Quick Overview

This article compares two tools that enhance customer support quality: Parnidia and Zendesk. The article identifies the key differences between these tools, one of which is a service, while the other is a platform.

Taking into account the differences, this article finds that using Parnidia companies can save up to 45,060.24€ per year. It also dives deeper into comparing implementation efforts, functionalities, and what role your Customer Service human agents would have when using these tools.

This article follows a narrative that there is no better tool. Instead, both tools have different purposes; therefore are a perfect fit for different types of companies.

Introduction

Every business that serves clients also provides Customer Service. Some companies receive a large number of inquiries across multiple channels, while others receive just a few. Some companies need to hire a full team of Customer Support Agents, while other companies need just a few people. Some people receive repetitive questions all day long, while others receive complex one-off questions. But at the end of the day, everyone has to care about their clients; otherwise, you are hurting your business.

Founded in Denmark in 2007, Zendesk was one of the pioneers in helping companies solve one of their fundamental problems- managing and tracking customer inquiries. Over the years, Zendesk grew from being just a ticketing system to offering an all-in-one customer service platform with the primary goal of making the job of Customer Support Agents as convenient as possible.

On the other hand, in 2024, the founders of Parnidia saw the potential of automating Customer Service altogether using Artificial Intelligence (AI). As many bigger e-commerce companies have been facing a constant flood of repetitive inquiries all day long, Parnidia was one of the first in Lithuania to develop AI assistants that would handle these inquiries 24/7.

While both Parnidia and Zendesk compete for companies to handle their customer support, it is important to note that both tools use different approaches, thus they serve different categories of businesses. It is the goal of the reader to understand which tools better suit them based on their budget, team size, and goals.

The Fundamental Difference: Hiring a Chef vs. Buying a Professional Kitchen

This analogy very well depicts the difference between Parnidia (the Chef) and Zendesk (the Kitchen).

Parnidia (the Chef)

As mentioned in the introduction, Parnidia offers AI solutions. Like a hired chef would come to your house, prepare, cook, and present you with the finished meal, Parnidia would do the same, working with the website, preparing the knowledge base and the workflows, installing the AI chatbot, and leaving you with the finished product.

Zendesk (the professional kitchen)

As with Parnidia, you would get the already prepared product, with Zendesk, you would be provided with all the new and shiny tools (the kitchen) required to prepare it by yourself. Of course, some individuals may enjoy the challenge of figuring out the process independently, but it's crucial to recognize that developing such workflows demands specialized knowledge and experience, and, most importantly, considerable time. As a business, you need to assess if you have time to fiddle around in “the kitchen”.

While the Chef vs. the Professional Kitchen analogy looks fun, beneath it lies the core difference between Parnidia and Zendesk. Parnidia is a Service, while Zendesk is a Platform. This difference is significant because it’s one of the key factors when comparing the prices.

Head-to-Head Comparison. The Key Decision Factors

Let us take a closer look at each section.

Total Cost of Ownership

Let's take an example of the Home by NB case study. Home by NB is a Lithuanian eCommerce business receiving 707 monthly conversations via Parnidia’s AI assistant. With the current accuracy of 81.72% (the industry norm is 80%), the AI agent correctly answers 578 conversations.

Accurate answers: 707 x 81.72% = 578 conversations per month.
Annual Parnidia’s AI chatbot cost: €1,995€ + 300€ x 12 =  5,595€

Subsequent years' cost of Parnidia’s AI chatbot: 300€ x 12 = 3,600€

Compare it with the numbers of Zendesk. Let's say a company purchases the cheapest plan “Suite Team” which costs 47€, intending to automate every message. This plan includes only 5 free Automated Responses by AI. Each extra conversation costs 1.28€

Included AI Conversations: Only 5 per month.
Additional Conversations Needed: 578 (total) - 5 (included) = 573

Monthly AI Usage Cost: 573 conversations × 1.28€/conversation = 733.33€

Total Monthly Software Cost: 47€ (plan) + 733.33€ (AI usage) = 780.33€
Total Annual Software Cost: 780.33€ x 12 = 9,363.96€

This shows that if Home by NB would like to automate their Customer Support by implementing Zendesk’s AI agents, it would cost them 9,363.96€. Now let’s see how the price compares if the business were to switch to the Parnidia solution, which costs 5,595€ in the first year and 3,600€ subsequently.

