Zendesk vs Intercom: Which One Is Right for You?

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. When comparing the reporting and analytics features of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms offer robust tools, but with distinct focuses and functionalities. This exploration aims to provide a detailed comparison, aiding businesses in making an informed decision that aligns with their customer service goals. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer robust solutions, but the choice ultimately depends on specific business needs. Choosing the right customer service platform is pivotal for enhancing business-client interactions.

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. Integrations are the best way to enhance the toolkit of your apps by connecting them for interoperable actions and features. Both Zendesk and Intercom have integration libraries, and you can also use a connecting tool like Zapier for added integrations and add-ons. 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. Help desk SaaS is how you manage general customer communication and for handling customer questions.

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. Zendesk and Intercom offer help desk management solutions to their users.

Team inboxes aggregate tickets applicable to the whole team–or a specific department–that any agent can address. 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. 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.

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. 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. However, competitive pricing is a promise and not a compromise to make decent customer support accessible for all.

Sendcloud adopted these solutions to replace siloed systems like Intercom and a local voice support provider in favor of unified, omnichannel support. 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. Amid tight budgeting times, Desku proves to be the buddy for excellent worth and without any costly expenditure. However, the approach is far much wider than merely focusing on what would be more cost-effective but instead exploring ways through which a solution that would suit you best could be realized. Before you make your choice, check out Messagely’s features and compare them to discover which platform is best for you.

Rightly Planned For Customer Service Needs

Learn how top CX leaders are scaling personalized customer service at their companies. It is none other than the modern customer support software of Helpwise. So yeah, all the features talk actually https://chat.openai.com/ brings us to the most sacred question — the question of pricing. You’d probably want to know how much it costs to get each of the platforms for your business, so let’s talk money now.

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. So, by now, you can see that according to this article, Zendesk inches past Intercom as the better customer support platform.

There are also several different Shopify integrations to choose from, as well as CRM integrations like HubSpot and Salesforce. Easily track your service team’s performance and unlock coaching opportunities with AI-powered insights. What better way to start a Zendesk vs. Intercom than to compare their features? G2 ranks Intercom higher than Zendesk for ease of setup, and support quality—so you can expect a smooth transition, effortless onboarding, and continuous success.

When comparing the automation and AI features of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms come with unique strengths and weaknesses. 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. You can contact the sales team if you’re just looking around, but you will not receive decent customer support unless you buy their service.

Intercom has a community forum where users can engage with each other and gain insights from their experiences. With only the Enterprise tier offering round-the-clock email, phone, and chat help, Zendesk support is sharply separated by tiers. In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the most expensive tools on the market.

Use HubSpot Service Hub to provide seamless, fast, and delightful customer service. Easily reply to customer conversations and manage workload in a smart & automated way. Test any of HelpCrunch pricing plans for free for 14 days and see our tools in action right away. 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 your self-service resources, divide them by categories, and integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience.

This gets you unlimited email addresses and email templates in both text form and HTML. There is automatic email archiving and incoming email authentication. Zendesk’s per-agent pricing structure makes it a budget-friendly option for smaller teams, allowing costs to scale with team growth.

Customer Success Playbook: A Complete Guide For Your Business

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. Zendesk supports teams that can then field these issues from a nice unified dashboard. Zendesk has great intelligent routing and escalation protocols as well. Zendesk provides limited customer support for its basic plan users, along with costly premium assistance options.

Below, we’ve compared the usability of Zendesk’s and Intercom’s agent dashboards and administrator controls. Create entry rules that trigger when the messaging campaign begins, choosing the target audiences and when follow-up messages generate. The Zendesk marketplace is also where you can get a lot of great add-ons.

• However, the right fit for your business will depend on your particular needs and budget.
• If that sounds good to you, sign up for a free demo to see our software in action and get started.
• The best part about Zendesk is that, along with its amazing features, it also provides its users with a magical wand for customizing them.
• Because of its easy navigation and interface, Intercom has always received positive words from its users.

On the other hand, it provides call center functionalities, unlike Intercom. Zendesk is billed more as a customer support and ticketing solution, while Intercom includes more native CRM functionality. Intercom isn’t quite as strong as Zendesk in comparison to some of Zendesk’s customer support strengths, but it has more features for sales and lead nurturing.

It really depends on what features you need and what type of customer service strategy you plan to implement. Intercom is ideal for personalized messaging, while Zendesk offers robust ticket management and self-service options. The cheapest plan for small businesses – Essential – costs $39 monthly per seat. But that’s not it, if you want to resolve customer common questions with the help of the vendor’s new tool – Fin bot, you will have to pay $0.99 per resolution per month. Their chat widget looks and works great, and they invest a lot of effort to make it a modern, convenient customer communication tool. Zendesk’s help center tools should also come in handy for helping customers help themselves—something Zendesk claims eight out of 10 customers would rather do than contact support.

Can I use both Zendesk and Intercom?

Here are our top reporting and analytics features and an overview of where Intercom’s reporting limitations lie. We make it easy for anyone within your company to access contextual customer information—including their conversation and purchase history—to provide better experiences. In fact, the Zendesk Marketplace has 1,300+ apps and integrations, from billing software to marketing automation tools. The sophisticated nature of its chatbot makes it more than a task automation tool — it takes customer interactions to the next level.

Zendesk wins the self-service tools category because it provides extensive help center customization options. 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. Zendesk’s chatbot, Answer Bot, automatically answers customer questions asynchronously in up to 40 languages–via any text-based channel. Self-service tools let customers resolve their own issues quickly and 24/7, improving satisfaction and reducing excessive agent workload.

When it comes to real-time analytics, Zendesk is winning our hearts. 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. 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.

