Intercom vs Zendesk: Which One is Right for Your Business?

Intercom is more for improving sales cycle and customer relationships, while Zendesk has everything a customer support representative can dream about, but it does lack wide email functionality. On the other hand, it provides call center functionalities, unlike Intercom. Overall, I actually liked Zendesk’s user experience better than Intercom’s in terms of its messaging dashboard.

To begin, both platforms have large knowledge bases that cover a lot of different topics and commonly asked questions. These tools are like self-help books; they let people solve common problems on their own. The knowledge bases are usually well-organized and changed on a regular basis, so users can always find the most up-to-date and useful information. You would rather have to integrate it with third-party apps like Appy Pie Connect. Automating onboarding messages, product guides, newsletters, and the list goes on.

They both offer some state-of-the-art core functionality and numerous unusual features. Whether you’ve just started searching for a customer support tool or have been using one for a while, chances are you know about Zendesk and Intercom. Combine that with their prowess in automation and sales solutions, and you’ve got a really strong product that can handle myriad customer relationship needs.

Send surveys at key points throughout the customer buying cycle, utilizing multiple types of question formats. Surveys turn customer insights into action, with triggers and campaign response adjustments depending on customer responses. Set triggers to target particular audiences at the right time, utilize carousels as part of a communication campaign, and compare carousels with A/B testing. With so many solutions to choose from, finding the right option for your business can feel like an uphill battle.

Zendesk vs Intercom A Detailed Comparison

For example, you can assign all inbound technical queries to an engineer; or, assign all pricing queries to the sales team. Set automatic triggers so that certain events send push notifications to targeted customers, or use them as part of communication campaigns and series, and run A/B testing to compare two notifications. The bot also ensures that the customer or employee will find the right article before contacting an agent. Knowledge Base is one of the self-service sections that includes articles or documents providing technical help to customers and employees.

Intercom does not offer a native call center tool, so it cannot handle calls through a cloud-based phone system or calling app on its own. However, you can connect Intercom with over 40 compatible phone and video integrations. If you’re exploring popular chat support tools Zendesk and Intercom, you may be trying to understand which solution is right for you.

Starting at $19 per user per month, it’s also on the cheaper end of the spectrum compared to high-end CRMs like ActiveCampaign and HubSpot. Intercom’s solution offers several use cases, meaning the product’s investments and success resources have a broad focus. But this also means the customer experience ROI tends to be lower than what it would be if you went with a best-in-class solution like Zendesk. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. In 2023, conversational messaging will play an essential role in customer service.

Zendesk, on the other hand, may not stress the same conversation-driven method, even though it has powerful team management tools. Its strength is that it offers a wide range of tools for organising teams, such as booking systems, knowledge bases, and customer service features. These tools are great for keeping track of tasks and making sure workflows run smoothly, but they might not put as much emphasis on real-time conversations for teams as Intercom does.

On the other hand, if you prioritize customer engagement, sales, and personalized messaging, Intercom is a compelling option, especially for startups and rapidly scaling businesses. Designed for all kinds Chat PG of businesses, from small startups to giant enterprises, it’s the secret weapon that keeps customers happy. When it comes to which company is the better fit for your business, there’s no clear answer.

Brian Kale, the head of customer success at Bank Novo, describes how Zendesk helped Bank Novo boost productivity and streamline service. Sendcloud is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that allows users to generate packing slips and labels to help online retailers streamline their shipping process. Intercom is the new guy on the block when it comes to help desk ticketing systems.

Both systems include pricing plans that are tiered and vary according to the amount of user seats or active contacts. Intercom is primarily concerned with price on a per-user basis, in contrast to Zendesk, which blends user seats with contact tiers when it comes to pricing. Some of the links that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation. Intercom’s native mobile apps are good for iOS, Android, React Native, and Cordova, while Zendesk only has mobile apps for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. No matter what Zendesk Suite plan you are on, you get workflow triggers, which are simple business rules-based actions to streamline many tasks.

Both Zendesk and Intercom have knowledge bases to help customers get the most out of their platforms. Intercom users often mention how impressed they are with its ease of use and their ability to quickly create useful tasks and set up automations. Even reviewers who hadn’t used the platform highlight how beautifully designed it is and how simple it is to interact with for both users and clients alike. The latter offers a chat widget that is simple, outdated, and limited in customization options, while the former puts all of its resources into its messenger. All customer questions, be it via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel, are landing in one dashboard, where your agents can solve them quickly and efficiently.

