Zendesk vs Intercom: Which Solution to Choose in 2024?

Zendesk vs Intercom: In-Depth Features & Price Comparison

Zendesk also offers a straightforward interface to operators that helps them identify the entire interaction pathway with the customers. Compared to being detailed, Zendesk gives a tough competition to Intercom. Operators can easily switch https://chat.openai.com/ from one conversation to another, therefore helping operators manage more interactions simultaneously. The ProProfs Live Chat Editorial Team is a diverse group of professionals passionate about customer support and engagement.

It also provides detailed reports on how each self-help article performs in your knowledge base and helps you identify how each piece can be improved further. In a nutshell, both these companies provide great customer support. I tested both of their live chats and their support agents were answering in very quickly and right to the point. Zendesk team can be just a little bit faster depending on the time of the day. They have a dedicated help section that provides instructions on how to set up and effectively use Intercom. Intercom generally receives positive feedback for its customer support, with users appreciating the comprehensive features and team-oriented tools.

You can see their attention to detail in everything — from their tools to their website. If you’d want to test Zendesk and Intercom before deciding on a tool for good, they both provide free trials. Intercom has a standard trial period for a SaaS product which is 14 days, while Zendesk offers a 30-day trial.

Customizing Intercom – getting started

Use HubSpot Service Hub to provide seamless, fast, and delightful customer service. We will start syncing the last 24 hours of data from your Intercom account. This may take some time depending on the options you selected and your conversation volume. You can contact our Support team if you have any questions or need us to import older data. With a very streamlined design, Intercom’s interface is far better than many alternatives, including Zendesk. It has a very intuitive design that goes far beyond its platform and into its articles, product guides, and even its illustrations.

Users can surface historical data and real-time metrics and compare them visually with graphs and charts. The platform also integrates with some third-party apps to help businesses increase its capabilities. Messagely’s live chat platform is smooth, effective, and easy to set up.

How to set up a regular sync of all public articles from your Zendesk Guide Help Center into Intercom. Easily track your service team’s performance and unlock coaching opportunities with AI-powered insights. Before you make your choice, check out Messagely’s features and compare them to discover which platform is best for you. You don’t have to pay per contact on your database, and you there are many free features you can use.

Here is a Zendesk vs. Intercom based on the customer support offered by these brands. Choose Zendesk for a scalable, team-size-based pricing model and Intercom for initial low-cost access with flexibility in adding advanced features. Zendesk’s per-agent pricing structure makes it a budget-friendly option for smaller teams, allowing costs to scale with team growth. The offers that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site (including, for example, the order in which they appear). This site does not include all software companies or all available software companies offers.

Zendesk has received a rating of 4.4 out of 5 from 2,693 reviewers. They’ve been rated as one of the easy live chat solutions with more integrated zendesk intercom options. Welcome to another blog post that helps you gauge which live chat solution is compatible with your customer support needs.

The setup is designed to seamlessly connect your customer support team with customers across all platforms. Zendesk would be a perfect option for businesses that are searching for a well-integrated support system. It offers a suite that compiles help desk, live chat, and knowledge base to their user base. This enables them to speed up the support process and build experiences that customers like. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Zendesk directly competes with Intercom when it comes to integrations.

The free Intercom Platform lets you see who your customers are and what they do in your workspace. If I had to describe Intercom’s help desk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools. It’s great, it’s convenient, it’s not nearly as advanced as the one by Zendesk. Lastly, Intercom offers an academy that offers concise courses to help users make the most out of their Intercom experience. Customers of Zendesk can purchase priority assistance at the enterprise tier, which includes a 99.9% uptime service level agreement and a 1-hour service level goal. At all tiers, there is an additional fee to work with a member of the Zendesk success team on unique engagements.

Conversation Intelligence Software

If you’re part of a team or manage a team, then it’s quite common that you’d want to broadcast certain messages… The Zendesk marketplace is also where you can get a lot of great add-ons. There are also several different Shopify integrations to choose from, as well as CRM integrations like HubSpot and Salesforce. No matter what Zendesk Suite plan you are on, you get workflow triggers, which are simple business rules-based actions to streamline many tasks. As for the category of voice and phone features, Zendesk is a clear winner.

To select the ideal fit for your business, it is crucial to compare these industry giants and assess which aligns best with your specific requirements. Intercom’s UI excels in modern design and intuitive functionality, particularly noted for its real-time messaging and advanced features. It is tailored for automation and quick access to insights, offering a user-friendly experience. Nevertheless, the platform’s support consistency can be a concern, and the unpredictable pricing structure might lead to increased costs for larger organizations. Chatbots are automated customer support tools that can assist with low-level ticket triage and ticket routing in real-time.

When you switch from Zendesk, you can also create dynamic macros to speed up your response time to common queries, like feature requests and bug reports. If you’ve already set up macros in Zendesk just copy and paste them over. Check out this tutorial to import ticket types and tickets data into your Intercom workspace. Understanding these fundamental differences should go a long way in helping you pick between the two, but does that mean you can’t use one platform to do what the other does better?

