Zendesk vs Intercom: Choosing the best tool for your business

When comparing Zendesk and Intercom, Zendesk stands out with its robust and versatile customer support solutions. 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.

While both Intercom and Zendesk excel in customer support and engagement, the decision between the two depends on your specific requirements. It’s well-suited for organizations aiming to enhance customer engagement zendesk chat vs intercom through real-time communication. It’s known for its unified agent workspace which combines different communication methods like email, social media messaging, live chat, and SMS, all in one place.

In comparison to that, you enjoy customized agent roles, sandbox, and skills-based routing, besides offering basic functionalities with the expensive enterprise plan. Because of its easy navigation and interface, Intercom has always received positive words from its users. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. We can say that Zendesk’s user interface is very clean and clear to understand. Besides its easy navigation, it also offers a mesmerizing ticketing system, multichannel communication, and analytics reporting. So, Zendesk’s users are always going to have a smooth experience with it.

For Intercom’s pricing plan, on the other hand, there is much less information on their website. There is a Starter plan for small businesses at $74 per month billed annually, and there are add-ons like a WhatsApp add-on at $9 per user https://chat.openai.com/ per month or surveys at $49 per month. Picking customer service software to run your business is not a decision you make lightly. Zendesk has been ruling the market for ages due to its multi-communication and ticketing system.

Zendesk offers a comprehensive suite of customer service features, whereas Intercom emphasizes personalized messaging and advanced sales automation tools. Yes, you can use Intercom on the front end for customer communication and Zendesk on the back end for managing support tickets and workflows. This combination maximizes the strengths of both help desk platforms, providing a seamless experience for managing customer accounts from initial interaction to issue resolution. While Intercom offers a user-friendly interface and solid chat features, it may lack the comprehensive, modular capabilities provided by Zendesk. Intercom’s tools are packaged together, limiting customization and potentially leading to higher costs if you need only specific features.

The integration of chatbots brings forth a multitude of benefits for businesses. By leveraging automated customer support, companies can significantly enhance their efficiency in addressing consumer queries. Furthermore, chatbot integration improves response time, leading to heightened customer satisfaction. The ability of virtual assistants to handle routine tasks allows human agents to focus on more complex and personalized interactions, thereby optimizing overall customer service operations. In the rapidly evolving landscape of customer service software in 2024, the competition between Zendesk and Intercom has intensified.

Zendesk’s tried and true approach to ticketing is both familiar and effective. Intercom is also easy to learn and its guided onboarding and training resources are especially helpful to new users. Discover customer and product issues with instant replays, in-app cobrowsing, and console logs. This is not a huge difference; however, it does indicate that customers are generally more satisfied with Intercom’s offerings than Zendesk’s.

It’s time to upgrade your customer service platform

However, if you compare Zendesk vs Intercom chat in ease of use, the letter wins. Create a chatbot with minimal coding and customize it to your heart’s content. Both Zendesk and Intercom provide a campaign tool, live chat, and a knowledge base.

Triggers should prove especially useful for agents, allowing them to do things like automate notifications for actions like ticket assignments, ticket closing/reopening, or new ticket creation. Their template triggers are fairly limited with only seven options, but they do enable users to create new custom triggers, which can be a game-changer for agents with more complex workflows. If delivering an outstanding customer experience and employee experience is your top priority, Zendesk should be your top pick over Intercom. Zendesk has the CX expertise to help businesses of all sizes scale their service experience without compromise. The top products based on usability and customer satisfaction, as rated by user reviews. Chatbots are software applications that can simulate human-like conversation and boost the effectiveness of your customer service strategy.

The final prices are revealed after engaging in sales demos and are not revealed upfront. This lack of transparency can create budgeting problems for businesses. However, it simplifies sorting and filtering options based on multiple parameters—date, priority, ticket, tags, sources, etc. It also enables dashboard customisation and integration with 500+ apps. Since its inception in 2007, Zendesk is known for its robust help desk software designed to improve customer relationships. Zendesk empowers brands to connect with customers on multiple channels.

It really depends on what features you need and what type of customer service strategy you plan to implement. You can use both Zendesk and Intercom simultaneously to leverage their respective strengths and provide comprehensive customer support across different channels and touchpoints. 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. The app includes features like automated messages and conversation routing — so businesses can manage customer conversations more efficiently. As businesses expand and evolve, the scalability and flexibility of their customer support platform becomes important. Examining the scalability and flexibility of Zendesk and Intercom helps businesses determine which platform can accommodate their growth trajectory and changing needs.

• Evaluate your company’s criteria to determine which set of standards best matches your goals.
• One place Intercom really shines as a standalone CRM is its data utility.
• Intercom can even integrate with Zendesk and other sources to import past help center content.
• Businesses are recognizing the rising importance of incorporating AI chatbots and automated customer support systems to meet the ever-changing needs of consumers.