Zendesk, on the other hand, has revamped its security since its security breach in 2016. With Zendesk, you can anticipate customer questions, allowing for shorter reply periods. With its CRM, you have the ability to place your clients in your sales funnels and follow through with them until conversion. Since Zendesk has many features, it takes a while to learn how to use the options you’ll be needing. In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the most expensive tools on the market.

Intercom : Cons

If money is limited for your business, a help desk that can be a Zendesk alternative or an Intercom alternative is ThriveDesk. Choose the plan that suits your support requirements and budget, whether you’re a small team or a growing enterprise. It is also ideal for businesses who are searching for conversational chatbot functionality. Their AI-powered chatbot can enable your business to boost engagement and improve marketing efforts in real-time. Zendesk, just like its competitor, offers a knowledge base solution that is easy to customize.

Test any of HelpCrunch pricing plans for free for 14 days and see our tools in action right away. Though the Intercom chat window says that their customer success team typically replies in a few hours, don’t expect to receive any real answer in chat for at least a couple of days. Just like Zendesk, Intercom also offers its Operator bot, which will automatically suggest relevant articles to clients right in a chat widget. You can publish https://chat.openai.com/ your self-service resources, divide them by categories, and integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience. If you create a new chat with the team, land on a page with no widget, and go back to the browser for some reason, your chat will go puff. You could say something similar for Zendesk’s standard service offering, so it’s at least good to know they have Zendesk Sell, a capable CRM option to supplement it.

Like with many other apps, Zapier seems to be the best and most simple way to connect Intercom to Zendesk. All plans come with a 7-day free trial, and no credit card is required to sign up for the trial. While Zendesk features are plenty, someone using it for the first time can find it overwhelming.

AI Weekly: As demand for chatbots increases, so does the need for better offerings – VentureBeat

Intercom’s app store has popular integrations for things like WhatsApp, Stripe, Instagram, and Slack. There is a really useful one for Shopify to provide customer support for e-commerce operations. HubSpot and Salesforce are also available when support needs to work with marketing and sales teams. Moreover, for users who require more dedicated and personalized support, Zendesk charges an additional premium. These premium support services can range in cost, typically between $1,500 and $2,800. This additional cost can be a considerable factor for businesses to consider when evaluating their customer support needs against their budget constraints.

Every single bit of business SaaS in the world needs to leverage the efficiency power of workflows and automation. Customer service systems like Zendesk and Intercom should provide a simple workflow builder as well as many pre-built automations which can be used right out of the box. There is a simple email integration tool for whatever email provider you regularly use. This gets you unlimited email addresses and email templates in both text form and HTML. Intercom’s dashboards may not be as aesthetically pleasing as Zendesk’s, but they still allow users to navigate their tools with few distractions. Zendesk is quite famous for designing its platform to be intuitive and its tools to be quite simple to learn.

With the integrations provided through each product, you can make use of both platforms to provide your customers with comprehensive customer service. While Intercom Zendesk integration is uncommon, as they both offer very similar products, it can be useful for unique use cases or during migrations from one platform to the other. Intercom’s user interface is also quite straightforward and easy to understand; it includes a range of features such as live chat, messaging campaigns, and automation workflows. Additionally, the platform allows for customizations such as customized user flows and onboarding experiences.

Zendesk for Service and Zendesk for Sales are sold as two separate solutions, each with three pricing plans, or tiers. Survey responses automatically save as data in users’ profiles, and Intercom provides survey data in analytics and reporting. Agents can participate in forums and turn forum posts into tickets; they also can turn community-post replies into articles for future customers. Community forums enable customers to assist each other by asking questions and sharing tips, experiences, and best practices–creating a unique, user-based, searchable information hub. When a customer asks a question in the Messenger widget, the Operator automatically suggests a handful of relevant articles based on keywords to help customers resolve their own issues.

