Zendesk vs Intercom: Which is better?

It works out-of-the-box and is easy to modify when changes arise, helping businesses move faster. In leveraging cutting-edge AI, Zendesk empowers service teams to resolve customer issues more quickly and accurately. Built on billions of customer experience interactions, the AI capabilities can be integrated across the entire service experience, from self-service to agent support, optimizing operations at scale. Both tools also allow you to connect your email account and manage it from within the application to track open and click-through rates. In addition, Zendesk and Intercom feature advanced sales reporting and analytics that make it easy for sales teams to understand their prospects and customers more deeply. Intercom’s solution aims to streamline high-volume ticket influx and provide personalized, conversational support.

Zendesk offers a free 30-day trial, after which customers will need to upgrade to one of their paid plans. The only category Zendesk Support suffered in was its pricing options. This is largely due to the fact that many features are relegated to the more expensive plans, which are pretty high up there for the industry. The Enterprise plan, for example, costs $99 per user, per month, which is more than double the cost of Zoho Desk’s most expensive plan at only $40 per user, per month.

Before you make your choice, check out Messagely’s features and compare them to discover which platform is best for you. Messagely pulls together all of the information about the customer contacting you and gives your representatives information on each interaction they’ve had with them, all within a streamlined platform. This way, your clients will never have to repeat themselves or get frustrated because their new representative doesn’t know their background. With Zendesk, you can anticipate customer questions, allowing for shorter reply periods. With its CRM, you have the ability to place your clients in your sales funnels and follow through with them until conversion.

HubSpot and Salesforce are also available when support needs to work with marketing and sales teams. 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 focuses on real-time customer messaging, while Zendesk provides a comprehensive suite for ticketing, knowledge base, and self-service support.

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. While both platforms have a significant presence in the industry, they cater to varying business requirements.

Intercom pricing

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. Zendesk is a customer service software company that provides businesses with a suite of tools to manage customer interactions.

Unlike Zendesk Support, Zendesk Sell doesn’t quite compare as favorably to the other best CRM for sales that we have reviewed. The platform has limited features in some key areas like lead communication and customer support, which puts it well behind other options. Yes, the price can be a bit high, particularly if you opt for the Suite plans, but it offers more features and better customization than any other CRM in our research. This helped it secure a 4.7/5 overall in our research, which makes Zendesk the best CRM for customer service across the industry.

You can then create linked tickets for any bug reports or issues that require further troubleshooting by technical teams. Intercom isn’t as great with sales, but it allows for better communication. With Intercom, you can keep track of your customers and what they do on your website in real time. Like Zendesk, Intercom allows you to chat with online visitors and assist with their issues. 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.

Intercom primarily focuses on messaging but offers limited channel breadth compared to Zendesk, requiring paid add-ons for critical channels like WhatsApp. 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. Say what you will, but Intercom’s design and overall user experience leave all its competitors far behind.

Zendesk is another popular customer service, support, and sales platform that enables clients to connect and engage with their customers in seconds. Just like Intercom, Zendesk can also integrate with multiple messaging platforms and ensure that your business never misses out on a support opportunity. Zendesk’s customer support is also very fast, though their live chat is only available for registered users. Whichever solution you choose, mParticle can help integrate your data.

If you’re a really small business or a startup, you can benefit big time from such free tools. On the other hand, Intercom prides itself on being the only complete customer service solution that provides a seamless experience across automation and human support. By aiming to resolve most customer conversations without human intervention, Intercom allows teams to focus on higher-value interactions. This not only increases customer satisfaction but also reduces operational costs.

From Answer Bot to Fin AI Agent 🤖

It enables businesses to engage with customers seamlessly, making it the ideal choice for managing diverse communication channels effectively. Pricing for paid Pendo plans is only provided on a quote basis and there are no listed price ranges on the solution’s website. That said, certain reviews have stated that prices start at upwards of $20,000 per year for a single product and more than twice that for higher plans. Overall, Intercom aims to increase customer satisfaction, strengthen customer relationships, and improve customer experience through personalized support.

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.

