The Sierra alternative with transparent evals and a 50% money-back guarantee.

Sierra does not publish pricing — it's enterprise quote-on-request, typically structured as a multi-year contract with annual minimums. Industry reporting puts the rate in the $0.50–$1.50 per AI-resolved conversation range, but every quote is bespoke. Richpanel publishes a per-conversation rate with seats included in one plan, plus a 50% resolution or money-back guarantee. The transparent rate plus the guarantee is the wedge — most enterprise buyers spend less with Richpanel and have a contractual safety net Sierra doesn't offer.

Sierra is an AI layer designed to sit on top of an existing helpdesk (Zendesk, Salesforce, etc.). Richpanel is a full AI-first helpdesk — agents, knowledge, evals, analytics, multi-brand all in one platform. For teams locked into a legacy helpdesk on a multi-year contract, Sierra's overlay model is convenient short-term but ends up doubling the bill (helpdesk + Sierra). Richpanel collapses both into one platform with the same agentic AI horsepower. Most mid-market enterprise buyers we talk to end up consolidating once the helpdesk contract is up.

Yes. SOC 2 Type II audited, HIPAA audited (Scrut Automation, Dec 2025), and GDPR compliant. Architecture: zero-day retention with the LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic), AES-256 encryption at rest, TLS 1.2+ in transit, PII redaction before any third-party logging. The full trust posture lives at /security and is audit-ready. Reference customers span SaaS, fintech, healthtech, and consumer brands.

Demo call (30 min) — we connect to your help center and a sample of recent tickets, and the AI builds a PoC live on your data while you watch. You see your brand voice, your SOPs, your refund policy reflected in the AI's first responses. Week 1-2 (pilot) — bounded scope, narrow intents, parallel to your existing stack. Shadow mode against live tickets, eval framework exposed to your team, calibrate resolution thresholds, dial confidence. End of week 2 — review pilot metrics with the founders; decision to flip live or extend. Week 3-4 (deployment) — expand intent coverage, integrate the full action surface (refunds, exchanges, account edits), wire analytics. End of week 4 — fully live in production. The 50% resolution in 30 days money-back guarantee starts when you flip live.

Every AI customer service vendor has an internal eval framework that scores hallucination, accuracy, tone, escalation correctness, and policy adherence. Sierra, Decagon, and most enterprise vendors keep this framework opaque to the customer — you see aggregate scores in a dashboard but not the underlying test cases or prompts. Richpanel exposes the full eval framework: every test case is authored by your CX team, every regression is visible, every score is auditable. The CX leader owns the AI quality story rather than being downstream of the vendor's quality story. This is the single most-mentioned reason CX leaders pick Richpanel after a head-to-head bake-off.