Whether you have a SaaS startup, an ecommerce business, or a WordPress site, you know the importance of customer service. Without the right tools, your support team will be scrambling to keep up with requests. Or your customers may not know how to reach out for help in the first place.
With ThriveDesk, you can rest easy knowing you have a simple and affordable help desk solution on hand. Keep reading to learn more about what we like—and don’t like—about ThriveDesk.
ThriveDesk: The Good and the Bad
When it comes to customer support tools, ThriveDesk definitely stands out from the competition for its user-friendly interface, affordability, and versatility.
However, it’s not a perfect solution for businesses with certain needs, and it has limited analytic tools and occasional bugs.
What ThriveDesk Is Good At
Deep WordPress integration: Through WPPortal, ThriveDesk’s WordPress integration, you never have to juggle multiple inboxes and platforms.
Instead, you’re able to centralize customer communications into one intuitive portal where visitors can fire off questions, track previous discussions, and self-serve answers. Real-time visitor monitoring allows your team to see who’s on your site and jump into live chats to provide instant assistance or even configure chatbots to handle FAQs.
The portal also collects lead and contact information, keeping all your customer data in one place and boosting sales at the same time. The unified messaging hub strengthens engagement by meeting visitors where they are.
Wide range of solutions: With ThriveDesk, you can connect with customers through email, the portal, and live chat. This combination of channels creates a broad support strategy that boosts engagement and problem resolution.
For example, you could follow up via email with a customer after they end a live chat session. This continues the conversation and shows you care. If a customer emails a question, you can invite them to a more interactive chat discussion.
The email channel allows customers to write anytime with questions or concerns, while the portal acts as a knowledge base where customers can find quick answers. Live chat enables real-time assistance when customers need it most.
Comprehensive features: ThriveDesk comes packed with features to help your support team collaborate and stay in touch with customers. Advanced formatting options like bold, italics, and lists ensure your messages are clear. Private notes are great for keeping up internal conversations without the customer seeing. Tags help you organize conversations by topic.
With ThriveDesk’s canned responses, you can prepare standardized replies to FAQs and keep them as templates, saving your team tons of time. Or use the shared inbox and many included features to let you handle customer inquiries in one unified place.
If streamlined collaboration, organized conversations, and satisfied customers sound good to you, ThriveDesk is a fantastic choice.
Simple and user-friendly interface: ThriveDesk’s polished design empowers your agents to juggle high volumes of customer requests without losing attention. Onboarding new reps takes minutes rather than days.
The dashboard provides an eagle-eye view of open tickets, monitored metrics, and agent workload. Users can prioritize urgent issues and close out requests swiftly.
Searching the knowledge base for instant answers is a cinch. Plus, new inquiries are automatically routed to the rep best suited to help. Macros allow agents to share instructions in one click. It’s clear that the software is designed for humans, freeing up your agents to have more human connections with customers.
Fantastic customer support: One of the first things you’ll notice when reaching out to the ThriveDesk customer support team is just how quickly they get back to you. By chat, email, or its Discord channel, we never had to wait more than a few minutes for a reply.
Their support reps immediately understood our questions and provided clear guidance. It was refreshing dealing with a company that genuinely cares about each customer’s success.
Reasonable pricing: Compared to the leading help desk competitors, ThriveDesk comes in at a fraction of the price. Yet you still get a robust feature set that covers all the helpdesk basics and then some.
ThriveDesk over-delivers considering its price. All plans include unlimited emails, unlimited live chat, a customizable chat widget, Knowledge Base, and reporting tools.
ThriveDesk also offers flexible plans to fit your needs and special discounts for nonprofits and academic institutions. Whether you’re bootstrapping a startup or running on fumes at your ecommerce store, ThriveDesk has a plan that will fit your budget.
ThriveDesk’s Potential Drawbacks
Limited integrations: With only 17 total integrations, options felt scarce compared to similar help desks boasting more than 50. For instance, we sorely missed a deep Shopify integration. As it stands now, you can’t view customer data or Shopify order details inside tickets. ThriveDesk promises a full Shopify integration soon, but it’s not here yet.
