Zendesk vs Intercom: Which is better?

It was later when they started adding all kinds of other tools like when they bought out Zopim live chat and just integrated it with their toolset. Intercom generally receives positive feedback for its customer support, with users appreciating the comprehensive features and team-oriented tools. However, there are occasional criticisms regarding the effectiveness of its AI chatbot and some interface navigation challenges.

Intercom offers a comprehensive customer database with detailed profiles, enabling businesses to gather and analyze customer data easily. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. This helps in providing personalized experiences and targeted messaging. On the other hand, Zendesk’s customer database may not offer the same level of depth and richness as Intercom. For $395/month the Pro tier allows up to 5 users and eliminates the volume restriction.

Live chat and messaging

Zendesk offers various features, which may differ according to the plan. Intercom also provides fast time to value for smaller and mid-sized businesses with limitations for large-scale companies. It may have limited abilities regarding the scalability or support of an enterprise-level company. Thus, due to its limited agility, businesses with complex business models may not find it appropriate. Compared to Intercom, Zendesk’s pricing starts at $49/month, which is still understandable but not meant for startups looking for affordable pricing plans.

Intercom is 4 years younger than Zendesk and has fancied itself as a messaging platform right from the beginning. Intercom lets businesses send their customers targeted in-app messages. Zendesk also has an Answer Bot, which instantly takes your knowledge base game to the next level.

In this segment, Dominic explores the outbound capabilities of Zendesk and Intercom. How well do these platforms facilitate proactive customer engagement? Which one offers superior communication tools for reaching out to customers? Dominic breaks down the outbound features, helping viewers understand how each platform supports ongoing conversations with customers. Intercom provides an extensive range of automation tools and workflows, allowing businesses to automate repetitive tasks and streamline their customer support processes.

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. Unlike Intercom, Zendesk is scalable, intuitively designed for CX, and offers a low total cost of ownership.

It also enables dashboard customisation and integration with 500+ apps. Zendesk offers an integrated CRM alongside its suite to offer a consolidated view of customer data. Intercom users will need to integrate a CRM externally, which can be inconvenient. Intercom focuses more on streamlining customer communication to help brands serve proactive support. Zendesk, on the other hand, focuses on multiple aspects like automating ticketing, analytics, self-service, etc. Because of the app called Intercom Messenger, one can see that their focus is less on the voice and more on the text.

Here comes Desku as the strong competitor, which can effectively substitute Zendesk and Intercom. Desku provides a user-friendly platform with robust features that enable easy transition during the migration from other support systems. One of the pivotal aspects of any customer support platform is its ticketing system. Dominic scrutinizes how Zendesk and Intercom handle ticketing, evaluating response times, ease of use, and customization options.

If you’re a sales-oriented corporation, use Intercom for its automation options. Both tools can be quite heavy on your budget since they mainly target big enterprises and don’t offer their full toolset at an affordable price. Overall, I actually liked Zendesk’s user experience better than Intercom’s in terms of its Chat GPT messaging dashboard. Intercom has a dark mode that I think many people will appreciate, and I wouldn’t say it’s lacking in any way. But I like that Zendesk just feels slightly cleaner, has easy online/away toggling, more visual customer journey notes, and a handy widget for exploring the knowledge base on the fly.

Intercom vs. Zendesk: Which Customer Support Solution is Right For Your Business?

Zendesk also offers detailed reports that can be shared with others and enable team members to collaborate on them simultaneously. You can either track your performance on a pre-built dashboard or customize and build one for yourself. This customized dashboard will help you see metrics that you’d like to focus on regularly. If that’s not detailed enough, then surely their visitor browsing details will leave you surprised. This enables your operators to understand visitor intent faster and provide them with a personalized experience.

Yes, Zendesk has an Intercom integration that you can find in the Zendesk Marketplace—it’s free to install. So, you can get the best of both worlds without choosing between Intercom or Zendesk. With over 160,000 customers across all industries and regions, Zendesk has the CX expertise to provide you with best practices and thought leadership to increase your overall value. But don’t just take our word for it—listen to what customers say about why they picked Zendesk. View the attached screenshots to easily evaluate the similarities and differences between Intercom and Zendesk Chat user interfaces. Experience the amazing capabilities of Intercom and Zendesk Chat on desktop and mobile devices for unparalleled productivity and flexibility.

