Zendesk vs Intercom: A comprehensive comparison guide

Posted on November 28, 2023 by Alex

Zendesk vs Intercom: Which is better?

While this resource center can reduce the dependency on agent assistance, it lacks the interactive element found in Intercom’s onboarding process. 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.

Zendesk has strong positive reviews especially since the software has mobile apps for access. Though some complained that it’s not easy to check the tickets using the apps. The platform offers Zendesk Talk as its call center solution to keep up with other help desks. This feature is browser-based, so you don’t need additional software or hardware.

Customer support and security are vital aspects to consider when evaluating helpdesk solutions like Zendesk and Intercom. Let’s examine and compare how each platform addresses these crucial areas to ensure effective support operations and data protection. Gain valuable insights with Intercom’s analytics and reporting capabilities.

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 has a rating of 4.3 out of 5 stars, based on over 5,600 reviews. Intercom has a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars, based on over 2700 reviews. 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. It doesn’t require a team of administrators to manage and its toolset is robust without being complex.

• 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?
• Intercom is fully integrated, omnichannel, and easy to use—so you can deliver quality, conversational support from start to finish.
• As a rule, Intercom reviews are positive as many users praise the interface, the ease of use, and the deployment of the software.
• It enables you to get quality product feedback from the right customers at the right time through the app or by email.

Both the platforms have the knowledge base feature, and in my opinion, both of them are becoming winners. Moreover, research says that companies can reduce customer resolution times upto a great percentage through the helpdesk software. Today, thanks to the virtual technology revolution, you can find numerous help desk software, but our vote goes for Zendesk and Intercom.

ITSM Comparison: Freshservice vs. Intercom vs. Zendesk

You get to engage with them further and get to know more about their expectations. This becomes the perfect opportunity to personalize the experience, offer assistance to prospects as per their needs, and convert them into customers. If compared to Intercom’s chatbot, Zendesk offers a relatively latest platform that makes support automation possible. So far, the chatbot can transfer chats to agents or resolve less complex queries in seconds. That means all you have to do is add the code to your website and enable it right away.

Apart from a live chat, it has a feature called ‘Business Messenger’ that comes with its own AI chatbot. 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 intercom vs zendesk use, the letter wins. Create a chatbot with minimal coding and customize it to your heart’s content. When it comes to customer support and engagement, choosing the right software can make a world of difference. Both offer powerful solutions for businesses looking to enhance their customer service capabilities.

After all, most businesses find it easier to use one solution for all of their needs rather than parceling duties out to different tools. Create a Chatbot for WhatsApp, Website, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, WordPress & Shopify with BotPenguin – 100% FREE! Our chatbot creator helps with lead generation, appointment booking, customer support, marketing automation, WhatsApp & Facebook Automation for businesses. AI-powered No-Code chatbot maker with live chat plugin & ChatGPT integration. 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.

Intercom pricing

When an agent clicks on a conversation, the full conversation history populates the middle screen. Behavior-based messaging allows you to customize every last detail of triggers and rules including–which channel sends the message, when it sends, where it sends, and who gets targeted. Intercom self-service chatbot widgets, highly customizable and capable of conversing in 32 different languages, embed into your website or application. With Intercom workload management tools, administrators can ensure that incoming conversations, traffic, and workload are evenly distributed among team members.

And this, undoubtedly, leaves your customer support agents free to solve urgent matters. However, if your organization heavily relies on Intercom’s real-time communication features, in-app messaging, and chat-based support, transitioning entirely to Zendesk may not cover all your needs. Intercom’s focus on instant interactions and personalized engagement is particularly valuable for businesses prioritizing chat-first customer support and real-time communication. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Its chat-based approach, automation capabilities, and chatbots are ideal for handling routine inquiries efficiently. Intercom is the go-to solution for businesses seeking to elevate customer support and sales processes.

Intercom has positioned itself as a messaging platform rather than a comprehensive CRM solution. This differentiates it from Zendesk, which offers a more traditional CRM experience. Intercom’s primary focus is engaging and communicating with customers through live chat, in-app messaging, and email. This makes it a great choice for businesses that want to provide their customers with a more personal experience. When it comes to customer support, both Intercom and Zendesk provide reliable assistance.

Get ahead of issues before they happen with in-context, automated messages. Intercom is fully integrated, omnichannel, and easy to use—so you can deliver quality, conversational support from start to finish. Zendesk raised their prices without improving their product—frustrating customers who struggle to justify further investments.

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. Zendesk has been ruling the market for ages due to its multi-communication and ticketing system. Whether it’s about communicating via phone, email, or social media, Zendesk will always stay upfront. 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.

