The Best Zendesk Chat Bot Alternatives

Zendesk is a powerful help desk solution. It has many powerful features, except for its chatbot, Answer Bot. Answer Bot is unable to handle complex user inputs or queries.

In addition, Answer Bot is tedious to set up and maintain. In other words, it is simply outdated.

Why settle for an inferior solution when superior options exist?

In this article, we explore the pros and cons of Answer Bot, as well as leading alternatives to Answer Bot.

What is Zendesk?

Zendesk is a cloud-based customer service platform. It offers tools to businesses for managing and improving customer service and engagement.

Offering an array of products and services, Zendesk assists businesses in efficiently managing and enhancing their customer interactions.

What is a Chat Bot?

A chat bot is a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users. It helps automate customer service and tasks.

An AI chat bot is the same as a chat bot, except it uses artificial intelligence to understand the user's question and respond accordingly.

Limitations of Zendesk Bots

Zendesk Bots (formerly known as Answer Bot) is the native chat bot Zendesk offers. Zendesk Bots have their advantages, but their limitations overshadow the advantages.

Pros:

• Easy Integration with Zendesk Suite: It seamlessly integrates with other Zendesk tools, allowing you to centralize customer support operations.
• Seamless Adaptation with External Platforms: Another of Zendesk's upside is its easy adaption with messaging apps and mobile apps.

Cons:

• Difficult Setup and Maintenance: Configuring workflows in Flow Builder can be tedious, posing a learning curve for users. Also, the ongoing maintenance demands effort, making it less user-friendly.
• Inflexible Design: Flow Builder's structure can be rigid, making adapting to changing business needs difficult. Users find it challenging to modify flows, impacting overall user-friendliness.
• Dated NLP Technology: Zendesk Bots relies on older Natural Language Processing (NLP), also known as conversational AI. This means Zendesk Bots have a potentially limited understanding of nuanced user queries and context.
• Answer Matching Limitation: NLP in Zendesk Bots focuses on "answer matching." It can struggles with complex user questions that require a deeper contextual understanding.
• Maintenance Effort: It is difficult to manage and update pre-set questions and answers in NLP.

Zendesk Chat Bot Alternatives

Several alternative chat bot solutions are available that integrate seamlessly with Zendesk. Here are the two best options, each with pros and cons.

Alternative 1: Sunshine Conversations’ Web Messenger

Sunshine Conversations' Web Messenger is a messaging widget. You can customize it for any web page.

The Sunshine Web Messenger enables the transfer conversations from the browser to SMS, Facebook Messenger, or other OTT channels.

Pros:

• Multi-Channel Support: Sunshine Conversations’ Web Messenger supports various messaging channels and platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and more.

Cons:

• Lacks Auto-response Capability: Sunshine Conversations is not an automated chat bot. It just displays the message without any logic to compose a message automatically.
• Premium Plan Feature: You must be a customer of Zendesk’s premium plan to access this chat bot.
• No more enhancements: Sunshine Conversations’ Web Messenger is in maintenance mode as of Dec 1, 2023. Zendesk acquired Sunshin Converations and has decided to no longer enhance the product.

Alternative 2: Alhena AI

In the realm of Zendesk chat bots, Alhena AI emerges not just as an alternative but as a game-changer.

This AI chat bot uses generative AI to deliver a smart, more personalized experience for each customer.

Pros:

• Effortless Knowledge Integration: Alhena AI ingests knowledge from different sources as is. You don't have to feed it perfect inputs or prepare exhaustive FAQs.
• Zendesk Data Extraction: It extracts knowledge from Zendesk macros and resolved tickets within Zendesk.
• Advanced Understanding of Complex Queries: Displays a better understanding of complex customer questions, using Large Language Models (or LLMs).
• Real-time Knowledge Retrieval: Automatically searches your knowledge base and generates highly relevant and accurate answers in real-time.
• No Hallucination: Many generative AI chatbots tend to hallucinate or make-up facts. Alhena AI specializes in minimizing hallucination. Here's a video of Alhena AI and a GPT trained on the same knowledge. The GPT hallucinates but Alhena AI doesn't.

• Empathetic Customer Support: Empathizes when addressing customer problems, making interactions more human-like.
• Dynamic Language Detection: Detects foreign languages on the fly and responds in a user's language, helping to overcome the customer service language barrier.
• Continuous Database Updating: Automatically re-scans your knowledge base, keeping your responses up to date.
• Smart Agent Transfers: Automatically transfers queries to live agents during business hours and to email after business hours.
• Feedback-driven Improvement: This AI chat bot learns and improves with both user feedback and administrator feedback.
• Multichannel Integration: Integrates across multiple channels including Live chat, Email, Slack, Discord, and other social media platforms.
• Enterprise System Integration: Integrates seamlessly with other enterprise systems to enable customer self-serve.
• Flexible Customization: Easy cloning and modifying to support different customer segments via Bot Profiles.

Cons:

• Not on Approved Vendor List: Alhena is a private Silicon Valley start-up and likely not on your list of approved vendors. Getting Alhena on your list of approved vendors might take time and involve multiple teams, including security and legal.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for an alternative to the Zendesk chat bot solution, Alhena is the tool for you. It provides a more accurate, human-like chat experience that does not hallucinate.

Its ability to empathize with customer issues makes it a great customer service tool to have in your arsenal.

Plus, it’s easy to set up, simple to use and provides a great customer experience.

Bottom line: Alhena AI, besides supercharging your customer service teams, makes handling customer issues and grievances a cakewalk.

It effortlessly turns your good customer service into a great one.

Great customer service is key to existing customer loyalty and inevitably leads to increased customer acquisition.

Request a demo of Alhena AI, or create a free generative AI chatbot using Alhena AI now.