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

Whether it’s about communicating via phone, email, or social media, Zendesk will always stay upfront. Both the platforms have the knowledge base feature, and in my opinion, both of them are becoming winners. It https://chat.openai.com/ will help you understand your customer’s issue and solve it instantly. Although you cannot be with your customers all the time in real-time, through Desku’s live chatting, you can actually have their back.

On the other hand, Intercom positions itself as a versatile solution, integrating customer communication with marketing and sales. Dominic’s insights provide viewers with a clear understanding of the primary focus of each platform. In this article, we will explore the key differences between Intercom and Zendesk, two popular customer support platforms.

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. If you’re a really small business or a startup, you can benefit big time from such free tools.

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. In contrast, while Zendesk does offer some automation capabilities, it may not be as robust and customizable as Intercom. They have a dedicated help section that provides instructions on how to set up and effectively use Intercom.

Zendesk vs. Intercom: Which one should you choose?

In contrast, Zendesk offers a more diverse range of communication channels, including email, social media, phone, and live chat. It also provides mid-sized businesses with comprehensive customer relationship management software, as they require more advanced features to handle customer support. Similarly, the ability of Zendesk to scale also makes it the best fit for enterprise-level organizations. Zendesk allows businesses to group their resources in the help center, providing customers with self-service personalized support. The platform has various customization options, allowing businesses personalized experiences according to their branding.

Help Center in Zendesk also will enable businesses to organize their tutorials, articles, and FAQs, making it convenient for customer to find solutions to their queries. 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.

Rated 5 stars out of 5 on G2, ThriveDesk is highly regarded by users. Rest assured, ThriveDesk’s lightweight design and speed won’t impact the performance of your Wix-powered eCommerce website. The optimized agent interface ensures rapid responses for maximum efficiency, all while keeping your website running smoothly. Sure, you can have a front desk—but you don’t necessarily have to plunk down the cost it would take to buy that desk, train an employee, and add them to your payroll. Groove has put together an informative review of both brands to highlight the similarities and differences to allow you to make the right choice. We are easy-going yet knowledgeable team of experts who will make sure that what’s important gets done skillfully.

We’ve put together an average user rating for Intercom and Zendesk Chat based on all the reviews and scores they’ve gotten on our site. If you go through Zendesk’s reviews and ratings section, you will get to see a long list of positive appraisals. And we all know that receiving such continuous positive Customer feedback isn’t easy at all. If not, then you should because it will ease much of your workload as you would not have to waste your precious time in finding the helpdesk operator, plus zero management issues.

CRM, Customer Service, Customer support

Pop-up chat, in-app messaging, and notifications are some of the highly-rated features of this live chat software. Intercom is a customer support messenger, bot, and live chat service provider that empowers its clients to provide instant support in real-time. This SaaS leader entered into the competition in 2011, intending to help its clients reach their target audiences and engage them in a conversation right away. When choosing between Zendesk and Intercom for your customer support needs, it’s essential to consider various factors that align with your business goals, operational requirements, and budget. Both platforms offer distinct strengths, catering to customer support and engagement aspects. Zendesk receives positive feedback for its intuitive interface, wide range of integrations, and robust reporting tools.

While some of these functionalities related to AI are included in the Zendesk suite, others are part of advanced AI add-ons. If agents want to offer their customers a great experience, they can spend an additional $50 to have the AI add-on. The pricing structure of Intercom is complex, making it difficult for Intercom users to understand their final costs. Intercom charges the price based on representative seats and people reached, with additional expenses for add-ons.

It also helps promote automation in routine tasks by automating repetitive processes and helps agents save time and errors. In addition to all these features, Suite Growth Plan offers light agents, multilingual support, multiple ticket forms, and a self-service customer portal. Zendesk’s automation features are limited to offering basic automation to streamline repetitive tasks. While Zeendesk provides automation services for ticket support systems, notifications, chatbots, etc., it may not be an extensive feature compared to Intercom. Some aspects give an edge or create differentiation in the operations of both software, which users may oversee while making a choice. We will discuss these differentiating factors to help you make the right choice for your business and help it excel in offering extraordinary customer service.

Its analytics do not provide deeper insights into consumer interactions as well. Intercom is also a customer service software that integrates entirely with third-party vendors, especially those offering messaging services. Using any plan, this integration is available to all customers, making the Chat GPT customer support experience and onboarding smooth. It can also handle complex interactions and provide real-time insight to customer support agents. Overall, Intercom is a better option if personalized and robust chatbots are something you are looking for when managing customer support strategy.

It will allow you to leverage some Intercom capabilities while keeping your account at the time-tested platform. In this paragraph, let’s explain some common issues that users usually ask about when choosing between Zendesk and Intercom platforms. To sum things up, one can get really confused trying to make sense of the Zendesk suite pricing, let alone calculate costs. If you’d want to test Intercom vs Zendesk before deciding on a tool for good, they both provide free trials for 14 days. But sooner or later, you’ll have to decide on the subscription plan, and here’s what you’ll have to pay. 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.

