Zendesk vs Intercom: In-Depth Features & Price Comparison

Zendesk VS Intercom: In-Depth Analysis & Review

intercom versus zendesk

Zendesk has an app available for both Android and iOS, which makes it easy to stay connected with customers while on the go. The app includes features like push notifications and real-time customer engagement — so businesses can respond quickly Chat GPT to customer inquiries. 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.

Pricing for both services varies based on the specific needs and scale of your business. Intercom, on the other hand, is a better choice for those valuing comprehensive and user-friendly support, despite minor navigation issues. Moreover, for users who require more dedicated and personalized support, Zendesk charges an additional premium. 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. Intercom’s dashboards may not be as aesthetically pleasing as Zendesk’s, but they still allow users to navigate their tools with few distractions.

However, for businesses seeking a more cost-effective and user-friendly solution, Hiver presents a compelling alternative. It works on top of your inbox and offers essential helpdesk functionalities. With Hiver, customer queries can be assigned to specific team members. The platform also allows teams to track queries, enabling supervisors to monitor progress and ensure timely responses. While both Zendesk and Intercom offer robust features, their pricing models might still be a hurdle for businesses looking to just start out with a help desk on a comparatively smaller budget. If your business requires a centralized platform to manage a high volume of customer inquiries across various channels, Zendesk is a solid choice.

Check out our chart that compares the capabilities of Zendesk vs. Intercom. To sum up, one can get really confused trying to understand the Zendesk pricing, let alone calculate costs.

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. 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 regarding innovative and out-of-the-box features. Meanwhile, collaboration tools make it easy to leave comments on tickets and work with different stakeholders to resolve requests.

Zendesk vs Intercom for pricing

Intercom offers reporting and analytics tools with limited capabilities for custom reporting, user behavior metrics, and advanced visualization. It also lacks advanced features like collaboration reporting, custom metrics, metric correlation, and drill-in attribution. Intercom does not have a dedicated workforce management solution, either.

This organization is important because it brings together customer interactions from all channels in this one place. And, Zendesk is nothing if not geared for helping agents deal with large ticket volumes efficiently. Plus, Intercom’s modern, smooth interface provides a comfortable environment for agents to work in. It even has some unique features, like office hours, real-time user profiles, and a high-degree of customization.

Our robust, no-code integrations enable you to adapt our software to new and growing use cases. Compared to Zendesk, Intercom offers few integrations, which may hinder its scalability. 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. There are many features to help bigger customer service teams collaborate more effectively, such as private notes or a real-time view of who’s handling a given ticket at the moment.

One place Intercom really shines as a standalone CRM is its data utility. 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. Intercom, on the other hand, was built for business messaging, so communication is one of their strong suits.

Zendesk enables you to provide IT support over the channels your employees use most, such as email, live chat, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and other business productivity channels. You can manage and unify these conversations through our unified Agent Workspace, which also has a context panel to provide reps with valuable insights to resolve inquiries faster. Spiceworks has reporting and analytics capabilities, but it lacks features like customized and advanced reports. While businesses must constantly focus on developing long-term consumer relationships, they can’t forget about their employees.

The program is simple to use and includes all of the necessary capabilities for providing good customer service. Zendesk’s Suite Team plan (the cheapest plan) costs $49 per user per month. You get multiple support channels at no extra cost with over 1000 APIs and integrations. They also offer several other features such as pre-defined responses, custom rules, and customizable online forms.

Does Zendesk have Intercom integration?

Intercom primarily focuses on messaging but offers limited channel breadth compared to Zendesk, requiring paid add-ons for critical channels like WhatsApp. 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. Discover customer and product issues with instant replays, in-app cobrowsing, and console logs. Now that we’ve covered a bit of background on both Zendesk and Intercom, let’s dive into the features each platform offers. 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.

  • Zendesk supports sales team productivity by syncing with your email to provide valuable data, like when your prospect opens, clicks, or replies to your email.
  • Zendesk also packs some pretty potent tools into their platform, so you can empower your agents to do what they do with less repetition.
  • Zendesk also offers digital support during business hours, and their website has a chatbot.
  • 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.
  • This enables them to speed up the support process and build experiences that customers like.

We also provide several low-to-pro-code customization options like API and app frameworks, Zendesk SDKs, AWS Events Connector, and robust developer resources. If you can’t find the exact solution you’re looking for, your dev team can build it. ProProfs Live Chat Editorial Team is a passionate group of customer service experts dedicated to empowering your live chat experiences with top-notch content.

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. Easily reply to customer conversations and manage workload in a smart & automated way. Lastly, Intercom offers an academy that offers concise courses to help users make the most out of their Intercom experience. Their reports are attractive, dynamic, and integrated right out of the box.

