Zendesk vs Intercom A Detailed Comparison

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. Zendesk also has an Answer Bot, which instantly takes your knowledge base game to the next level. It can automatically suggest relevant articles for agents during business hours to share with clients, reducing your support agents’ workload. Basically, if you have a complicated support process, go with Zendesk, an excellent Intercom alternative, for its help desk functionality.

Intercom’s chatbot feels a little more robust than Zendesk’s (though it’s worth noting that some features are only available at the Engage and Convert tiers). 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. Advanced workflows are useful to customer service teams because they automate processes that make it easier for agents to provide great customer service. Intercom also has an omnichannel customer service solution, but it’s fairly limited, with no native voice capabilities and minimal voice integrations.

This serves the dual benefit of adding convenience to the customer experience and lightening agents’ workloads. 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. If you’re not ready to make the full switch to Intercom just yet, you can integrate Intercom with your Zendesk account.

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. 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.

It’s also good for sending and receiving notifications, as well as for quick filtering through the queue of open tickets. Email marketing, for example, is a big deal, but less so when it comes to customer service. Still, for either of these platforms to have some email marketing or other email functionality is common sense.

They have a 2-day SLA, no phone support, and the times I have had to work with them they have been incredibly difficult to work with. Very rarely do they understand the issue (mostly with Explore) that I am trying to communicate to them. The support documentation is incredibly lackluster, and it’s often impossible to know which guide to use as they have non-sensical terminology that makes even finding the appropriate guide very difficult. 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. Zendesk is a much larger company than Intercom; it has over 170,000 customers, while Intercom has over 25,000.

Customer support and data security

There are also several different Shopify integrations to choose from, as well as CRM integrations like HubSpot and Salesforce. The learning and knowledgebase category is another one where it is a close call between Zendesk and Intercom. However, we will say that Intercom just edges past Zendesk when it comes to self-service resources. All plans come with a 7-day free trial, and no credit card is required to sign up for the trial. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks.

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. In this paragraph, let’s explain some common issues that users usually ask about when choosing between Zendesk and Intercom platforms. If you’d want to test Intercom vs Zendesk before deciding on a tool for good, they both provide free trials for 14 days.

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. 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. 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 enables customers to self-serve through its messaging platform. Agents can easily find resources for customers from their agent workspace. Here are our top reporting and analytics features and an overview of where Intercom’s reporting limitations lie.

But sooner or later, you’ll have to decide on the subscription plan, and here’s what you’ll have to pay. 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. Intercom does have a ticketing dashboard that has omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk.

Zendesk can also save key customer information in their platform, which helps reps get a faster idea of who they are dealing with as well as any historical data that might assist in the support. Zendesk Sunshine is a separate feature set that focuses on unified customer views. Help desk SaaS is how you manage general customer communication and for handling customer questions. When comparing the automation and AI features of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms come with unique strengths and weaknesses. Learn how top CX leaders are scaling personalized customer service at their companies.

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. 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. 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. 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.

If you seek a comprehensive customer support solution with a strong emphasis on traditional ticketing, Zendesk is a solid choice, particularly for smaller to mid-sized businesses. The Zendesk Workspace provides agents a single workspace with access to all team collaboration and customer communication channels so that an agent can manage all conversations without switching interfaces. 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. The primary function of Intercom’s mobile app is the business messenger suite, including personalized messaging, real-time support tools, push notifications, in-app messaging and emailing.

With Intercom workload management tools, administrators can ensure that incoming conversations, traffic, and workload are evenly distributed among team members. The Agent Workspace highlights tickets based on the issue and urgency, https://chat.openai.com/ assigning each one a priority–agents can also tag tickets based on recency, hold-vs-open status, and urgency. Some of the links that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation.

Zendesk vs Intercom for pricing

Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates. 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. Intercom, on the other hand, was built for business messaging, so communication is one of their strong suits. Combine that with their prowess in automation and sales solutions, and you’ve got a really strong product that can handle myriad customer relationship needs.

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. The support team faced spiking ticket volumes, numerous new customer accounts, and the need to shift to remote work.

Track customer service metrics to gain valuable insights and improve customer service processes and agent performance. Sales teams can also view outbound communications, and any support agent can access resources from the Intercom workspace. 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.

Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page. 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. They’ve been marketing themselves as a messaging platform right from the beginning. 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. G2 ranks Intercom higher than Zendesk for ease of setup, and support quality—so you can expect a smooth transition, effortless onboarding, and continuous success.

Intercom’s solution aims to streamline high-volume ticket influx and provide personalized, conversational support. It also includes extensive integrations with over 350 CRM, email, ticketing, and reporting tools. The platform is recognized for its ability to resolve a significant portion of common questions automatically, ensuring faster response times. 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.