• Moreover, research says that companies can reduce customer resolution times upto a great percentage through the helpdesk software.
• Zendesk has the CX expertise to help businesses of all sizes scale their service experience without compromise.
• Its analytics do not provide deeper insights into consumer interactions as well.
• When comparing the omnichannel support functionalities of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms show distinct strengths and weaknesses.
• It is a totally cloud-based service; you can operate this VOIP technology by sitting in any corner of the world.

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.

Gain valuable insights with Intercom’s analytics and reporting capabilities. Track key metrics, measure campaign success, and optimize customer engagement strategies. 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 and Intercom are prominent players in the field of customer support and engagement platforms, each offering unique capabilities and advantages to address varying user requirements. 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. There are many features to help bigger customer service teams collaborate more effectively — like private notes or a real-time view of who’s handling a given ticket at the moment, etc. At the same time, the vendor offers powerful reporting capabilities to help you grow and improve your business.

It’s virtually impossible to predict what you’ll pay for Intercom at the end of the day. They charge for customer service representative seats and people reached, don’t reveal their prices, and offer tons of custom add-ons at additional cost. 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. intercom vs zendesk 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. Intercom has more customization features for features like bots, themes, triggers, and funnels. Though expensive and quality are synonymous in some worlds, such a principle cannot define Desku where it stands out as one of such affordable companies.

ROI comes down to getting the most out of the features available, so payment structures that are scaleable and flexible are a must. Its tight focus on customer support keeps things simple, especially when people are learning the software. Easily reply to customer conversations and manage workload in a smart & automated way. Lastly, Intercom offers an academy that offers concise courses to help users make the most out of their Intercom experience. Intercom’s helpdesk is more of a complementary tool to their chat tools. Intercom is more communication-oriented, whereas Zendesk has everything a customer support representative wants.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. It also offers a confusing pricing structure and fewer integrations, making it less scalable and cost-effective. Zendesk provides an integrated on-demand helpdesk – customer support portal solution based on the latest Web 2.0 technologies and design philosophies. The product has an elegant, minimalist design implemented in Ruby on Rails and provide… Get a unified view of all customer touchpoints and manage technology solutions from a single dashboard, empowering agents and admins to provide exceptional customer service. When it comes to real-time analytics, Zendesk is winning our hearts.

To that end, you can import themes or apply your own custom themes to brand your help center the way you want it. From there, you can include FAQs, announcements, and article guides and then save them into pre-set lists for your customers to explore. You can even moderate user content to leverage your customer community. Zendesk provides comprehensive security and compliance features, ensuring customer data privacy.

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. Now, let’s delve into the Zendesk vs. Intercom comparison to help you make an informed decision when selecting the right customer support and engagement platform that aligns with your specific needs. Also, their in-app messenger is worth a separate mention as it’s one of their distinctive tools (especially since Zendesk doesn’t really have one).

In this context, Zendesk and Intercom emerge as key contenders, each offering distinct features tailored to dynamic customer service environments. Zendesk boasts robust reporting and analytics tools, plus a dedicated workforce management system. 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.

However, this may be sufficient for smaller businesses or those using an existing CRM that integrates with Intercom. Intercom, while differing from Zendesk, offers specialized features aimed at enhancing customer relationships. Founded as a business messenger, it now extends to enabling support, engagement, and conversion. Intercom also offers a few features that are unique to its platform – one of these being the ability to segment users based on their behavior. This means that you can send targeted messages to different groups of users based on how they interact with your product.

It lets customers reach out via messaging, a live chat tool, voice, and social media. 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. Also, this software offers a feature called ‘Business Messenger’ that comes with its own AI chatbot.

Zendesk Vs Intercom: Pricing

Desku provides a user-friendly platform with robust features that enable easy transition during the migration from other support systems. It has a direct integration with Shopify and other tools including powerful B2B customer handling. It also satisfies all the requirements you’ve outlined including order history, interaction history, notes, tickets etc.

In today’s business world, customer service is fast-paced, and customers have higher expectations. To enhance customer satisfaction, businesses must equip their teams with customer support solutions and customer service software. Intercom is the go-to solution for businesses seeking to elevate customer support and sales processes. With its user-friendly interface and advanced functionalities, Intercom offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed to effectively communicate and engage with customers.

Apart from team conversations, it integrates with the ticketing system. Thus, the inbox is used to refer tickets to other customer service agents who can solve them. Therefore, a helpdesk with a good inbox can make your team efficient in solving problems. Intercom’s reporting is average compared to Zendesk, as it offers some standard reporting and analytics tools.

In the domain of customer onboarding, Intercom takes a definitive lead with its distinctive feature – the ability to create interactive product tours. These tours serve as virtual guides, leading customers through a website and product offerings in an engaging and personalized manner. This approach not only enhances user understanding but also significantly boosts user engagement. While Zendesk is a widely used and versatile customer support and engagement platform, it’s important to consider whether there might be a better software solution tailored to your specific needs.