First year savings when using Parnidia = 9,363.96€ - 5,595€ = 3,768.96€

Subsequent years savings when using Parnidia = 9,363.96€ - 3,600€ = 5,763.96€

On the other hand, since Zendesk is a Human-centric platform, there is a high chance that a client of Zendesk would not use the AI agent plan and rely on a human agent to manage all 578 conversations.

Let’s calculate how much it would cost for a company to employ a human agent. In this calculation, the gross average wage of Customer Support agents working in e-commerce businesses located in Europe and North America was taken.

Customer service specialist salary: 4,055.02€

Total Annual Salary Cost: 4,055.02€ × 12 months = 48,660.24€

First year savings when using Parnidia = 48,660.24€ - 5,595€ = 43,065.24€

Subsequent years savings when using Parnidia = 27,583€ - 3,600€ = 45,060.24€

Overall, as seen by these comparisons, relying upon Customer Service to AI agents decreases the costs significantly, but Parnidia has much lower costs due to being able to handle more conversations per month. It is also important to note that Human Agents might still operate the Zendesk platform even if AI Agents are running, thus increasing the costs by 48,660.24€ per year. No additional Zendesk add-ons have been included in the calculation, which could also impact the cost.

Implementation & Effort

As the analogy of the Chef and the Kitchen suggests, Parnidia’s team handles everything themselves. They prepare the knowledge base, build the logic behind the workflows, do the quality assurance, and deploy the AI chatbot straight to your website. There is minimal time and effort required from the client - a maximum of 2 hours of testing during the integration process. You don’t need to be an AI prompt engineering expert or invest hundreds of hours just to have an AI assistant handle Customer Support for you.

On the other hand, companies that choose Zendesk are left to build workflows by themselves. While Zendesk provides a no-code drag-and-drop building option, it still would require employees' time, training, and technical expertise.

Scope of Functionality

Parnidia is focused purely on providing a high-quality conversational AI for eCommerce businesses, clinics, and Software as a Service (SaaS) companies. Its goal is to help companies that are getting a lot of repetitive questions and can easily be automated (e.g., “Where is my order?”, “What are the return policies?”, “How much does it cost to ship it?, etc).
As some businesses receive hundreds of questions like this per month, handing them to AI leaves human agents able to work on more meaningful tasks.

Besides the automated answers, Parnidia’s AI assistant can make product recommendations, track orders, help register patients, and answer FAQ sections.

As mentioned in the introduction, Zendesk is offering an all-in-one Customer Service platform. For companies that have a large team of Customer Support agents and receive a lot of unique problems that the customers face, Zendesk provides the ability to ticket these problems, track them in a CRM, analyze efficiency, and access thousands of apps and integrations.

There is no doubt that Zendesk covers more ground in the Customer Service field, although the primary use is different for both tools.

Building tools

Being the premium experts of Voiceflow, Parnidia relies on this tool. It is a specialized platform for designing, prototyping, and building sophisticated conversational AI agents. Voiceflow allows its customers to connect their own powerful AI models like GPT-4, Claude, Llama, etc, instead of relying on what is given.

When it comes to Zendesk, it has a feature called Zendesk Flow Builder made to deflect common tickets and guide users. Being from Zendesk’s ecosystem, it is only accessible to Zendesk users. While it has AI features, you will only be able to use Zendesk’s proprietary AI and will not be able to connect other AI models.

While on the surface, both tools are made to look as intuitive as possible, underneath, you will find that complex workflows require more time and more knowledge. While it may take 15 minutes to set up a simple workflow that answers the operating hours of the business, building more complex workflows on Zendesk will require either careful planning (to map out the logic behind the questions and answers) or a even a developer (to set up the APIs, handle authentications, and read and interpret the data that comes back).