Say what you will, but Intercom’s design and overall user experience leave all its competitors far behind. 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. 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.

Ultimately, it’s important to consider what features each platform offers before making a decision, as well as their pricing options and customer support policies. Since both are such well-established market leader companies, you can rest assured that whichever one you choose will offer a quality customer service solution. 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. It is great to have CRM functionality inside your customer service platform because it helps maintain great customer experiences by storing all past customer engagements and conversation histories.

When you switch from Zendesk, you can also create dynamic macros to speed up your response time to common queries, like feature requests and bug reports. If you’ve already set up macros in Zendesk just copy and paste them over. With ThriveDesk, you can supercharge your website’s Chat PG growth and streamline customer interactions like never before. It can team up with tools like Salesforce and Slack, so everything runs smoothly. Survey composer allows you to create the question and answer format, also customizing color, rating scales, and greetings.

Easily track your service team’s performance and unlock coaching opportunities with AI-powered insights. While Intercom does not offer free trials, they do offer demo versions of each plan. Administrator reports allow managers to observe real-time CSAT scores, conversation volume, first response time, and time to close. Intercom’s Inbox organizes all of an agent’s core functions into one interface.

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. 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. Intercom, on the other hand, is ideal for those focusing on CRM capabilities and personalized customer interactions.

All these features are necessary for operational efficiency and help agents deliver fast, personalized customer experiences. 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 provides limited customer support for its basic plan users, along with costly premium assistance options.

Intercom has a different approach, one that’s all about sales, marketing, and personalized messaging. Intercom has your back if you’re looking to supercharge your sales efforts. 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.

You need a complete customer service platform that’s seamlessly integrated and AI-enhanced. Use ticketing systems to manage the influx and provide your customers with timely responses. When it comes to advanced workflows and ticketing systems, Zendesk boasts a more full-featured solution. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Due to our intelligent routing capabilities and numerous automated workflows, our users can free up hours to focus on other tasks.

• Known for its scalability, Zendesk is suitable for various business sizes, from startups to large corporations.
• Both Zendesk and Intercom have AI capabilities that deserve special mention.
• 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.
• Customer support and security are vital aspects to consider when evaluating helpdesk solutions like Zendesk and Intercom.
• You can publish your self-service resources, divide them by categories, and integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience.

Its straightforward pricing structure ensures businesses get access to the required features without complex tiers or hidden costs, making it an attractive option for cost-conscious organizations. 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. Whether you’ve just started searching for a customer support tool or have been using one for a while, chances are you know about Zendesk and Intercom. The former is one of the oldest and most reliable solutions on the market, while the latter sets the bar high in terms of innovative and out-of-the-box features. 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)?

This gets you unlimited email addresses and email templates in both text form and HTML. Intercom’s dashboards may not be as aesthetically pleasing as Zendesk’s, but they still allow users to navigate their tools with few distractions. 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.

What is the difference between Intercom and Zendesk?

Like so many others, Monese determined that Zendesk was the best solution to provide seamless, omnichannel support because of its scalability and reliability. With over 100,000 customers across all industries and regions, Zendesk knows what it takes to interact with customers while retaining and growing relationships. Businesses should always consider a tool’s TCO before committing to a purchase. 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.

• Check out our list of unified communications providers for more information.
• 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.
• In today’s world of fast-paced customer service and high customer expectations, it’s essential for business leaders to equip their teams with the best support tools available.
• But that doesn’t mean you have to completely switch from your current provider if you’re not quite ready.

You can even improve efficiency and transparency by setting up task sequences, defining sales triggers, and strategizing with advanced forecasting and reporting tools. Starting at $19 per user per month, it’s also on the cheaper end of the spectrum compared to high-end CRMs like ActiveCampaign and HubSpot. In 2023, conversational messaging will play an essential role in customer service. Customers increasingly expect to receive fast, convenient, and personalized support. Provide self-service alternatives so customers can resolve their own issues.

This will provide live data on who your users are and what they do in your app. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer varying flavors when it comes to curating the whole customer support experience. Seamlessly integrate Intercom with popular third-party tools and platforms, centralizing customer data and improving workflow efficiency. Picking customer service software to run your business is not a decision you make lightly. However, customers can purchase multiple Intercom plans to use together, or purchase add-ons to select just the features they want.

Intercom also does mobile carousels to help please the eye with fresh designs. Chatbots are automated customer support tools that can assist with low-level ticket triage and ticket routing in real-time. How easy it is to program a chatbot and how effective a chatbot is at assisting human reps is an important factor for this category. We have already mentioned several times above how chat tools are one of the main ways that customers can reach out to a help desk or support team, but let us delve deeper into advanced chat widget features. Intercom’s UI excels in modern design and intuitive functionality, particularly noted for its real-time messaging and advanced features.

