Top 7 Gladly Alternatives in 2024 for Customer Service

Customer service, often considered the lifeblood of any thriving business, boasts a rich and varied history that spans millennia. Tracing its roots back to ancient civilizations, customer service began as direct, face-to-face interactions in bustling marketplaces, where merchants understood the importance of building good relations with their customers. Today, the digital age has revolutionized the way businesses deliver customer service. The advent of the internet and digital technologies has enabled companies to transcend geographical boundaries and serve customers worldwide, at any time, and through various channels. As businesses strive to keep up with evolving customer expectations, customer service software (like Gladly) have become crucial for providing seamless, consistent experiences.

Gladly, like several other customer service platforms, empowers modern customer service teams to create meaningful connections, boost productivity, and drive lifelong customer loyalty at scale. It combines the strengths of AI and human agents to prioritize helping customers, not solving tickets. While Gladly has been a popular choice, some organizations may seek alternatives that offer better scalability, advanced features, or cost-effective solutions.

In this blog, I’ll take you through the top 7 customer service software alternatives that very closely rival Gladly as a customer support platform in 2024. I will explore the unique strengths of each alternative, and suggest the best of these options based on its unique features and user reviews.

But first,

What is Gladly?

Gladly is a customer service platform that puts people at the forefront, offering a holistic approach to customer interactions. Gladly is built for eCommerce businesses that want to maintain consistency in customer service across different channels and scale their customer support without compromising quality. By focusing on a single, lifelong conversation with each customer, Gladly enables agents to provide personalized and seamless service across various channels, including voice, SMS, email, chat, and social media.

Furthermore, the platform's adaptable interface and integrated channels streamline agent workflows and enhance customer engagement, making it easier for agents to navigate multiple communication methods in one place. This comprehensive approach helps leading retail brands strengthen customer loyalty and foster meaningful connections with their clientele.

Why might Gladly be the right fit for your team's Customer Service needs?

• Gladly promotes teamwork among customer service staff by providing the facility to share information, assign tasks, and work together to resolve the issues of customers.
• Its intelligent routing allows you to assign queries according to the department, agent’s expertise, and priority.
• It has a chatbot and live chat feature that helps turn website visitors into customers by guiding them during their purchase and answering queries about the products they’re considering.

Why do you need a Gladly Alternative?

• Several verified users have complained about the complexities of Gladly’s user interface alongside operational glitches while in use.
• Customer queries can get buried and overlooked because they aren't handled in the order they're received, leading to longer wait times.
• You can’t unmerge a customer once accidentally linked or merged.
• While Gladly's extensive feature set offers significant value, it can overwhelm some users. This can result in a cumbersome onboarding process and ultimately, underutilization of the platform, limiting its potential benefits.

What are the Top 7 Customer Service Platform Alternatives to Gladly in 2024?

1. Distrobird
2. Salesforce Service Cloud
3. Intercom
4. Kustomer
5. Gorgias
6. Richpanel
7. Tidio

1. Distrobird

Distrobird is a powerful and intuitive customer support software designed to revolutionize how you engage with customers and manage sales processes. It seamlessly integrates a wide array of tools, including campaigns, sequences, SMS campaigns, cloud-based phone systems, web chat, and many more exciting customer support features into a single user-friendly interface. By centralizing these capabilities, we empower sales and support teams to work more productively and efficiently, enhancing sales, boosting customer retention, and streamlining communication channels. This makes it an indispensable asset for startups looking to optimize their go-to-market strategies.

Trusted by hundreds of companies worldwide, Distrobird scales with you, offering free plans for unlimited teams and users globally, while also allowing for upgrades of advanced features. This scalable global solution has facilitated over 80 million conversations across 101 countries, generating substantial revenue for its users.

Distrobird best features

• Distrobird’s free plan encompasses all of its features.
• Distrobird boasts an intuitive interface that facilitates seamless team onboarding and rapid deployment in minutes, not days.
• Distrobird empowers you to create and manage multi-channel campaigns and integrations, thus ensuring your team focuses solely on answering clients, potentially doubling their output.
• Distrobird integrates a web chat system on your website to offer real-time support and sales assistance, encouraging immediate engagement with visitors and potential leads
• Contacts' data is automatically enriched, ensuring your team is well-informed about who they're communicating with and how to keep them satisfied.

Distrobird limitations

• Currently, Distrobird does not have a mobile app
• Its free plan supports a maximum of 3 users and 4 teams

Distrobird pricing

• Free plan for the Voice, Sequences, and Shared Inbox products.
• Startup plan for Shared Inbox: $8/month
• Startup, Growth & Enterprise plans for both the Sequences and Voice products: $25,$50, & $75 respectively

2. Salesforce Service Cloud

Salesforce Service Cloud is the customer service solution within the Salesforce CRM platform, offering a holistic view of your customer base and streamlining support across multiple communication channels. One of its standout features is the remote assistance tool, which allows service agents to share screens with customers, enabling them to see precisely what the customer sees and quickly diagnose issues.