To be fair, Voiceflow is as complex as Zendesk’s Flow Builder, if not even more complex. But that is completely understandable, as Voiceflow is a building tool used by dedicated Conversation Designers, AI Product Managers, and Developers, not Customer Support Managers and business owners- the target audience for Zendesk’s solutions.

As mentioned above, Parnidia focuses on providing high-quality conversational AI assistants; on the other hand, it is very hard or even impossible to build a workflow on Flow builder that would be good in context switching. If a customer is in the middle of a "Track My Order" flow and suddenly asks, "By the way, what's your return policy?", a simple flow will break. It can't remember the original request, handle the new one, and then return to the first task.

To put it in simple terms, Zendesk is a great solution for all-around customer service solutions, but you will get stuck quickly when trying to build workflows that extend their complexity beyond just providing working hours for your business.

With Voiceflow, you are getting a tool that is specifically designed for building conversational AI chatbots. With the help of developers like Parnidia, you will get a convenient solution without needing to spend time and high costs for in-house development.

Operational Model

The primary goal of Parnidia is to turn Customer Service into an autonomous operation with AI agents by automating the previously mentioned recurring inquiries. This frees up humans from monotonous work, allowing them to shift their focus to more significant tasks within the company. On the other hand, automating Customer Support can reduce the headcount and result in lower costs for the business.
Before switching to Parnidia, some business owners would be replying to messages over on Messenger, while others would use outsourced Customer Service solutions. This would lead to tiredness, fatigue, or paying extra for others.

While there is always an option to outsource your customer service, it is not the cheapest option. Let’s come back to the Home by NB case. Home by NB would save a total of 1,471.8 hours per year using Parnidia’s solution. That shows how many hours of work there would be for outsourced human agents. A realistic rate for a skilled agent from a cost-effective but reputable region (e.g., Eastern Europe, the Philippines) typically falls between 13.8€ and 23€ per hour. The average comes down to 18€ per year. This would lead to the company paying 26,492.4€ per year to outsource their customer service.

‍Saved hours per year using Parnidia: 1,471.8 hours
Salary range of outsourced agents: 13.8€ - 23€ per hour

The total average cost of outsourcing CS: 1,471.8 hours * (13.8€ + 23€ / 2) = 26,492.4€

While outsourcing your Customer Support may cost you less than employing an in-house team, the hidden costs of buying a seat on Zendesk, onboarding, training, managing, and doing quality assurance can accumulate to another 10,000€ per year or even more.

On the contrary, Zendesk is designed to augment a human agent. As the platform is human-centric, it puts the human agents in the driving seat of Customer Support. Some add-ons and extra features can lead to automated conversations, but automating nearly 600 conversations per month can result in huge monthly costs, as calculated above.

‍Conclusion: What Are You Buying?

Who Should Choose Parnidia?

Based on the analysis above, Parnidia should be chosen by companies that:

• Want a “set it and forget it” solution.
• Don’t have a dedicated IT or customer support team with knowledge of how to build AI workflows.
• Want a predictable, fixed monthly cost for automation.
• Primarily focused on automating a high volume of repetitive conversations to reduce costs.
• Want to increase e-commerce sales, as the AI assistant would recommend products based on identified customer needs, and capture lead information.

Who Should Choose Zendesk?

As for Zendesk, it should be chosen by companies that:

• Receive a high number of one-of-a-kind problems from customers
• Look for an all-in-one platform to manage ticketing, CRM, and support channels.
• Have an in-house staff who have the time and skill to build and maintain their custom AI workflows.
• Want AI to augment humans and not to replace them completely.

‍Choose the tool that fits you the best

While both Parnidia and Zendesk are trying to improve Customer Service quality for their clients, they are doing it in different ways. One tool is a better fit for some companies, while the other one is a better fit for other companies.

In the end, it boils down to the company itself to evaluate its internal resources, budget, and primary goals, to be able to confidently decide whether the managed service of Parnidia or the comprehensive platform of Zendesk is the right strategic investment for the business.