For a while now I am contemplating about why companies choose one custserv solution over another. After all the market is pretty crowded. Vendors have a hard time to differentiate themselves. Just looking at G2Crowd one finds 88 Help Desk Solutions. Larger organizations are likely to be influenced by Gartner’s Magic Quadrant on Customer Engagement Centers or the Forrester Wave on Customer Service Solutions. Smaller organizations are probably looking more at the new breed of peer-to-peer review sites, like the aforementioned G2Crowd or GetApp, TrustRadius, Capterra and others. Many companies conduct research and establish an RFP process to determine the best fit; some see a bottom-up approach from team level to corporation. A kind of ‘shadow IT’ emerges to solve a team’s particular problem. This solution over time could get corporate blessing and may even become the main solution. A clear and reliable roadmap is mandatory for all vendors, so no difference here. Same for share of mind – this has become table stakes. But what is it that makes one vendor win over another? Are there patterns? To get more insight I asked some smart people who stay unnamed here – but you know who you are!

So What Are Contributing Factors?

The good news is that there seem to be only a few factors. Based on the discussions I can roughly group them into six categories. Here they are, in no particular order:

• A particular feature is needed or desired
• Suite- vs. Best-of-Breed thinking
• Size of the customer organization
• Relationship building
• Referrals
• Departmental adoption

Of course they are not mutually exclusive. Let me briefly dive into each of them.

Need of a Particular Feature

This is something that helps nimble specialty vendors that either already offer a very particular feature, e.g. support for mobile applications, a Google-like search through an FAQ, an FAQ that is available offline, or the philosophy of treating service requests as a conversation instead of coming from a ticket point of view. The former emphasizes on the customer, the latter on the service provider. With the probable exception of the philosophy approach this contributing factor does not provide a vendor with a lasting advantage; successful features can – and will – be copied in a short time.

Suite vs. Best-of-Breed

Helpdesk software should not be a silo of its own but be integrated into the other business systems. As one of my contacts said “there is some convergence”. However, integration is a very complex topic. Some vendors are therefore offering tightly integrated software, usually on cost of some breadth or depth of functionality and are successfully selling this as an advantage. Customers that go the suite way are usually more interested in a holistic approach than a complete fit to all needs. On the other hand Best-of-Breed vendors are focusing on providing the best solution while maintaining a small footprint and while increasingly offering integration via platforms. This is usually achieved by having prebuilt integrations and partnerships with platform vendors and therefore by joining (or creating) an ecosystem of vendors. Still, customers opting for Best-of-Breed often look more into a strong functional fit to their requirements.

Size of the Customer Organization

As one of the persons I talked to said, “You cannot be wrong if you decide for IBM” was a slogan back in the 80s that pretty well describes the behavior of large organizations. Risk averse, following the mainstream – almost driven by fear. Although this is no more that prevalent, one can still observe that larger, more centralized organizations favor the incumbents over new best-of-breed solutions. This results in a tendency towards suite solutions. Organizations that give their units more independency tend to be more nimble, like smaller organizations, and are more accessible for best-of-breed and departmental solutions.

Relationship Building

Relationships are a powerful tool. Vendors that are able to demonstrate that they are not only after a sale but also want to become reliable partners to their customers can get a distinct advantage, especially when showing an outside-in focus that focuses on continuous benefits to the customer. Strong relationships serve as a barrier for competition, and create the opportunity for internal as well as external referrals.

Referrals

Referrals are the strongest marketing that a vendor can use. Regardless of best-of-breed or suite, referrals get earned by building a relationship and delivering up to promise. This is doubly true in times where trust implodes and is in crisis mode with people mainly trusting “someone like me”. Be it the groqing out of a department of a solution, or the win of an additional customer, satisfied customers who turn advocates are key.

Departmental Adoption

Land and expand! This is a proven strategy for small and aggressive vendors, enabled by cloud delivery models. Especially in organizations with decentralized decision-making this is a good approach to get functional pain points alleviated quickly, albeit often at the expense of a corporate strategy.

What Does It Mean?