It also enables agents to perform customized workflow management, assign tickets to the right agent for request handling, and track the ticket’s progress. Zendesk and Intercom offer basic features, including live chat, a help desk, and a pre-built knowledge base. They have great UX and a normal pricing range, making it difficult for businesses to choose one, as both software almost looks similar in their offerings.

While Zendesk incorporates live chat and messaging functionalities to facilitate proactive customer engagement, it falls short of matching Intercom’s level of personalization. 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. By leveraging the out-of-the-box Netomi virtual agent integration, companies enhance both the agent and customer experience, while also reducing costs.

In this case, all customer requests will be routed properly, leaving no gaps in your customer service operations. Intercom’s AI capabilities extend beyond the traditional chatbots; Fin is renowned for solving complex problems and providing safer, accurate answers. Fin’s advanced algorithm and machine learning enable the precision handling of queries.

However, if businesses seek a more personalized customer experience, Intercom’s advanced features could be beneficial. The ease of use and customization options play a significant role in the seamless integration of a customer support platform within existing business operations. Analyzing the user-friendliness and customizability of Zendesk and Intercom provides insights into their adaptability to diverse business environments.

By evaluating their key features, pricing, specifications, and ratings, you’ll gather valuable information to make a well-informed decision. Talking about the Intercom, it has flexible pricing plans that its experts can help adjust as per your requirements to match contacts and number of seats. The good news is that you enjoy a generous free 14-day trial by opting to get an idea if the particular service is suitable for your business or not. That their customers are fully satisfied with their products and services, and so is the motto of our Desku chatbots.

To sum things up, one can get really confused trying to make sense of Zendesk’s pricing, let alone to calculate costs. You’d probably want to know how much it costs to get Zendesk or Intercom for your business, so let’s talk money now. As I’ve already mentioned, they started as a help desk/ticketing tool, and honestly, they perfected every bit of it over the years.

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. Your typical Zendesk review will often praise the platform’s simplicity and affordability, as well as its constant updates and rolling out of new features, like Zendesk Sunshine. For example, you can read in many Zendesk Sell reviews how adding sales tools benefits Zendesk Support users. Zendesk has strong positive reviews especially since the software has mobile apps for access.

With its live analytics feature on the dashboard, it makes it easy for you to make instant decisions in no time. Such live insights are very useful in evaluating your customer support process. But, you would not be able to enjoy such a live tracking experience on Intercom. Chat tools are the foundation of customer support software in 2023 and can serve as a key differentiator when choosing the right vendor.

• Experience the amazing capabilities of Intercom and Zendesk Chat on desktop and mobile devices for unparalleled productivity and flexibility.
• Finally, we also have some B2B customers (funeral homes) and expect this part of our business to grow significantly in 2021.
• So, if you have customers who prefer to call service with an Intercom, it wouldn’t be possible.

Intercom, on the other hand, was built for business messaging, so communication is one of their strong suits. 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. Zendesk also packs some pretty potent tools into their platform, so you can empower your agents to do what they do with less repetition. Agents can use basic automation (like auto-closing tickets or setting auto-responses), apply list organization to stay on top of their tasks, or set up triggers to keep tickets moving automatically.

Efficient customer service and support capabilities are fundamental for maintaining high customer satisfaction levels. Evaluating the customer service and support features of Zendesk and Intercom aids businesses in understanding which platform facilitates more effective and prompt customer issue resolution. Zendesk has an app available for both Android and iOS, which makes it easy to stay connected with customers while on the go.

Moreover, Intercom bots can converse naturally with customers by using conversation starters, respond with self-help, and knowledge base articles. However, if you compare Zendesk vs Intercom chat in ease of use, the letter wins. Create a chatbot with minimal coding and customize it to your heart’s content.

This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. They have a 2-day SLA, no phone support, and the times I have had to work with them they have been incredibly difficult to work with. Very rarely do they understand the issue (mostly with Explore) that I am trying to communicate to them. In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the most expensive tools on the market. Yes, you can integrate the Intercom solution into your Zendesk account.

Therefore, to gauge if your chosen help desk is effective or not, you use analytics. In this case, each customer service software has a unique way of generating reports such as scheduling, the scope of the analysis, customer reports, and more. Intercom has Articles as a knowledge base solution for self-support, as well as internal support.

While Intercom also provides a user-friendly interface, some users may find it a tad overwhelming, especially when juggling multiple support requests. Zendesk’s simplicity, combined with its robust functionality, significantly reduces the margin for errors and confusion. In the realm of user-friendliness, Zendesk clearly emerges as the superior choice. Determining whether Intercom can effectively replace Zendesk depends on your specific customer support and engagement requirements.

Avoid cherry-picking and shared inboxes by using Dixa’s Conversation Offers and Intelligent Routing. Your team can provide excellent customer support across multiple channels by receiving the right conversation at the right time. The best part about Zendesk is that, along with its amazing features, it also provides its users with a magical wand for customizing them.

Intercom has a different approach, one that’s all about sales, marketing, and personalized messaging. Intercom has your back if you’re looking to supercharge your sales efforts. It’s like having a toolkit for lead generation, customer segmentation, and crafting highly personalized messages.