Zendesk is built to grow alongside your business, resulting in less downtime, better cost savings, and the stability needed to provide exceptional customer support. Many customers start using Zendesk as small or mid-sized businesses (SMBs) and continue to use our software as they scale their operations, hire more staff, and serve more customers. Our robust, no-code integrations enable you to adapt our software to new and growing use cases.

What truly sets Intercom apart is its data-driven approach to customer engagement. It actively collects and utilizes customer data to facilitate highly personalized conversations. For instance, it can use past interactions and behaviors to tailor recommendations or responses. While Zendesk intercom versus zendesk offers a comprehensive set of features, other platforms may excel in certain areas or provide more tailored solutions that align better with your customer support strategy and objectives. Zendesk, unlike Intercom, is a more affordable and predictable customer service platform.

Zendesk is a ticketing system before anything else, and its ticketing functionality is overwhelming in the best possible way. Intercom does have a ticketing dashboard that has omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk. Their reports are attractive, dynamic, and integrated right out of the box. You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads.

These plans are not inclusive of the add-ons or access to all integrations. Once you add them all to the picture, their existing plans can turn out to be quite expensive. Zendesk has also introduced its chatbot to help its clients send automated answers to some frequently asked questions to stay ahead in the competitive marketplace. What’s more, it helps its clients build an integrated community forum and help center to improve the support experience in real-time. Welcome to another blog post that helps you gauge which live chat solution is compatible with your customer support needs. And in this post, we will analyze two popular names in the SaaS industry – Intercom & Zendesk.

Intercom compared to Zendesk

Zendesk supports teams that can then field these issues from a nice unified dashboard. Zendesk has great intelligent routing and escalation protocols as well. Yes, you can replace Zendesk with Intercom as both customer support platforms have a rich set of features and integrations.

Zendesk’s advanced automation features make it the preferred choice for businesses seeking to optimize their workflow and enhance customer support efficiency. Zendesk is a customer service software offering a comprehensive solution for managing customer interactions. It integrates customer support, sales, and marketing communications, aiming to improve client relationships.

Reports & Analytics

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. It introduces shared inboxes tailored for different teams, such as sales, marketing, and customer success. These shared inboxes facilitate seamless customer interactions across multiple channels, ensuring that teams can collaborate efficiently and maintain consistent, top-notch support. Not only does Zendesk offer a free trial, it’s actually sort of a freemium tool, which means you can choose one their tools (live chat, knowledge base, call center software) and use it for free forever. As any free tool, the functionalities there are quite limited, but nevertheless.

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. 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. Triggers should prove especially useful for agents, allowing them to do things like automate notifications for actions like ticket assignments, ticket closing/reopening, or new ticket creation.

Zendesk offers a more comprehensive suite of tools, including advanced call center features with Zendesk Talk and modular add-ons like Guide, Chat, and Explore for enhanced customization. It provides versatile communication channels, supporting web, mobile, and messaging, with robust AI-powered chatbots for improved efficiency. Additionally, Zendesk’s extensive analytics and reporting capabilities help businesses tailor their services to elevate customer service experience and increase customer satisfaction.

These capabilities enable businesses to streamline their sales processes, prioritize leads effectively, and manage their sales pipelines with greater efficiency and precision. Both Zendesk and Intercom are excellent customer service solutions. However, the right fit for your business will depend on your particular needs and budget. If you’re looking for a comprehensive solution with lots of features and integrations, then Zendesk would be a good choice. On the other hand, if you need something that is more tailored to your customer base and is less expensive, then Intercom might be a better fit. Intercom is a customer relationship management (CRM) software company that provides a suite of tools for managing customer interactions.