HubSpot and Salesforce are also available when support needs to work with marketing and sales teams. Intercom bills itself first and foremost as a platform to make the business of customer service more personalized, among other things. They offer an advanced feature for customer data management that goes beyond basic CRM stuff. It gives detailed contact profiles enriched by company data, behavioral data, conversation data, and other custom fields. 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.

Low total cost of ownership

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. Zendesk and Intercom are robust tools with a wide range of customer service and CRM features.

After this live chat software comparison, you’ll get a better picture of what’s better for your business. 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. However, you can browse their respective sites to find which tools each platform supports.

Zendesk allows for the creation of predefined rules and workflows that efficiently route tickets to the appropriate agents, ensuring swift and precise issue resolution. Moreover, Zendesk excels in sending automated responses and escalating critical issues with precision. While there can be add-ons, such as premium customer support, you can generally anticipate what you’ll be paying for your Zendesk subscription. It calculates the cost of its Pro and Premium plans based on the number of AI resolutions, people reached, and seats (or users). This can make it challenging to estimate the cost yourself during your research and you need to speak with Intercom for more information.

Zendesk Leads in Integration Capabilities Over Intercom

But in case you are in search of something beyond these two, then ProProfs Chat can be an option. Just like Intercom, Zendesk’s customer service is quite disappointing. The only relief is that they do reach out to customers, but it gets too late. In terms of customer service, Zendesk fails to deliver an exceptional experience. This can be a bummer for many as they can always stumble upon an issue.

Zendesk is yet another powerful way to help businesses interact with their customers. Intecom’s pricing strategies are not as transparent as Zendesk’s pricing. Agents can easily track customer conversations, view unassigned tickets, and track their overall performance. It also makes the inter-team collaboration a bit more engaging and effortless. The Zendesk Vs Intercom dilemma is probably one of the most talked about in the customer support industry.

They’ve been rated as one of the easy live chat solutions with more integrated options. This live chat software provider also enables your business to send proactive chat messages to customers and engage effectively in real-time. This is one of the best ways to qualify high-quality leads for your business and improve your chances of closing a sale faster. Zendesk has also introduced its chatbot to help its clients send automated answers to some frequently asked questions to stay ahead in the competitive marketplace. What’s more, it helps its clients build an integrated community forum and help center to improve the support experience in real-time. Welcome to another blog post that helps you gauge which live chat solution is compatible with your customer support needs.

Visit either of their app marketplaces and look up the Intercom Zendesk integration. Like with many other apps, Zapier seems to be the best and most simple way to connect Intercom to Zendesk. The Zendesk marketplace is also where you can get a lot of great add-ons. There are also several different Shopify integrations to choose from, as well as CRM integrations like HubSpot and Salesforce. The main idea here is to rid the average support agent of a slew of mundane and repetitive tasks, giving them more time and mental energy to help customers with tougher issues.

Other chatbots don’t sit natively within the agent desk, but with Netomi, virtual and human agents work alongside each other, creating an efficient and ultra-powerful customer service team. Whatever people are using to communicate with each other, whether it be online or over the phone, they expect to also be able to talk to the businesses they use with those same tools and platforms. Among the many challenges facing businesses today is the pressing need to meet their customers where they are. When choosing the best customer support solution in 2024, it’s essential to consider factors such as scalability, customization, and the nature of customer inquiries.

We also adhere to numerous industry standards and regulations, such as HIPAA, SOC2, ISO 27001, HDS, FedRAMP LI-SaaS, ISO 27018, and ISO 27701. Intercom only started offering ticket management in 2022 when they shifted from conversations to tickets. Personalized messaging, in-app messaging, product tours, and chatbot capabilities set Intercom apart from Zendesk. 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. Here is a Zendesk vs. Intercom based on the customer support offered by these brands.

Zendesk is a much larger company than Intercom; it has over 170,000 customers, while Intercom has over 25,000. While this may seem like a positive for Zendesk, it’s important to consider that a larger company may not be as agile or responsive to customer needs as a smaller company. 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.

With over 160,000 customers across all industries and regions, Zendesk has the CX expertise to provide you with best practices and thought leadership to increase your overall value. But don’t just take our word for it—listen to what customers say about why they picked Zendesk. If that’s not enough, check out the Zendesk 14-day free trial to test out all our features risk-free. View the attached screenshots to easily evaluate the similarities and differences between Intercom and Zendesk Chat user interfaces. Experience the amazing capabilities of Intercom and Zendesk Chat on desktop and mobile devices for unparalleled productivity and flexibility.

Beyond that, you can create custom reports that combine all of the stats listed above (and many more) and present them as counts, columns, lines, or tables. You could say something similar for Zendesk’s standard service offering, so it’s at least good to know they have Zendesk Sell, a capable CRM option to supplement it. You can use Zendesk Sell to track tasks, streamline workflows, improve engagement, nurture leads, and much more. 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.