The platform's integrated AI technology can identify elements within shared images and suggest troubleshooting steps to aid support team members in efficiently resolving customer issues. For more complex cases, agents can easily escalate to higher support levels. Additionally, the AI tool can guide agents to relevant articles within the knowledge management system, enhancing both productivity and service quality.

Salesforce best features

• Salesforce’s comprehensive and centralized view of customer data, enables efficient case management and personalized customer interactions.
• It allows agents to efficiently collaborate with experts and resolve support queries faster.
• With Salesforce, you can monitor risks to customer relationships with incident detection and management tools, so you can address issues early on
• Automate workflows with AI within Service Cloud, streamlining operations, saving time, and reducing costs for your support team.

Salesforce limitations

• Highly priced compared to other options on this list.
• Many of the software features like AI, omnichannel routing, and self-service platforms come at extra cost.
• Its user interface may pose challenges for those who are not technically inclined, as it may not be the most intuitive.
• Verified users have complained about Salesforce poor technical support when trying to resolve issues.

Salesforce pricing

• Starter: $25 per month per user
• Professional: $80 per month per user
• Enterprise: $165 per month per user
• Unlimited: $330 per month per user
• Eistein 1 service: $500 per month per user.

3. Intercom

Intercom is a complete customer service solution that provides a seamless customer experience across automation and human support, delivering increased customer satisfaction while reducing costs. Founded in 2011, Intercom has quickly become one of the most recognized customer service solution providers in the industry. The company focuses on boosting customer satisfaction while simultaneously reducing operational costs by handling most customer conversations through automated channels. This approach allows customer service representatives to dedicate more time to high-value interactions.

Intercom's platform offers a range of communication options, customizable live chat widgets, omnichannel support, and integrations with numerous other apps. Although Intercom primarily focuses on support, it also provides additional functionalities such as product tours through add-ons. Ultimately, Intercom seeks to enhance customer satisfaction, strengthen relationships, and elevate customer experience through personalized support.

Intercom best features

• The ability to converse with our customers quickly and seamlessly between email and the messenger app is great.
• Beautiful design, with many useful details.
• Intercom offers many integrations across multiple channels so that you can effortlessly connect it with essential tools as your company evolves.
• Businesses can track key metrics and leverage same to measure the effectiveness of their communication efforts and make data-driven decisions to provide excellent customer service.

Intercom limitations

• Pricey compared to its alternatives; be prepared for a hefty price increase as the number of team members you have grows/expands.
• The platform often demands a level of technical expertise, which can make it harder for you to complete all the necessary setups.
• Many users have reported a low level of customer support engagement when experiencing issues with the platform.
• Service interruptions could significantly impact your ability to communicate with clients effectively (since the Intercom software is entirely cloud-based).

Intercom pricing

• Essential: $39 per seat per month
• Advanced: $99 per seat per month
• Expert: $139 per seat per month

4. Kustomer

Kustomer is a modern customer support solution focused on providing fast, personalized customer service by empowering agents with all the information they need in one screen. By integrating all customer experience operations into one robust support engine, the platform delivers a personalized experience for customers while streamlining processes for service teams. Kustomer IQ, the platform's AI-powered chatbot, helps lighten the workload on customer experience teams and expedites query resolution times. Acting as a centralized communication hub, Kustomer enables customer service representatives to manage inquiries from various channels—such as email, voice, SMS, and website chat—within a single interface.

Furthermore, Kustomer's analytics tools allow businesses to track agent performance based on metrics like average response time and the volume of unique customer interactions. The platform's intuitive messaging system includes advanced features that foster direct and tailored customer support, strengthening customer relationships and enhancing overall satisfaction.

Kustomer best features

• Kustomer allows for merging conversations through a unified customer view across various platforms, equipping support agents with a full history of customer interactions.
• It provides real-time analytics through detailed dashboard insights into customer engagements and agent effectiveness.
• It comes with an accessible self-service portal that can be added to your website and is accessible in over 70 languages.

Kustomer limitations

• Kustomer is quite pricey and only caters to companies that can afford 8 or more seats, making it unsuitable for smaller businesses.
• While Kustomer's conversation system is user-friendly, it takes some time for users to fully grasp how to use it, indicating a steep learning curve.
• Some users have pointed out that the knowledge-base system lacks a visual edit interface, making it difficult to create and modify content more intuitively.
• Filters for new searches can be a bit tricky to set up.

Kustomer pricing

• Enterprise: $89 per month per user.
• Ultimate: $139 per month per user.