Gain valuable insights with Intercom’s analytics and reporting capabilities. Track key metrics, measure campaign success, and optimize customer engagement strategies. HubSpot helps seamlessly integrate customer service tools that you and your team already leverage. While Intercom offers unique feature options that weave together well into campaigns and series, it lacks voice calling–a critical feature–and spreads its more advanced features out too much among plans. Intercom has a unique pricing structure, offering three separate solutions, each intended for a distinct use case.

We’re big fans of Zendesk’s dashboard with built-in collaboration tools, but we wish the Agent Workspace came with the Team or Growth plans–not just Professional. 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 plan prices are determined based on your specific business needs, so interested users must contact them for specific price details. Intercom offers admin full visibility and control over all company inboxes, as well as agent access controls and role management. The dashboard’s left-hand column organizes and sorts all tickets by urgency.

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. As you can imagine, banking from anywhere requires a flexible, robust customer service experience. Yes, you can install the Messenger on your iOS or Android app so customers can get in touch from your mobile app.

Both options are well designed, easy to use, and share some pretty key functionality like behavioral triggers and omnichannel-ality (omnichannel-centricity?). But with perks like more advanced chatbots, automation, and lead management capabilities, Intercom could have an edge for many users. Novo has been a Zendesk customer since 2019 but didn’t immediately start taking full advantage of all our features and capabilities. In addition to Intercom vs Zendesk, alternative helpdesk solutions are available in the market. ThriveDesk is a feature-rich helpdesk solution that offers a comprehensive set of tools to manage customer support effectively.

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. 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. The highlight of Zendesk’s ticketing software is its omnichannel-ality (omnichannality?). Whether agents are facing customers via chat, email, social media, or good old-fashioned phone, they can keep it all confined to a single, easy-to-navigate dashboard. That not only saves them the headache of having to constantly switch between dashboards while streamlining resolution processes—it also leads to better customer and agent experience overall.

Choosing the right customer service platform is pivotal for enhancing business-client interactions. In this context, Zendesk and Intercom emerge as key contenders, each offering distinct features tailored to dynamic customer service environments. The intercom and zendesk 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.

Brian Kale, the head of customer success at Bank Novo, describes how Zendesk helped Bank Novo boost productivity and streamline service. Sendcloud adopted these solutions to replace siloed systems like Intercom and a local voice support provider in favor of unified, omnichannel support. Yes, you can support multiple brands or businesses from a single Help Desk, while ensuring the Messenger is a perfect match for each of your different domains.

Zendesk receives positive feedback for its intuitive interface, wide range of integrations, and robust reporting tools. However, some users find customization challenging, and the platform is considered expensive, requiring careful cost evaluation. You get a dashboard that makes creating, tracking, and organizing tickets easy. Create a help center combining knowledge base articles and a customer contact request form, embeddable into any webpage or mobile app. Customers can search the help center by query keywords and sort through articles in 40 languages.

When an agent clicks on a conversation, the full conversation history populates the middle screen. Intercom wins the reporting and analytics category due to its unique visualization and display formats for contact center and article data. Reporting and analytics provide metrics, trends, and key performance indicators (KPIs) that offer insights to agents and administrators.

Explore alternative options like ThriveDesk if you’re looking for a more budget-conscious solution that aligns with your customer support needs. ThriveDesk is a help desk software tailor-made for businesses seeking extensive features and a powerful yet simple live chat assistant. Even better, it’s the most cost-effective, lightweight, and speedy live chat solution available for Shopify business owners.

This has helped to make Zendesk one of the most popular customer service software platforms on the market. 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. First, you can only talk to the support team if you are a registered user.

If you’re a sales-oriented corporation, use Intercom for its automation options. Both tools can be quite heavy on your budget since they mainly target big enterprises and don’t offer their full toolset at an affordable price. Intercom has more customization features for features like bots, themes, triggers, and funnels.

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. In an omnichannel contact center, agents can manage customer interactions across channels, no matter which channel a customer uses to contact the company. This article will compare Intercom vs Zendesk, outlining each tool’s features, ease-of-use, pricing and plans, pros and cons, and user-support options. Intercom and Zendesk are two of the most popular customer service platforms, each with its own set of distinct advantages and drawbacks. 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.

Now that we’ve covered a bit of background on both Zendesk and Intercom, let’s dive into the features each platform offers. Lastly, Intercom offers an academy that offers concise courses to help users make the most out of their Intercom experience. 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. Intercom feels more wholesome and is more client-success-oriented, but it can be too costly for smaller companies. It will allow you to leverage some Intercom capabilities while keeping your account at the time-tested platform. Though the Intercom chat window says that their customer success team typically replies in a few hours, don’t expect to receive any real answer in chat for at least a couple of days.