Determining whether Intercom can effectively replace Zendesk depends on your specific customer support and engagement requirements. Compared to Intercom, Zendesk’s pricing starts at $49/month, which is still understandable but not meant for startups looking for affordable pricing plans. 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. When you see pricing plans starting for $79/month, you should get a clear understanding of how expensive other plans can become for your business.

The three tiers—Suite Team, Suite Growth, and Suite Professional—also give you more options outside of Intercom’s static structure. Suite Team is more affordable than Intercom’s $79/month tier; Suite Professional is more expensive. Overall, Zendesk wins out on plan flexibility, especially given that it has a lower price plan for dipping your toes in the water.

Intercom offers a comprehensive customer database with detailed profiles, enabling businesses to gather and analyze customer data easily. 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.

You can set office hours, live chat with logged-in users via their user profiles, and set up a chatbot. Customization is more nuanced than Zendesk’s, but it’s still really straightforward to implement. You can opt for code via JavaScript or Rails or even integrate directly with the likes of Google Tag Manager, WordPress, or Shopify. Overall, I actually liked Zendesk’s user experience better than Intercom’s in terms of its 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.

This is one of the best ways to qualify high-quality leads for your business and improve your chances of closing a sale faster. Intercom offers a simplistic dashboard with a detailed view of all customer details in one place. Operators will find its dashboard quite beneficial as it will take them seconds to find necessary features during an ongoing chat with the customers. Admins will also like the fact that they can see the progress of all their teams and who all are actively answering a customer’s query in real-time. Our CSV import feature allows you to effortlessly handle large volumes of data with options to customize the import type to your specific needs. With the bulk user import option, you can efficiently import users in bulk, ensuring a swift and accurate transfer of data.

Whether it is about organizing customer issues or communicating with team members, dashboards can make an impactful difference. Let us kickstart the comparison with our first parameter- types of users. We need a solution that allows whoever picks up the chat or phone to quickly see the history of that customer, their request, notes, and the status of their order. We need a powerful chat tool that can enable immediate engagement, have some basic automation, and allows users to drop in. Yes, you can replace Zendesk with Intercom as both platforms have a rich set of features and integrations. They have similar features, but Intercom has lots of features and tools that better integrate each other.

A mighty email marketing platform to help you reach your customers and increase sales. Variables (tags) to create dynamic email templates for highly personalized email campaigns that get triggered based on your customers’ behavior. Being customer support platforms, both Intercom and Zendesk provide Voice Support. We have numerous customers that do this and benefit greatly from our out-of-the-box integration with Intercom. Fintech startup Novo had to pivot to new ways of working in 2020, just like everyone else.

The cheapest plan for small businesses – Starter – costs $89 monthly, including 2 seats and 1,000 people reached/mo. Each additional 1,000 contacts on a Starter plan will cost you $25/mo. Pro plan is rather a team plan that costs $395/mo and includes 5 seats.

You need a complete customer service platform that’s seamlessly integrated and AI-enhanced. We sell a high-touch, high ASP product (caskets) and have scaled to where we’re adding several more customer service agents to our company. Customers often call or chat with us multiple times prior to the purchase and post-purchase, as these are emotional, time-sensitive purchases.

Feature Set Comparison: Zendesk vs Intercom

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. However, as Monese grew and eyed a European expansion, it became clear that the company needed to centralize data in a single solution that would scale along with them. Monese is another fintech company that provides a banking app, account, and debit card to make settling in a new country easier. By providing banking without boundaries, the company aims to provide users with quick access to their finances, wherever they happen to be.

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. If your company is looking for customer support software, you have likely heard of Intercom and Zendesk. 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.

Zendesk wins the omnichannel capabilities category because it offers voice as a service, which we think is absolutely critical. Design and send out mobile push messages–phone pop-ups containing text and images that prompt customers to take action and redirect to a specific app page when clicked. Zendesk for Sales, or Zendesk Sell, is Zendesk’s sales pipeline and CRM tool with its own dashboard for lead generation and conversion. Why ruffle yours with Zendesk & Intercom’s steep pricing & fewer features?

Contact Center of the Future: Empower Agents with AI…

You get multiple support channels at no extra cost with over 1000 APIs and integrations. They also offer several other features such as pre-defined responses, custom rules, and customizable online forms. Simplicity is an important consideration when selecting the best customer service software. Having easy-to-use software is far more controllable and saves time whether you’re a tiny and growing business or a massive multinational. 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.

For $395/month the Pro tier allows up to 5 users and eliminates the volume restriction. This tier provides everything a small or medium-sized business will need, including better ticket management and advanced workflow automation tools. As two of the most popular and effective customer support solutions on the market, Intercom and Zendesk often compete head-to-head to win the business of companies like yours. Choose Zendesk for a scalable, team-size-based pricing model and Intercom for initial low-cost access with flexibility in adding advanced features. When comparing the reporting and analytics features of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms offer robust tools, but with distinct focuses and functionalities. While both platforms have a significant presence in the industry, they cater to varying business requirements.

