| Functionality | 2 <p>Channeled's Slack-centricity means that it's overall feature set as a dedicated customer support tool is relatively lacking. To be more specific, Channeled is best suited to businesses who primarily manage their customer interactions via Slack and not via other channels such as SMS, live chat or email. That being said, when it comes to managing Slack threads, it provides a robust and complete feature set including shortcuts that can be triggered by emoji reactions within Slack, and analytics/sentiment analysis over Slack threads.</p> | 7 <p>LiveAgent is a fairly well rounded product. It offers support for almost all channels you can think of including live chat, most social media platforms and even call centre support. Additionally, it provides the ability to create basic help centres. The area where it falls short is chatbots - both rule based and AI - where it currently offers no native solution.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 9 <p>As a result of it's focus on Slack, Channeled has a shallow learning curve. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">An average SMB employee would require less than 30 minutes and no guidance to master the product. </span>It's onboarding process is simple, short and easy to understand and makes full use of Slacks native integrations. Additionally, it's web app is simple, intuitive and easy to navigate.</p> | 3 <p>Given the breadth of functionality, LiveAgent can be unintuitive to use at times. Many core features were buried away deep in settings or hidden by poor UX. Additionally, many elements of the web app lacked tooltips and had truncated text components making it additionally difficult to figure our what button does what. It would take an average SMB employee over a day to master its use.</p> |
| Look and feel | 8 <p>Channeled's web app is simple, modern and easy to navigate. Additionally, it's design aesthetic is minimalist making it easy to work with and fast to load.</p> | 2 <p>LiveAgent feels dated. Its live chat template customisation offerings feel like they're from two decades ago and its internal facing web app isn't well designed either. M<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">any elements of the web app lacked tooltips where one might expect them and had truncated text components making the app feel rough around the edges. </span></p> |
| Customisability | 3 <p>Channeled does provide some elements of customisability such as the ability to create custom tags which businesses can assign to conversation threads, or the ability to create custom shortcuts which can be triggered by emoji reactions directly from Slack. However, there are limited routes for further customisability such as the inability to manipulate analytics dashboards or save custom views.</p> | 7 <p>LiveAgent offers a number of channels for customization. It's external facing components offer a deep range of options for branding, colour and styling. Meanwhile its internal facing features also offer a lot of room for tweaking. For example, it's very easy to configure custom filtered views for your inbox, or set up deeply flexible rules that can be triggered from almost anything.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 8 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Channeled offers a simple self-serve free trial for their platform. We found the initial setup to be simple, taking <5 mins. Setting up your first channels are particularly easy too - given Channeled's focus on Slack. It takes only a few clicks to connect and configure.</span></p> | 3 <p>LiveAgent offers a self-serve free trial for their platform. We found the initial setup to be slightly longer than necessary, taking around 10 minutes. Setting up your first channels may take some time though - with no easy connection option, you’ll have to setup email forwarding manually. When it comes to richer customisation options - the platform is fairly standard when compared to competitors with simple scripts to add live widgets to your website and relatively basic (albeit dated) appearance customisation options. </p> |
| Customer Support | 3 <p>Channeled customer support options for most of it's pricing tiers remains minimal. Channeled provides a contact email address for support requirements as well as a documentation website which offers explanations and walkthroughs of its core features; however, the latter is still largely unfinished at the time of writing.</p> | 6 <p>LiveAgent offers support via a live chat widget inside its web app. We found it quick and easy to contact a real agent (<3 mins), and when tested, we find them to be helpful and direct, often resolving technical questions in one response.</p><p>Though LiveAgent also provides a help centre, we found this very confusing to use and overwhelming at times. Thankfully, support agents rarely linked to articles and instead opted to answer questions directly.</p> |
| Integratability | 7 <p>Channeled provides a number of integrations with popular CRMs (Salesforce, Hubspot), helpdesks (Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk), project management tools (Linear, Asana etc.) and automation platforms like Zapier. Additionally, it offers an API through which users can interact with data directly, though this is a relatively new feature that Channeled is continuing to build upon.</p> | 7 <p>LiveAgent offered a strong array of integrations. It covered all the basics from popular CRM systems (Salesforce, Hubspot) to project management platforms (Jira) to automation platforms (Zapier). We were also pleased to see that they offer an API too.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 7 <p>Businsses can export data themselves via the web app as well as through Channeled's dedicated API.</p> | 7 <p>LiveAgent offers self-serve export functionality for both customer data and anlytics data within its web app. On top of this, they also offer an API - however, the documentation leaves a lot to be desired in terms of clarity.</p> |
