Give customers access to your customer support team by embedding a customized widget onto your website.

• Kustomer comes with a web widget to create powerful personalized chat experiences for your customers with CRM-powered chatbots and quick access to FAQs.
• Zendesk enables you to natively embed Zendesk functionality—Help Center, Chat, or Tickets—into any app, website, or standalone device.

Winner: Zendesk

Customize your chat widget’s design, appearance, and messaging options to provide a personalized chat experience across platforms while also matching the look and tone of your brand.

• With Kustomer, you can style and customize the chat widget experience with new colors and Experience settings.
• Zendesk provides numerous options for customizing the look and feel of the Web Widget. You can take a look at their advanced customization options here. 

Winner: Zendesk

Change the language of your chat widget.

• With Kustomer, you can turn on an additional feature that automatically detects the language used in a conversation. 
• By default, the Zendesk Web Widget embedded in a website displays text in the language of the end user’s browser.

Winner: Both

With an agent workspace, your team can collaborate across multiple channels from a single ticket interface. To view and track customer issues, your agents will no longer have to switch between dashboards.

• Kustomer includes an agent workplace where you can configure agent views to suit your needs. Additionally, your agents can also access metrics to gain insight on their personal performance.
• Zendesk also includes an agent workspace to help your team manage conversations across all web, mobile, and social channels in a single view.

Winner: Kustomer

To manage customer communication at scale, organize customer questions from multiple channels, in a shared inbox that your entire team can access.

• In Kustomer, you can combine customer data from various systems and channels into a single customer-centric workspace.
• Zendesk also comes with a multichannel inbox to help your agents provide a seamlessly integrated support experience.

Winner: Both

The helpdesk includes a system for managing, assigning, and prioritizing customer inquiries. This enables your agents to engage customers through various channels and easily convert queries into tickets.

• Both Kustomer and Zendesk come with this feature. However, Zendesk comes with various streamlined ticketing workflows. 

Winner: Zendesk

You can build customized searches to help you organize everything from customers to companies. 

• Kustomer allows you to find, share, and act on information across platforms from a single location.
• Using Zendesk’s search tool, you can look for information such as ticket properties, user properties, comments, tags, Help Center articles, and so on. Compared to Kustomer, Zendesk comes with advanced search capabilities. 

Winner: Zendesk

• Kustomer allows you to respond to customers directly from the platform using your company’s email support address.
• You can also configure your version of Zendesk Support to provide customized email channel support. Zendesk wins because of their extensive customization features, triggers and automations, and so on.

Winner: Zendesk

Ability to segment by sentiment changes of a specific product, Geo, data range to drive actions for a group of customers.

• Kustomer, unfortunately, does not natively offer this feature. 
• Zendesk allows you to organize customer groups based on behavior (such as purchasing habits) or demographics (like age or location).

Winner: Zendesk

• Both Kustomer and Zendesk integrate SMS and voice channels into your helpdesk to improve the customer relationship experience.

Winner: Both

You can set up custom IVR trees using all of your customer data to deliver support even before connecting with your agent.

• Kustomer, unfortunately, does not natively offer this feature. 
• Zendesk allows you to create multi-level interactive voice response (IVR) or phone trees to route customers to the appropriate agent or department and provide recorded responses to frequently asked questions (FAQs).

Winner:  Zendesk

Your team will have access to a list of currently online users, including information such as their local timezone, geolocation, current URL, and a list of historical activity events.

• Kustomer, unfortunately, does not natively offer this feature. 
• Zendesk comes with software that tracks all interactions with current and potential customers, resulting in increased sales from satisfied customers.

Winner: Zendesk

Integrate the helpdesk directly into your website, as well as a large number of third-party stores and apps.

• Kustomer comes with plenty of built native integrations with various apps and marketplaces.
• With Zendesk, you can select the best apps for your company from over 1,200 available on their Marketplace.

Winner: Zendesk

• Both Kustomer and Zendesk convert the messages received on your Facebook Messenger to tickets. Your agents can easily view and reply to the messages through the dashboard without switching tabs.

Winner: Both

• Both Kustomer and Zendesk allow your agents to easily view and reply to Instagram messages through the dashboard without switching tabs.

Winner: Both

• Both Kustomer and Zendesk offer native WhatsApp integration.

Winner: Both

• Both Kustomer and Zendesk conveniently convert tweets and mentions into tickets. Also, an agent can easily interact with the users through either Twitter or the helpdesk.

