Zendesk vs Intercom: Choosing the best tool for your business

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. 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.

Intercom’s messaging system enables real-time interactions through various channels, including chat, email, and in-app messages. Connect with customers wherever they are for timely assistance and personalized experiences. So, get ready for an insightful journey through the landscapes of Zendesk and Intercom, where support excellence converges with AI innovation.

In contrast, while Zendesk does offer some automation capabilities, it may not be as robust and customizable as Intercom. Ultimately, the choice between Intercom and Zendesk depends on your specific needs and priorities. If you prioritize real-time messaging and customer engagement, Intercom may be the better option for you. On the other hand, if you require robust ticketing and support management features, Zendesk might be the more suitable choice. Consider your budget, team size, and integration requirements before making a decision. While there can be add-ons, such as premium customer support, you can generally anticipate what you’ll be paying for your Zendesk subscription.

Company size: Zendesk vs. Intercom

It is handy for both sides since users can get in touch with customer support teams via a chat widget placed right on the website. Zendesk directly competes with Intercom when it comes to integrations. This live chat service provider offers 200+ integrations to its user base. With a mix of productivity, collaboration, eCommerce, CRM, analytics, email marketing, social media, and other tools, you get the option to create an omnichannel suite. On the other hand, Intercom brings a dynamic approach to customer support.

It offers a comprehensive platform for managing customer inquiries and support tickets across multiple channels, providing businesses with a powerful toolset for customer service management. Zendesk’s extensive feature set and customizable workflows are particularly appealing to organizations looking to streamline and scale their customer support operations efficiently. Zendesk is distinguished by its robust and versatile customer support solutions.

Zendesk vs. Intercom

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. 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. However, it’s important to note that Intercom’s pricing can vary depending on factors such as the number of users, conversations, and additional features you require. In some cases, Zendesk may be considered a more cost-effective option compared to Intercom, particularly for businesses with smaller budgets or those looking for more predictable pricing.

The strength of Zendesk’s UI lies in its structured and comprehensive environment, adept at managing numerous customer interactions and integrating various channels seamlessly. However, compared to the more contemporary designs like Intercom’s, Zendesk’s UI may appear outdated, particularly in aspects such as chat widget and customization options. This could impact user experience and efficiency for new users grappling with its complexity​​​​​​. Intercom is a customer relationship management (CRM) software company that provides a suite of tools for managing customer interactions. The company was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Intercom’s products are used by over 25,000 customers, from small tech startups to large enterprises.

What’s worse, Intercom doesn’t offer a free trial to its prospect to help them test the product before onboarding with their services. Instead, they offer a product demo when prospects reach out to learn more about their pricing structure. Suppose you are thinking that Intercom isn’t offering any attractive features, but it’s actually not true.

The main difference is its connectivity with the Intercom Team Inbox. This makes things faster for support teams to access information without bothering other users. Also, a customer experience form can be found at the end of each article. The answers are analyzed to help streamline the AI and can also be collated into a report for your perusal. Also, this software offers a feature called ‘Business Messenger’ that comes with its own AI chatbot. Moreover, Intercom bots can converse naturally with customers by using conversation starters, and respond with self-help, and knowledge base articles.

When agents don’t have to waste time toggling between different systems and tools to access the customer details they need, they can deliver faster, more personalized customer service. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. 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.

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. Intercom live chat is modern, smooth, and has many advanced features that other chat tools don’t. It’s highly customizable, too, so you can adjust it according to your website or product’s style.

But the most important thing is that you get a help desk that you believe in—and that you integrate it into a website as thoroughly as possible. Given that both of these platforms seem aimed at one sort of market or another, it shouldn’t surprise you that we might find a few gaps in the sorts of services they provide. But it’s also a given that many people will approach their reviews to Zendesk and Intercom with some specific missions in mind, and that’s bound to change how they feel about the platforms. There are several notable alternatives to Intercom in the customer support and engagement space, including Zendesk, Freshdesk, Help Scout, HubSpot, and Zoho Desk. There are several notable alternatives to Zendesk in the customer support and engagement space, including Intercom, Freshdesk, Help Scout, and Zoho Desk. And that’s why it offers a long list of customization options like workflow automation, ticket management system, and layouts.

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. However, it’s essential to consider the strengths of Zendesk, which offers a comprehensive and versatile customer support platform.

What makes it different from other help desk tools is the Answer Bot. This is an AI assistant that will help anyone navigate Guide by providing results as you type your query. The bot also ensures that the customer or employee will find the right article before contacting an agent. 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…

In addition to these features, Intercom offers messaging automation and real-time visitor insights. Because Intercom started as a live chat service, its messenger functionality is very robust. It feels very modern, and Intercom offers some advanced messenger features that Zendesk does not. Zendesk started in 2007 as a web-based SaaS product for managing intercom vs zendesk incoming customer support requests. Since then, it has evolved into a full-fledged CRM that offers a suite of software applications to its over 160,000 customers like Uber, Siemens, and Tesco. This exploration aims to provide a detailed comparison, aiding businesses in making an informed decision that aligns with their customer service goals.

Zendesk vs. Intercom: Features comparison

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. However, the right fit for your business will depend on your particular needs and budget.

It is quite the all-rounder as it even has a help center and ticketing system that completes its omnichannel support cycle. This feature ensures that each customer request is handled by the best-suited agent, improving the overall efficiency of the support team. 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. The overall sentiment from users indicates a satisfactory level of support, although opinions vary.

