| Functionality | 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> | 9 <p>Zoho Desk offers very rich support functionality. It supports most channels, and the creation of help centres and community forums. It also has pretty advanced automation, AI and reporting functionality.</p><p>However, Zoho Desk doesn't support native SMS as a support channel, and has limited chat functionality compared to competitors.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 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> | 2 <p>Zoho is bogged down by complex, unique terms like "guided conversations" and "static card block." Key workflows like replying to tickets take more clicks than average. Settings are scattered over the pages. There's an almost overwhelming amount of features (e.g. 13 tabs in total in a single open ticket view). So while powerful, Zoho's complexity can slow you down significantly.</p> |
| Look and feel | 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> | 2 <p>Zoho Desk feels dated and cluttered, both internally and externally. Page load times are often slow. We haven't found a default Help Center theme that we'd feel confident sharing with customers</p> |
| Customisability | 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> | 8 <p>Zoho Desk offers extensive customization for both internal and external pages. Externally, you can fully customize the style and layout of your Help Centre (which supports over 50 languages), as well as the Live Chat widget, with the flexibility to incorporate custom code.</p><p>Internally, you have the ability to create custom data objects and personalize the layout and display of information in your agent workspace, which dynamically updates based on ticket content.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 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> | 4 <p>Despite offering a self-serve free trial, we get the impression that Zoho is not optimised for a smooth self-serve onboarding process. Initial setup was confusing and clunky, taking over 15 minutes. Connecting your first channels is an obscure process. For example, there is no one-click email connection process and instead you'll need to set up email forward manually. Additionally, Zoho's unintuitive UX means deeper customization is also a frustrating process that can take several days.</p> |
| Customer Support | 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> | 6 <p>While Zoho offers 24/7 support live chat in-app, the response can be inconsistent in terms of helpfulness. The help centre is of relatively low quality, with many articles receiving mixed feedback from users.</p> |
| Integratability | 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> | 8 <p>Zoho Desk offers hundreds of pre-built integrations with common third-party tools that SMBs use, including CRMs, email marketing tools, and project management systems. It also has an extensive marketplace for additional integrations and an API for custom integrations.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 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> | 6 <p>Zoho Desk allows for self-serve export of key data, however, to export email threads, you'll need to request it by emailing support.</p> |
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