The alternative to Zendesk
Your Zendesk AI was sold at up to 80%. Most teams we meet are living at 10 to 20%.
It answers from your help center. It does not read the order, check the policy or take the action, so the ticket still lands on a person. Richpanel resolves 50% of your conversations in 30 days, in writing, or you get your money back.
30-minute proof of concept · 2-week pilot · full deployment in 4 weeks
Your team manages the AI.
The AI manages the operation.
Brands that run customer service on Richpanel
The AI is no longer the hard part. Running it is.
Every reliable AI operation needs instructions, customer context, tool access, permissions, tests, guardrails, escalation behavior, QA and continuous improvement. On most platforms that becomes a permanent job for the CX team.
The reply is the smallest part of the system.
An AI that manages the AI. The setup is self-improving.
You do not get another set of builders to configure. You get an AI team that sets itself up, watches its own work, and fixes what it gets wrong.
CX Manager AI builds the operation
Reads your ticket history and policies, drafts the SOPs, connects the tools, sets the limits and tests every change.
Customer AI completes the work
Understands the request, gathers the customer, order and account context, and performs only the actions it is permitted to.
Agent AI prepares the exceptions
Pulls the facts, checks the policy and queues the action for one-click approval by a person.
QA AI reviews every outcome
Finds the misses, identifies the cause and hands the required fix back to the manager.
Write the policy. Don’t draw the conversation.
Flow builders assume customers follow branches you predicted in advance. Real conversations carry several requests, change direction halfway through, and depend on facts that only appear once the account is open.
When a subscriber asks to cancel, check the delivery schedule before you answer.
If the boxes are piling up, offer to skip the next one or space the deliveries further apart. That is usually the whole problem.
If it is a money thing, offer the smaller size instead.
If they say no a second time, just cancel it. Never argue, and never more than two offers.
Anything about an allergy or a reaction goes straight to a person.
Policies stay simple. Conversations are allowed to stay messy.
Watch one messy ticket become a finished outcome.
The same conversation moves through understanding, context, policy, preparation, guardrails and completion. No workflow branches.
Maya Chen
Subscriber, 14 months · Order #38291Give the AI autonomy one action at a time.
Lookups run on their own. Anything that moves money or edits an order waits for a person until you decide otherwise. Hard-stop topics always go to a human.
Risky decisions are checked before the customer sees them.
Most QA tells you what went wrong after the damage is done. Richpanel challenges the decision while the conversation is still open.
Before launch, the same policies are tested against thousands of situations drawn from your own ticket history.
Every miss becomes a tested fix.
QA AI reviews resolved and escalated conversations and identifies whether the failure came from a missing tool, a policy gap, a knowledge gap or tone drift. CX Manager AI proposes the correction and tests it against your historical conversations before publishing. Nobody on your team writes it.
On the tickets that still need a person, nine steps become two.
Routine conversations never reach the queue. The exceptions arrive with the context gathered, the policy checked and the action already prepared.
An escalation should take seconds to review. Not minutes to reconstruct.
Don’t optimize for a closed ticket. Optimize for the right outcome.
A deflected ticket ends in a self-serve cancellation link. A resolved one ends in an exchange, a skipped delivery or a subscription that is still running next month.
Cancellation becomes a skip.
Check the delivery schedule, understand why the customer wants out, and offer the right save before the subscription ends.
Return becomes an exchange.
Offer the replacement product or bonus store credit before the money leaves the brand.
Tracking becomes resolution.
Check the actual shipment, replace it when it is genuinely lost, and tell the customer once the action is done.
Give the customer a reason not to take the money back.
Richpanel turns a $79.99 return into $84.99 of exchange credit and keeps the spend inside the brand. The same AI that closes the conversation protects the order.
AI is only useful when the operating numbers move.
fewer tickets on one portfolio brand
Three brands moved across with zero migration issues.
lower cost per ticket
About $500K back every year while CSAT climbed from 88% to 96%.
agents, with volume flat or up
Helpdesk, self-service portal and agent copilot in one system.
Individual brand results. We will model yours live on the demo.
Compare who does the work, not who has the longer feature list.
Both products can use AI. The difference is who sets it up, who operates it, and who improves it every week.
| Question | Zendesk | Richpanel |
|---|---|---|
| Can the AI answer customers? | Yes. AI agents answer from configured knowledge and procedures. | Yes. Customer AI answers using customer, order and policy context. |
| Can the AI take actions? | Yes. Through actions, integrations and flows your team configures. | Yes. Through native commerce tools and granular permissions. |
| Who sets up the use cases? | Your admins, consultants or partners configure the agents, procedures, actions and integrations. | CX Manager AI drafts the setup, the simulations and the operating instructions. Your team approves. |
| Who finds the failures? | Reporting and QA surface issues for your team to diagnose. | QA AI identifies the cause and feeds the fix back to CX Manager AI. |
| Who implements the improvements? | Your team updates the configuration. | CX Manager AI proposes the change and tests it against your history before publishing. |
| Best fit | Broad enterprise service operations that want a deeply configurable platform. | Teams that want a high resolution rate without building an internal AI operations function. |
See what the operating model could save you.
Every assumption is editable. The point is not to win on a hidden price. It is to put seats, add-ons, AI usage and team capacity in one place.
Zendesk estimate, monthlyZendesk side models Suite Professional at $115 per seat, Copilot at $50 and Quality Assurance at $35, which is the $200 default above, plus an illustrative $1.50 per AI resolution. Zendesk now quotes resolution allowances by tier, so replace the estimate with your own quote. Richpanel uses the published $99 seat and roughly $0.20 per AI-resolved conversation. List prices on annual billing, accessed August 2026.
Switch from Zendesk without downtime.
Zendesk keeps serving your customers while Richpanel is built and tested. You cut over once, after you have seen the results.
We rebuild your setup.
Tickets, macros, tags, routing rules, SLAs, automations and integrations come across. You do not start from a blank account.
We replay your own tickets.
Before anything reaches a customer, the AI is tested on thousands of your past conversations, so you see what it would have resolved and where it would have escalated.
Zendesk stays live.
Real tickets keep flowing through your current helpdesk while we build and verify Richpanel. Customers and agents keep working normally.
You switch on sign-off.
We verify the data, train your team, and you review the results. Nothing is cancelled until you say so.
Zendesk, answered honestly.
50% resolved in 30 days, or your money back.
We migrate you at no charge and buy out up to 100% of your remaining Zendesk contract.
Don’t switch on a promise.
Test Richpanel on your own tickets.
We will analyze your Zendesk conversations, show you which ones Richpanel would resolve, identify the missing policies or tools, and map the operational impact.
30-minute proof of concept2-week pilotlive in 4 weeksSOC 2 and HIPAA audited