Zendesk vs Intercom: Which One Is Right for You?

Besides, the prices differ depending on the company’s size and specific needs. We conducted a little study of our own and found that all Intercom users share different amounts of money they pay for the plans, which can reach over $1000/mo. The price levels can even be much higher if we’re talking of a larger company. 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. If I had to describe Intercom’s helpdesk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools.

The overall sentiment from users indicates a satisfactory level of support, although opinions vary. Intercom is a customer support platform known for its effective messaging and automation, enhancing in-context support within products, apps, or websites. It features the Intercom Messenger, which works with existing support tools for self-serve or live support. Today, both companies offer a broad range of customer support features, making them both strong contenders in the market. Zendesk offers more advanced automation capabilities than Intercom, which may be a deciding factor for businesses that require complex workflows.

Many software vendors aren’t upfront about the cost of using their products, maintenance costs, or integration fees. Altogether, this can significantly impact affordability in the long term. 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. They’ve been marketing themselves as a messaging platform right from the beginning. Their reports are attractive, dynamic, and integrated right out of the box. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads.

Omnichannel Functionalities

Zendesk for Sales, or Zendesk Sell, is Zendesk’s sales pipeline and CRM tool with its own dashboard for lead generation and conversion. We have numerous customers that do this and benefit greatly from our out-of-the-box integration with Intercom. With over 100,000 customers across all industries and regions, Zendesk knows what it takes to interact with customers while retaining and growing relationships.

It is none other than the modern customer support software of Helpwise. Here, we’ve outlined the support options that Intercom and Zendesk provide to companies using their platforms. 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.

But that doesn’t mean you have to completely switch from your current provider if you’re not quite ready. Like so many others, Monese determined that Zendesk was the best solution to provide seamless, omnichannel support because of its scalability and reliability. Businesses should always consider a tool’s TCO before committing to a purchase.

It’s like having a toolkit for lead generation, customer segmentation, and crafting highly personalized messages. This makes it an excellent choice if you want to engage with support and potential and existing customers in real time. Intercom is a great choice for companies seeking a more rounded solution for managing customer relationships, with strong sales and marketing features. Its extensive automation capabilities are a bonus for businesses seeking to streamline their customer interactions. The platform’s omnichannel dashboard provides a seamless experience for agents, enabling streamlined resolution processes.

Intercom is a customer messaging platform that enables businesses to engage with customers through personalized and real-time communication. Zendesk’s pricing structure provides increasing levels of features and capabilities as businesses move up the tiers. This scalability allows organizations to adapt their support operations to their expanding customer base.

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.

On the other hand, Intercom brings a dynamic approach to customer support. Its suite of tools goes beyond traditional ticketing and focuses on customer engagement and messaging automation. From in-app chat to personalized autoresponders, Intercom provides a unified experience across multiple channels, creating a support ecosystem that nurtures and converts leads. Effective customer support is the backbone of any successful business, akin to frying eggs for the perfect omelette. This is where software platforms such as Zendesk and Intercom come into play, offering customer-centric tools like ticketing, issue resolution, automation, and messaging. But with each software boasting its unique strengths, which one should you choose?

Their AI-powered chatbot can enable your business to boost engagement and improve marketing efforts in real-time. 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 zendesk vs intercom 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. Intercom’s UI excels in modern design and intuitive functionality, particularly noted for its real-time messaging and advanced features.

Zendesk vs Intercom – Which Tool Should YOU Choose?

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. 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. There are 3 Basic support plans at $19, $49 and $99 per user per month billed annually, and 5 Suite plans at $49, $79, $99, $150, and $215 per user per month billed annually. NovoChat, on the other hand, is great for businesses that primarily engage with their clients through messaging apps.