The future of customer service is integrated, AI-enhanced—and powered by Intercom

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. 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. 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. Help desk software creates a sort of “virtual front desk” for your business.

Zendesk and Intercom each have their own marketplace/app store where users can find all the integrations for each platform. Using Zendesk, you can create community forums where customers can connect, comment, and collaborate, creating a way to harness customers’ expertise and promote feedback. Community managers can also escalate posts to support agents when one-on-one help is needed.

It’s Intercom VS Zendesk, the battle of two well-known software in the help desk category. If you have been wondering which to choose, Intercom or Zendesk, the good news is you aren’t alone. That’s true, businesses vary by industry, size, purposes, the software they need, a budget for that software, and the list can go on. In terms of G2 ratings, Zendesk and Intercom are both well-rated platforms. 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.

It plans on using this funding to research machine learning technology instead of just lining their own pockets. 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.

Best Reamaze Alternative Tools for Customer Support in 2023

You can create an omnichannel CRM suite with a mix of productivity, collaboration, eCommerce, CRM, analytics, email marketing, social media, and other tools. Both app stores include many popular integrations, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Zapier. Intercom offers an easy way to nurture your qualified leads (prospects) into customers with Intercom Series.

To sum things up, one can get really confused trying to make sense of Zendesk’s pricing, let alone to calculate costs. You’d probably want to know how much it costs to get Zendesk or Intercom for your business, so let’s talk money now. As I’ve already mentioned, they started as a help desk/ticketing tool, and honestly, they perfected every bit of it over the years. As it turns, it’s quite difficult to compare Zendesk against Intercom as they serve different purposes and will fit different businesses. If you’re running a business, you’d know that occasional disruptions to your products or services are inevitable…. When comparing the omnichannel support functionalities of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms show distinct strengths and weaknesses.

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. Track key metrics, measure campaign success, and optimize customer engagement strategies. We hope that this Intercom VS Zendesk comparison helps you choose one that matches your support, marketing, and sales needs.

The chat enables you to send targeted, behavior based Zendesk messages to customers. Zendesk chat provides a personal connection with customers who need support. Both Zendesk Chat and Intercom have a free trial available and a freemium model to test out which chat service will work best for your company. Some of the links that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation. One more thing to add, there are ways to integrate Intercom to Zendesk.

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. Zendesk’s automation features are limited to offering basic automation to streamline repetitive tasks. While Zeendesk provides automation services for ticket support systems, notifications, chatbots, etc., it may not be an extensive feature compared to Intercom. The Zendesk chat tool has the most necessary features like shortcuts to saved responses, chatbots, and live chat analytics. 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.

As any free tool, the functionalities there are quite limited, but nevertheless. If you’re a really small business or a startup, you can benefit big time from such free tools. Zendesk provides limited customer support for its basic plan users, along with costly premium assistance options. On the other hand, Intercom is generally praised for its support features, despite facing challenges with its AI chatbot and the complexity of its help articles. This exploration aims to provide a detailed comparison, aiding businesses in making an informed decision that aligns with their customer service goals.

Evolution of Chatbot Integration

Zendesk started in 2007 as a web-based SaaS product for managing 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. Research by Zoho reports that customer relationship management (CRM) systems can help companies triple lead conversion rates. Those same tools also increase customer retention by 27% while saving 23% on sales and marketing costs. What makes Intercom stand out from the crowd are their chatbots and lots of chat automation features that can be very helpful for your team. You can integrate different apps (like Google Meet or Stripe among others) with your messenger and make it a high end point for your customers.

Though, if you compare Zendesk chat vs Intercom, the plugin is a bit hard to use as reviewed by customers. Installing it might take some technical skill and even when installed, could malfunction a bit. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to assist customers through self-help options or access to the relevant articles before connecting them to your team.

By exploring their distinct offerings, we aim to assist businesses in making informed decisions when selecting a customer service platform. Intercom’s reporting is average compared to Zendesk, as it offers some standard reporting and analytics tools. Its analytics do not provide deeper insights into consumer interactions as well.

If this scenario applies to you, you must check out our feature-rich and cost-effective tool—Helplama. Intercom’s helpdesk is more of a complementary tool to their chat tools. Intercom is more communication-oriented, whereas Zendesk has everything a customer support representative wants. It doesn’t require a team of administrators to manage and its toolset is robust without being complex. Zendesk’s pricing is very competitive for the market and is presented in a straightforward way that makes predicting costs simple and accurate.

ThriveDesk empowers small businesses to manage real-time customer communications. One of Zendesk’s standout features that we need to shine a spotlight on is its extensive marketplace of third-party integrations and extensions. Imagine having the power to connect your helpdesk solution with a wide range of tools and applications that your team already uses. Whether it’s syncing data with your CRM, enhancing communication via messaging platforms, or automating tasks with productivity apps, Zendesk makes it possible.