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to communicate with your 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. Further, if companies plan to create multi-channel campaigns, Intercom makes a great fit.

For any help desk software to succeed, the dashboard interface is extremely crucial. Intercom doesn’t really provide free stuff, but they have a tool called Platform, which is free. The free Intercom Platform lets you see who your customers are and what they do in your workspace. It has very limited customization options in comparison to its competitors. Inside a ticket, the workspace center console displays the ticket’s conversation.

• With Intercom, you can keep track of your customers and what they do on your website in real time.
• Therefore, it becomes all the more important to review your options carefully.
• Zendesk’s ticketing system is renowned for its highly organized approach, which empowers businesses to manage customer support requests with unparalleled efficiency.
• Netomi’s virtual agents sit alongside human agents to supplement and enhance the capacity of support teams, ensuring the seamless resolution of customer queries.

Check this ultimate Intercom vs Drift comparison to choose the best messaging platform for your customer support, marketing, and sales. The two essential things that Zendesk lacks in comparison to Intercom are in-app messages and email marketing tools. It’s best used when you need a centralized platform to manage customer support operations, whether through email, chat, social media, or phone. Zendesk is ideal for businesses seeking to enhance their customer service processes and maintain a high level of customer satisfaction across all communication channels. Zendesk and Intercom are tailored to enhance your customer support and engagement, providing robust tools for managing customer inquiries, automating responses, and facilitating communication. However, a fundamental difference between them is their scope and focus.

Its user-friendly interface and robust automation tools have positioned it as a leader in tailored customer engagement. It enables businesses to have real-time conversations with their customers through their website or mobile app. In contrast, Zendesk offers a more diverse range of communication channels, including email, social media, phone, and live chat. Intercom offers a unique pricing model based on the number of people you engage with, which includes both customers and team members. On the other hand, Zendesk offers plans based on the number of support agents, making it more suitable for businesses that have a dedicated support team. As a conversational relationship platform, Zendesk gives you the option of live chatting with customers via your website, mobile, and messaging.

Understanding the unique attributes of Zendesk and Intercom is crucial in this comparison. Zendesk is renowned for its comprehensive range of functionalities, including advanced email ticketing, live chat, phone support, and a vast knowledge base. Its ability to seamlessly integrate with various applications further amplifies its versatility. Did you know that integrations between Zendesk and Intercom are possible? With the integrations provided through each product, you can make use of both platforms to provide your customers with comprehensive customer service.

Zendesk for Service sells three plans, ranging from $49 to $99 monthly per user, with a 30-day free trial available for each plan. The right side of the screen displays all customer contact information and company interaction history, and the agent can contact the customer via any channel with just a few clicks. The workspace left-hand column notifies agents of all ticket updates. The top of the agent workspace shows an agent’s open tickets, ticket statistics, and satisfaction statistics, as well as tabs depicting all current tickets.

The Zendesk Admin Center panels allow administrators to control settings, accessibility, automations, and workflows for everything from chatbots to integrations and custom APIs. When it comes to user interface, both Intercom and Zendesk offer intuitive and user-friendly interfaces. However, Intercom’s interface is more modern and visually appealing, making it easier for users to navigate and find what they need. Zendesk’s interface, while not as visually appealing, is highly customizable, allowing businesses to tailor it to their specific needs. They also have an integrated capability where you see everything related to the one customer in one spot – all their interactions with you, and can move the customer through your custom stages. If you do go with ActiveCampaign, I HIGHLY recommend that you take their paid training.

You can use this support desk to help customers or you can forward potential new users to your sales department. 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. 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.

These tickets can then be systematically tracked, prioritized, and responded to. This structured approach ensures that no customer query goes unnoticed or unattended, regardless of the channel through which it was initiated. When it comes to integrations, Zendesk and Intercom both offer diverse possibilities, but here, Zendesk takes the lead. Zendesk boasts an extensive array of integration options, with over 1,500 apps in its ecosystem.

So, by now, you can see that according to this article, Zendesk inches past Intercom as the better customer support platform. Integrations are the best way to enhance the toolkit of your apps by connecting them for interoperable actions and features. Intercom provides an extensive range of automation tools and workflows, allowing businesses to automate repetitive tasks and streamline their customer support processes.

And we all know that receiving such continuous positive Customer feedback isn’t easy at all. And you would be surprised to know that the Intercom does not have a VOIP call service. So, if you have customers who prefer to call service with an Intercom, it wouldn’t be possible. You would rather have to integrate it with third-party apps like Appy Pie Connect.

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