So you see, it’s okay to feel dizzy when comparing Zendesk vs Intercom platforms. 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. Leave your email below and a member of our team will personally get in touch to show you how Fullview can help you solve support tickets in half the time. This is not a huge difference; however, it does indicate that customers are generally more satisfied with Intercom’s offerings than Zendesk’s.

Simply put, this plan is aimed at those businesses looking to really ramp up sales in the ecommerce space. Particularly with the built-in lead and deal scoring, you’ll be able seriously improve Chat GPT your sales with this plan, if you can afford the added cost. Plus, it comes with more advanced team management infrastructure, so you can easily manage multiple teams at larger businesses.

CAPABILITIES

This is especially helpful for smaller businesses that may not need a lot of features. Intercom is a customer relationship management (CRM) software company that provides a suite of tools for managing customer interactions. The company was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Intercom’s products are used by over 25,000 customers, from small tech startups to large enterprises. According to our research, Zendesk is one of the best CRM for customer support, offering a wide range of features with exemplary support for a surprisingly reasonable price. However, there are plenty of other great options out there depending on what your business actually needs.

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. 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. You can also add apps to your Intercom Messenger home to help users and visitors get what they need, without having to start a conversation.

After this, you’ll have to set up your workflows, personalizing your tickets and storing them by topic. You can then add automations and triggers, such as automatically closing a ticket or sending a message to a user. 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.

HubSpot is another Salesforce-like option, offering a lot for a comparable price tag, but does offer a few more budget options, so might be a good fit. Enterprise is a great choice for a business with the same staff operating across multiple brands. As for company size, this plan will be attractive for both large companies and scrappy-but-growing ones. You can always upgrade, however, so many businesses may want to start with the Professional suite first. While it’s the lowest Suite tier available, you still get access to all the bundled products mentioned above, so there’s no need to fret. With plenty of automation features, a unified agent workspace, robust APIs, you’ll be get the full experience, while still saving a bit of money.

• This packs all resolution information into a single ticket, so there’s no extra searching or backtracking needed to bring a ticket through to resolution, even if it involves multiple agents.
• You can use Zendesk Sell to track tasks, streamline workflows, improve engagement, nurture leads, and much more.
• Messagely also provides you with a shared inbox so anyone from your team can follow up with your users, regardless of who the user was in contact with first.
• Twilio offers several solutions for managing different aspects of customer support and communication.
• We also provide real-time and historical reporting dashboards so you can take action at the moment and learn from past trends.

Zendesk and Intercom also both offer analytics and reporting capabilities that allow businesses to analyze and monitor customer agents’ productivity. As a result, companies can identify trends and areas for improvement, allowing them to continuously improve their support processes and provide better service to their customers. Intercom generally receives positive feedback for its customer support, with users appreciating the comprehensive features and team-oriented tools. However, there are occasional criticisms regarding the effectiveness of its AI chatbot and some interface navigation challenges. The overall sentiment from users indicates a satisfactory level of support, although opinions vary. With industry-leading AI that infuses intelligence into every interaction, robust integrations, and exceptional data security and compliance, it’s no wonder why Zendesk is a trusted leader in CX.

The Support Enterprise plan costs $115 per user, per month, and it comes with guaranteed 24/7 phone and email support from the Zendesk team. The biggest difference between the Elite plan and the other less expensive plans is the number of sales pipelines you’re allowed to take advantage of. The extra cost is worth it though, as this plan adds a wide range of email features, including unlimited templates and personalized bulk sending. You’ll also get access to a more robust analytics and reporting platform, so you know exactly what works and what doesn’t.

Zendesk vs Intercom – which should you choose?

Struck not in a bad way, more like in a very neutral ‘huh, this may be interesting’ way. Ever wondered how people collaborated and shared ideas on the internet before the rise of social media platforms? All plans come with a 7-day free trial, and no credit card is required to sign up for the trial. One more thing to add, there are ways to integrate Intercom to Zendesk. Visit either of their app marketplaces and look up the Intercom Zendesk integration.

