Intercom vs Zendesk: Comparing features, integrations, and pricing

In today’s business world, customer service is fast-paced, and customers have higher expectations. To enhance customer satisfaction, businesses must equip their teams with customer support solutions and customer service software. 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.

In comparison, Intercom’s confusing pricing structure that features multiple add-ons may be unsuitable for small businesses. Remember that while both Zendesk and Intercom offer robust solutions, understanding your business’s specific needs is key to selecting the ideal customer support platform. Zendesk’s emphasis on versatility and adaptability makes it suitable for businesses seeking comprehensive support across various industries. In contrast, Intercom’s messaging and engagement tools are instrumental in fostering meaningful customer relationships through personalized conversations. Intercom focuses on real-time customer messaging, while Zendesk provides a comprehensive suite for ticketing, knowledge base, and self-service support.

Tools that allow support agents to communicate and collaborate are important aspect of customer service software. One place Intercom really shines as a standalone CRM is its data utility. Overall, I actually liked Zendesk’s user experience better than Intercom’s in terms of its messaging dashboard.

There is a simple email integration tool for whatever email provider you regularly use. This gets you unlimited email addresses and email templates in both text form and HTML. Zendesk has more pricing options, and its most affordable plan is likely cheaper than Intercom’s, although without exact Intercom numbers, it is not easy to truly know the cost.

Intercom vs Zendesk: overall impression

Our AI-driven self-serve options significantly reduce response times, providing customers with speedy solutions. Gone are the days when your team had to manually sift through a pile of customer inquiries. Avoid cherry-picking and shared inboxes by using Dixa’s Conversation Offers and Intelligent Routing. Your team can provide excellent customer support across multiple channels by receiving the right conversation at the right time.

It’s much easier if you decide to go with the Zendesk Suite, which includes Support, Chat, Talk, and Guide tools. There are two options there — Professional for $109 or Enterprise for $179 if you pay monthly. The difference between the two is that the Professional subscription lacks some things like chat widget unbranding, custom agent roles, multiple help centers, etc. Their help desk is a single inbox to handle customer requests, where your customer support agents can leave private notes for each other and automatically assign requests to the right people. You can publish your knowledge base articles and divide them by categories and also integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience. Intercom stands out for its modern and user-friendly messenger functionality, which includes advanced features with a focus on automation and real-time insights.

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. It provides a comprehensive platform for managing customer inquiries, support tickets, and interactions across multiple channels.

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. Intercom primarily focuses on messaging but offers limited channel breadth compared to Zendesk, requiring paid add-ons for critical channels like WhatsApp. For a deeper insight into the functionality of Intercom and Zendesk Chat, explore the videos provided below. Review the video content to make an informed decision and select the option that best suits your needs.

Founded in 2007, Zendesk started as a ticketing tool for customer success teams. It was later that they started adding all kinds of other features, like live chat for customer conversations. They bought out the Zopim live chat solution and integrated it with their toolset. But they also add features like automatic meeting booking (in the Convert package), and their custom inbox rules and workflows just feel a little more, well, custom. I’ll dive into their chatbots more later, but their bot automation features are also stronger.

Get a unified view of all customer touchpoints and manage technology solutions from a single dashboard, empowering agents and admins to provide exceptional customer service. 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. With its live analytics feature on the dashboard, it makes it easy for you to make instant decisions in no time. Such live insights are very useful in evaluating your customer support process.

Customization

It guarantees continuous omnichannel support that meets customer expectations. 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. Selecting an ideal helpdesk software that suits your business needs is critical for the success of your customer support. In this article, we will directly compare two customer service providers—Zendesk vs Intercom, to help you evaluate what would work best for your business.

The strength of Zendesk’s UI lies in its structured and comprehensive environment, adept at managing numerous customer interactions and integrating various channels seamlessly. However, compared to the more contemporary designs like Intercom’s, Zendesk’s UI may appear outdated, particularly in aspects such as chat widget and customization options. Its ability to seamlessly integrate with various applications further amplifies its versatility.

Lessons Team Leaders Can Learn From Bees

ThriveDesk empowers small businesses to manage real-time customer communications. The sophisticated nature of its chatbot makes it more than a task automation tool — it takes customer interactions to the next level. 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. Integrating AI in the help center helps agents find answers to customer inquiries, providing a seamless customer experience. Zendesk’s AI offers automated responses to customer inquiries, increasing the team’s productivity, as they can spend time on the most crucial things.

• Save money and time by relying on our expert onboarding team to assist you in building and implementing your personalized Dixa setup.
• Intercom has your back if you’re looking to supercharge your sales efforts.
• It will allow you to leverage some Intercom capabilities while keeping your account at the time-tested platform.
• Zendesk is among the industry’s best ticketing and customer support software, and most of its additional functionality is icing on the proverbial cake.
• Such live insights are very useful in evaluating your customer support process.

