14 Companies That Switched From Zendesk to Kustomer (And What Happened Next)
Every week, someone on Reddit asks the same question: is it worth switching from Zendesk? The answers are usually vague or anecdotal, with many complaints about pricing and recommendations lacking context. Nobody backs it up with actual numbers, and the thread moves on before anyone gets a real answer.
So instead of another opinion, here are stories from 14 real companies that made the switch, what was breaking for them on Zendesk, and what changed after they moved to Kustomer. Real industries, real employee counts, real stats pulled straight from their case studies. No hypotheticals.
The short version: companies including Turo, Yummy, Jerome's Furniture, and 11 others have left Zendesk for Kustomer, citing rising per-agent costs and a ticket-based model that doesn't hold customer context across channels. The result, on average across the companies with published stats below: faster first response times, lower cost per contact, and measurably higher CSAT.
| Company | Industry | Headline result |
|---|---|---|
| Jerome's Furniture | Retail | Customer inquiries down 50% |
| Yummy | Technology (LATAM) | First response time up 80% |
| Bulletproof | Retail | Handle time down 50%, CSAT +15pt |
| Aplazo | Consumer Services (LATAM) | CSAT +40%, automation +36% |
| MeUndies | eCommerce | Inbound chat +83%, 2x efficiency |
| Everlane | eCommerce | Agent hours -25%, AI deflection 4x |
| Hexclad | eCommerce | AOV +$100, CLV +21% |
| Terra Kaffe | Consumer Services | Mid-90s CSAT, 100% visibility |
| HopSkipDrive | Technology | Improved agent productivity |
| Turo | Travel | Ticket-based CRM → conversational platform |
| Lulus | Retail | Faster response, AI-powered agent tools |
| Caraway | Retail | Proved agent-generated revenue |
| Coterie Baby | Consumer Services | Agentic AI for order management |
| Smalls | Retail | Increased agent performance visibility |
Why Companies Actually Leave Zendesk
The pattern across all 14 of these stories isn't pricing, even though that comes up. It's architecture.
Zendesk was built around tickets: closed, categorized, routed, and reopened only when something goes wrong. That works fine when support means "answer requests as they come in, one at a time." It breaks down the moment a customer's history needs to travel with them, across channels, across teams, across months. A support platform built for case volume and a support platform built for customer relationships are not the same product, even when they're solving what looks like the same problem on the surface.
The companies below hit that wall in different ways. A furniture retailer watched duplicate requests pile up because agents couldn't see what a customer had already asked, so the same issue got logged, answered, and escalated multiple times by different people. A Latin American super app needed to move at a completely different speed than a legacy, ticket-based system was ever built for. A DTC cookware brand needed its support data connected to actual revenue outcomes, not stuck in a queue that nobody outside the support team ever looked at. A fintech company needed AI to carry real volume on WhatsApp without losing the judgment calls that only a human should make. It's the same pricing complexity and structural tradeoffs that show up across nearly every Zendesk review, just playing out differently depending on the size and shape of the team.
What they had in common: they needed a platform built around the customer, not the case number. Here's what happened when they made the move.
1. Jerome's Furniture
Industry: Retail
Jerome's Furniture transformed its customer experience by centralizing conversations and integrating Kustomer directly with its point-of-sale system. Before the switch, agents were fielding the same request multiple times because nothing tied a customer's full history together in one place, a problem that compounds, not improves, as a support team scales past a few hundred people across multiple store locations. Senior Director Marjorie Carlos led the shift, and the cultural change inside the team mattered as much as the technical one: agents went from managing isolated cases to managing actual customer relationships.
- Customer inquiries down 50%
- Cost per contact down 40%
- Average speed to answer down 97%
2. Yummy
Industry: Technology (LATAM super app)
Yummy is one of Latin America's fastest-growing super apps, and its support volume was scaling faster than a legacy, ticket-based system could reasonably keep up with. Moving to Kustomer gave the team a single view across every channel instead of a patchwork of disconnected queues that agents had to check separately. The switch touched nearly every measurable part of the support operation at once, from how fast a customer got a first reply to how satisfied they were by the end of the conversation.