However, it’s essential to recognize that Zendesk has its own array of strengths, particularly in its comprehensive and versatile customer support platform. Intercom’s pricing structure offers different plans to cater to various customer support and engagement needs, accommodating users with different budgets. Another critical difference between Zendesk and Intercom is their approach to CRM. In addition to its service features, Zendesk offers a fully integrated CRM solution, Zendesk Sell, available for an additional cost, starting at $19/agent/month. It includes tools for lead management, sales forecasting, and workflow management and automation. Its customer data platform lets you manage customer data, segmentation, and automated reminders.

Intercom has a very robust advanced chatbot set of tools for your business needs. There is a conversation routing bot, an operator bot, a lead qualification bot, and an article-suggesting bot, among others. It is also not too difficult to program your own bot rules using Intercon’s system.

They offer an advanced feature for customer data management that goes beyond basic CRM stuff. It gives detailed contact profiles enriched by company data, behavioral data, conversation data, and other custom fields. Zendesk wins the major category of help desk and ticketing system software. It lets customers reach out via messaging, a live chat tool, voice, and social media.

If money is limited for your business, a help desk that can be a Zendesk alternative or an Intercom alternative is ThriveDesk. They offer straightforward pricing plans designed to meet the diverse needs of businesses, with only 2 options to choose from; it makes it easier for business owners to make a decision regarding pricing. Choose the plan that suits your support requirements and budget, whether you’re a small team or a growing enterprise. As your business grows, so does the volume of customer inquiries and support tickets.

But they also add features like automatic meeting booking (in the Convert package), and their custom inbox rules and workflows just feel a little more, well, custom. I’ll dive into their chatbots more later, but their bot automation features are also stronger. 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. You can use it for customer support, but that’s not its core strength. With industry-leading AI that infuses intelligence into every interaction, robust integrations, and exceptional data security and compliance, it’s no wonder why Zendesk is a trusted leader in CX.

However, you can connect Intercom with over 40 compatible phone and video integrations. Intercom recently ramped up its features to include helpdesk and ticketing functionality. Zendesk, on the other hand, started as https://chat.openai.com/ a ticketing tool, and therefore has one of the market’s best help desk and ticket management features. You can use this support desk to help customers or you can forward potential new users to your sales department.

Seamlessly integrate Intercom with popular third-party tools and platforms, centralizing customer data and improving workflow efficiency. For small companies and startups, Zendesk offers a six-month free trial of up to 50 agents redeemable for any combination of Zendesk Support and Sell products. Zendesk has over 1,300 integrations, compared to Intercom’s 300+ apps, making it the leader in this category. However, you can browse their respective sites to find which tools each platform supports. Zendesk and Intercom each have their own marketplace/app store where users can find all the integrations for each platform.

Agents can quickly grasp the context of customer interaction through these support tickets and sentiment analysis that AI facilitates. On the other hand, Intercom may have a lower ROI when compared to Zendesk due to the limited depth of features it offers. Although it provides businesses with valuable messaging and automation tools, they may require more than this to achieve a higher level of functionality. Companies might assume that using Intercom increases costs, potentially impacting businesses’ ROI.

• The Help Center software by Intercom is also a very efficient tool.
• If, after the additional prices they charge, the plan works for you, Intercom is a great way to manage your customer relationships.
• Compared to being detailed, Zendesk gives a tough competition to Intercom.
• However, reading the reviews, it’s probably more accurate to say that Zendesk is “mixed” on customer support, whereas Intercom doesn’t have a stellar record.
• Using Zendesk, you can create community forums where customers can connect, comment, and collaborate, creating a way to harness customers’ expertise and promote feedback.
• So if an agent needs to switch from chat to phone to email (or vice versa) with a customer, it’s all on the same ticketing page.

Zendesk’s core feature has always been its ticketing system, and it remains the industry’s finest. Since Zendesk’s inception, its ticketing system has remained the best in the business. Zendesk has over 160,000 customers, including some well-known brands like Siemens, Uber and Instacart. Zendesk identifies itself as a growth-enabling, all-in-one solution. Many use cases call for different approaches, and Zendesk and Intercom are but two software solutions for each case.