Intercom and Zendesk are two of the most popular customer service platforms, each with its own set of distinct advantages and drawbacks. HubSpot helps seamlessly integrate customer service tools that you and your team already leverage. When it comes to advanced workflows and ticketing systems, Zendesk boasts a more full-featured solution. Due to our intelligent routing capabilities and numerous automated workflows, our users can free up hours to focus on other tasks. The two essential things that Zendesk lacks in comparison to Intercom are in-app messages and email marketing tools. On the other hand, Intercom lacks many ticketing functionality that can be essential for big companies with a huge client support load.

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. What’s really nice about this is that even within a ticket, you can switch between communication modes without changing views. So if an agent needs to switch from chat to phone to email (or vice versa) with a customer, it’s all on the same ticketing page. There’s even on-the-spot translation built right in, which is extremely helpful. Which platform is “better” depends on the precise requirements and objectives that you have. Intercom puts a lot of effort into making a sleek and easy-to-use interface.

All customer questions, be it via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel, are landing in one dashboard, where your agents can solve them quickly and efficiently. It guarantees continuous omnichannel support that meets customer expectations. 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)? One place Intercom really shines as a standalone CRM is its data utility.

Knowledge Base

Let’s explore how Zendesk and Intercom stack up in terms of basic functionalities required by a helpdesk software. 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. So, by now, you can see that according to this article, Zendesk inches past Intercom as the better customer support platform.

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. Intercom enables customers to self-serve through its messaging platform. Agents can easily find resources for customers from their agent workspace. Zendesk offers robust, pre-built reports for sales and support teams. Here are our top reporting and analytics features and an overview of where Intercom’s reporting limitations lie. But keep in mind that Zendesk is viewed more as a support and ticketing solution, while Intercom is CRM functionality-oriented.

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, 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. Zendesk, like Intercom, offers multilingual language functionality.

Here is a Zendesk vs. Intercom based on the customer support offered by these brands. However, customers can purchase multiple Intercom plans to use together, or purchase add-ons to select just the features they want. Intercom has a unique pricing structure, offering three separate solutions, each intended for a distinct use case. We wish some of their great features were offered in multiple plans, but none features overlap among plans. 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.

Frequently asked questions

Intercom also offers reporting features, but they aren’t as extensive as Zendesk’s. They are, however, adequate for most users, providing essential insights into customer service operations. Intercom can function as a standalone CRM, allowing businesses to track and manage customer interactions efficiently. However, larger businesses might need to supplement it with additional services for a more comprehensive solution. Intercom, of course, allows its customer support team to collaborate and communicate too, but overall, Zendesk wins this group. Intercom has a very robust advanced chatbot set of tools for your business needs.

Zendesk wins the collaboration tools category because of its easy-to-use side conversations feature. The entire thread is saved within the ticket for future agents to reference. Agents can add each other to internal notes within a ticket, looping in team members to collaborate when necessary. 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.

Intercom, on the other hand, lacks key ticketing features that are critical for large firms with a high volume of customer assistance. Zendesk’s Suite Team plan (the cheapest plan) costs $49 per user per month. 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. 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. What’s worse, Intercom doesn’t offer a free trial to its prospect to help them test the product before onboarding with their services.

• Zendesk’s ticketing system allows for support tickets to be generated, tracked effectively, and routed to the most appropriate support team agent.
• Operators can easily switch from one conversation to another, therefore helping operators manage more interactions simultaneously.
• Intercom’s live chat reports aren’t just offering what your customers are doing or whether they are satisfied with your services.
• The lack of transparency can make it harder for businesses to determine the actual costs and compare different plans.

Although many people tout it as the solution for large businesses, its bottom pricing tier is a nice entry for any small business looking to add customer service to its front page. These plans make Hiver a versatile tool, catering to a range of business sizes and needs, from startups to large enterprises looking for a comprehensive customer support solution within Gmail. 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. Intercom also has a mobile app available for both Android and iOS, which makes it easy to stay connected with customers even when away from the computer.