We also wanted to connect ThriveDesk directly to Facebook Messenger for seamless customer conversations, but there’s no native Facebook integration.
Overall, ThriveDesk’s light integration with key platforms was something of a dealbreaker for us. We hope they expand soon to provide the unified experience that modern businesses expect.
Lack of advanced reporting and analytics: While ThriveDesk offers some basic reporting, we found it lacks the customization and detail needed for advanced analytics. As a business owner, you want to slice and dice your data, generating reports tailored to your specific business needs. ThriveDesk falls short for those wanting more than surface-level data.
ThriveDesk won’t allow you to pull the exact data you want. Instead, you have to make do with their generic templates which often contain metrics you don’t need. More graph and visualization choices are needed to spot trends and patterns at a glance.
As your business grows, your data and reporting needs will become more complex. ThriveDesk’s rudimentary capabilities simply won’t evolve as you scale.
Occasional bugs and glitches: We noticed some sporadic issues that disrupted the workflow on ThriveDesk’s user interface. Pages loaded slowly at times, buttons hesitated before responding to clicks, and form submissions stalled mid-process, leaving us in limbo.
These performance hiccups caused some delays, while other features simply failed. Upload processes crashed unexpectedly. Pages refused to save changes. Baffling error messages popped up out of the blue. While relatively rare, these glitches impaired our ability to get work done efficiently.
Thankfully, the polite and receptive customer support team swiftly resolved each issue we reported. Still, these sporadic disruptions left us feeling disappointed in ThriveDesk’s overall stability and polish.
ThriveDesk Plans and Pricing
There are three different transparent pricing plans to choose from on ThriveDesk: Starter, Plus, and Enterprise.
Deciding on the plan for you comes down to choosing the size and complexity of your customer service team. Billing annually will save you 20% on each plan versus paying month-by-month, and every tier comes with a free trial if you need it.
Starter Plan
We highly recommend the Starter plan for early-stage startups, lean ecommerce businesses, and small WordPress teams. It runs for $25 per month when paid annually and $35 month-by-month.
Four included seats and two mailboxes allow your team to collaborate and share the workload of managing customer queries. Live chat with AI-powered assistants provides instant responses to common questions. You also get 10 instant replies.
With this plan, you can set up one knowledge base to curate support articles and set up basic integrations with popular apps like Shopify and WordPress.
Plus Plan
This powerful package is tailored for growing companies who require full-time support staff to provide exceptional service. For $99 per month or an annual subscription of $85 per month, you’ll get 10 seats for your support team. It comes with everything in the Starter plan, and much more.
Five shared mailboxes allow you to segment support by department or product. With two Knowledge Bases, you can create internal and external wikis to document solutions.
The Plus plan also comes with real-time visitor tracking, unlimited instant replies, and canned responses. You can connect ThriveDesk with Zapier, Slack, and other advanced integrations at this level as well.
Enterprise Plan
The Enterprise plan is perfect for scaling companies that need robust customer service software. Go month-to-month for $45 per user, or pay annually at $25 per user per month. The minimum is 10 users, so it works for companies of all sizes.
With the Enterprise plan, your agents get unlimited shared mailboxes and Knowledge Bases, allowing your whole team to access customer communications seamlessly and search for relevant information with ease.
You also have all of ThriveDesk’s Plus features like live chat, help desk, shared team inbox, and automation workflows. Plus, take advantage of extra perks like load balancing, premium integrations with your existing help desk software, and a dedicated account manager.
Final Thoughts
ThriveDesk is a powerful yet easy-to-use customer support platform. Its comprehensive range of features, reasonable price, and deep WordPress integration make it a great choice for startups and ecommerce or WordPress businesses.
However, if you have a Shopify store or need advanced reporting capabilities, we would recommend other alternatives with more extensive integrations.