The overall sentiment from users indicates a satisfactory level of support, although opinions vary. Intercom also excels in real-time chat solutions, making it a strong contender for businesses seeking dynamic customer interaction. This unpredictability in pricing might lead to higher costs, especially for larger companies. While it offers a range of advanced features, the overall costs and potential inconsistencies in support could be a concern for some businesses​​​​.

While deciding between Zendesk and Intercom, you should ensure the customization, AI automation, and functionalities align with your business goals. Intecom’s pricing strategies are not as transparent as Zendesk’s pricing. So, whether you’re a startup or a global giant, Zendesk’s got your back for top-notch customer support. Zendesk lets you chat with customers through email, chat, social media, or phone. While both Zendesk and Intercom offer ways to track your sales pipeline, each platform handles the process a bit differently.

Zendesk boasts an extensive array of integration options, with over 1,500 apps in its ecosystem. Both Zendesk and Intercom are standout performers when it comes to providing comprehensive multi channel support, catering to diverse customer needs. Zendesk offers a versatile array of communication channels, including email, chat, social media, phone, and web forms. This breadth of options ensures that businesses can effectively engage with their customers through their preferred communication method. In the realm of automation and workflow management, Zendesk truly shines as a frontrunner.

• It is also not too difficult to program your own bot rules using Intercon’s system.
• Its feature offering is second to none and for growing companies, Zendesk scales as well or better than any other customer support platform on the market.
• Groove has put together an informative review of both brands to highlight the similarities and differences to allow you to make the right choice.
• These plans are not inclusive of the add-ons or access to all integrations.
• While doing my research for this article, I’ve not only tested both Intercom and Zendesk myself, but also read a pile of different articles, comparisons, guides, showdowns and all this kind of stuff.

You can create a help platform to assist users in guiding themselves, or you can use AI-enabled responses to create a more “human” like effect. Help desk software creates a sort of “virtual front desk” for your business. That means automating customer service and sales processes so the people visiting your website don’t actually have to interact with anyone before they take action. As businesses expand and evolve, the scalability and flexibility of their customer support platform becomes important. Examining the scalability and flexibility of Zendesk and Intercom helps businesses determine which platform can accommodate their growth trajectory and changing needs.

With custom correlation and attribution, you can dive deep into the root cause behind your metrics. We also provide real-time and historical reporting dashboards so you can take action at the moment and learn from past trends. Meanwhile, our WFM software enables businesses to analyze employee metrics and performance, helping them identify improvements, implement strategies, and set long-term goals. As a result, customers can implement the help desk software quickly—without the need for developers—and see a faster return on investment.

Intercom stands out for its modern and user-friendly messenger functionality, which includes advanced features with a focus on automation and real-time insights. Its AI Chatbot, Fin, is particularly noted for handling complex queries efficiently. Both platforms have their unique strengths in multichannel support, with Zendesk offering a more comprehensive range of integrated channels and Intercom focusing on a dynamic, chat-centric experience. Key offerings include automated support with help center articles, a messenger-first ticketing system, and a powerful inbox to centralize customer queries.

There are two options there — Professional for $109 or Enterprise for $179 if you pay monthly. The difference between the two is that the Professional subscription lacks some things like chat widget unbranding, custom agent roles, multiple help centers, etc. Their help desk is a single inbox to handle customer requests, where your customer support agents can leave private notes for each other and automatically assign requests to the right people.

After all, most businesses find it easier to use one solution for all of their needs rather than parceling duties out to different tools. Whatever people are using to communicate with each other, whether it be online or over the phone, they expect to also be able to talk to the businesses they use with those same tools and platforms. Among the many challenges facing businesses today is the pressing need to meet their customers where they are. It is great to have CRM functionality inside your customer service platform because it helps maintain great customer experiences by storing all past customer engagements and conversation histories. This method helps offer more personalized support as well as get faster response and resolution times.

We will also consider customer feedback and reviews to provide insights into the usability of each platform. This feature ensures that each customer request is handled by the best-suited agent, improving the overall efficiency of the support team. While Zendesk incorporates live chat and messaging functionalities to facilitate proactive customer engagement, it falls short of matching Intercom’s level of personalization.