- First response time improved 80%
- Average resolution time down 42%
- Customer satisfaction scores at 90%+
3. Bulletproof
Industry: Retail
Bulletproof paired Kustomer with an Amazon Connect integration to bring phone support into the same unified timeline as chat and email, something that's genuinely difficult to do cleanly inside a traditional ticketing tool. The result wasn't just faster handle times. It was a direct, measurable drop in what every single customer contact costs the business, which is the kind of number that gets a support team a seat at the budget conversation.
- Average handle time down 50%
- CSAT up 15 points
- Cost per contact down $4
4. Aplazo
Industry: Consumer Services (LATAM BNPL)
Aplazo, a buy-now-pay-later platform scaling rapidly across Mexico, needed to automate high-volume, repetitive questions on WhatsApp and in-app chat without losing the human judgment that fintech support requires when money is involved. Kustomer AI took on the general-information volume; agents kept the calls that actually needed a person. That balance is the part most companies get wrong when they bolt AI onto an existing ticketing tool instead of building automation into the platform from the start.
- CSAT improved 40%+ on general inquiries
- Automation now handles 36% of total inquiry volume
5. MeUndies
Industry: eCommerce
MeUndies needed its support team to keep pace with a DTC brand's chat-heavy customer base without doubling headcount every time volume spiked around a launch or a sale. Consolidating onto Kustomer let the team absorb a massive jump in chat volume while actually getting more efficient, not less, which is the opposite of what usually happens when a channel that intimate and immediate scales fast.
- Inbound chat volume up 83%
- Team efficiency roughly doubled
6. Everlane
Industry: eCommerce
Everlane wanted AI to actually carry weight inside its support operation instead of sitting on top of it as a bolt-on chatbot that could only handle the simplest, most scripted questions. With Kustomer AI built into the core workflow and a full 360-degree view of each customer through the Kustomer Timeline, the team quadrupled how much they could automate without customers noticing a drop in quality or a colder, more robotic experience.
- Agent hours saved: 25%
- AI-driven deflection increased 4x
- Full 360-degree customer view via Kustomer Timeline
7. Hexclad
Industry: eCommerce
Hexclad, the cookware brand known for its cast-iron and nonstick hybrid pans, used Kustomer to turn support into a driver of customer loyalty instead of a cost center that only shows up on a spreadsheet as an expense. Personalized service, backed by full order and conversation history instead of a case number with no context, translated directly into bigger baskets and customers who stuck around longer.
- Average order value up $100
- Customer lifetime value up 21%
8. Terra Kaffe
Industry: Consumer Services
Terra Kaffe, a luxury coffee machine manufacturer, switched off Zendesk for one core reason: visibility. Support agents couldn't see the full customer journey from purchase through every conversation that followed, which meant every interaction effectively started from zero, no matter how many times that customer had already reached out. Kustomer gave the team that missing context back, so agents could provide the kind of high-touch, informed service that matches the price point of a luxury appliance brand.
- CSAT scores in the mid-90s
- 100% visibility into the customer journey
9. HopSkipDrive
Industry: Technology
HopSkipDrive uses Kustomer's analytics and omnichannel timeline view to improve agent productivity across a support operation where trust and safety are non-negotiable, given the nature of the service. The unified view replaced a fragmented, case-by-case way of tracking customer and driver relationships, giving the team increased visibility and analytics on both satisfaction and how often the same customer needed to come back for help, information that used to be scattered across separate, disconnected records.
10. Turo
Industry: Travel
Turo's COO Julie described the shift plainly: moving off a ticket-based CRM and onto a conversational platform transformed how the entire customer operation worked, not just the support team's day-to-day. Unifying phone, chat, and digital channels into one view gave agents the context to handle both guest and host issues without switching tools mid-conversation, and turned raw customer data into insights the broader business could actually act on, rather than information that stayed locked inside the support tool.