Different criteria have different impacts and need to be looked at from different angles. However, one thing is clear: Relationships and referrals are key components in the mix. Suite- as well as Best-of-Breed vendors are well advised to build strong partnership relationships with their customers. For both types of vendors this brings new customers and for Best-of-Breed vendors it additionally opens the door from the department into the main enterprise.

Suite Vendors

For big suite vendors it is hard to do a departmental sale. Examples for this category of vendors are SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft, or formerly Netsuite, probably also Zendesk. Their solutions are regularly (with some exceptions) geared to the large enterprise where also the deals are bigger. Relationship building encompasses building relations to a number of stakeholders and correspondingly takes more time. These vendors need to be able to make a strong point on easy process integration plus getting the right feature-set into the solution. Their being confined to the enterprise market is their biggest problem and they need to be able to act like Best-of-Breed vendors. The emergence of <take your pick> clouds shows that they are working on this.

Best-of-Breed Vendors

In contrast to suite vendors, Best-of-Breed vendors can concentrate on particular, important and distinguishing features. With that they also focus on a smaller set of industries and customer sizes. Due to their focus they are often able to maintain an advantage. Good examples here are Helpshift, or Freshworks and, surprisingly, Salesforce. An odd assortment? No. Helpshift is a pureplay, albeit with a focus on bigger customers. Freshworks and Salesforce offer a variety of solutions, with Freshworks covering the SMB market and Salesforce the upper M and enterprise markets. I do not name them suite vendors, as both sell disjoint products that can be integrated via a common platform. Salesforce here became big by using a ‘land and expand’ strategy, which it still uses. For vendors in this group it is important to show the right feature fit for their audience plus the ability to integrate into other systems, to not get marginalized. Helpshift has the clearest focus with a strong, matching feature set, and a tight integration into Salesforce. Freshworks and Salesforce are offering a number of specialized applications that can integrate through their own platforms – and offer marketplaces to attract specializations that they do not offer themselves. And there is Nimble, which is in a different area, but has a very interesting strategy. The company positions itself as the ‘entry drug’ into a larger ecosystem, with a tight focus, augmented by a clear growth path for their customers. And with relationship sales par excellence. In conclusion: There is a simple framework but the secret is in the mix. And the mix differs for each company. Use the right arguments for the right customer.

Soon there will be an additional in-app customer service channel. So far we have a bunch of service channels, most of them requiring the user to leave the app to

• Pick up the phone for a call
• Browse for self support
• Open up an additional chat window
• Take on the social media channels
• Move on to messenger applications
• How about getting into your car to get to a store?
• ...

And then a customer may be moving back and forth between these channels with all the potential of losing track of the incident status and the friction that cross channel customer service still causes. There is no doubt that providing in-app support is the best possibility to offer fast issue resolution. It can provide telemetry information from within the app, identify the user and therefore provides a lot of relevant context that makes it easier for a service agent to help the customer without unnecessary delays. The customers’ shift to emphasize on the “Now” is also seen by Google research.

Not Every Device is a Smartphone

But what if the customer cannot pick up the phone to engage in a typed conversation? The customer might be engaged in a VR game, or driving a car, or in any number of situations without having a free hand. Maybe the customer simply doesn’t want to pick up a phone? What if the app doesn’t offer a user interface at all beyond a little light that indicates ‘I am available’? This would e.g. be the situation in an ambient environment that senses the presence of a person and acts accordingly. An environment like this would mainly be voice and gesture controlled via devices like Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home, Apple’s HomePod, or Microsoft’s upcoming Home Hub. Systems like these will offer a keyboard as a secondary means to access service and support at best. But there is no need to look that far out. Imagine a gaming situation. Neither an Xbox, nor a Playstation, nor any other major controller offers a keyboard. In case of these or a VR or AR game the user would hold the controller and doesn’t have the leeway to get to a keyboard. So why would they offer a keyboard to enable conversational (or other) in-app support? There is no reason. Instead users will interact with the service system and –agent via gesture-, view- and speech based interfaces.

