Zendesk vs. LivePerson

Live conversations can be a beneficial support option. However, they can contribute to escalating operational costs. According to Gartner, live channels can cost an average of $8.01 per contact, while self-service channels cost about $0.10 per contact. In essence, redirecting customer queries to self-service channels can save brands as much as $1 million.

When compared to LivePerson, Zendesk offers more comprehensive self-service functionalities aimed at lowering ticket volumes. Zendesk also offers end-to-end case management tools to address customer inquiries beyond the initial response time. This, along with our fast time to value, low total cost of ownership, and customer experience (CX) expertise, enables us to provide a consistently high return on investment (ROI).

Here's a deeper look at the top three benefits you'll get with Zendesk vs. LivePerson.

More in this guide:

• At-a-glance comparison: Zendesk vs. LivePerson
• Zendesk vs. LivePerson: Features comparison
• Pricing plans: LivePerson vs. Zendesk
• Customer stories on using Zendesk vs. LivePerson
• Frequently asked questions
• Ready to try Zendesk?

The following table contains an at-a-glance comparison of Zendesk vs. LivePerson on six key features. The data from this table is based on a combination of reviews from verified users, research by our product team, and feedback from our customers.

When it comes to choosing the right customer service software, it pays to peek under the hood. Let’s compare the features of Zendesk vs. LivePerson to see who rises to the top.

Self-service

Zendesk offers essential self-service software features like robust knowledge bases, chatbots, and community forums. Knowledge management tools inside Zendesk also make it easy to maintain and scale your self-service offerings. For example, Content Cues uses AI to help you discover opportunities and tasks that will improve your knowledge base health. It can identify underperforming articles to ensure content is relevant and up to date and review tickets to flag common questions to write articles about.

LivePerson also offers self-service software, such as chatbots that can share help center articles with customers. However, its knowledge management tools have certain limitations. For example, it doesn’t have a feature like Content Cues to help keep knowledge fresh.

Case management, collaboration, and escalation

Zendesk enables support teams to efficiently manage cases at scale with robust collaboration and escalation features. For example, with Side Conversations, agents can message whomever they need to without leaving the ticket. At the same time, escalation features like macros, triggers, and custom ticket fields empower your team to escalate tickets based on your chosen criteria.

Unlike Zendesk, LivePerson’s case management isn't set up for end-to-end customer service out of the box. For example, based on LivePerson’s documentation, its native collaboration features appear limited to basic messaging between agents and transferring conversations to different skills. Without further integration, you can’t have side conversations without switching tabs. And you’ll have to share customer information between tools manually. As for setting up escalation policies, LivePerson seems to limit you to escalations based on agents’ pre-specified user ID and skill ID.

Service level agreements (SLAs)

You can avoid a lot of customer frustration by setting proper expectations. And ultimately, that’s what SLAs are about—setting expectations. In Zendesk, you can quickly and easily customize your SLA configuration. Whether you need to set up internal and external SLAs, customer or service-based SLAs, multilevel SLAs, or all of the above, you can do it in Zendesk.

LivePerson also offers SLA support, but it’s limited to messaging conversations. For more advanced configurations, like SLA per skill or capacity management, you’ll need to contact your LivePerson account manager.

Live chat and messaging

Zendesk live chat and messaging features help you provide fast and convenient support on your website, mobile applications, and social messaging channels, such as Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and WhatsApp.

With Zendesk, messaging conversations live in the same workspace as all your other channels, so agents get all the tools and customer context they need to provide personalized service. Additionally, Zendesk supports advanced messaging features like group and proactive messaging.

At its core, LivePerson is a messaging platform. So, while it includes all the messaging functionalities you’d expect, it lacks the case management capabilities you need to resolve customer issues. In other words, you’ll likely need to customize LivePerson to make it suitable as an end-to-end customer service messaging solution, which can require significant professional service costs.

Unified omnichannel solution

Omnichannel is not just about adding channels—it’s also about building deeper, more insightful relationships with customers over time. Zendesk empowers you to do that by offering fast, personalized, and uninterrupted service across email, chat, voice, social messaging, and more. With Zendesk, teams can streamline support with a unified, conversation-focused agent workspace that connects all customer conversations in a centralized hub for a complete view of each customer and their interaction history.

LivePerson’s omnichannel capabilities have certain limitations. While it offers voice bots and enables teams to deflect calls into messaging, it doesn’t provide traditional inbound calling.

Single customer view and integrations

With the 1,500+ pre-built integrations in the Zendesk marketplace, you can easily bring all your siloed customer intelligence into one place. Given this 360-degree view of your customers, you can better anticipate customer needs and personalize conversations at scale. Additionally, Zendesk integrations empower you to extend and customize your support software to leverage it for different use cases.

By comparison, LivePerson has a limited number of integrations.