• The Sell dashboard, different from the Service dashboard, features pre-built widgets that agents can organize however they want, to view the metrics they care most about.
• However, additional costs for advanced features can quickly increase the total expense.
• Pre-selected assignment rules customize each ticket’s destination, assigning routing paths to agents or departments based on customer priority status, query type, or issue details.
• Its AI Chatbot, Fin, is particularly noted for handling complex queries efficiently.

It’s also good for sending and receiving notifications, as well as for quick filtering through the queue of open tickets. The main idea here is to rid the average support agent of a slew of mundane and repetitive tasks, giving them more time and mental energy to help customers with tougher issues. For Intercom’s pricing plan, on the other hand, there is much less information on their website.

It has a very intuitive design that goes far beyond its platform and into its articles, product guides, and even its illustrations. Users also point out that it can take a couple of hours to get used to the flow of tickets, which doesn’t happen in CRM, and they aren’t pleased with the product’s downtime. Although Zendesk isn’t hard to use, it’s not a perfectly smooth experience either. Users report feeling as though the interface is outdated and cluttered and complain about how long it takes to set up new features and customize existing ones. Then, you can begin filling in details such as your account’s name and icon and your agents’ profiles and security features. To sum up this Intercom vs Zendesk battle, the latter is a great support-oriented tool that will be a good choice for big teams with various departments.

One of the things that sets Zendesk apart from other customer service software providers is its focus on design. The company’s products are built with an emphasis on simplicity and usability. This has helped to make Zendesk one of the most popular customer service software platforms on the market. Intercom focuses on real-time customer messaging, while Zendesk provides a comprehensive suite for ticketing, knowledge base, and self-service support. What sets Zendesk apart is its user-friendly interface, customizable workflows, and scalability.

Its multichannel support is more focused on engaging customers through its chat and messaging systems, including mobile carousels and interactive communication tools. However, compared to Zendesk, Intercom might not offer the same breadth in terms of integrating a wide range of external channels. While it excels in interactive and engaging communication, especially on mobile, some businesses might find its focus on chat-based interfaces limiting if they need extensive email or voice call support.

Chatbots are automated customer support tools that can assist with low-level ticket triage and ticket routing in real-time. How easy it is to program a chatbot and how effective a chatbot is at assisting human reps is an important factor for this category. Zendesk provides limited customer support for its basic plan users, along with costly premium assistance options. On the other hand, Intercom is generally praised for its support features, despite facing challenges with its AI chatbot and the complexity of its help articles.

You can create articles, share them internally, group them for users, and assign them as responses for bots—all pretty standard fare. Intercom can even integrate with Zendesk and other sources to import past help center content. I just found Zendesk’s help center to be slightly better integrated into their workflows and more customizable.

The admin and manager dashboard provides a zoomed-out view of all activity taking place in each inbox, for whole departments and individual agents. Agents can respond in any channel by typing in the text box and have access to deep customer experience history and background in the right-hand column. The dashboard’s left-hand column organizes and sorts all tickets by urgency. When an agent clicks on a conversation, the full conversation history populates the middle screen.

It will allow you to leverage some Intercom capabilities while keeping your account at the time-tested platform. Say what you will, but Intercom’s design and overall user experience leave all its competitors far behind. Intercom does have a ticketing dashboard that has omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk. Sendcloud adopted these solutions to replace siloed systems like Intercom and a local voice support provider in favor of unified, omnichannel support. In order to obtain an idea of the financial consequences that will be incurred by your team as well as the predicted number of clients, it is essential to compare their plans in a meticulous manner. Visit either of their app marketplaces and look up the Intercom Zendesk integration.

Although it can be pricey, Zendesk’s platform is a very robust one, with powerful reporting and insight tools, a large number of integrations, and excellent scalability features. In this article, we’ll compare Zendesk vs Intercom to find out which is the right customer support tool for you. You can create dozens of articles in a simple, intuitive WYSIWYG text editor, divide them by categories and sections, and customize with your custom themes.

You get multiple support channels at no extra cost with over 1000 APIs and integrations. Zendesk is renowned for its comprehensive toolset that aids in automating customer service workflows and fine-tuning chatbot interactions. Its strengths are prominently seen in multi-channel support, with effective email, social media, and live chat integrations, coupled with a robust internal knowledge base for agent support. On the contrary, Intercom is far less predictable when it comes to pricing and can cost hundreds/thousands of dollars per month. But this solution is great because it’s an all-in-one tool with a modern live chat widget, allowing you to easily improve your customer experiences.

