#1 most frequent
United States of America
79.3%403 installations of 508
What is Kustomer?
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.
Categories & Use Cases
Media
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Screenshot of Example of a customer profile within Kustomer.
Top Performing Features
Email support
Integrates with email so that agents can send and receive information related to support tickets via email; email communications are attached to support tickets.
Category average: 8.8
Internal knowledge base
Internal knowledge base helps agents answer customers' support questions.
Category average: 8.1
Customer portal
Customer portal allows customers to submit tickets themselves and/or access self help resources.
Category average: 8.2
Areas for Improvement
External knowledge base
Customers can self-service by searching through help articles.
Category average: 8
Social integration
Agents can communicate with customers via social networks like Facebook and Twitter; may also include brand activity monitoring/reporting capabilities.
Category average: 8
Help Desk CRM integration
Integrates with CRM so that tickets and support communications are coordinated with customers' records.
Category average: 8.6
Who Buys & Uses Kustomer
#2 most frequent
Canada
4.7%24 installations of 508
#3 most frequent
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
3.3%17 installations of 508
Wonderful tool with a great customer support team!
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We used Kustomer as our main B2C communication tool. It was super helpful in keeping comms organized and gave everyone on our team transparency into each other’s workload.
Pros
- Organize communication per customer so nothing gets lost or slipped through the cracks
- Customizable interface so that team leads can set up the platform in unquie ways for their specific team to be successful
- Great customer support team ready to answer questions and provide solutions or workarounds for unique problems.
- Insight into communication for the whole team so that providing support to other team members is seamless (especially helpful when another teammate is out of office)
Cons
- Integrations across more platforms would be helpful. I did find it time consuming to create a new contact manually every time someone reached out from our website for the first time.
- SLA tracking could have been improved from a managerial standpoint
- Easier way to create and share templates across teams would have been helpful
Return on Investment
- Not sure about the value of the product as I was not involved in the billing for the product but the tool itself was integral in our daily business operations
- Our sales team used it to communicate with customers and our B2B team used it to communicate with vendors. As a small business it was super helpful to be able to have transparency on those communications company-wide
Usability
Alternatives Considered
HubSpot CRM and Salesforce Sales Cloud
Other Software Used
Dialpad Connect, Boomerang for Outlook
Kustomer CRM Solution - Great Choice
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Kustomer to address all customer interactions, including email, our platform that handles individual and group chats, an internal ticketing system for action items, etc. It has worked well for us since it allows us to centralize all communications and allows a great deal of visibility for our team to work together and tackle any issue or item that our clients send our way. I strongly recommend this CRM, and the Kustomer team has helped us make the necessary changes on their API for the Kustomer app to adapt better to our needs and daily use.
Pros
- Email Communication
- Internal Tickets
- Chat Conversations
- Internal Notes
- Teammate Tagging for visibility
Cons
- Email Thread Visibility
- Exporting Emails to PDF
- GUI needs to improve
Return on Investment
- It has really helped us to improve our ART over all the departments.
Alternatives Considered
Salesforce.com
Other Software Used
Slack, Dialpad Talk, Zoom
Usability
Flexible, Scalable, and Highly Configurable - jack of all trades, master of many
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Kustomer to consolidate communication with our end users. We pipe in data from a number of other sources to give as complete a picture of our users to our service agents as possible. We also manage a customer-facing knowledge base, contact and communication forms, and a chat assistant using Kustomer's technology.
Pros
- multi channel communication
- customizable workflows and business rules for getting very granular about how you handle each situation
- complex routing capabilities to distribute work across a team with different skill sets
- custom attributes are available at customer, conversation, company, and other object levels, allowing you to group, tag, flag, respond, highlight, etc. as needed using whatever cross section helps your use case
- customizable insight cards to alter the look and feel, present important information to agents, connect to other systems, etc.
Cons
- The conversational assistant (chat bot) is powerful, but would benefit by a visual or "tree"-like designer similar to what is seen on their workflow builder
- When building business rules, it would be great to see examples of what customers or conversations would be affected by a given set of conditions
Return on Investment
- first contact resolution is improved because you can get a whole picture of the client, not just a ticket
- FAQs/help articles are already in the platform, so can be leveraged in automatic email and chat bot responses
- we're able to easily prioritize and shift what issues need to be handled first while in backlog
Alternatives Considered
Dixa, HubSpot CRM, Gladly, Freshdesk and Intercom
Other Software Used
Zingtree, Zapier
Usability
Kustomer and Customers
Pros
- Cohesiveness: all the information we need is in one spot, from customer information, order information, feedback opportunities and the actual conversation(s) with the customers.
- Stability: compared to other CRM tools, Kustomer has been the most stable and has crashed less than other tools.
- Troubleshooting: any issues that we have are typically resolved immediately.
Cons
- Flexibility: were often told from Kustomer reps that certain functionalities are unachievable, though there could be an easy solution.
- Team Member Specifics: For our different channels of support, we are only able to change the entire team setting. For example, for chats, everyone who is on that team can receive up to 2 chats. For training purposes, it’s typically easier to allow our trainees to take just one at a time, but we do not have control over that.
- Routing: no matter how many workarounds or troubleshooting we do, we find that the system just does not route contacts efficiently.
Alternatives Considered
Zendesk, Zendesk Chat (formerly Zopim) and Zendesk Talk
Other Software Used
Shopify, Atlassian Confluence, Zenefits, Shiftboard
Kustomer's features can lack intuition, but once comfortable on the platform, it is easy to navigate and find your information in a nicely unified place.
Pros
- Kustomer allows you to add multiple inboxes that can be shared and viewed across a large team. For Customer Care, we can see the "to do" list for our team but we can also easily see what other team members and users are working on in other inboxes. This provides open communication and accountability between and across departments.
- Kustomer allows you to tag and prioritize different tasks and assign them to certain teams and users. This makes for easy organization and assigning tasks.
- Kustomer allows us to have information unified within one space. You can see all interactions from and to a customer, as well as all inner office communication about that customer in the same place.
Cons
- 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.
Return on Investment
- It has had a positive impact because prior to Kustomer we were using 3 different tools that did not integrate together.
- Kustomer has allowed us to unify our communication, which saves time and provides greater accountability and easy information access.
- It also has helped us monitor team performance and quality due to the high visibility and open inboxes, which has positively affected our people management and coaching.
Alternatives Considered
Asana, Front, Slack and Talkdesk
Other Software Used
Talkdesk, Slack, Google Drive
