
Customer Support | 4 <p>You can contact Gorgias' support agents via a live chat widget in their web app. When tested, you initially have to get through an AI agent which we found to be relatively helpful, however, unable to answer more complex queries. Real agents took an average of an hour to respond and though helpful, often seemed biased to wanting to book demo/sales calls if questions around pricing were asked.</p> | 7 <p>You can get support for Ada in two ways. The first, is via their own AI support agent. In testing we find it helpful for basic queries but ofte overy cautious in its responses and readily opts to hand off to a real agent. The second is via email - when tested, Ada's real agents were quick to reply (< 2 hours), knowledgeable and helpful.</p> | 10 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">We found Crisps's customer support to be best in class. Whilst you can contact the team through a range of channels - the easiest remains via a live chat widget via their app/website. From our testing, we found it incredibly easy to get in touch with a real agent, often in under a minute, who'd be able to help troubleshoot even the most complex of issues.</span></p> | 8 <p>Intercom provides in-app live chat with Fin AI and their support team. We’ve found that while Fin AI delivers helpful responses, and it's possible to connect with a human agent - although this can take up to 6 business hours which can be painfully long in our experience.</p> | 2 <p>Multiple users we’ve spoken to have raised concerns about Zendesk’s customer support. A common frustration is the support team’s tendency to provide unhelpful responses, often redirecting users to irrelevant Help Center articles and requiring far too much back-and-forth. We also found navigating Zendesk’s Help Center to be a challenge—it’s missing the clear visuals and video guidance that other platforms do so well.</p> |
Integratability | 7 <p>For their target customer segment, e-commerce brands, Gorgias offers a very comprehensive integrations store - providing integrations with all the major players like Shopify, BigCommerce etc. Additionally, we appreciated the fact that they also offer a mobile app with which you can handle tickets on the go more easily.</p> | 5 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">When tested, Ada doesn't yet have an extensive set of integrations compared to other CS tools. That being said, the majority of key integrations for larger businesses such as with Salesforce, are present.</span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">We notice that whilst it's older rules based product offering did support a much wider array of integrations, these have yet to be ported over to its AI agent product.</span></p> | 7 <p>Crisp has a deep and rich integrations ecosystem, which includes popular CRMs (HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce), project management tools (JIRA, Trello), and email marketing platforms (Mailchimp). They also provide an API for custom integrations as well as a Zapier integration for even more extensibility.</p> | 10 <p>Intercom boasts a robust integrations ecosystem that includes popular CRMs like HubSpot and Pipedrive, project management tools such as JIRA, and email marketing platforms like Mailchimp. They also offer an API for custom integrations and are continually expanding their integration offerings, with the flexibility to develop new ones upon request.</p> | 9 <p>Zendesk boasts a massive ecosystem of pre-built integrations that cover most of the tools startups rely on. This includes popular CRMs like HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Salesforce, email marketing tools like Mailchimp, and project management platforms like Asana, Jira, and Trello. Beyond that, it offers an extensive marketplace for even more integrations, plus a robust API for building custom connections.</p> |
Ease of Migration | 5 <p>Users can export data on tickets and other analytics via a self-serve option directly within Gorgias' dashboards.</p> | 5 <p>Whilst Ada does not offer a self-serve data export feature, it's data export API is rich and well documented and covers all the core areas of data you'd want and expect to export.</p> | 5 <p>Crisp does offer users the ability to export customer profiles self-serve to a CSV. However this is limited to a maximum of 200,000 profiles. Beyond this, Crisp offers relatively little in terms of data export options. However, it is worth noting that there are plenty of other ways you can interact with data within Crisp via either its API or one of many third-party integrations (e.g. Zapier).</p> | 8 <p>Users can export key data independently through self-serve options, while most other data can be accessed via API or provided upon request. Additionally, Intercom enables seamless data exports to relevant third-party vendors through pre-built integrations.</p> | 8 <p>Zendesk allows you to self-serve export key data with ease. For most other data, exports are available either through the API or by making a request to their support team.</p> |