Intercom Vs Zendesk: A Comprehensive Comparison Of Support Solutions

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.

First, you can only talk to the support team if you are a registered user. 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. But I like that Zendesk just feels slightly cleaner, has easy online/away toggling, more visual customer journey notes, and a handy widget for exploring the knowledge base on the fly.

Both Zendesk and Intercom are customer support management solutions that offer features like ticket management, live chat and messaging, automation workflows, knowledge centers, and analytics. Zendesk has traditionally been more focused on customer support management, while Intercom has been more focused on live support solutions like its chat solution. While the company is smaller than Zendesk, Intercom has earned a reputation for building high-quality customer service software. The company’s products include a messaging platform, knowledge base tools, and an analytics dashboard. Many businesses choose to work with Intercom because of its focus on personalization and flexibility, allowing companies to completely customize their customer service experience. On the contrary, Intercom is far less predictable when it comes to pricing and can cost hundreds/thousands of dollars per month.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. As mentioned before, the bot builder is a visual drag-and-drop system that requires no coding knowledge; this is also how other basic workflows are designed. The more expensive Intercom plans offer AI-powered content cues, triage, and conversation insights. 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.

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.

Intercom’s Messenger lets users schedule timely, targeted, and personal messages sent based on triggers and customer actions, and is automatically translatable into over 30 languages. When a customer asks a question in the Messenger widget, the Operator automatically suggests a handful of relevant articles based on keywords to help customers resolve their own issues. Users with light access–such as knowledgeable agents and supervisors–can be added to tickets for browsing and feedback. While light agents cannot interact with the customer on the ticket, they can make notes and interact privately with other team members and agents involved with the ticket. Collaboration tools enable agents to work together in resolving customer tickets and making sales. Operator, Intercom’s automation engine, empowers Intercom chatbots to gather key information from each website visitor to qualify leads and route customers to the right destination.

Intercom or Zendesk: Chatbot features

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.

The platform is recognized for its ability to resolve a significant portion of common questions automatically, ensuring faster response times. While both platforms have a significant presence in the industry, they cater to varying business requirements. Zendesk, with its extensive toolkit, is often preferred by businesses seeking an all-encompassing customer support solution.

It gives detailed contact profiles enriched by company data, behavioral data, conversation data, and other custom fields. 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, 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 intercom versus zendesk 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.

Intercom vs Zendesk: Feature Comparison

For example, you can assign all inbound technical queries to an engineer; or, assign all pricing queries to the sales team. Automation and AI save resources and time–every automated workflow and routing decision frees an agent to work on more complex issues. Set triggers to target particular audiences at the right time, utilize carousels as part of a communication campaign, and compare carousels with A/B testing. With so many solutions to choose from, finding the right option for your business can feel like an uphill battle. One more thing to add, there are ways to integrate Intercom to Zendesk.

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.

Zendesk also offers digital support during business hours, and their website has a chatbot. Premiere Zendesk plans have 24/7 proactive support with faster response times. Other customer service add-ons with Zendesk include custom training and professional services. Zendesk is a customer service software company that provides businesses with a suite of tools to manage customer interactions. The company was founded in 2007 and today serves over 170,000 customers worldwide. Zendesk’s mission is to build software designed to improve customer relationships.

This means the company is still working out some kinks and operating with limited capabilities. Sales teams can also view outbound communications, and any support agent can access resources from the Intercom workspace. Prioritize the agent experience to maximize productivity and customer satisfaction while reducing employee turnover.

Zendesk for Service, a customer service solution, provides unified customer-facing communication channels, self-service, collaboration, customer routing, and analytics–all organized in one dashboard. 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.

• 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.
• Compare Zendesk versus Intercom to determine who will be the best partner for your business at every phase of the customer journey.
• On the other hand, Zendesk’s customer support includes a knowledge base that’s very intuitive and easy to navigate.
• So, Zendesk’s users are always going to have a smooth experience with it.

You would rather have to integrate it with third-party apps like Appy Pie Connect. 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. For leading a successful business, communication is one of the keys. Customers will stay with you long if they are not getting any support from your company, especially when you are new to them.

But this solution is great because it’s an all-in-one tool with a modern live chat widget, allowing you to easily improve your customer experiences. At the same time, Zendesk looks slightly outdated and can’t offer some features. Zendesk is renowned for its comprehensive toolset that aids in automating customer service workflows and fine-tuning chatbot interactions. Its strengths are prominently seen in multi-channel support, with effective email, social media, and live chat integrations, coupled with a robust internal knowledge base for agent support.

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. Suppose you are thinking that Intercom isn’t offering any attractive features, but it’s actually not true. There is one mind-boggling feature in Intercom, and that is its in-app messaging serving. It’s a very good way of communicating with customers through multi-platform apps. Moreover, the best part is it also lets you send customized messages to various customers on the basis of their actions.