Multilingual content and other advanced features come with a $49 price per agent per month. Founded in 2007, Zendesk started off as a ticketing tool for customer support teams. 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. With a multi-channel ticketing system, Zendesk Support helps you and your team to know exactly who you’re talking to and keep track of tickets throughout all channels without losing context.

Intercom VS. Zendesk: User Review

Crisp offers multichannel software with various use cases, like sales and customer support. The platform allows users to tag, assign, and collaborate with other agents and departments from a centralized location, and provides agents with a real-time view of what visitors are typing. Agents can manage requests from channels like email, live chat, messaging, X (formerly known as Twitter), and text.

If I had to describe Intercom’s helpdesk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools. Well, I must admit, the tool is gradually transforming from a platform for communicating with users to a tool that helps you automate every aspect of your routine. So you see, it’s okay to feel dizzy when comparing Zendesk vs Intercom platforms. This guide will help you choose the right apps for your business from the more than 1,200 available on the Marketplace. Find reporting for all articles (including synced articles) in the Articles report.

Kayako offers a help desk solution with a shared inbox that helps teams manage customer requests. Kayako offers a unified workspace, SingleView, that consolidates customer requests, data, order history, self-service activity, and email conversations. Users can customize Kayako’s shared inbox interface to match agent preferences. The platform’s speed and quality may not meet expectations, leading to switching costs. Additionally, Zoho falls short of a frictionless agent experience, with different agent interfaces for chat, phone, and ticketing.

Depending on your needs, you can set up Intercom on your website or mobile app and add your automations. Setting up Intercom help centers is also very easy and intuitive, with no previous knowledge required. 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 leveraging cutting-edge AI, Zendesk empowers service teams to resolve customer issues more quickly and accurately. Built on billions of customer experience interactions, the AI capabilities can be integrated across the entire service experience, from self-service to agent support, optimizing operations at scale. Intercom is better for smaller companies that are looking for a simple and capable customer service platform. Instead, using it and setting it up is very easy, and very advanced chatbots and predictive tools are included to boost your customer service. Intercom offers an integrated knowledge base functionality to its user base. Using the existing knowledge base functionality, they can display self-help articles in the chat window before the customer approaches your team for support.

After this, you’ll have to set up your workflows, personalizing your tickets and storing them by topic. You can then add automations and triggers, such as automatically closing a ticket or sending a message to a user. Again, Zendesk has surpassed the number of reviewers when compared to Intercom. Some of the highly-rated features include ticket creation user experience, email to case, and live chat reporting.

Proactive Chat

It’s important to choose the right customer service software for your business. With many Intercom alternatives to consider, our related guides make comparing them a cinch. That means we know which tools and capabilities agents need to deliver an exceptional customer experience. Its sales CRM software starts at $19 per month per user, but you’ll have to pay $49 to get Zapier integrations and $99 for Hubspot integrations. Finally, you can pay $199 per month per user for unlimited sales pipelines and advanced reporting along with other features.

Its straightforward pricing structure ensures businesses get access to the required features without complex tiers or hidden costs, making it an attractive option for cost-conscious organizations. Zendesk has a help center that is open to all to find out answers to common questions. Apart from this feature, the customer support options at Zendesk are quite limited. First, you can only talk to the support team if you are a registered user. In this article, we comprehensively do a comparison of Zendesk vs Intercom, examining their key features, benefits, and industry use cases. By exploring their distinct offerings, we aim to assist businesses in making informed decisions when selecting a customer service platform.

Does Intercom support localization?

With Intercom you can send targeted email, push, and in-app messages which can be based on the most relevant time or behavior triggers. Basically, you can create new articles, divide them by categories and sections — make it a high end destination for customers when they have questions or issues. If you’re a huge corporation with a complicated customer support process, go Zendesk for its help desk functionality.

We stay ahead of the curve on trends, tackle technical hurdles, and provide practical tips to boost your business. With our commitment to quality and integrity, you can be confident you’re getting the most reliable resources to enhance your customer support initiatives. They offer an omnichannel chat solution that integrates with multiple messaging platforms and marketing channels and even automates incoming support processes with bots. It is quite the all-rounder as it even has a help center and ticketing system that completes its omnichannel support cycle. All interactions with customers be it via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel are landing in one dashboard, where your agents can solve them fast and efficiently. There’s a plethora of features to help bigger teams collaborate more effectively — like private notes or real-time view of who’s handling a given ticket at the moment, etc.

Intercom feels more wholesome and is more client-success-oriented, but it can be too costly for smaller companies. At the same time, they both provide great and easy user onboarding. Yes, you can integrate the Intercom solution into your Zendesk account. It will allow you to leverage some Intercom capabilities while keeping your account at the time-tested platform.