The next In-App Support Channel is Voice

Voice recognition technologies are maturing rapidly and start to achieve human level accuracy in understanding at least English language. Human level of understanding lies at a word error rate (WER) of about 5 per cent, which means that a human on average gets five out of hundred words wrong due to misrecognition, missing a word, or falsely inserting one. Machines arrive at human level of language understanding; source 2017 Internet Trends Report Machines arrive at human level of language understanding; source 2017 Internet Trends Report While Amazon doesn’t give any numbers on Alexa’s capabilities, Microsoft announced it reached a word error rate (WER) of 5.9 per cent in October 2016; IBM beat them to the punch with a WER of 5.5 percent in March 2017. And Google announced in May 2017 that it reached a WER of 4.9 per cent. Using speech recognition techniques on a level like this, in combination with natural language processing (NLP) and perhaps natural language generation (NLG), in-app service conversations can get both, very personal, and very immersive. And very effective. Speaking is the form of communication that comes easiest to humans. Speaking and conversations are tightly linked. Last but not least it is also a very efficient way of providing customer service as the human ability to exchange information is highest when speaking.

Bringing Human Back To Customer Service

Right now customer service 2.0, the automation of customer service, seems to move from call deflection via self-service and then bots to customer service 3.0. Helped by increasing maturity of NLP- and intent detection technology this iteration will move the bots from the second row into the front row. They will become the primary customer support interface. Instead of using a search box on an FAQ, customers will ask a bot for help via a chat interface. The bot itself then will be able to answer the question using e.g. an FAQ or database, or escalate the question to a human operator. The distinction between self-service and aided customer service will first blur, then vanish. The machine takes care of the simpler problems, the human of the more difficult ones. With further refinement of Natural Language Processing, text to speech-, speech to text technologies and intent detection, typing will give way to speech again, then introducing customer service 4.0. Customer service will fully turn into a conversation and it will not matter anymore whether it is synchronous or asynchronous. It also will not matter anymore whether customer service is delivered by a bot or a human, but will appear human. And that might have an impact on the call center and its operation itself that we will look at in a separate post. The bottom line is: Customer service will be humanized again.  

Mid of April I published an article about the mobile in-app support landscape that, amongst other players, touched on Zendesk. In this article I stated: “Zendesk is not a mobile native. Their chat widget integrates into web pages and the company does not offer in-app chat. Instead the company offers solutions that hook into existing messaging apps like Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp.” This statement was based upon research that I did in the first half of the month with Zendesk publishing their Fabric based in-app support kit on April 19 of the same month. So, maybe I should have posted this article a little later, but good on Zendesk for getting on with mobile in app support. They had, as well as many other bigger vendors in the customer service and call center arena still have, a wide open flank here that gets covered by specialist vendors like Helpshift, Intercom, or LivePerson, or suite vendors like Freshworks.

Zendesk, a Mobile Native or Not?

I say that, although I maybe did them wrong by stating that they don’t do in-app FAQs – although I do not believe so, as the help center content seems to be delivered from the server and needs an online connection. Still I maintain that they are not a native player. I will explain my reasoning a little later, after summarizing what I got out of talks with Douglas Hanna and, more recently, Greg Dreyfus from Zendesk. As per now Zendesk offers two different SDKs for mobile. The support SDK and the Chat SDK (both links go to the iOS version, there are Android versions, too). The support SDK enables mainly three things:

• The searching and showing of help center content
• The opening and management of requests (support tickets)
• And the prompting for app reviews

It is what I would call the essentials of customer service, extended to the mobile world. The chat SDK is what gives the (at least to me) interesting features:

• Chat
• Messaging
• Attachments to chats and messages
• Chat ratings
• Emailing of chat transcripts

From a customer base, Greg tells me that between 4,000 and 7,000+ customers (4,000 using the Android SDK and 3,000 the iOs SDK) are using the support SDK and a tenth of that the chat SDK. This makes sense as, without further technology, the support SDK helps deflect calls via self-service and keeps requests asynchronous and therefore helps in keeping the service center small. This is in line with Gartner Group’s observation in their 2017 Magic Quadrant on Customer Engagement Centers that most Zendesk deployments are for 20 agents or less, although there are implementations with 100+ agents, too. On the other hand, the chat SDK is what enables a company to become more customer friendly. It enables the customer to initiate a chat and to leave a message (request, ticket) if no operator is available. I didn’t get any numbers of active devices that are equipped with either of the SDKs.