At the same time, the vendor offers powerful reporting capabilities to help you grow and improve your business. In this guide, we compare two products—Zendesk vs. Spiceworks—and detail how these IT help desk software options stack up. While Spiceworks offers standard IT ticketing features, Zendesk stands apart due to our speed, reliability, scalability, and security capabilities. We’re also suitable for employee and customer support, so we can meet all your service needs. The Zendesk sales CRM offers tiered pricing plans designed to support businesses of all sizes, from startups to enterprises. The Professional and Enterprise plans offer advanced features that build on those in the Team and Growth plans, including lead scoring, call scripts, and unlimited email sequences.

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. Is it as simple as knowing whether you want software strictly for customer support (like Zendesk) or for intercom versus zendesk some blend of customer relationship management and sales support (like Intercom)? Powered by Explore, Zendesk’s reporting capabilities are pretty impressive. 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.

intercom versus zendesk

One user noted that, in some cases, it can take Pipedrive at least eight hours to populate saved leads, making it difficult to quickly communicate with hot leads. 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. While both Zendesk and Intercom are great and robust platforms, none of them are able to provide you with the same value Messagely gives you at such an  affordable price.

While most of Intercom’s ticketing features come with all plans, it’s most important AI features come at a higher cost, including its automated workflows. Having only appeared in 2011, Intercom lacks a few years of experience on Zendesk. It also made its name as a messaging-first platform for fostering personalized conversational experiences for customers. However, after patting yourself on the back, you now realize you’re faced with the daunting task of choosing between the two.

Zendesk vs Intercom: Which one should you choose?

Utilizing modern CRM software can help your sales team boost their productivity and sales performance. While they like the ease of use this product offers its users, they’ve indeed rated them low in terms of services. Use HubSpot Service Hub to provide seamless, fast, and delightful customer service.

We hope this list has provided you with a better grasp of each platform and its features. Remember that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and the optimal platform for you will be determined by your individual demands. While both offer a wide number of integration options, Zendesk wins the top spot in this category. Zendesk is designed to fit your business needs whether you’re a fast-growing startup or a well-established company. Honestly, when it comes to Zendesk, it is not the most modern tool out there. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk, though is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously.

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. Intercom bills itself first and foremost as a platform to make the business of customer service more personalized, among other things. They offer an advanced feature for customer data management that goes beyond basic CRM stuff. It gives detailed contact profiles enriched by company data, behavioral data, conversation data, and other custom fields. Overall, I actually liked Zendesk’s user experience better than Intercom’s in terms of its messaging dashboard.

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. 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. Since Intercom’s focus is on driving customer engagement, the interface prominently displays important features like in-app messaging and chatbots.

A collection of these reports can enable your business to identify the right resources responsible for bringing engagement to your business. While in Intercom, advanced chatbots, a modern and well-developed chat widget, email marketing services, product demonstrations, and in-app messaging all contribute to a better customer experience. Zendesk’s customer support is also very fast, though their live chat is only available for registered users.

With a multi-channel ticketing system, Zendesk Support helps you and your team to know exactly who you’re talking to and keep track of tickets throughout all channels without losing context. The setup is designed to seamlessly connect your customer support team with customers across all platforms. Founded in 2007, Zendesk started off as a ticketing tool for customer support teams. It was later when they started adding all kinds of other tools like when they bought out Zopim live chat and just integrated it with their toolset. Intercom’s ticketing system and help desk SaaS is also pretty great, just not as amazing as Zendesk’s. Their customer service management tools have a shared inbox for support teams.

This not only increases customer satisfaction but also reduces operational costs. One stand out automation feature is its co-pilot, also known as Fin AI Copilot. It is an AI-powered assistant that functions as a knowledge base search tool, equipping agents with instant answers when they interact with customers, directly within the Intercom inbox.

But it’s designed and crafted so well that I can’t seem to get enough of it. It’s highly customizable, so you can adjust it according to your website or product’s style. So when I realized lots of companies actually prefer Zendesk over Intercom, I was surprised. 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. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. What really struck me though is that people seemed to like Zendesk more.

While Zendesk features are plenty, someone using it for the first time can find it overwhelming. Intercom has a community forum where users can engage with each other and gain insights from their experiences. With only the Enterprise tier offering round-the-clock email, phone, and chat help, Zendesk support is sharply separated by tiers. 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.

I just found Zendesk’s help center to be slightly better integrated into their workflows and more customizable. 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.

Our AI-powered employee service solution is built to move at the speed of your business, grow with you, and offer security measures that keep your data safe. Sign up for a free trial today to revolutionize your internal operations. Spiceworks, on the other hand, has limited AI and automation capabilities. As of now, the solution doesn’t offer a conversational chatbot, but it has basic capabilities for automating replies and ticket transfers. At Zendesk, we prioritize the safety of your employee and customer data just as highly as you do. We combine enterprise-level security features, advanced encryption keys, and comprehensive audits of our systems to ensure all private information stays private.

Intercom, on the other hand, focuses on automating tasks that help improve customer engagement. When you’re choosing the right tool that can help you do this, Zendesk and Intercom are two popular names that are likely to come up. Both are known for their range of features – AI, analytics, automation, and ticketing, amongst others. So, by now, you can see that according to this article, Zendesk inches past Intercom as the better customer support platform. 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.