Its ability to seamlessly integrate with various applications further amplifies its versatility. Intercom focuses on real-time customer messaging, while Zendesk provides a comprehensive suite for ticketing, knowledge base, and self-service support. 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.

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. The customer support platform starts at just $5 per agent per month, which is a very basic customer support tool.

You get call recording, muting and holding, conference calling, and call blocking. Zendesk also offers callback requests, call monitoring and call quality notifications, among other telephone tools. Intercom’s dashboards may not be as aesthetically pleasing as Zendesk’s, but they still allow users to navigate their tools with intercom versus zendesk few distractions. As for Intercom’s general pricing structure, there are three plans, but you’ll have to contact them to get exact prices. For those of you who have been waiting for the big showdown between these two customer support heavyweights, we are glad to present the ultimate Zendesk vs Intercom comparison article.

Instead, using it and setting it up is very easy, and very advanced chatbots and predictive tools are included to boost your customer service. Why don’t you try something equally powerful yet more affordable, like HelpCrunch? 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. These products range from customer communication tools to a fully-fledged CRM. Zendesk boasts incredibly robust sales capabilities and security features.

Intercom or Zendesk: Help desk and ticketing

Zendesk offers a free 30-day trial, after which customers will need to upgrade to one of their paid plans. 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. But keep in mind that Zendesk is viewed more as a support and ticketing solution, while Intercom is CRM functionality-oriented. Which means it’s rather a customer relationship management platform than anything else. 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.

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. Say what you will, but Intercom’s design and overall user experience leave all its competitors far behind. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously.

Zendesk vs. Intercom

In fact, agents can even add customers to private messaging chats when necessary, and the customer will receive the whole conversation history by email to ensure they’re up to date. Automatic assignment rules establish criteria that automatically route tickets to the right agent or team, based on message or user data. While Intercom lacks some common customer-service channels like voice calling and video conferencing, it supports other unique features that transfer across channels. In an omnichannel contact center, agents can manage customer interactions across channels, no matter which channel a customer uses to contact the company. The offers that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation.

Further, if companies plan to create multi-channel campaigns, Intercom makes a great fit. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. However, customers should keep in mind that Intercom does not offer voice. The primary function of Intercom’s mobile app is the business messenger suite, including personalized messaging, real-time support tools, push notifications, in-app messaging and emailing. Intercom also does mobile carousels to help please the eye with fresh designs. The strength of Zendesk’s UI lies in its structured and comprehensive environment, adept at managing numerous customer interactions and integrating various channels seamlessly.

Intercom wins the reporting and analytics category due to its unique visualization and display formats for contact center and article data. Survey responses automatically save as data in users’ profiles, and Intercom provides survey data in analytics and reporting. Reporting and analytics provide metrics, trends, and key performance indicators (KPIs) that offer Chat PG insights to agents and administrators. 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. Agents can participate in forums and turn forum posts into tickets; they also can turn community-post replies into articles for future customers.

Check out our list of unified communications providers for more information. Companies looking for a more complete customer service product–without niche bells and whistles, but with all the basic channels you want–should look to Zendesk. Small businesses who prioritize collaboration will also enjoy Zendesk for Service.

Zendesk vs. Intercom: Head to Head Comparison

Founded in 2007, Zendesk started as a ticketing tool for customer success teams. It was later that they started adding all kinds of other features, like live chat for customer conversations. They bought out the Zopim live chat solution and integrated it with their toolset. Novo has been a Zendesk customer since 2019 but didn’t immediately start taking full advantage of all our features and capabilities. Users can benefit from using Intercom’s CX platform and AI software as a standalone tool for business messaging.

Is it as simple as knowing whether you want software strictly for customer support (like Zendesk) or for some blend of customer relationship management and sales support (like Intercom)? Powered by Explore, Zendesk’s reporting capabilities are pretty impressive. Right out of the gate, you’ve got dozens of pre-set report options on everything from satisfaction ratings and time in status to abandoned calls and Answer Bot resolutions. You can even save custom dashboards for a more tailored reporting experience. One place Intercom really shines as a standalone CRM is its data utility.

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. Survey composer allows you to create the question and answer format, also customizing color, rating scales, and greetings. The Sell dashboard’s Tasks page sorts all of an agent’s tasks by due date.

They have a dedicated help section that provides instructions on how to set up and effectively use Intercom. 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. Intercom and Zendesk are both powerful support solutions with unique features. Intercom excels in real-time messaging and customer engagement, while Zendesk focuses on ticketing and strong customer support. The choice between the two depends on specific business needs and budget considerations.

• The more expensive Intercom plans offer AI-powered content cues, triage, and conversation insights.
• We’re big fans of Zendesk’s dashboard with built-in collaboration tools, but we wish the Agent Workspace came with the Team or Growth plans–not just Professional.
• Agents can easily find resources for customers from their agent workspace.
• If you go through Zendesk’s reviews and ratings section, you will get to see a long list of positive appraisals.

Its AI Chatbot, Fin, is particularly noted for handling complex queries efficiently. Key offerings include automated support with help center articles, a messenger-first ticketing system, and a powerful inbox to centralize customer queries. When it comes to which company is the better fit for your business, there’s no clear answer.

Zendesk is a great option for large companies or companies that are looking for a very strong sales and customer service platform. It offers more support features and includes more advanced analytics and reports. On the other hand, Zendesk’s customer support includes a knowledge base that’s very intuitive and easy to navigate. It divides all articles into a few main topics so you can quickly find the one you’re looking for. It also includes a list of common questions you can browse through at the bottom of the knowledge base home page so you can find answers to common issues. While administrators can automatically assign tickets to certain agents or teams, they can also manually assign tickets to members of sales or customer service teams.