The Intercom Messenger, in particular, performs well compared to the Zendesk alternative. We give the edge to Zendesk here, as it’s typically aimed for more complex environments. It’s also more exclusively focused on providing help support, whereas Intercom sometimes moonlights as being part-time sales. The result is that Zendesk generally wins on ratings when it comes to support capacity. Whether Intercom is cheaper than Zendesk depends on your specific usage, feature requirements, and the number of users in your organization.

Why should I choose Zendesk over Intercom?

Just like Intercom, Zendesk can also integrate with multiple messaging platforms and ensure that your business never misses out on a support opportunity. Intercom is great for talking to customers in real-time, like through live chats or in-app messages. Zendesk is more about organizing customer requests with a ticketing system and talking to customers through many channels like email, phone, or chat. If you are looking for a comprehensive customer support solution with a wide range of features, Zendesk is a good option.

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. Pop-up chat, in-app messaging, and notifications are some of the highly-rated features of this live chat software. Intercom’s live chat reports aren’t just offering what your customers are doing or whether they are satisfied with your services. They offer more detailed insights like lead generation sources, a complete message report to track customer engagement, and detailed information on the support team’s performance. A collection of these reports can enable your business to identify the right resources responsible for bringing engagement to your business.

• One of Zendesk’s most notable aspects is its robust ticketing system.
• Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates.
• What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously.
• Zendesk outshines Intercom for customer support workflows with its core feature, the ticketing system.
• 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.

You can leverage chatbots to handle basic customer queries and reduce the burden on your support team. You can add agents, create teams, and set agent roles & permissions to decide their level of access to the tool. Automated ticket routing ensures that all tickets have an owner and are shared with the most capable agents. The best way, however, to maximize their potential is through Intercom Zendesk integrations on Appy Pie Connect. It’s an invaluable tool for businesses aiming to enhance customer satisfaction, increase conversions, and build lasting relationships.

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. Intercom isn’t as great with sales, but it allows for better communication. With Intercom, you can keep track of your customers and what they do on your website in real time. Like Zendesk, Intercom allows you to chat with online visitors and assist with their issues.

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. 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. Zendesk’s Admin Center provides tools that automate agent ticket workflows.

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. 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. It can team up with tools like Salesforce and Slack, so everything runs smoothly. This approach aligns well with Intercom’s emphasis on direct customer communication.

• Customers can skip the self-service options and get routed to a live agent through customizable routing rules, templates, and response timers.
• For very small companies and startups, Intercom also offers a Starter plan–with a balanced suite of features from each of the above solutions–at $74 monthly per user.
• Below, we’ve compared the usability of Zendesk’s and Intercom’s agent dashboards and administrator controls.
• We’ve analyzed a dozen of reviews to help you get an average estimate of Zendesk vs Intercom functionality.

Which means it’s rather a customer relationship management platform than anything else. The Zendesk chat tool has most of the necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers, and live chat analytics. Intercom calculates the price based on the number of seats (users) you request. Depending on the seat type (subscription plan), users get access to different features.

ProProfs makes it easier for you to get a pulse on what your customers want. You can share automated surveys to allow them to rate their support experience instantly. If you don’t plan on building a huge enterprise just yet, we have to give the edge to Zendesk when it comes to flexible pricing options. While they like the ease of use this product offers its users, they’ve indeed rated them low in terms of services. Zendesk also has a clear and customizable interface, but it has more features, so it might take a bit longer to learn. Its easy navigability allows you to switch between different sections smoothly.

Many businesses choose to work with Intercom because of its focus on personalization and flexibility, allowing companies to completely customize their customer service experience. The company’s products include a ticketing system, live chat software, knowledge base software, and a customer satisfaction survey tool. Zendesk also offers a number of integrations with third-party applications.

For example, the Messaging feature is not available in the Support plan, while Articles aren’t available in the Engage and Conver plans. Unfortunately, you can’t calculate the price by yourself since Intercom hid its pricing table. Though, you can sum up the price together with the Intercom sales team accurately if you contact them.

Zendesk for Service and Zendesk for Sales are sold as two separate solutions, each with three pricing plans, or tiers. Intercom’s role-based permissions allow administrators full control over each department’s and agent’s capabilities, and access to channels and information. Survey responses automatically save as data in users’ profiles, and Intercom provides survey data in analytics and reporting. 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.

But, you would not be able to enjoy such a live tracking experience on Intercom. 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. Experience the comprehensive power of Intercom for effective customer communication, automation, support tools, integrations, and analytics.

Both Zendesk and Intercom have AI capabilities that deserve special mention. Zendesk’s AI (Fin) helps with automated responses, ensuring your customers get quick answers. On the other hand, Intercom’s AI-powered chatbots and messaging are designed to enhance your marketing and sales efforts, giving you an edge in the competitive market.

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. For standard reporting like response times, leads generated by source, bot performance, messages sent, and email deliverability, you’ll easily find all the metrics you need.

It offers a comprehensive suite of features that empowers businesses to foster immediate connections with their customers. With Intercom, businesses can engage in real-time chats, schedule meetings, and strategically deploy chat boxes to specific customer segments. 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.

While Intercom excels in certain aspects of customer communication, Zendesk offers its own set of strengths that cater to different aspects of customer support and engagement. Zendesk, just like its competitor, offers a knowledge base solution that is easy to customize. Their users can create a knowledge repository to create articles or edit existing ones as per the changes in the services or product. 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. Intercom offers an integrated knowledge base functionality to its user base.