| Functionality | 7 <p>At it's core, Glassix offers a fairly strong omni-channel support product. It covers all the basic channels from email to social media (only modern B2B software teams who use Slack might feel left out). Additionally, it offers up a fairly comprehensive rules based chatbot builder and even the functionality to configure an AI chatbot. However, we were disappointed to see the lack of any kind of help centre functionality (either creating one for its own sake or to feed in as context for the AI chatbot).</p> | 6 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">HelpCrunch is more of a customer engagement platform than a focused support tool. It places emphasis on features like proactive messaging via its chat widget and sending email outbound blasts to engage customers. When it comes to its core support functionality like live chat and building help centres, HelpCrunch is nothing special. We were sad to see a lack of any kind of AI chatbot and a limited array of integrations though.</span></p> |
| Ease of Use | 2 <p>We found Glassix to be very unintuitive to use. Its web app is poorly laid out, with many components and lines of text being chopped off arbitrarily - making some parts near unusable at times if it weren't for tooltips. This is a shame as its onboarding process was simple and clear. On average it would take an SMB employee a couple days to master its use.</p> | 5 <p>Whilst we found HelpCrunch's interface to feel somewhat dated, overall, the product is fairly simple to use. Its inbox experience is familiar and intuitive, similar to the feel of an email inbox. On average, it would take an SMB employee a few hours to master its use.</p> |
| Look and feel | 2 <p>When tested, we find Glassix to be dated, clunky and unintuitive. All too often, we came across arbtrarily truncated lines of text and core components. It's customer facing live chat widget feels years behind many modern competitors (even Glassix's own in app support widget had logos which didn't fit and white borders where colour fills were not applied correctly).</p><p>Similarly, its internal facing analytics dashboard, though comprehensive, is extremely overwhelming and painful on the eyes.</p> | 4 <p>HelpCrunch's design aesthetic feels dated. It lacks the simpler, more modern look that many of its competitors have today - both on the internal facing web app and external facing widgets/knowledge bases. When tested, we also noticed a slight lag to certain pages in terms of load times, often taking a few seconds.</p> |
| Customisability | 7 <p>Glassix offers a deep set of customization options. When it comes to its customer facing live chat widget, you're able to customize everything from the basics (colour and logos) to deeper design elements (fonts and sounds).</p><p>Additionally, we appreciate the ability to create custom analytics reports which highlight the metrics you care about most on a timely basis.</p><p>When tested, Glassix's chatbot builder also offered a reasonable amount of depth and facets for creating an experience that feels unique to your business.</p> | 7 <p>HelpCrunch offers a number of channels to customize your experience with the product. On the internal facing pieces of the product we especially appreciated the ability to customise how customer cards look in the inbox, as well as the ease to which you can create custom inbox views. However, the options for customizing the look and feel of widgets/knowledge bases were somewhat more limited.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 3 <p>Though Glassix does offer a self-serve free trial through their website, it's clear that the platform is not optimized for this. We found their onboarding process to be clunky and confusing (taking >15 mins to complete and integrate initial channels). Additionally, when it comes to long term customization, their odd integrations system wherein enterprise customers <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">can access some integrations built by external partners means that a full setup can take over a week.</span></p> | 4 <p>HelpCrunch offers a simple 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 one-click email connect 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 appearance customisation options. </p> |
| Customer Support | 1 <p>Glassix offers customer support via a live chat widget within its web app. When tested, we found it difficult to get in touch with a real agent, occasionally taking over an hour to get a response. However, even once connected, we found agents to be particularly unhelpful - more focused on upselling than answering questions and often communicating poorly and even cutting off conversations when they didn't have an answer.</p><p>Additionally, Glassix's provided help centre is extremely complex (mixing developer documentation with agent guides is not user friendly). It also failed to answer most questions we had and was filled with bugs/typos itself.</p> | 8 <p>HelpCentre offers support primarily via a live chat widget inside its web app. When tested, we find it easy to get hold of a live agent - in generally less than 5 minutes. Once contacted, we found them to be knowledgeable and helpful, often able to answer complex queries in a single response.</p> |
| Integratability | 2 <p>Whilst we were pleased to see that Glassix offers an API, we were disappointed to see that it offers very little in terms of Glassix built integrations. Beyond its standard omni-channel offering, Glassix does not provide integrations with any standard sources of context you might expect such as CRMs or e-commerce/payments platforms. Instead they offer a bizarre system where customers on their enterprise tier can access some integrations built by external partners. Additionally, the lack of integration with an automation platform like Zapier makes it difficult for non-technical individuals to build out custom automations themselves.</p> | 2 <p>We were disappointed by HelpCrunch's limited array of integrations. Core integrations such as with CRMs (Salesforce, Hubspot), e-commerce platforms (Shopify) or ticketing platforms (Jira) are all marked as 'coming soon' but remain omitted entirely for the time being.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 3 <p>Glassix does offer the ability to export some data to excel self-serve, however it's limited to certain report types and doesn't cover the full range of data stored in the platform. That being said, you are able to export data via webhook and API too.</p> | 6 <p>HelpCrunch offers self-serve export functionality for contact lists and transcripts within its web app. We were also pleased to note that they an offer an API which users can interact with too.</p> |