What does Zendesk think about AI and Bots?

To Zendesk, AI is an important tool in the shed. However, as per Greg, for the time being it needs to be confined to the back end and predictive analytics, as the intelligence is not reliable enough (yet) to handle customer requests unsupervised. So there are no bots on the immediate horizon, as they would need to be limited to overly narrow areas of knowledge. Having said this, Zendesk is looking into this topic and observing the progress, as also evidenced by their release of their Guide product.

My Take

Zendesk is admittedly one of the big kids on the block of customer service centers. Their software is covering all major channels and it offers rich functionality. There are good reasons for it appearing prominently in the G2 Quadrant for Helpdesk Software and in the Leader’s quadrant of Gartner Group’s Magic Quadrant for Customer Engagement Centers. Zendesk has a broad and satisfied customer base mainly in the SMB market. The thriving Zendesk apps marketplace is helping to get even more coverage, or to improve the solution where marketplace partners see opportunities. So, they are clearly doing a lot of things right and are probably even a good alternative for Salesforce, especially as they have a mobile offering, which is a distinct weakness of Salesforce, which on the other hand has a strong position for customers that do not only look into customer service functionality. I, however, do think that both, the mobile support SDK as well as the chat SDK can benefit of some improvement. I have the impression that the support SDK pulls help center content from a server. If that impression is true this should be changed to offering the content directly on the device. If I am right here, this is only a minor one, though. After all, cell coverage can be assumed to improve. Still, the search experience is far better in case of the FAQ being delivered directly into the app. Still, Zendesk is working on adding offline search capabilities in order to offer a better experience. Where I think Zendesk got it wrong is their approach of in-app chat. The way Greg presented the functionality to me it appears that a chat request waits until getting picked up by an agent – which could be any agent, if the customer does not choose to pick one of the offered categories. In case no agent picks up, the customer can convert it into a ticket herself, turning the chat into a message. This seems to come from a strict definition of chat being synchronous and is in my eyes rather service center oriented than customer oriented. It also seems that there is no use of meta information available through the SDK or the text of the request itself to attribute and then route a request into the appropriate queue. This concept appears to me as the extension of web chat into the app and is probably due to the way the back end is designed to work. Here also comes the advantage of a working bot framework. A bot, basing on a good knowledge base and a machine-learning framework will be able to automate a lot of requests in its domain. It can also support the agents by already providing relevant articles ordered by confidence in an assisting role. There are vendors that are capable of both. I think that it would be beneficial for Zendesk to become a leader on this way, as these functionalities will become key requirements in the upcoming world of customer service in an ambient computing environment.

In a mobile world, where the smartphone has become the command center of our lives support needs to be offered from directly inside the app, using in-app messaging. This way the advantages of being able to send relevant contextual information about the state of the app to the service agent and the ability to engage in a service conversation via a conversational UI can get brought to full advantage. The user is identified, relevant information has been gathered, which the service agent can use right away. This leads to capabilities that a genuine mobile in-app support system needs to have on top of generic help center functionality:

1. In-App FAQ that gets pushed out to the phone and is available in an offline scenario
2. Collation of meta data about the phone, user and the incident that created the support call, along with the ability to send that to the customer service center
3. In-App messaging/conversational UI in combination with push notifications
4. Automation to properly route incoming issues and to increase the issue resolution efficiency
5. An ability to integrate into CRM- or other systems
6. An ability to selectively and proactively engage with users, to e.g. support onboarding or push notifications about special situations to relevant parts of the user community.