Zendesk’s per-agent pricing structure makes it a budget-friendly option for smaller teams, allowing costs to scale with team growth. When comparing the omnichannel support functionalities of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms show distinct strengths and weaknesses. Leave your email below and a member of our team will personally get in touch to show you how Fullview can help you solve support tickets in half the time. Discover customer and product issues with instant replays, in-app cobrowsing, and console logs. Now that we’ve covered a bit of background on both Zendesk and Intercom, let’s dive into the features each platform offers. Lastly, Intercom offers an academy that offers concise courses to help users make the most out of their Intercom experience.

Zendesk might be a better choice if your company puts a lot of value on full customer help, keeping track of issues, and making decisions based on data. Zendesk’s messaging system makes it easier for customers to ask questions and get help, and it makes sure that every question is properly recorded and handled. Zendesk users, on the other hand, usually say good things about its powerful support system. With this feature, businesses can easily handle and keep track of customer requests, making sure that no issues get lost.

Whether agents are facing customers via chat, email, social media, or good old-fashioned phone, they can keep it all confined to a single, easy-to-navigate dashboard. That not only saves them the headache of having to constantly switch between dashboards while streamlining resolution processes—it also leads to better customer and agent experience overall. Zendesk is among the industry’s best ticketing and customer support software, and most of its additional functionality is icing on the proverbial cake. Intercom, on the other hand, is designed to be more of a complete solution for sales, marketing, and customer relationship nurturing. Intercom built additional tools to aid in marketing and engagement to supplement its customer service solution.

Intercom’s integration capabilities are limited, and some apps don’t integrate well with third-party customer service technology. This can make it more difficult to import CRM data and obtain complete context from customer data. For example, Intercom’s Salesforce integration doesn’t create a view of cases in Salesforce.

If I had to describe Intercom’s helpdesk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools. So you see, it’s okay to feel dizzy when comparing Zendesk vs Intercom platforms. You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads.

However, customers can purchase multiple Intercom plans to use together, or purchase add-ons to select just the features they want. Intercom has a unique pricing structure, offering three separate solutions, each intended for a distinct use case. We wish some of their great features were offered in multiple plans, but none features overlap among plans. Intercom’s Messenger lets users schedule timely, targeted, and intercom vs. zendesk personal messages sent based on triggers and customer actions, and is automatically translatable into over 30 languages. Self-service tools let customers resolve their own issues quickly and 24/7, improving satisfaction and reducing excessive agent workload. In an omnichannel contact center, agents can manage customer interactions across channels, no matter which channel a customer uses to contact the company.

What’s more, it helps its clients build an integrated community forum and help center to improve the support experience in real-time. After this live chat software comparison, you’ll get a better picture of what’s better for your business. You can construct an omnichannel suite by combining productivity, e-commerce, CRM, analytics, social media, and other applications.

HubSpot helps seamlessly integrate customer service tools that you and your team already leverage. Picking customer service software to run your business is not a decision you make lightly. Zendesk pricing is divided between a customer support product called “Zendesk for support”, and a fully-fledged CRM called “Zendesk for sales”.

This is not a huge difference; however, it does indicate that customers are generally more satisfied with Intercom’s offerings than Zendesk’s. Zendesk is a much larger company than Intercom; it has over 170,000 customers, while Intercom has over 25,000. While this may seem like a positive for Zendesk, it’s important to consider that a larger company may not be as agile or responsive to customer needs as a smaller company. The Sell dashboard, different from the Service dashboard, features pre-built widgets that agents can organize however they want, to view the metrics they care most about. Sequence all channels–chat, web post, email, chatbot outreach, tour message, banner, push notification, or carousel–mixing and matching modes of outreach to fit campaign goals. Automation and AI save resources and time–every automated workflow and routing decision frees an agent to work on more complex issues.

If a customer isn’t satisfied with Answer Bot’s response, Answer Bot quickly routes them to an agent best suited to help. The entire thread is saved within the ticket for future agents to reference. Agents can add each other to internal notes within a ticket, looping in team members to collaborate when necessary.