That’s because if there’s a glitch or a system outage, you want an immediate fix or clarity on the resolution. You can use the dashboards to understand customer journeys in-depth and identify areas of improvement. While it helps track some basic support metrics, Intercom’s strength lies in helping companies understand user behavior, product usage, and friction points along the journey.

That being said, Intercom has an impressive array of features as well. These include chatbot automation features, customer segmentation, and targeted SMS messaging to reach the right audience efficiently. Keep up with emerging trends in customer service and learn from top industry experts. Master Tidio with in-depth guides and uncover real-world success stories in our case studies.

Conversely, Intercom has a shared inbox tool that routes conversations from every channel, including live chat, email, SMS, and more, into one place. However, it offers a limited channel scope compared to Zendesk, and users will have to get paid add-ons for channels like WhatsApp. You can access detailed customer data at a glance while chatting, enabling you to make informed decisions in real time. The customer journey timeline provides a clear view of customer activities, helping you understand behaviors and tailor your responses accordingly. Aura AI transcends the limits of traditional chatbots that typically struggle with anything but the simplest user queries.

Both the platforms offer valuable automation features, and the optimal choice depends on your business’s specific needs. Essentially, Fin AI Copilot acts as a personal assistant for every support staff, helping them resolve customer issues faster and more efficiently. Whereas, Fin AI Agent is an actual chatbot that responds on its own to customers’ questions.

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. It starts with as low as $19/user/month and can go up to $49/user/ month. This means, even when you choose a higher plan, you’ll be paying considerably less than what you would have to pay for Zendesk or intercom. 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. Intercom also does mobile carousels to help please the eye with fresh designs.

Customers want speed, anticipation, and a hyper-personalized experience conveniently on their channel of choice. Intelligence has become key to delivering the kinds of experiences customers expect at a lower operational cost. As more organizations adopt AI, it will be critical to choose a data model that aligns with how your business operates. Customer experience will be no exception, and AI models that are purpose-built for CX lead to better results at scale. Zendesk lacks in-app messages and email marketing tools, which are essential for big companies with heavy client support loads. Conversely, Intercom lacks ticketing functionality, which can also be essential for big companies.

intercom versus zendesk

Yes, Zendesk has an Intercom integration that you can find in the Zendesk Marketplace—it’s free to install. So, you can get the best of both worlds without choosing between Intercom or Zendesk. Zendesk is a ticketing system before anything else, and its ticketing functionality is overwhelming in the best possible way. With Zendesk, businesses don’t have to worry about the cost of scale limitations. Let’s dive deeper into five key features and see how Spiceworks and Zendesk compare.

Reporting and Analytics

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. It has very limited customization options in comparison to its competitors. Zendesk which is less user-friendly and charges more for quality support, might not work for smaller businesses.

Chatwoot challenges Zendesk with open source customer engagement platform – VentureBeat

Chatwoot challenges Zendesk with open source customer engagement platform.

Posted: Mon, 09 Aug 2021 07:00:00 GMT [source]

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. On the contrary, Intercom’s pricing is far less predictable and can cost hundreds/thousands of dollars per month. But this solution wins because it’s an all-in-one tool with a modern live chat widget, allowing you to improve your customer experiences easily. It has a more sophisticated user interface and a wide range of features, such as an in-app messenger, an email marketing tool, and an AI-powered chatbot.

intercom versus zendesk

Intercom has a dark mode that I think many people will appreciate, and I wouldn’t say it’s lacking in any way. 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. 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.

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. Also, their in-app messenger is worth a separate mention as it’s one of their distinctive tools (especially since Zendesk doesn’t really have one). With Intercom you can send targeted email, push, and in-app messages which can be based on the most relevant time or behavior triggers. 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.

Personalized messaging, in-app messaging, product tours, and chatbot capabilities set Intercom apart from Zendesk. It is none other than https://chat.openai.com/ the modern customer support software of Helpwise. Here is a Zendesk vs. Intercom based on the customer support offered by these brands.

Most notably, it doesn’t have built-in functionality to connect tickets with Microsoft Teams or Slack. Users would need a third-party integration like Tray.io to connect those channels. A sales CRM should also provide you with the benefits of pipeline management software. Zendesk helps you manage and update your leads, analyze your pipeline, and create customizable reports on the go with our mobile CRM app. Plus, visit tagging and geolocation features allow your sales team to effortlessly log in-person sales visits, letting you monitor all your sales interactions in one centralized place. Pipedrive provides a mobile app to manage sales leads, view your calendar, and access your to-do list.

intercom versus zendesk

Every single bit of business SaaS in the world needs to leverage the efficiency power of workflows and automation. Customer service systems like Zendesk and Intercom should provide a simple workflow builder as well as many pre-built automations which can be used right out of the box. 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.

اترك تعليقاً

لن يتم نشر عنوان بريدك الإلكتروني. الحقول الإلزامية مشار إليها بـ *