Sequence all channels–chat, web post, email, chatbot outreach, tour message, banner, push notification, or carousel–mixing and matching modes of outreach to fit campaign goals. If a customer isn’t satisfied with Answer Bot’s response, Answer Bot quickly routes them to an agent best suited to help. With Intercom workload management tools, administrators can ensure that incoming conversations, traffic, and workload are evenly distributed among team members. Set automatic triggers so that certain events send push notifications to targeted customers, or use them as part of communication campaigns and series, and run A/B testing to compare two notifications. Agents can use the desktop chatbox to respond to customers in any outbound channel. Yes—as your business’s needs grow, you will require a more sophisticated case management system.

That’s why it would be better to review where both the options would be ideal to use. Zendesk also offers detailed reports that can be shared with others and enable team members to collaborate on them simultaneously. You can either track your performance on a pre-built dashboard or customize and build one for yourself. This customized dashboard will help you see metrics that you’d like to focus on regularly. Now that we know a little about both tools, it is time to make an in-depth analysis and identify which one of these will be perfect for your business. Here’s a list of criteria we’ve used to differentiate the two for you.

To help you explore more options, we’ve put together a list of the best Zendesk alternatives as well as the best Intercom alternatives you might want to consider. Intercom’s pricing isn’t very transparent, with the starter pack costing $74 per month for two seats. The lack of transparency can make it harder for businesses to determine the actual costs and compare different plans. Intercom’s advanced chatbots, coupled with customizability, give it an edge over Zendesk in this category. The offers that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation.

Intercom vs. Zendesk: Omnichannel Capabilities

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. Many users complain that Intercom’s help is unavailable the majority of the time, forcing them to repeatedly ask the same question to a bot. When they do respond, they’re usually unhelpful or want to immediately transfer you to the sales department. Whatever you think of Intercom’s design and general user experience, you can’t deny that it outperforms all of its competitors. Everything, from the tools to the website, reflects their meticulous attention to detail.

The app includes features like automated messages and conversation routing — so businesses can manage customer conversations more efficiently. Zendesk has an app available for both Android and iOS, which makes it easy to stay connected with customers while on the go. The app includes features like push notifications and real-time customer engagement — so businesses can respond quickly to customer inquiries. Messagely’s pricing starts at just $29 per month, which includes live chat, targeted messages, shared inbox, mobile apps, and over 750 powerful integrations.

If you thought Zendesk prices were confusing, let me introduce you to the Intercom charges. 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.

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. You could technically consider Intercom a CRM, but it’s really more of a customer-focused communication product. It isn’t as adept at purer sales tasks like lead management, list engagement, advanced reporting, forecasting, and workflow management as you’d expect a more complete CRM to be.

It can be classified as a chatbox for average users, just like the ones found on a variety of websites. The user experience is similar to that of a Facebook Messenger chat. We hope that this Intercom VS Zendesk comparison helps you choose one that matches your support, marketing, and sales needs. But in case you are in search of something beyond these two, then ProProfs Chat can be an option. After an in-depth analysis such as this, it can be pretty challenging for your business to settle with either option.

Now, their use cases comprise support, engagement, and conversion. Their chat widget looks and works great, and they invest a lot of effort to make it a modern, convenient customer communication tool. Zendesk also has an Answer Bot, which instantly takes your knowledge base game to the next level.

Higher-tier plans in Zendesk come packed with advanced functionalities such as chatbots, customizable knowledge bases, and performance dashboards. These features can add significant value for businesses aiming to implement more sophisticated support capabilities as they scale. 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. Intercom, while differing from Zendesk, offers specialized features aimed at enhancing customer relationships.

With live chat, in-app messaging, and targeted messaging, among other features, the tool lets businesses talk to customers right away. People who work in fields like e-commerce or SaaS, where quick responses and personalised exchanges are very important, may benefit the most from this. Zendesk users, on the other hand, usually say good things about its powerful support system. With this feature, businesses can easily handle and keep track of customer requests, making sure that no issues get lost. Zendesk’s analytics features are also often praised; they help businesses learn a lot about how customers connect with them, how well agents do their jobs, and overall support trends.