It is possible to find vendors that deliver parts or all of this in order to deliver a mobile service experience. Platforms like G2Crowd, but also traditional analyst companies like Forrester and Gartner give some leads. Gartner lists Salesforce, Pegasystems, Oracle, Microsoft, Zendesk as leaders in customer engagement centers, with SAP being the only Challenger and Lithium the only Visionary. None of these companies gets high marks for in-app support, though. So, we are apparently looking for specialist vendors. Concentrating on the bigger medium and enterprise end of the market I’ll briefly look over the following companies, which offer parts or all of the desired solution.

• Apptentive
• Freshdesk/Hotline
• Helpshift
• Intercom
• LivePerson
• Salesforce Service Cloud and com
• Zendesk

Salesforce and Zendesk are part of this list as in-app service specialists see them in sales opportunities as competitors.

Vendors

Apptentive

Apptentive focuses on mobile customer engagement to foster a better way to communicate. The solution offers in-app messaging, rating prompts, notifications and surveys. There are no FAQ’s, though. The company got founded in 2011. The solution integrates into Zendesk, Uservoice, and Desk.com, which can be used to build a more complete in-app customer service solution in combination with Apptentive. Further integrations should be possible using the company’s API. Apptentive gathers meta-data from the mobile apps and presents it via its reporting solution. This data then can be exported as CSV and imported into a CRM system to enrich it and to provide for segmentation. However, there does not seem to be a campaigning functionality inside Apptentive itself.

Freshdesk/Hotline

Hotline.io, the former Konotor, is the mobile in-app support platform of Freshdesk. Konotor got founded in 2012 and was acquired by Freshdesk in November 2015. It is a native in-app support platform that fully caters for the criteria mentioned above. Hotline positions itself more like an engagement platform than a customer service platform. Being a part of the Freshdesk group their focus is more on the upper end of the SMB arena. Their clients mainly consist of startups and bigger corporations (as the smaller ones often do not have mobile apps, according to Srikrishnan Ganesan who heads up Hotline). Freshdesk itself seems to be sales-driven (which is not a bad thing). The company recently won the 2017 CRM Watchlist award, which is an impact award given by Paul Greenberg, which gives high visibility. Hotline has built-in integrations e.g. with Zendesk, and Slack and, of course, with Freshdesk itself. Using APIs it is possible to integrate with other CRM- and customer service systems. With the help of the Freshdesk platform it turns into a multi channel support system. The campaign module that is built into the back end allows segmenting customers based upon meta-data, app usage, and other criteria and allows for simple campaign automation.

Helpshift

Helpshift seems to be the leading mobile in-app support platform with a base of about 1.3 billion installations. The company got founded in 2011 and pioneered the idea of in-app support, providing a native platform that fully caters for the criteria above. The company positions itself as revolutionizing the customer support experience on mobile – with a strong focus on customer service. The target of Helpshift is enterprises and bigger call centers, and their number of installations proves that they are up to it. In 2014 Helpshift won the CRM Idol competition and the company is probably a bit of a hidden gem, which may partly be attributed to their enterprise focus. Helpshift has a deep integration into the Salesforce Service Cloud and I personally expect integration into MS Dynamics looming, as Microsoft Outlook Mobile is a key customer and Microsoft itself a leading investor into the company. Being API-driven integrations into other CRM systems are easily possible. The backend itself is multi-channel capable. The Helpshift campaign module is geared for service rather than marketing and leverages meta-data for segmentation, easily allowing for the facilitation of onboarding or recovering abandoned baskets, and getting over the early retention barrier.

Intercom

Intercom positions itself as a platform with support for live chat, marketing and support, with all part solutions being seamlessly integrated via their platform. The company has a strong mobile focus. A lot of their customer base seems to deploy the solution as a customer service solution. As Helpshift, the company was founded in 2011. Their solutions cover the criteria above, with the exception seeming to be the in-app FAQ. FAQ’s seem to be published through the web, instead. Their analytics offer the nice feature of identifying candidates for improved or new knowledge base articles, based upon searches. The solution offers multi-channel support and integrates into a good number of communications channels, and into Salesforce, to have a strong support system. They have deliberate support for onboarding processes, helping customers to get over the early retention barrier. Using data collected from the devices a segmentation and hence a targeted communication with users is possible, for example the onboarding support.