Zendesk boasts incredibly robust sales capabilities and security features. I tested both of their live chats and their support agents were answering in very quickly and right to the point. Zendesk team can be just a little bit faster depending on the time of the day. Not only does Zendesk offer a free trial, it’s actually sort of a freemium tool, which means you can choose one their tools (live chat, knowledge base, call center software) and use it for free forever. As any free tool, the functionalities there are quite limited, but nevertheless.

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. This plan is a bit more robust, aimed at medium-sized businesses that want to ramp up their overall customer offerings. This plan offers multiple help centers — as opposed to the one in the Team plan — a self-service customer portal, and even more automated responses via chatbot.

Intercom also does mobile carousels to help please the eye with fresh designs. Intercom has a very robust advanced chatbot set of tools for your business needs. There is a conversation routing bot, an operator bot, a lead qualification bot, and an article-suggesting bot, among others.

You can publish your self-service resources, divide them by categories, and integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience. For standard reporting like response times, leads generated by source, bot performance, messages sent, and email deliverability, you’ll easily find all the metrics you need. 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. Now that we’ve covered a bit of background on both Zendesk and Intercom, let’s dive into the features each platform offers. Learn how top CX leaders are scaling personalized customer service at their companies.

Their agent was always trying to convert me into a lead along the way, but heck, that’s a side effect of our job. I found that if I wanted to work most productively I’d need to have all four main Zendesk products opened in different browser tabs as there is no option of having all of them within a single dashboard. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk, though is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. Moreover, these are new prices as they’re in the middle of changing their pricing policy right now (and they’re definitely not getting cheaper).

When visitors click on it, they’ll be directed to one of your customer service teammates. 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. You can create an omnichannel CRM suite with a mix of productivity, collaboration, eCommerce, CRM, analytics, email marketing, social media, and other tools.

Right out of the gate, you’ve got dozens of pre-set report options on everything from satisfaction ratings and time in status to abandoned calls and Answer Bot resolutions. You can even save custom dashboards for a more tailored reporting experience. zendesk and intercom You can create articles, share them internally, group them for users, and assign them as responses for bots—all pretty standard fare. Intercom can even integrate with Zendesk and other sources to import past help center content.

There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. From Answers to Assist, we released a ton of product updates in 2023. While both Zendesk and Intercom offer ways to track your sales pipeline, each platform handles the process a bit differently.

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. 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.

Intercom vs Zendesk: What are Key Differences?

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. 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. Pricing for both services varies based on the specific needs and scale of your business. When comparing the omnichannel support functionalities of https://chat.openai.com/, both platforms show distinct strengths and weaknesses.

This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site (including, for example, the order in which they appear). This site does not include all software companies or all available software companies offers. 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.

Both app stores include many popular integrations, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Zapier. Because Intercom started as a live chat service, its messenger functionality is very robust. It feels very modern, and Intercom offers some advanced messenger features that Zendesk does not. Moreover, for users who require more dedicated and personalized support, Zendesk charges an additional premium.

Which means it’s rather a customer relationship management platform than anything else. But it’s designed so well that you really enjoy staying in their inbox and communicating with clients. Basically, if you have a complicated support process, go with Zendesk, an excellent Intercom alternative, for its help desk functionality. 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. You could technically consider Intercom a CRM, but it’s really more of a customer-focused communication product.

It’s also good for sending and receiving notifications, as well as for quick filtering through the queue of open tickets. 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. You get call recording, muting and holding, conference calling, and call blocking. Zendesk also offers callback requests, call monitoring and call quality notifications, among other telephone tools. There is a simple email integration tool for whatever email provider you regularly use.

In this article, we comprehensively do a comparison of Zendesk vs Intercom, examining their key features, benefits, and industry use cases. By exploring their distinct offerings, we aim to assist businesses in making informed decisions when selecting a customer service platform. Zendesk AI is the intelligence layer that infuses CX intelligence into every step of the customer journey. In addition to being pre-trained on billions of real support interactions, our AI powers bots, agent and admin assist, and intelligent workflows that lead to 83 percent lower administrative costs. Customers have also noted that they can implement Zendesk AI five times faster than other solutions. But keep in mind that Zendesk is viewed more as a support and ticketing solution, while Intercom is CRM functionality-oriented.