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 Sunshine is a separate feature set that focuses on unified customer views. Zendesk is quite famous for designing its platform to be intuitive and its tools to be quite simple to learn. This is aided by the fact that the look and feel of Zendesk’s user interface are neat and minimal, with few cluttering features. When it comes to self-service portals for things like knowledgebases, Intercom has a useful set of resources. Intercom also has a community forum where users can help one another with questions and solutions. Both platforms have their unique strengths in multichannel support, with Zendesk offering a more comprehensive range of integrated channels and Intercom focusing on a dynamic, chat-centric experience.

When he isn’t writing content, poetry, or creative nonfiction, he enjoys traveling, baking, playing music, reliving his barista days in his own kitchen, camping, and being bad at carpentry. Though Zendesk now considers itself to be a “service-first CRM company,” since its founding in 2007, their bread and butter offering has leaned much more heavily toward the “service” part of that equation. Keeping this general theme in mind, I’ll dive deeper into how each software’s features compare, so you can decide which use case might best fit your needs. We have numerous customers that do this and benefit greatly from our out-of-the-box integration with Intercom.

CAPABILITIES

When it comes to customer communication, Intercom has a perfect layout and customer information storage system. Based on such information, you can easily communicate with your customers and resolve their queries instantly. Its easy navigability allows you to switch between different sections smoothly. Automating onboarding messages, product guides, newsletters, and the list goes on. Intercom understands very well that email marketing is no more than a magic wand for building strong customer relations. Zendesk is yet another powerful way to help businesses interact with their customers.

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.

Advanced workflows are useful to customer service teams because they automate processes that make it easier for agents to provide great customer service. Zendesk chat allows you to Chat PG 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.

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.

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 https://chat.openai.com/ 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.

There is also something called warm transfers, which let one rep add contextual notes to a ticket before transferring it to another rep. You also get a side conversation tool. In the category of customer support, Zendesk appears to be just slightly better than Intercom based on the availability of regular service and response times. However, it is possible Intercom’s support is superior at the premium level.

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. 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. As you can imagine, banking from anywhere requires a flexible, robust customer service experience. No matter how a customer contacts your business, your agents will have access to the tools and information they need to continue and close conversations on any channel. 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.

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 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.

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. Zendesk is a ticketing system before anything else, and its ticketing functionality is overwhelming in the best possible way. They’ve been marketing themselves as a messaging platform right from the beginning. Currently based in Albuquerque, NM, Bryce Emley holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NC State and nearly a decade of writing and editing experience.

• It is tailored for automation and quick access to insights, offering a user-friendly experience.
• This additional cost can be a considerable factor for businesses to consider when evaluating their customer support needs against their budget constraints.
• As you can imagine, banking from anywhere requires a flexible, robust customer service experience.
• However, if you’re looking for a streamlined, all-in-one messaging platform, there is no better option than Messagely.
• Automating onboarding messages, product guides, newsletters, and the list goes on.

If you want to enjoy the benefits of both Zendesk and Intercom in one place and enjoy better value for money overall, Desku is a strong alternative. 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. The setup is designed to seamlessly connect your customer support team with customers across all platforms. From the inbox, live agents and chatbots can refer to and link knowledge base articles, to elaborate on replies and help customers locate answers.

What makes Desku unique is that it has competitively priced services with similar features as those provided by other companies but at a lower cost. Here comes Desku as the strong competitor, which can effectively substitute Zendesk and Intercom. Desku provides a user-friendly platform with robust features that enable easy transition during the migration from other support systems. Messagely’s pricing starts at just $29 per month, which includes live chat, targeted messages, shared inbox, mobile apps, and over 750 powerful integrations.

It has a very intuitive design that goes far beyond its platform and into its articles, product guides, and even its illustrations. After signing up and creating your account, you can start filling in your information, such as your company name and branding and your agents’ profiles and information. The setup can be so complex that there are tutorials by third parties to teach new users how to do it right. Zendesk for Sales offers three plans, ranging from $19 to $99 monthly per user, with free trials available for each plan. Zendesk for Service and Zendesk for Sales are sold as two separate solutions, each with three pricing plans, or tiers.

Intercom also has an omnichannel customer service solution, but it’s fairly limited, with no native voice capabilities and minimal voice integrations. However, you’ll likely end up paying more for Zendesk, and in-app messenger and other advanced customer communication tools will not be included. Intercom isn’t as great with sales, but it allows for better communication.

Some of the links that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation. However, this is somewhat subjective, and depending on your business needs and favorite tools, you may argue we got it all mixed up, and Intercom is truly superior. Some startups and small businesses may prefer one app, while large companies and enterprise operations will have their own requirements. No matter what Zendesk Suite plan you are on, you get workflow triggers, which are simple business rules-based actions to streamline many tasks. There is a simple email integration tool for whatever email provider you regularly use.

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.

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