What do you dislike about Crisp?
As a customer of 6 years, we unfortunately feel that Crisp is losing focus, afraid to make changes, not responsive to feedback, don't follow up on issues and bugs no matter how detailed they're reported, and sticking with them I fear will put us behind in the AI race.
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AI:
Crisp's adoption of AI, in such a vital field where even early on it was clear that it'd redefine how we do customer support, has unfortunately been slow, plauged by poor decisions such as training their own AI model for over a year, which underperformed and ultimately was seemingly - for now at least - scrapped, reworking and launching "competing" and non-complementary AI features - of which we now count 3;
- The "Copilot", which - at least in our case - doesn't work (reported multiple times with no solution in sight)
- The "MagicReply" rollout, which never ended up delivering on the promises even still made on the Crisp website; it's clunky, has, in our case, not helped even once, was never and still is not even implemented in their own mobile app, and isn't in any way "hooked up" to or integrated with their latest AI rollout...;
- "Hugo" - finally the AI Agent that was promised and advertised as sort of achievable with the "Bot" workflows: we helped beta-test this for quite many months before the official rollout, and were happy to be included in the beta. But, even after the beta there are a multitude of bugs that aren't being fixed or addressed, though reported in great detail multiple times, and unfortunately, as with a lot of the new features added to Crisp, their own new flagship feature feels like a "guest" in their UI... It feels almost like a third-party add-on - it's just not very well-integrated into the platform. Up until a few weeks ago one couldn't manually trigger the AI bot to take over a conversation - which was often necessary given it just gave up or didn't reply in the first place a lot of the time.
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The general platform:
It's evident that Crisp is built by developers - that's usually something I like and admire in a product - my company's platform is too! But, it seems in the quest to make their platform dynamic, agile and easy to develop new features for, they've dug a hole for themselves that result in an, at times, poor user-experience.
Almost all Crisp features are, for some reasons, "Plugins". Their core features are shown side by side with various third-party plugins. Want to change a setting? Well go to "Settings" - oh, unless it's a setting for the look of the AI chatbox - *that* is a plugin, and to change the colors, welcome text, position, etc., you don't go to "Settings > Chatbox Settings > Chatbox Appearance" - here you only find *half* the chatbox settings - the other half you find in Plugins > Customization for some reason.
Now, this is a bit nit-pickity, as after 6 years we *do* know our way around the Crisp UI - even if we have to find half the settings in odd places, and at times do forget and wonder "Where the hell did they put this...?" - but, this goes and cuts a deeper rift in the user experience, as it's not just the wording and placement that is weird - once a core feature that is a plugin is activated, it still *feels like a plugin*.
The core Crisp platform, beyond a - sure, nice - UI update not too long ago, hasn't changed much. The new AI features? They're not changing anything in the UI, not capitalizing on the free space in the UI, they don't - in _any_ way show up the conversation flow - it's all hidden in sub-menus burried below up to 10 collapsible sidebar items, or elsehow hidden behind 3, 4, 5 clicks: it doesn't feel like a part of the platform, it feels like an afterthought - and of course, it is. It is an afterthought - it was added many years after the platform was built. But that doesn't have to mean the main UI can't change when something as fundamentally disruptive as AI comes along - something Crisp, when it comes to marketing, *does* seem to realize the impact and importance of; it just feels like the focus on AI is 90% marketing, 10% implementation, and as a long-time customer, it feels like we're losing out and that we haven't picked the winning horse.
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The Helpdesk:
A feature we *loved* the first, second and sure, even third year - but after four, five and now six years, it hasn't changed a bit. The search is so clunky that even I, who wrote 90% of our articles, can't find articles, instead having to Google them. No AI is built in, no sign of AI translations even, not much change in terms of UI, and the editor is evidently home-cooked, clunky, and filled with bugs and poor parsing of Markdown that goes against the Markdown specification, which results in tables being something we often just give up on, formatting with italic *and* bold? Forget it. [Mark too much text ] and try to make that bold? Well now it breaks all the formatting because you also marked that little "space" at the end... We have reported this multiple times, we stick to just writing stock Markdown rather than using their rich-editor, but alas every time we open the editor it starts in the "Rich-edit" format, which messes up the entire formatting even if we don't save and go straight to manual markdown. This means we have some articles we simply don't open. We have internal notes on the whiteboard at the office saying "Do not open article [x], [y] and [z]"... Lastly, we've resorted to create all our Helpdesk articles with Claude and the Crisp API instead to avoid these issues.