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. Choose Zendesk for a scalable, team-size-based pricing model and Intercom for initial low-cost access with flexibility in adding advanced features. Zendesk’s per-agent pricing structure makes it a budget-friendly option for smaller teams, allowing costs to scale with team growth. When it comes to utility, Zendesk’s utility may not be as robust as a pure CRM solution. However, customers do have the option to go to Zendesk Sell for a more robust experience.

What is the difference between Intercom and Zendesk?

Intercom is more communication-oriented, whereas Zendesk has everything a customer support representative wants. To sum it all up, you need to consider various aspects of your business before choosing CRM software. While deciding between Zendesk and Intercom, you should ensure the customization, AI automation, and functionalities align with your business goals. As we delve into the features of Zendesk, we can identify the following weaknesses regarding user experience. It’s where customers ask the questions that may result in the largest sales in your company’s history.

Services such as CallHippo, Ozonetel, Toky, Aircall Now are just a few of many more add-ons in lieu of call center tools built into the help desk software. Zendesk does not provide its customers with email marketing tools for the basic subscriptions at the time of writing. However, the add-on Customer Lists available for Professional and Enterprise subscriptions does have mass email options. This is an AI assistant that will help anyone navigate Guide by providing results as you type your query. The bot also ensures that the customer or employee will find the right article before contacting an agent.

Intercom offers an easy way to nurture your qualified leads (prospects) into customers with Intercom Series. The comparison of whether Intercom is better than Zendesk depends on your specific customer support and engagement needs and objectives. If you seek to enhance customer engagement through chat-based support, in-app messaging, and proactive outreach, Intercom may be the superior option.

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. Additionally, Intercom’s call center and advanced analytics rely on third-party integrations, whereas Zendesk offers solutions like Zendesk Sell, Talk and Explore. If you need a highly customizable, all-in-one platform with extensive built-in features, Zendesk may be the better choice.

Both app stores include many popular integrations, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Zapier. Explore alternative options like ThriveDesk if you’re looking for a more budget-conscious solution that aligns with your customer support needs. Experience the comprehensive power of Intercom for effective customer communication, automation, support tools, integrations, and analytics. Intercom’s messaging system enables real-time interactions through various channels, including chat, email, and in-app messages. So, get ready for an insightful journey through the landscapes of Zendesk and Intercom, where support excellence converges with AI innovation.

Luckily, a range of customer service solutions is available that enables you to communicate directly with your customers in real-time. These tools are ideal for personalizing the customer experience and building better customer relationships. It’s best used when you need a centralized platform to manage customer support operations, whether through email, chat, social media, or phone. Determining whether Zendesk is better than Intercom hinges on your unique customer support and engagement requirements. Zendesk excels as a robust and versatile customer support platform, offering comprehensive tools for managing customer inquiries and support operations across various channels. If your business values a feature-rich and customizable solution for customer interactions, Zendesk may be the better choice.

AI helps businesses gain detailed insight into consumer data in real-time. Both Zendesk and Intercom provide a campaign tool, live chat, and a knowledge base. We will compare those customer service solutions in terms of functionality and price.

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. Zendesk provides comprehensive security and compliance features, ensuring customer data privacy. This includes secure login options like SAML or JWT SSO (single sign-on) and native content redaction for sensitive information. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. 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. AI is integral to customer relationship management software and facilitates consumer interactions.

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. However, businesses must choose between Zendesk vs Intercom based on their needs and requirements. 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 facilitates efficient ticketing, live chat, and knowledge base management, ensuring timely issue resolution.

To sum things up, Zendesk is a great customer support oriented tool which will be a great choice for big teams with various departments. Intercom feels more wholesome and is more customer success oriented, but can be too costly for smaller companies. There are four different subscription packages you can choose from, all of which also have Essential, Pro, and Premium options for businesses of different sizes. You’d need to chat with Intercom sales team for get the costs for the Premium subscription, though. Zendesk also has the Answer Bot, which can take your knowledge base game to the next level instantly. It can automatically suggest your customer relevant articles reducing the workload for your support agents.

On one hand, Zendesk offers a great many features, way more than Intercom, but it lacks in-app messenger and email marketing tools. On the other hand, Intercom has all its (fewer) tools and features integrated with each other way better, which makes your experience with the tool as smooth as silk. Hivers offers round-the-clock proactive support across all its plans, ensuring that no matter the time or issue, expert assistance is always available. This 24/7 support model is designed to provide continuous, real-time solutions to clients, enhancing the overall reliability and responsiveness of Hivers’ services.

Say what you will, but Intercom’s design and overall user experience leave all its competitors far behind. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. 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 I had to describe Intercom’s helpdesk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools.