5. Gorgias

Gorgias is a customer support help desk solution designed specifically for e-commerce businesses. As an all-in-one customer service, customer support, and live chat helpdesk, it offers tools including email integration, autoresponders, ticket management, customer history tracking, request assignment, and more to aid with customer service. It also integrates with various support platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Outlook, Live Chat, and more so that customer queries from multiple channels can be aggregated and managed in one place. This streamlined approach helps e-commerce companies manage customer interactions more effectively.

Customer support tickets can all be handled using the same ticketing system within Gorgias, regardless of the channel that they came from, and all tickets are subject to the same rules, tags, and macros. Users can set up autoresponders to improve ticket resolution speed and tickets are automatically sorted according to predefined attributes and topics.

Gorgias best features

• Highly customizable dashboard
• AI-assisted ticket management
• Automation tools
• Allows multiple languages in one price plan.

Gorgias limitations

• Verified users have reported issues while navigating the interface with one user reporting Gorgias as “not the best experience on the customer's end”
• Gorgias gets a lot of updates and it tends to interrupt the workflow sometimes.
• Users are sometimes unable to mark a ticket as unread, and sometimes tickets get lost.
• Some e-commerce platforms are not supported in lower pricing plans

Gorgias pricing

• Starter: $10
• Basic: $60
• Pro: $360
• Advanced: $900

6. Tidio

Tidio is a comprehensive customer service platform designed to enhance your customer support and drive increased sales. Its live chat widget provides round-the-clock accessibility, allowing your business to be available 24/7. AI-powered chatbots engage customers in real-time, enabling you to boost sales and improve overall customer satisfaction. The platform seamlessly integrates with popular e-commerce platforms, CRM software, and email marketing services, providing a full suite of customer relationship management tools. It also offers advanced reporting and automation workflows for efficient support operations.

With Tidio's innovative live chat platform, you can deliver exceptional customer journeys 24/7. Utilizing Lyro AI, a state-of-the-art AI support agent, you can address up to 70% of customer queries, streamlining your support efforts. Manage all live communication channels from a single dashboard to provide immediate support. Connect with website visitors through a lightweight live chat widget, guide leads through sales funnels with custom automation flows, and leverage email marketing to generate leads. Additionally, free plans are available for businesses looking to get started.

Tidio best features

• With Tidio, you can manage all your unlimited chat history across email messages, live chat, and social media chat apps in one place, and respond quickly to every user query.
• This help desk software turns client queries into tickets and helps support agents keep track of each communication under one roof.
• You can also leverage advanced reporting and automation workflows.

Tidio limitations

• Tidio lacks native knowledge base features.
• Small businesses may find their pricing plans somewhat too expensive.
• Users have reported that setting up a chatbot and email campaigns is rather confusing.

Tidio pricing

• Free - $0 per month.
• Starter – $29 per month.
• Growth – $50 per month.
• Tidio+ – from $499 per month.

7. Richpanel

Richpanel's live chat and customer service helpdesk streamline customer care, making it both easy and profitable. As the importance of service continues to grow, brands with outstanding customer experiences generate times more revenue than their competitors. Richpanel's helpdesk provides smooth, personalized performance, enabling customers to quickly find answers through self-service and assisting support agents in working efficiently.

The platform offers a highly customizable portal with articles addressing frequently asked questions, enhancing the customer experience and reducing support tickets by 50-70%, thereby lightening the load on support teams. Richpanel also features a comprehensive dashboard that offers essential data and insights, tailored to the needs of customer experience leaders. This eliminates the need for tedious spreadsheets to track agent performance, providing a more streamlined approach to managing customer support operations.

Richpanel best features

• All customers' information is on a single platform making it unnecessary to jump around onto different screens or tabs to get customer information.
• Allows for third-party integrations.
• Automated responses.

Richpanel limitations

• Simple to use but may take some time to fully setup.
• The paid plan is not suitable for businesses with low ticket volume.
• Does not provide native phone support.

Richpanel pricing

• Incubator: $9 (3 agents/month)
• Pro: $60 per agent per month
• Pro Max: $120 per agent per month

Which Customer Service Platfrom Is Right For You?

While Gladly has advantages such as promoting teamwork among customer service staff and handling real-time queries, its complex user interface, operational glitches, and high costs may drive businesses to seek other options.

Distrobird stands out as a comprehensive solution, offering an all-in-one platform for calls, emails, SMS, and integrations with popular CRMs and business tools.

Its features cater to both sales and customer support teams, with functionalities like multi-channel communication, automation, and a customer-centric inbox for streamlined workflows.

Whether you're a startup or an established business, Distrobird's scalable pricing plans make it a cost-effective choice. Create your free Distrobird account and see how it can transform your customer interactions!