Kustomer is a customer service CRM platform built for managing high support volume by optimizing experiences throughout the customer service journey. Kustomer was acquired by Facebook in late 2020, but spun out in 2023 and re-launched as an independent entity, Kustomer, LLC.
$89
per month, per user
Zendesk Sell
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Zendesk Sell (formerly Base CRM) is a CRM that aims to give reps access to integrated tools that provide the full context of a customer account. This keeps them in the loop and allows them to capitalize on opportunities. Zendesk Sell can be extended with Reach, a lead generation and engagement tool that automates the process of finding and keeping leads interested, so reps can focus more on building relationships and crushing their quotas.
Base CRM was founded in 2009, and acquired by Zendesk…
$19
per seat/month billed annually
Pricing
Kustomer
Zendesk Sell
Editions & Modules
Enterprise
$89
per month, per user
Ultimate
$139
per month, per user
Sell Team
$19.00
per seat/month billed annually
Reach prospecting enrichment add-on (requires a Sell Subscription)
$27.00
Per User Per Month (billed annually)
Sell Professional
$49.00
per seat/month billed annually
Sell Enterprise
$99.00
per seat/month billed annually
Sell Elite
$199.00
per seat/month billed annually
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Kustomer
Zendesk Sell
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
All plans require an annual subscription and 8 users minimum.
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Kustomer
Zendesk Sell
Considered Both Products
Kustomer
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose Kustomer
I think that Kustomer is the most user friendly BUT I think the other platforms are built to do a lot more and can be much more customized
I find it baffling how little data can be stored or associated with a customer in many other systems, and how difficult that can be to set up. It is fine if you already have a robust CDP that you can hook up and use to power your CRM, but it is rare that an organization has the …
It has improved a lot of the training time needed for our new hires to understand the Kustomer interface and how to handle communications fully. The time invested went significantly down, and the learning curve improved a lot as well.
Apps like Intercom, Zendesk, and Gorgios all treat customer inquiries as tickets, just tracking that one issue or interaction with a customer. Kustomer treats each customer as an individual, which allows us to provide top-notch customer service. Customers love that we're able …
Kustomer is a great fit for our organization because we can cut down on multiple contacts from the same customer and see all their information in one place. It's also infinitely customizable, so if we need changes made we can make them while still using the same platform. This …
The UI of Kustomer is a lot cooler than what we are using before. There are a lot of features that Kustomer has that make things easier and more convenient than Desk.com.
I use both in my role with the company. Our social media channels are managed through Khoros, but we use Kustomer to notate and contact customers outside of social media. I'd much rather bring our social media channels into Kustomer, to help with efficiency.
Kustomer is far more intuitive, personal, and holistic than Zendesk. As a company who has a lot of interaction with a single customer, it is such an advantage to take the customer approach rather than a single ticket approach. Zendesk was very limited in a lot of the actions …
All other systems I have used have been internally-made programs that were a lot more basic order-taking systems, no notes or call functions outside of when order was placed. Doesn't really compare here.
Kustomer simply does more than any other platform I've been able to work with. Sure some others will give you a handful of neat tricks built in for managing a channel or two but those rarely offer any external integrative capacity or limit what you can do in connections. …
I was not personally involved in the decision-making process when selecting a new CRM and ultimately settling on Kustomer. That said, I'm happy with the decision to partner with them. Compared to our previous CRMs, it is much easier to work with everything in one place and we …
Moving from Zendesk to Kustomer was driven by the clarity that the customer timeline brings for advocate engagement alongside the custom workflow abilities.
Zendesk did not give a big picture of the customer. It was more of a ticketing platform, and only gave statistics of those conversations. We were unable to track customer sentiment, or other attributes of the customer.
Kustomer is far more scalable and flexible than Zendesk, and it provides a real omni-channel experience far from the "Zendesk for mails, Zendesk chat for chats" we were used to. On the automation and customisation features, it gets even clearer how Kustomer can deal with a lot …
The contact management system is better and the association between contacts and deals is a big improvement. Tracking emails in addition to notes is an improvement.
We moved away from the platform above because integrations and reporting through Zendesk Sell (formerly Base CRM) are far better. Zendesk Sell (formerly Base CRM) is definitely a more modern approach to our ever-changing company. We needed a system that provided accurate and …
Simpler than most CRMs, which can be good if your sales team is not very tech savvy. We switched to Hubspot which provides a lot more value than Base did, but it isn't right for everyone. Hubspot is focused on capturing in-bound leads and has its own flaws and limitations, but …
Zendesk Sell is not as robust as other leading CRM tools I have used in the past like Salesforce. Salesforce is the market leader and is always leading the way in innovation. Salesforce objects management is better simpler and allows the user to customize different screens and …
SVP Sales, Business Development, and Solutions Architecture
Chose Zendesk Sell
It does everything salesforce was doing only easier and the mobile app was much better and cheaper. I have been able to both run a sales team and do the sysadmin and setup work on base as a sales manager.
Let's face it, there's a lot of competition in the market of CRM systems. From Salesforce, Hubspot, and Zoho, which offer other modules that integrate other elements of the business into the CRM, to options like Sharpspring, CampaignerCRM, and SugarCRM that integrates marketing …
Base CRM is great for beginners, or small sales forces. API/integrations need help. As a CRM it works just fine, but could use some improvement, and backing. A lot of Base CRM users are great help, but there needs to be a more robust back end to help your customers implement …
It works really well for you to ask a teammate to review a case/email/message and provide some input since you can all review the same conversations and client accounts. They can also cover your inbox using your email handle in case you are out of the office suing some well deserved PTO.