Zendesk excels in its ticketing system, offering users an intuitive platform for collaboration among support agents. Its robust workflows streamline the ticket resolution system and efficiently handle all customer complaints. It also enables agents to perform customized workflow management, assign tickets to the right agent for request handling, and track the ticket’s progress. Zendesk and Intercom offer basic features, including live chat, a help desk, and a pre-built knowledge base.

Like with many other apps, Zapier seems to be the best and most simple way to connect Intercom to Zendesk. We’d also recommend checking out this blog on suspended ticket management in ZenDesk. Intercom live chat is modern, streamlined, and highly customisable compared to Zendesk. Analytics features Intercom has is done through add-ons such as Google Analytics, Statbot, Microsoft Teams, and more. Zendesk also offers detailed reports that can be shared with others and enable team members to collaborate on them simultaneously.

Create code-free screencast tours of products, websites, webpages, and applications within your website. Set triggers to target particular audiences at the right time, utilize carousels as part of a communication campaign, and compare carousels https://chat.openai.com/ with A/B testing. G2 ranks Intercom higher than Zendesk for ease of setup, and support quality—so you can expect a effortless onboarding, and continuous success. It can team up with tools like Salesforce and Slack, so everything runs smoothly.

In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the hardest on your pocket. Zendesk can be more flexible and predictable in this area as you can buy different tools separately (or even use their limited versions for free). Though Intercom chat window says that their team typically replies in zendesk vs. intercom a few hours, I received the answer in a couple of minutes. Their agent was always trying to convert me into a lead along the way, but heck, that’s a side effect of our job. To sum things up, one can get really confused trying to make sense of Zendesk’s pricing, let alone to calculate costs.

In the digital age, customer support platforms have become the cornerstone of ensuring customer satisfaction and retention. Businesses across various industries rely on these platforms to manage and streamline customer interactions, enhance communication, and provide timely assistance. It introduces shared inboxes tailored for different teams, such as sales, marketing, and customer success. These shared inboxes facilitate seamless customer interactions across multiple channels, ensuring that teams can collaborate efficiently and maintain consistent, top-notch support.

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. 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. To make an informed decision regarding your 2024 customer service needs, consider how Zendesk and Intercom adapt to emerging technologies and industry trends.

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. We’d also recommend checking out this blog on suspended ticket management in ZenDesk. Intecom’s pricing strategies are not as transparent as Zendesk’s pricing. 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.

On the other hand, if you require robust ticketing and support management features, Zendesk might be the more suitable choice. Consider your budget, team size, and integration requirements before making a decision. When you combine the help desk with Intercom Messenger, you get added channels for customer engagement.

It’s also good for sending and receiving notifications, as well as for quick filtering through the queue of open tickets. There are pre-built workflows to help with things like ticket sharing, as well as conversation routing based on metrics like agent skill set or availability. There are even automations to help with things like SLAs, or service level agreements, to do things like send out notifications when headlights are due.

Zendesk’s user-friendly interface simplifies the management of customer support processes, contributing to its popularity among businesses seeking practical solutions. On the other hand, Intercom’s focus on facilitating personalized conversations enhances overall customer experience but may have a steeper learning curve due to its advanced messaging capabilities. When it comes to customer support and engagement, choosing the right software can make a world of difference. Both offer powerful solutions for businesses looking to enhance their customer service capabilities. In this article, we will compare Intercom and Zendesk, highlighting their features, benefits, and drawbacks. The choice between the two depends on specific business needs and budget considerations.

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 integration options make it popular for businesses seeking efficient Chat GPT customer service solutions. When comparing Zendesk and Intercom, it’s essential to delve into the specific features offered by each platform. Zendesk presents a robust suite of customer service solutions, including ticketing systems and knowledge base management, catering to diverse business needs.

These weaknesses are not as significant as the features and functionalities Zendesk offers its users. In addition to all these features, Suite Growth Plan offers light agents, multilingual support, multiple ticket forms, and a self-service customer portal. Zendesk’s automation features are limited to offering basic automation to streamline repetitive tasks.

There is a really useful one for Shopify to provide customer support for e-commerce operations. 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.

Their reports are attractive, dynamic, and integrated right out of the box. You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads. Discover customer and product issues with instant replays, in-app cobrowsing, and console logs.

Businesses are recognizing the rising importance of incorporating AI chatbots and automated customer support systems to meet the ever-changing needs of consumers. 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. Get the best of both worlds with Dixa’s Human + AI approach, which combines human intuition and AI efficiency. This allows your team to concentrate on important conversations while our system takes care of routine inquiries.

When comparing the user interfaces (UI) of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms exhibit distinct characteristics and strengths catering to different user preferences and needs. Yes, you can integrate the Intercom solution into your Zendesk account. It will allow you to leverage some Intercom capabilities while keeping your account at the time-tested platform.