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The mobile app:
While the Crisp mobile app has gotten better, it's been an uphill battle. As a startup, we often utilized Crisp at all hours of the day where one might not have access to a computer. Unfortunately, for many years the experience with the Crisp app - if it even worked - was just not great. Today, it's better, but it still lacks almost all new features Crisp has shipped the last two years: no way to trigger Hugo conversations, there's no AI implemented in the app at all (arguably it's the place you need it the most; when you don't have a computer with a keyboard in front of you).
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The "Status page":
Though our plan comes with the "Status page" plugin, we've always opted for third-party solutions - even though this means less well-integrated status in the Crisp widget, which would otherwise be able to nicely show the platform status and use it as context for the AI (I think). It's just... Not user-friendly. The status page talks about "Nodes" and "Replicas", showing in a format echoed by no other status page on the market - almost nothing feels familiar, the core functions of general uptime percentage missing, leading even my company of developers to say "What the heck am I even looking at". In my opinion, it's just not usable. Now this is not a core feature of Crisp, but a pattern begins to present itself: the more half-baked solutions they make, the more the platform as a whole suffers. The status page seems to be an open source side project by the CTO called "Vigil" on GitHub, and while the effort and the fact that it's open source is commendable, as customers who have 4 pending bug reports that are bumped and not followed up on, as customers who wish for better implementation of core features, fewer clicks and more time saved for operators, also maintaining a status page, which probably should be a separate product - it is for Uptimerobot and so many others.
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Their support:
Unfortunately, for a company that makes a customer support platform, we've always, since day one, found that 90% of our conversations with Crisp support have been unhelpful, at times infuriating, and almost always felt a lack of understanding, having to repeat ourselves sometimes to 5 different employees in the span of just a few minutes, having to repeat bug reports, answer the same questions asked by different people, and being treated, even after all these years, as "any other new customer", though the people we've chatted with should know by now that we know our stuff, when we report bugs and say that we've "... checked the Network tab in DevTools and see [x]", that giving us the standard "Have you tried clearing your cache", just because it's item #1 in the "Support guidelines", is a waste of time, in time comes off as patronizing but most of all, it's just *inefficient* - and that is the one word I'd use to describe the support in Crisp: inefficient.
Their platform gives them all the tools - we know, we use them - to add notes, segments and prior context: why I have to answer the same question now to a third employee for the second day in a row, just to report one bug is infuriating and it comes off as a lack of respect for their customers and their time. When handing them a bug on a silver platter with all the details they could dream of, if we don't hear back on it and we bump them a few weeks later, we're asked to repeat it, to provide links again, the same context - which could be avoided by either Crisp support scrolling up just a few messages, or by the bug not being forgotten about for weeks. We're asked to send a "temporary debug link" - oh well we have to resend it the next day as it has now expired and they didn't get a chance to look at it. I really really want to keep loving Crisp, and it's easier to when it works, but they're not an easy company to love when it doesn't - and right now, it just doesn't.
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In conclusion:
In our brutally honest opinion, which we have tried to offer Crisp in a constructive way in their chat multiple times, Crisp currently does not do their core function of providing a modern support platform, to be able to "afford" chasing side-quests, status pages and training their own AI models: the fundamentals have to work first, and for us, it just does not. Which saddnes me, as we've stood by Crisp for 6 years, provided feedback, been in beta programs, left reviews online, referred customers to them and provided detailed bug reports by developers, for developers. In the end, I feel the customer is being forgotten. It may just be that we're too small a fish, but our feedback has been met with unresponsiveness, our current fundamental issues with the direction of the platform met with shallow "Thanks for your feedback" messages, and as we today spend too much time trying to improve on Crisp by using their APIs, building flows in "Zapier", we've felt saddened but forced to look for other solutions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