Customization options

With the Zendesk Agent Workspace, agents can customize their view to ensure they only see the most important information needed to solve customer problems. Also, using relevant details and events, you can customize your workspace to automatically update ticket metadata, route tickets based on skills, and much more. Your help center is also fully customizable in Zendesk, so you can be sure it embodies your brand’s visual identity.

Using LivePerson, you can create custom bot dialogs and custom automated workflows. But for further customization, you’ll need to enlist the help of a developer to customize your software with APIs and SDKs.

AI technology

Zendesk AI is explicitly built for CX and comes pre-trained on billions of previous support tickets and customer service data. Ultimately, this saves service teams the time and cost of manual setup.

With the Zendesk no-code bot builder, you can deploy a chatbot in minutes to help deflect tickets for agents. But Zendesk also offers generative AI tools for agents to help them resolve more complex inquiries and equip them with insights. Some of these tools include:

• Intelligence in the context panel: An agent-facing panel in the Agent Workspace shows agents AI-powered insights and suggests the right macros to apply to solve the customer’s issue.
  
• Intelligent triage: This feature uses intent detection, language detection, and sentiment analysis to classify incoming requests and allow teams to power workflows based on these insights.

LivePerson is continuously working on their AI technology and has added new automated customer experiences across voice and messaging.

Triggers and workflows

With Zendesk, you can set custom triggers to route tickets and set up notifications however you wish. For example, you can route conversations based on agent availability, expertise, and conversation priority; notify customers when you're out of office; and send customer satisfaction score follow-ups. Additionally, deep reporting and analytics enable you to improve the customer experience over time while reducing employee overhead and preserving customer satisfaction.

LivePerson covers the basics of triggers and workflows as they relate to messaging. For example, with LivePerson, you can route conversations based on customer profile, status, and other contextual data. However, for triggers and workflows that rely on data from your integrations with LivePerson, you’ll need help from developers to build the workflow you want.

Reporting and analytics

Zendesk reporting and analytics tools integrate data from every channel so you can measure how customers interact with your brand across touchpoints. You can analyze your service and sales performance using pre-built dashboards prepopulated with best practice customer service metrics. But there are also thousands of ways to customize metrics, charts, filters, and dashboards using a point-and-click experience.

As is with its triggers, workflows, and AI tech, LivePerson’s reporting and analytics are serviceable—for messaging. In other words, LivePerson can provide reporting on messaging. But since it isn't built with CX best practices from the ground up, it requires further integration to enable reporting that helps you identify deeper opportunities for service improvements.

LivePerson’s pricing isn’t public. You’ll need to contact LivePerson for a quote. With Zendesk pricing, on the other hand, what you see is what you get.

Read on to see how leading brands are using Zendesk to deliver exceptional CX.

Spartan Race

When Spartan Race, the world’s largest obstacle race and endurance brand, needed to rethink its CX approach and delivery, the team knew who to turn to: Zendesk.

Using Zendesk, Spartan Race can provide reliable omnichannel support through email, chat, phone, social messaging, web form, and its help center. Asynchronous messaging has been particularly impactful, enabling the team to address messages in a live scenario or capture the conversation when agents are unavailable while ensuring the customer’s message will be answered as soon as possible.

“Messaging made a huge difference by providing asynchronous communication that’s always available. Now it’s possible to meet the customer wherever they are across our website and channels,” said Aja Varney, Director of Global Customer Engagement at Spartan Race.

The team also uses a bot to answer the most common questions that are easy to solve through self-service while ensuring that they give customers the option to reach a human. Since rolling out Zendesk automations, Spartan Race has increased self-service by 46 percent and help center views by 40 percent. All good news for a company focused on efficiency and productivity.

BoxyCharm

In response to rapid growth, BoxyCharm, a cosmetics brand, needed to scale its customer support. One reason BoxyCharm chose Zendesk was because of its commitment to the company’s future growth and long-term success.

“[Zendesk] answered all of our questions and were clearly knowledgeable about the platform in every way, so they really put us at ease,” said Anna Skidmore, Vice President of BFA Care at BoxyCharm.

The simplicity of Zendesk’s platform was also a relief for the team. Before switching to Zendesk, adapting the customer support system to meet new business needs was cumbersome. But with Zendesk, it was effortless, in part due to its seamless integrations.

“I cannot speak highly enough of Zendesk and the integrations and third-party apps you have. If you don't have an out-of-the-box solution for it, you have a partner that provides a solution for us,” explained Skidmore.

Liberty London

Liberty London is an iconic UK premium department store retailer that leans on Zendesk AI to automatically classify and route incoming customer support tickets to the right team at the right time, allowing agents keep customers happy and manage busy periods with confidence.

Zendesk’s intelligent triage also takes the pressure off when the team gets busy. It can identify and label customer intent, sentiment, and language, so issues are routed to the right place and solved as quickly as possible.

“Liberty is all about delivering a personal service,” said Ian Hunt, Director of Customer Services at Liberty London. “I see AI enhancing that personal service because now our customers will be interacting with a human who’s being put in front of them at the right time with the right information.”