Zendesk vs Intercom: Which Solution to Choose in 2024?

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. Zendesk, less user-friendly and with higher costs for quality vendor support, might not suit budget-conscious or smaller businesses. 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.

Use ticketing systems to manage the influx and provide your customers with timely responses. Provide self-service alternatives so customers can resolve their own issues. This serves the dual benefit of adding convenience to the customer experience and lightening agents’ workloads. All customer questions, be it via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel, are landing in one dashboard, where your agents can solve them quickly and efficiently. It guarantees continuous omnichannel support that meets customer expectations.

Team inboxes aggregate tickets applicable to the whole team–or a specific department–that any agent can address. By leveraging the out-of-the-box Netomi virtual agent integration, companies enhance both the agent and customer experience, while also reducing costs. 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.

Zendesk vs Intercom: 2024 Explicit Comparison

While Zendesk is a widely used and versatile customer support and engagement platform, it’s important to consider whether there might be a better software solution tailored to your specific needs. In contrast, Intercom follows a pricing structure that can be straightforward for businesses looking for specific functionalities. However, it’s important to note that Intercom’s pricing can vary depending on factors such as the number of users, conversations, and additional features you require. Intercom is more for improving sales cycle and customer relationships, while Zendesk has everything a customer support representative can dream about, but it does lack wide email functionality.

Intercom’s Messenger lets users schedule timely, targeted, and personal messages sent based on triggers and customer actions, and is automatically translatable into over 30 languages. Zendesk wins the self-service tools category because it provides extensive help center customization options. The ticket display’s Side Conversations tab allows agents to initiate internal conversations via email, Slack, or ticketing system notes–without leaving the ticket.

Once you login into your account, a live chat popup is available if you have questions that need quick answers. Their support section is based on the Docs forum, where you can ask questions or read on related topics. The Intercom team will usually answer to all questions on this forum. IOS and Android apps will help you view, manage, and respond to customer conversations from your mobile device. You can see exactly if your support volume is increasing, if your team is responding fast enough to your users and leads, and who on your team is the busiest. Your support insights will show you data about your signed up users and visitors to your site.

Support requests are managed as ongoing conversations rather than tickets which are shared via a unified inbox allowing multiple team members to share knowledge and solutions. For an area of focus as critical as customer support, it can mean the difference between a satisfied customer and a lost account. When it comes to customer support software, Zendesk is #1 in popularity and brand recognition. Learn more about the differences between leading chat support solutions Intercom and Zendesk so that you can choose the right tool for your needs. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer varying flavors when it comes to curating the whole customer support experience. Customer support and security are vital aspects to consider when evaluating helpdesk solutions like Zendesk and Intercom.

They have similar features, but Intercom has lots of features and tools that better integrate each other. So it will transmit the live data on the users and what they are doing in your app. This option is useful for those who are looking for a smooth switch from Zendesk to Intercom.

Intercom vs Zendesk

Zendesk also offers integrations, but the ecosystem may not be as extensive as Intercom’s. Zendesk has strong positive reviews especially since the software has mobile apps for access. Though some complained that it’s not easy to check the tickets using the apps. Because it’s something they believe the developers should fine-tune. Zendesk’s customer support is also very fast, though their live chat is only available for registered users. 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 add agents, create teams, and set agent roles & permissions to decide their level of access to the tool. Automated ticket routing ensures that all tickets have an owner and are shared with the most capable agents. With its robust ticketing system, versatile automation capabilities, and extensive reporting tools, Zendesk empowers businesses to handle customer inquiries effectively and improve support efficiency. It’s best used when you need a centralized platform to manage customer support operations, whether through email, chat, social media, or phone. Zendesk is ideal for businesses seeking to enhance their customer service processes and maintain a high level of customer satisfaction across all communication channels.

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. All interactions with customers be it via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel are landing in one dashboard, where your agents can solve them fast and efficiently. There’s a plethora of features to help bigger teams collaborate more effectively — like private notes or real-time view of who’s handling a given ticket at the moment, etc. Intercom offers an integrated knowledge base functionality to its user base. Using the existing knowledge base functionality, they can display self-help articles in the chat window before the customer approaches your team for support.

On the other hand, Intercom, starting at a lower price point, could be more attractive for very small teams or individual users. However, additional costs for advanced features can quickly increase the total expense. Intercom stands out for its modern and user-friendly messenger functionality, which includes advanced features with a focus on automation and real-time insights. Its AI Chatbot, Fin, is particularly noted for handling complex queries efficiently. Businesses of all sizes can rely on the Zendesk customer service platform and benefit from workflow management, powerful AI tools, robust insights, and more.

Once you add them all to the picture, their existing plans can turn out to be quite expensive. Now, let’s delve into the Zendesk vs. Intercom comparison to help you make an informed decision when selecting the right customer support and engagement platform that aligns with your specific needs. And that’s why it offers a long list of customization options like workflow automation, ticket management system, and layouts. It will help you understand your customer’s issue and solve it instantly.