Known for its scalability, Zendesk is suitable for various business sizes, from startups to large corporations. 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. 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.

In this article, we’ll compare Zendesk vs Intercom to find out which is the right customer support tool for you. We hope that this Intercom VS Zendesk comparison helps you choose one that matches your support, marketing, and sales Chat GPT needs. But in case you are in search of something beyond these two, then ProProfs Chat can be an option. While they like the ease of use this product offers its users, they’ve indeed rated them low in terms of services.

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. Conversations allow you to chat to your customers in a personal way.

According to one user, it has “too many apps and products” that need to be consolidated and simplified. Intercom, on the other hand, excels in providing a seamless customer service experience by merging automation with human support. Its proactive support features, unified inbox, and customizable bots are highly beneficial for businesses looking to engage customers dynamically and manage conversations effortlessly. 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. Intercom also excels in real-time chat solutions, making it a strong contender for businesses seeking dynamic customer interaction.

You can even improve efficiency and transparency by setting up task sequences, defining sales triggers, and strategizing with advanced forecasting and reporting tools. 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. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. Intercom only started offering ticket management in 2022 when they shifted from conversations to tickets. 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”.

However, you won’t be able to edit or manipulate synced articles via API calls. This way, your clients will never have to repeat themselves or get frustrated because their new representative doesn’t know their background. With Zendesk, you can anticipate customer questions, allowing for shorter reply periods.

But I don’t want to sell their chat tool short as it still has most of necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers and live chat analytics. It has very limited customization options in comparison to its competitors. When comparing the omnichannel support functionalities of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms show distinct strengths and weaknesses. When comparing the automation and AI features of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms come with unique strengths and weaknesses.

Besides, the prices differ depending on the company’s size and specific needs. We conducted a little study of our own and found that all Intercom users share different amounts of money they pay for the plans, which can reach over $1000/mo. The price levels can even be much higher if we’re talking of a larger company. And there’s still no way to know how much you’ll pay for them since the prices are only revealed after you go through a few sale demos with the Intercom team. To sum things up, one can get really confused trying to make sense of the Zendesk suite pricing, let alone calculate costs.

In short, Zendesk is perfect for large companies looking to streamline their customer support process; Intercom is great for smaller companies looking for advanced customer service features. Zendesk chat allows you to talk with your visitors in real time through a small chat bar at the bottom of your site. When visitors click on it, they’ll be directed to one of your customer service teammates. For basic chat and messaging, Intercom charges a flat fee of $39 per month for its basic plan with one user and $99 per month for its team plan with up to 5 users. If you want automated options, Intercom starts at either $499 or $999 per month for up to ten users, depending on the level of automation you’re looking for. Its $99 bracket includes advanced options, such as customer satisfaction prediction and multi-brand support, and in the $199 bracket, you also get advanced security and other very advanced features.

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​​​​. Intercom is a customer support platform known for its effective messaging and automation, enhancing in-context support within products, apps, or websites. It features the Intercom Messenger, which works with existing support tools for self-serve or live support. Zendesk wins the major category of help desk and ticketing system software.

Founded as a business messenger, it now extends to enabling support, engagement, and conversion. Zendesk, unlike Intercom, is a more affordable and predictable customer service platform. Also, it’s the pioneer in the support and communication tools market. You can always count on it if you need a reliable customer support platform to process tickets, support users, and get advanced reporting. Zoho offers a suite of tools across many use cases, including its customer service software, Zoho Desk.

However, there are occasional criticisms regarding the effectiveness of its AI chatbot and some interface navigation challenges. The overall sentiment from users indicates a satisfactory level of support, although opinions vary. Intercom’s solution aims to streamline high-volume ticket influx and provide personalized, conversational support. It also includes extensive integrations with over 350 CRM, email, ticketing, and reporting tools. The platform is recognized for its ability to resolve a significant portion of common questions automatically, ensuring faster response times. Zendesk also offers digital support during business hours, and their website has a chatbot.

• 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.
• If you’re a really small business or a startup, you can benefit big time from such free tools.
• I just found Zendesk’s help center to be slightly better integrated into their workflows and more customizable.
• Zendesk’s per-agent pricing structure makes it a budget-friendly option for smaller teams, allowing costs to scale with team growth.

What sets Zendesk apart is its user-friendly interface, customizable workflows, and scalability. It caters to a wide range of industries, particularly excelling in e-commerce, SaaS, technology, and telecommunications. It is favored by customer support, helpdesk, IT service management, and contact center teams. While both platforms have a significant presence in the industry, they cater to varying business requirements.

Its help desk consists of a ticketing system that consolidates requests into a shared inbox, a live chat feature for real-time support, and call center software for inbound and outbound calls. Help Scout’s customer service software features a shared inbox that allows multichannel support. The shared inbox offers the familiarity of using email but with automation options, collaboration tools, and a sidebar that provides customer data and activities.