11. Lulus
Industry: Retail
Lulus Senior Manager of Customer Service Tiffany Steinberg has talked publicly about how AI is reshaping retail support, but only when it's paired with a customer-first platform instead of layered on top of a legacy, ticket-based one as an afterthought. Combining that platform with AI-powered insights and agent tools let the team respond faster and stay genuinely present in each conversation, instead of managing a queue of case numbers waiting to be closed out.
12. Caraway
Industry: Retail
Caraway Home was juggling multiple separate support tools before consolidating onto a single omnichannel platform with open API access and modern integrations. Better routing and tighter community collaboration pushed average order value up, but the bigger shift was what that unlocked: for the first time, the CX team could actually prove agent-generated revenue, connecting customer experience work directly to dollars instead of reporting only on response times that nobody outside the department cared much about.
13. Coterie Baby
Industry: Consumer Services
Coterie Baby's team uses agentic AI for order management and automated dashboards built on connected data systems that used to require manual reconciliation every time a customer's order status changed. For a lean team of 50, that's the difference between keeping pace with customer volume and quietly falling behind it, since there's no large support org to absorb the extra manual work a fragmented system creates.
14. Smalls
Industry: Retail
Smalls, the fresh pet food brand, needed to scale customer experience without losing the personal, pet-parent-to-pet-parent touch that built its customer base in the first place. Kustomer's unified data and streamlined workflows gave the team increased visibility into agent performance and faster response times, driving overall CX operational efficiency while the brand grew nationwide, without sacrificing the personalization that made the support experience feel human in the first place.
The Common Thread
None of these companies switched because Zendesk stopped working entirely. They switched because it stopped being enough.
A ticket queue can answer a customer's question. It can't tell an agent what that customer bought last month, which channel they prefer, or whether they've already asked this same question twice this week through two different channels. That's the actual difference between a ticket-based system and a platform built around the customer relationship: one closes cases, the other builds context that carries forward.
Look across the 14 companies above and a few groupings show up. The high-volume DTC and retail brands (MeUndies, Everlane, Hexclad, Bulletproof, Smalls) leaned hardest on AI-driven deflection and unified channels to keep pace with chat and social volume without proportionally growing headcount. The larger, more complex operations (Jerome's Furniture, Turo, Lulus) needed the platform to connect to other systems entirely, a point-of-sale system, a multi-sided marketplace, a broader retail data stack, not just handle conversations in isolation. And the LATAM fintech and super app companies (Yummy, Aplazo) needed AI that could carry real volume in a regulated, trust-sensitive environment without losing the human layer customers still expect when something goes wrong with their money or their order.
Different starting points, same ending point: support that compounds, where every conversation makes the next one easier instead of starting over from a blank case number. None of them describe the switch as a one-time fix, either. The gains kept showing up months later, as more of the customer relationship data accumulated in one place instead of being scattered across tools.
How to Tell if You're Actually Ready to Switch
Not every team on Zendesk needs to leave. If your support volume is low, your channel mix is simple, and nobody on the team can point to a specific moment where the tool got in the way, switching platforms is a distraction, not a fix. The 14 companies above all had something more concrete going on: a specific, named problem that a ticket-based system structurally could not solve, no matter how many workflows or add-ons got layered on top of it.
A few honest questions worth asking before you start evaluating alternatives seriously:
- Can an agent see a customer's full history, across every channel, without opening five tabs or asking the customer to repeat themselves?
- Is your cost per contact going up as volume grows, instead of down?
- Are you paying for AI features that still require a human to do most of the actual work?
- Does closing a case feel like the goal, or does keeping the customer relationship healthy feel like the goal?
If two or more of those questions made you wince, that's roughly where every company on this list started.
If you're evaluating whether to make the same move, see the full Kustomer vs. Zendesk feature-by-feature comparison before you talk to sales. And if you want to see the wider field first, here's a full breakdown of the top 20 Zendesk alternatives on the market right now.