I think that for a company that creates any sales and needs to house their client information, the Base is perfect. The price of the program makes it completely worth the investment. And to be able to use customizations makes it possible for any business that does sales use Base for their orders. I would say for companies that use legal contracts or binding contracts for their business, Base may be too simple for their needs. We work in tandem with a company that always has contracts going back and forth, and the build out of the customizations here weren't really going to work for them.
All customer data (past orders, communication with customer service, rewards account data) is in one place. This helps agents avoid confusion and reduces the number of tabs they need to open.
The Knowledge Base (or K Base) is very helpful. Any time we roll out a new policy or have a limited-time promotion, we can add all the relevant information and worksheets there for the convenience of the agents. That way they can stay in a chat while looking up the answer to a question.
We can seamlessly move from chat into email if the customer leaves or the queue times are too long. All the interactions will stay on the customer profile page, so they are kept up to date.
Integrates well with FullContact, Slack via Zapier, and Gmail and google calendar.
Excellent mobile app for iPhone lets salespeople have data at their fingertips and enter notes at conferences, in elevators, wherever.
Does all the basic things a salesperson needs to be productive, contacts capture, deal capture, documents, smart linking of contacts to deals, and nice reminder features.
For our team, the feature that defaults all notes to begin in "done" status is difficult. Throughout each day we need to have notes open and assigned back and forth to different teams, and we have to remember to manually "open" each note. There is too much room for human error with this setting, and it is easy for important notes to be missed if a user forgets to open the note.
Similarly, it can be hard to remember to assign emails/notes to a particular team in addition to a user. We almost exclusively work out of team inboxes, and if someone on Care writes an email to a customer, the email will automatically be "done" when it is created, and it will be assigned to the user who wrote it, but not also to the user's team. There are instances where an email needs to be snoozed for several days/hours with further action needed, and unless the user remembers to assign the email to their team it may "awake" from the snooze and not be visible to anyone except the user who created it. Similarly to my first comment, this leaves a lot of room for human error and is not very intuitive.
Personally, I do not love that all tickets/emails/notes are jumbled together in the same inbox. While this gives visibility to everything on the "to do" list at the same time, it can be visually overwhelming. We have created unique folders for certain types of projects or categories of work, but have experienced tech glitches or just the awkwardness of another step to manually read the note, determine what type of category it is, and then manually assign it to another folder. Would love to have things auto-sort and take out this manual lift.
I love the idea of the autopilot setting, but we have not been able to use this for our work because it sorts items based on time, and not based on priority. In our line of work, we may have an urgent situation arise that needs attention before an email that was sent in 60 minutes ago. The autopilot feature would push the email to my associates sooner than it would the urgent situation from 5 minutes ago. Due to this, we manually monitor inboxes and assign work to ourselves and others.
There is a learning curve, but it is more than worth it, especially to have a dedicated resource pointed at Kustomer and any other software it interacts with. The basic implementation is useful, and powerful - certainly a MASSIVE upgrade over taking care of your customers in an email inbox or shuffling between multiple windows and applications! It is also set up really well to grow and reconfigure with your business. I'm a big fan.
I received about two hours worth of training on Zendesk Sell (formerly Base CRM). I will say it's a clean look and the ability to change views is extremely helpful. I do wish there were other features that allowed the views to be more simplistic. Some views can be overwhelming to look at. Nevertheless with the minimum training, I am still able to navigate through Zendesk Sell (formerly Base CRM) successfully due to the ease of usability.
It’s a great tool that has helped our company and overall customer service. I believe if we were able to edit certain setting for our specific company that would be hopeful. We have been told before that certain desires of ours would make a change throughout all of Kustomer. Which is not something we would want, we would just want that to change for our business.
Due to the ease of the product, I have not had the chance to reach out to support yet. I’ve had no reason. The resources provided to clients are extremely helpful and detailed. So far my questions have been pretty basic and I generally just ask my colleague or teammate. They're able to assist with the answer.
This product has a great backing of users, but needs more options direct from Base CRM on all operations of the software. YouTube videos do a great job of helping implement, and the back end support is a great help as well. The CRM is a great free option, and should be treated as such.
I find it baffling how little data can be stored or associated with a customer in many other systems, and how difficult that can be to set up. It is fine if you already have a robust CDP that you can hook up and use to power your CRM, but it is rare that an organization has the resources or the customer-focus to rally behind setting up their customer service/experience team up for success. With a platform like Kustomer, you can actually evolve the relationship over time, or use the past experiences (number of contacts, purchases, previous issues, etc.) to power your next steps with a customer, making for a much more nuanced relationship with a human, not just a ticket.
Zendesk Sell is not as robust as other leading CRM tools I have used in the past like Salesforce. Salesforce is the market leader and is always leading the way in innovation. Salesforce objects management is better simpler and allows the user to customize different screens and have different dashboards for reporting reasons. This is definitely a good alternative to Salesforce especially if you are currently using any other Zendesk products like Zendesk support.
We’re getting so much positive feedback — which is not something you traditionally associate with a customer care team — because we’re making it effortless for customers to deliver both positive and negative feedback, and we can now resolve the bad feedback really really quickly.
Primarily from our increased efficiency with Kustomer, we’ve seen a significant reduction of $3 to $4 for every cost per contact.