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 per month or surveys at $49 per month. Your typical Zendesk review will often praise the platform’s simplicity and affordability, as well as its constant updates and rolling out of new features, like Zendesk Sunshine. For example, you can read in many Zendesk Sell reviews how adding sales tools benefits Zendesk Support users.

The answer, as with most things in life, is that it depends on your specific needs and ultimate goals. 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.

By team

With the integrations provided through each product, you can make use of both platforms to provide your customers with comprehensive customer service. While Intercom Zendesk integration is uncommon, as they both offer very similar products, it can be useful for unique use cases or during migrations from one platform to the other. 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. This could impact user experience and efficiency for new users grappling with its complexity​​​​​​. Zendesk offers robust, pre-built reports for sales and support teams.

Gain valuable insights with Intercom’s analytics and reporting capabilities. Track key metrics, measure campaign success, and optimize customer engagement strategies. Both platforms have their unique strengths in multichannel support, with Zendesk offering a more comprehensive range of integrated channels and Intercom focusing on a dynamic, chat-centric experience. Intercom, on the other hand, is ideal for those focusing on CRM capabilities and personalized customer interactions.

As a rule, Intercom reviews are positive as many users praise the interface, the ease of use, and the deployment of the software. However, some users remarked that a developer is needed to properly install the software or run the risks of problems in the future. The Intercom Messenger, in particular, performs well compared to the Zendesk alternative.

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. The platform offers Zendesk Talk as its call center solution to keep up with other help desks. This feature is browser-based, so you don’t need additional software or hardware.

Founded as a business messenger, it now extends to enabling support, engagement, and conversion. There is power to be realized in partnerships and the strategic combination of forces, and companies using chatbots for customer service can further enhance the CX, taking it to new heights. Netomi’s virtual agents sit alongside human agents to supplement and enhance the capacity of support teams, ensuring the seamless resolution of customer queries.

Essentially, Desku is not an option but a reliable replacement for Zendesk and Intercom that companies can rely on at lower costs and improved performance. Zendesk’s pricing is very competitive for the market and is presented in a straightforward way that makes predicting costs simple and accurate. Easily track your service team’s performance and unlock coaching zendesk vs. intercom opportunities with AI-powered insights. Rated 5 stars out of 5 on G2, ThriveDesk is highly regarded by users. Rest assured, ThriveDesk’s lightweight design and speed won’t impact the performance of your Wix-powered eCommerce website. The optimized agent interface ensures rapid responses for maximum efficiency, all while keeping your website running smoothly.

Intercom’s products are used by over 25,000 customers, from small tech startups to large enterprises. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Understanding the unique attributes of Zendesk and Intercom is crucial in this comparison. Zendesk is renowned for its comprehensive range of functionalities, including advanced email ticketing, live chat, phone support, and a vast knowledge base.

• Zendesk is a customer service software offering a comprehensive solution for managing customer interactions.
• Intercom is great for talking to customers in real-time, like through live chats or in-app messages.
• Their most popular tier (Suite Professional) is $115/month and includes a feature set that is very hard to beat at that price.
• Though expensive and quality are synonymous in some worlds, such a principle cannot define Desku where it stands out as one of such affordable companies.
• It gives detailed contact profiles enriched by company data, behavioral data, conversation data, and other custom fields.
• Just as Zendesk, Intercom also offers its own Operator bot which will automatically suggest relevant articles to customers who ask for help.

Drift allows for handoffs between chatbots and human agents in relevant situations. Customers can skip the self-service options and get routed to a live agent through customizable routing rules, templates, and response timers. Agents can also start a voice or video chat with customers from the chat window. Intercom is ideal for personalized messaging, while Zendesk offers robust ticket management and self-service options. While both Intercom and Zendesk excel in customer support and engagement, the decision between the two depends on your specific requirements.

Agents can prioritize overdue tasks, today’s tasks, or future tasks. Create entry rules that trigger when the messaging campaign begins, choosing the target audiences and when follow-up messages generate. Create code-free screencast tours of products, websites, webpages, and applications within your website. Automation and AI save resources and time–every automated workflow and routing decision frees an agent to work on more complex issues. Set triggers to target particular audiences at the right time, utilize carousels as part of a communication campaign, and compare carousels with A/B testing. If you need to have access to integrations right out the box, Zendesk is the big winner here.

One of the most significant downsides of Intercom is its customer support. 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. While Intercom also provides a user-friendly interface, some users may find it a tad overwhelming, especially when juggling multiple support requests.

Moreover, research says that companies can reduce customer resolution times upto a great percentage through the helpdesk software. Today, thanks to the virtual technology revolution, you can find numerous help desk software, but our vote goes for Zendesk and Intercom. It doesn’t require a team of administrators to manage and its toolset is robust without being complex. When evaluating the cost of any software tool, you have to look beyond the price tag. ROI comes down to getting the most out of the features available, so payment structures that are scaleable and flexible are a must.

It’s also good for sending and receiving notifications, as well as for quick filtering through the queue of open tickets. Intercom’s large series of bots obviously run on automations as well. As mentioned before, the bot builder is a visual drag-and-drop system that requires no coding knowledge; this is also how other basic workflows are designed. The more expensive Intercom plans offer AI-powered content cues, triage, and conversation insights. 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.