Existing customers have complained consistently about how they aren’t available at the right time to offer support to customers. There are even instances where customers don’t receive the first response in more than seven days. 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. Zendesk pricing is divided between a customer support product called “Zendesk for support”, and a fully-fledged CRM called “Zendesk for sales”. Both Zendesk and Intercom have knowledge bases to help customers get the most out of their platforms.

In comparison, Intercom’s confusing pricing structure that features multiple add-ons may be unsuitable for small businesses. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer customer service software with AI capabilities—however, they are not created equal. With Zendesk, you get next-level AI-powered support software that’s intuitively designed, scalable, and cost-effective. Compare Zendesk vs. Intercom and future-proof your business with reliable, easy-to-use software.

If you’re a huge corporation with a complicated customer support process, go Zendesk for its help desk functionality. If you’re smaller more sales oriented startup with enough money, go Intercom. 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.

Depending on your needs, you can set up Intercom on your website or mobile app and add your automations. Setting up Intercom help centers is also very easy and intuitive, with no previous knowledge required. After signing up and creating your account, you can start filling in your information, such as your company name and branding and your agents’ profiles and information. Then, you can begin filling in details such as your account’s name and icon and your agents’ profiles and security features. The setup can be so complex that there are tutorials by third parties to teach new users how to do it right.

Zendesk is a robust choice for businesses seeking quick setup, scalability, and powerful AI-driven support. Its strength in creating a comprehensive self-service knowledge base and its extensive integration ecosystem make it a versatile option. You can also use Intercom as a customer service platform, but given its broad focus, you may not get the same level of specialized expertise. 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.

Zendesk supports teams that can then field these issues from a nice unified dashboard. Zendesk has great intelligent routing and escalation protocols as well. Zendesk boasts robust reporting and analytics tools, plus a dedicated workforce management system. With custom correlation and attribution, you can dive deep into the root cause behind your metrics. We also provide real-time and historical reporting dashboards so you can take action at the moment and learn from past trends.

For example, you can read in many Zendesk Sell reviews how adding sales tools benefits Zendesk Support users. 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. Overall, Zendesk empowers businesses to deliver exceptional customer support experiences across channels, making it a popular choice for enhancing support operations.

It’s divided into about 20 topics with dozens of articles each, so navigating through it can be complicated. Honestly, when it comes to Zendesk, it is not the most modern tool out there. The cheapest (aka Essential) ‘All of Intercom’ package will cost you $136 per month, but if you only need their essential chat tools only, you can get them for $49 per month. To sum things up, one can get really confused trying to make sense of Zendesk’s pricing, let alone to calculate costs. As I’ve already mentioned, they started as a help desk/ticketing tool, and honestly, they perfected every bit of it over the years. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks.

Its multichannel support is more focused on engaging customers through its chat and messaging systems, including mobile carousels and interactive communication tools. However, compared to Zendesk, Intercom might not offer the same breadth in terms of integrating a wide range of external channels. While it excels in interactive and engaging communication, especially on mobile, some businesses might find its focus on chat-based interfaces limiting if they need extensive email or voice call support.

The Team plan costs $19 per user, per month billed annually and offers 8/5 email support from the Zendesk team. Options like Zoho CRM, which scored a 4.7/5, or Freshsales, which scored a 4.5/5, are definitely better CRM platforms for sales, thanks to larger feature catalogs and more scalability. Still, Zendesk CRM overall is a great option if you’re looking for a budget option that can check a lot of boxes and work with Zendesk Support, which is one of our top choices for customer support CRMs. Help Scout offers three different pricing plans, with the total cost based on the number of users. It enables them to engage with visitors who are genuinely interested in their services. You get to engage with them further and get to know more about their expectations.

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. With those add-ons, Zendesk Suite offers a more omnichannel customer support experience, allowing for ticketing through more communication channels, like SMS, forum, and chatbot.