LivePerson

LivePerson offers a mobile in-app support solution through its LiveEngage platform. The company sets out to drive conversations and loyalty through the platform, and does not position it as a support- but an engagement system. LiveEngage is an ‘upgrade’ from the company’s earlier LivePerson solution, which seems to have caused some grief for customers. This ‘upgrade’ seems to resemble a pivot into the mobile in-app business. They are targeting enterprises although they also have startup customers. LivePerson is in the chat business for around 20 years. Focusing on messaging they do offer a chat platform that can be integrated into apps and web sites. They do not offer knowledge base support of customers but rely on custom integrations into CRM systems. Their key asset is their long standing history along with a platform that can turn chat into action, albeit more with a focus on cross-selling. Their current challenge is their need to manage their pivot and some customers that lost functionality that was important for them.

Salesforce

Salesforce offers two customer service solutions, the Salesforce Service Cloud and Desk.com, addressing different customer sizes. Desk.com is geared towards smaller organizations where the Service Cloud is enterprise scale. Both solutions offer multi channel support capabilities. Gartner Group, in their 2016 Magic Quadrant for Customer Engagement Centers states that “mobile chat” (their term for in-app messaging) is best handled by partner solutions that are available via the AppExchange market place.

Desk.com

Desk.com is Salesforces “Out-of-the-Box helpdesk for small businesses”. Being a member of the Salesforce family the solution has considerable grunt and exposure behind it. Desk.com is not a native mobile in-app support platform but a general support platform that allows for embedding support functionality inside mobile apps via an SDK. The SDK allows for the creation of tickets from within the mobile app and for knowledge base search with the knowledge base not being inside the app itself. In contrast to other providers Desk.com does not cater for conversational in-app support. The main support experience is provided outside the app. Being a member of the Salesforce family integration into other family members is a given, since they share the same platform. This includes a connection to the Sales Cloud that facilitates the conversion of support cases to sales opportunities. But at its root Desk.com is a helpdesk solution that got extended to cover mobile apps.

Service Cloud

The Service Cloud is the Salesforce customer service offering for enterprises. As such it offers a full fledged service solution that also extends into mobile devices via e.g. ticketing live chat, knowledge bases and support of communities. All this takes advantage of the powerful Salesforce platform. There, however, is no direct in-app support, which makes a good case for the integration of Helpshift.

Zendesk

Zendesk is a leading cloud based customer service platform, offering multi channel support. Zendesk features as a leader in the Gartner 2016 Magic Quadrant for Customer Engagement Centers. Zendesk is not a mobile native. Their chat widget integrates into web pages and the company does not offer in-app chat. Instead the company offers solutions that hook into existing messaging apps like Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp. They offer knowledge bases, support of communities, and portals. Zendesk has integrations into many other systems, including MS Dynamics and Salesforce. The support for messaging apps, besides Zendesk being competitively met by mobile in-app vendors, is the main reason for them appearing here.

What It Means

The in-app service market is a specialist market. If a strong support for mobile apps using a conversational interface and an in-app experience are required, not many players with the strength to support larger enterprises are left. This can be seen in the table below, which covers above solutions and is enriched by some generic help center functionality. Mobile In-App Support Provider Overview Zendesk and Salesforce both offer partner solutions to fulfill in-app service requirements. By themselves they are not in-app support players. Apptentive focuses on rating systems and surveys and is not a full-fledged player as well.. Intercom positions itself more as an engagement platform although customers seem to deploy it as a support platform, too. Without an own knowledge base capability it, however, misses an important capability. This leaves us with three vendors: Freshdesk, Helpshift, and LivePerson, with LviePerson currently pivoting from being a web based chat provider to an in-app service solution provider, which seems to cause existing customers some grief. The solution is also missing an in-app FAQ. Helpshift and Freshdesk as the front-runners are running very different strategies. For Freshdesk in-app support is one of their capabilities that they acquired over time and made part of their solution set. Helpshift totally focuses on in-app support, believing that mobile will be, if not already is, the dominant channel, which needs specialized support functionality to offer maximum service and experience.