A helpdesk solution’s user experience and interface are crucial in ensuring efficient and intuitive customer support. Let’s evaluate the user experience and interface of both Zendesk and Intercom, considering factors such as ease of navigation, customization options, and overall intuitiveness. We will also consider customer feedback and reviews to provide insights into the usability of each platform.

Zendesk allows businesses to group their resources in the help center, providing customers with self-service personalized support. The platform has various customization options, allowing businesses personalized experiences according to their branding. Help Center in Zendesk also will enable businesses to organize their tutorials, articles, and FAQs, making it convenient for customer to find solutions to their queries. Its messaging also has real-time notifications and automated responses, enhancing customer communication. Zendesk excels in its ticketing system, offering users an intuitive platform for collaboration among support agents.

This makes it easier for support teams to handle customer interactions without switching between different systems. Plus, Zendesk’s integration with various channels ensures customers can always find a convenient way to reach out. On the contrary, Intercom is far less predictable when it comes to pricing and can cost hundreds/thousands of dollars per month. 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. This cloud-based live chat and messaging platform helps support teams communicate with customers via website or mobile app.

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. 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. You need a complete customer service platform that’s seamlessly integrated and AI-enhanced. It’s important to choose the right customer service software for your business.

They may be utilized to alert consumers about product updates, provide assistance, and promote specials that are relevant to them. Zendesk’s dashboard ties together your customer interactions from every possible channel. This makes it easy for agents to manage requests and communicate with customers more efficiently. They also offer features that enhance collaboration amongst employees if you have a bigger team. To make an informed decision regarding your 2024 customer service needs, consider how Zendesk and Intercom adapt to emerging technologies and industry trends.

Some help desk software provides call center tools as one of customer communication channels. So, let’s explore the difference between Zendesk and Intercom call center tools. Knowledge Base is one of the self-service sections that includes articles or documents providing technical help to customers and employees. To make a comparison of Zendesk vs Intercom knowledge base features is quite tricky.

Customers want speed, anticipation, and a hyper-personalized experience conveniently on their channel of choice. Intelligence has become key to delivering the kinds of experiences customers expect at a lower operational cost. As more organizations adopt AI, it will be critical to choose a data model that aligns with how your business operates. Customer experience will be no exception, and AI models that are purpose-built for CX lead to better results at scale. When reviewing a product, users are asked to assess the product’s overall quality, which includes assigning specific ratings for ease of use, value for money, customer support, and functionality. Olark allows businesses to configure routing and automations to streamline support.

While both platforms offer email marketing tools, Zendesk’s email marketing features are more robust and comprehensive. Zendesk’s email marketing functionalities include advanced segmentation options, powerful automation tools, and detailed email tracking capabilities. These features empower businesses to create highly targeted and personalized email campaigns, ensuring efficient communication and nurturing of customer relationships. To begin with, efficient customer relationship management is important these days. Without proper channels to reach you, usually, customers will take their business elsewhere.

Basically, you can create new articles, divide them by categories and sections — make it a high end destination for customers when they have questions or issues. But I don’t want to sell their chat tool short as it still has most of necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers and live chat analytics. Zendesk’s per-agent pricing structure makes it a budget-friendly option for smaller teams, allowing costs to scale with team growth. When comparing Zendesk and Intercom, various factors come into play, each focusing on different aspects, strengths, and weaknesses of these customer support platforms. Intercom, on the other hand, is ideal for those focusing on CRM capabilities and personalized customer interactions. To sum up this Intercom vs Zendesk battle, the latter is a great support-oriented tool that will be a good choice for big teams with various departments.

This scalability ensures businesses can align their support infrastructure with their evolving requirements, ensuring a seamless customer experience. 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. LiveAgent’s help desk is an omnichannel customer service platform that helps agents handle communications via phone, live chat, social messaging, text, and email. Its help desk consists of a ticketing system that consolidates requests into a shared inbox, a live chat feature for real-time support, and call center software for inbound and outbound calls.

On the other hand, Intercom focuses on providing powerful messaging and engagement tools that facilitate personalized customer interactions. Zendesk is a leading customer service software that offers a comprehensive suite of tools for businesses to manage customer support, engagement, and relationships. Its user-friendly interface, robust ticketing system, and extensive Chat GPT integration options make it popular for businesses seeking efficient customer service solutions. 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.

However, it is a great option for businesses seeking efficient customer interactions, as its focus on personalized messaging compensates for its lack of features. Intercom’s messaging platform is very similar to Zendesk’s dashboard, offering seamless integration of multiple channels in one place for managing customer interactions. Although Intercom offers an omnichannel messaging dashboard, it has slightly less functionality than Zendesk.