It’s also more exclusively focused on providing help support, whereas Intercom sometimes moonlights as being part-time sales. The result is that Zendesk generally wins on ratings when it comes to support capacity. We hope that this Intercom VS Zendesk comparison helps you choose one that matches your support, marketing, and sales needs. But in case you are in search of something beyond these two, then ProProfs Chat can be an option.

Intercom Alternatives That Are Free Or Low Cost In 2023

We need a solution that allows whoever picks up the chat or phone to quickly see the history of that customer, their request, notes, and the status of their order. We need a powerful chat tool that can enable immediate engagement, have some basic automation, and allows users to drop in. Zendesk provides an integrated on-demand helpdesk – customer support portal solution based on the latest Web 2.0 technologies and design philosophies. The product has an elegant, minimalist design implemented in Ruby on Rails and provide…

Intercom is the go-to solution for businesses seeking to elevate customer support and sales processes. With its user-friendly interface and advanced functionalities, Intercom offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed to effectively communicate and engage with customers. Zendesk is a customer service software company that provides businesses with a suite of tools to manage customer interactions.

But Intercom’s friendliness for growing companies is something you can’t afford to ignore. If your business is established and you need to cut down on those ticket resolution times, Zendesk may be worth it. While they like the ease of use this product offers its users, they’ve indeed rated them low in terms of services. Zendesk also offers a straightforward interface to operators that helps them identify the entire interaction pathway with the customers. Compared to being detailed, Zendesk gives a tough competition to Intercom. Operators can easily switch from one conversation to another, therefore helping operators manage more interactions simultaneously.

Let’s examine and compare how each platform addresses these crucial areas to ensure effective support operations and data protection. Now that we’ve covered a bit of background on both Zendesk and Intercom, let’s dive into the features each platform offers. Zendesk’s per-agent pricing structure makes it a budget-friendly option for smaller teams, allowing costs to scale with team growth.

Zendesk’s chatbot, Answer Bot, automatically answers customer questions asynchronously in up to 40 languages–via any text-based channel. Zendesk also makes it easy to customize your help center, with out-of-the-box tools to design color, theme, and layout–both on mobile and desktop. Self-service tools let customers resolve their own issues quickly and 24/7, improving satisfaction and reducing excessive agent workload.

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 is 4 years younger than Zendesk and has fancied itself as a messaging platform right from the beginning. Intercom lets businesses send their customers targeted in-app messages. Although many people tout it as the solution for large businesses, its bottom pricing tier is a nice entry for any small business looking to add customer service to its front page.

But if you’re not familiar with them, think of the software as online human resource departments. For instance, customers and staff alike can channel messages through it. The methods that help desks use, however, are meant to cater to possibly thousands to millions of messages. Because there could be a thousand customers complaining at any given hour to all your staff having problems with business protocols.

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. While doing my research for this article, I’ve not only tested both Intercom and Zendesk myself, but also read a pile of different articles, comparisons, guides, showdowns and all this kind of stuff. What really struck me though is that people seemed to like Zendesk more. Struck not in a bad way, more like in a very neutral ‘huh, this may be interesting’ way. Sure, you can have a front desk—but you don’t necessarily have to plunk down the cost it would take to buy that desk, train an employee, and add them to your payroll.

• I just found Zendesk’s help center to be slightly better integrated into their workflows and more customizable.
• Send surveys at key points throughout the customer buying cycle, utilizing multiple types of question formats.
• It lets customers reach out via messaging, a live chat tool, voice, and social media.
• Having the two presented side by side, which is the best CRM solution?

Zendesk’s pricing structure provides increasing levels of features and capabilities as businesses move up the tiers. This scalability allows organizations to adapt their support operations to their expanding customer base. Higher-tier plans in Zendesk come packed with advanced functionalities such as chatbots, customizable knowledge bases, and performance dashboards. These features can add significant value for businesses aiming to implement more sophisticated support capabilities as they scale. Both Zendesk and Intercom are customer support management solutions that offer features like ticket management, live chat and messaging, automation workflows, knowledge centers, and analytics.

Intercom, on the other hand, is designed to be more of a complete solution for sales, marketing, and customer relationship nurturing. 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. On the other hand, Intercom shines in its focus on conversational engagement and real-time communication with customers. It offers a chat-first approach, making it ideal for companies looking to prioritize interactive and personalized customer interactions. When comparing Zendesk and Intercom, Zendesk stands out with its robust and versatile customer support solutions.

Its tight focus on customer support keeps things simple, especially when people are learning the software. Use HubSpot Service Hub to provide seamless, fast, and delightful customer service. See how leading multi-channel consumer brands solve E2E customer data challenges with a real-time customer data platform.

Their chat widget looks and works great, and they invest a lot of effort to make it a modern, convenient customer communication tool. Zendesk also has an Answer Bot, which instantly takes your knowledge base game to the next level. It can automatically suggest relevant articles for agents during business hours to share with clients, reducing your support agents’ workload. 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.