Winner: Both

• Both Kustomer and Zendesk allow you to convert your most frequently asked support questions into a knowledge base of help articles, allowing customers to help themselves. 
• Kustomer, however, charges an additional fee based on usage per fully-automated conversation.

Winner: Zendesk

• Both Kustomer and Zendesk come with a portal where customers can view and respond to conversations across email, chat, social messaging and SMS.

Winner: Both

A Community or Forum enables customers to interact and help each other by answering questions and sharing best practices.

• Kustomer, unfortunately, does not natively offer this feature. 
• However, on Zendesk-powered forums, a customer can start a new discussion and request a new feature by commenting on the forum. Also, Zendesk provides admins with moderation features.

Winner: Zendesk

Portal customization is yet another important feature that you should look for, as it helps you come up with logos and custom themes that best match the look and feel of your brand.

• Kustomer’s theme editor allows you to customize the portal’s appearance to match your organization’s personal branding.
• Zendesk’s customer portal provides the option to customize most of the portal right from your brand logo, the portal color, themes, knowledge base, help center, and layout of the article pages.

Winner: Zendesk

The helpdesk allows you to deploy custom chatbots. With conversational assistants, you can collect relevant customer information, increase agent productivity, and streamline the support experience. 

• Kustomer lets you personalize and automate chat interactions for customers with the updated Conversational Assistants feature. However, this has additional charges
• Zendesk allows you to set up an Answer Bot on a variety of support channels such as chat, messaging, email, Slack, and others.

Winner: Zendesk

• Kustomer, unfortunately, does not natively offer this feature. 
• Zendesk lets your team easily add new information with integrated knowledge management and leverage that content themselves to respond to customers faster and more accurately. 

Winner:  Zendesk

• Both Kustomer and Zendesk automatically detect, and route bot conversations based on customer input. With this feature, you can now create automated workflows to handle specific customer intents. 

Winner: Both

A sentiment engine is a collection of natural language processing APIs that analyze text messages sent to the helpdesk by customers via Chat, Email, SMS, and Social Channels.

• Kustomer comes with a default Natural Language Processing (NLP) workflow that automatically detects the sentiment of a message. 
• Zendesk, unfortunately, does not natively offer this feature. 

Winner: Kustomer

The web widget presents relevant knowledge-base articles just when the customers need them.

• Kustomer comes with Self-learning AI models that predict agent responses based on historical conversation data. 
• Zendesk, unfortunately, does not natively offer this feature.

Winner: Kustomer

• Kustomer comes with KIQ for Agents to automate routine workflows. However, it costs an additional $20 per month / per user.
• Zendesk, on the other hand, comes with various comprehensive features to set up custom workflows. 

Winner: Zendesk

• Both Kustomer and Zendesk allow you to create custom reports from scratch. You can begin with a blank template and choose your preferred data, including common metrics.

Winner: Both

These reports give agents the option to analyze their productivity and improve upon it accordingly to provide a better customer experience.

• Zendesk comes with a prebuilt dashboard displaying your Zendesk Chat engagement data. 
• Kustomer, on the other hand, includes a Conversation report that shows you how quickly agents respond to customer inquiries and how much time they spend resolving customer issues.

Winner: Kustomer 

These reports help businesses monitor the status of their support teams.

• Zendesk comes with a Support dashboard with 8 different metrics including: Efficiency, Agent Updates, Unsolved Tickets, etc.
• Kustomer provides an Overview Report with high-level information about your organization, allowing you to see traffic from all teams.

Winner: Kustomer

By analyzing the voice reports, your agents can work on areas where they fall short and provide an overall better customer experience.

• Kustomer comes with a Conversation Report with various metrics. 
• Zendesk offers a dashboard with the following voice metrics: Calls, Efficiency, Agent Activity, Quality, etc.

Winner: Zendesk 

The customer portal reports give you the analytics that help you monitor the views of your knowledge base or guide. It also informs you whether people found your articles useful or not.

• Kustomer does not provide customer portal reports.
• Zendesk, however, offers 2 customer portal reports: Knowledge base, and Search.

Winner: Zendesk

The bot reports help you monitor the performance of the automated bots in your helpdesk. 

• Kustomer comes with an Assistant report helps you understand how your conversational assistant is performing 
• Zendesk offers a dashboard with the following metrics: Suggestion Rate, Click-through Rate, Resolution Rate, Rejection rate, etc.

Winner: Zendesk

• Kustomer does not include pre-built revenue reports
• Zendesk includes a Performance Dashboard with a revenue widget and report that displays total revenue in a given timeframe.

Winner: Zendesk