Zendesk vs Intercom: Which Is Right For Your Business in 2023?

Customer support and security are vital aspects to consider when evaluating helpdesk solutions like Zendesk and Intercom. Let’s examine and compare how each platform addresses these crucial areas to ensure effective support operations and data protection. Seamlessly integrate Intercom with popular third-party tools and platforms, centralizing customer data and improving workflow efficiency. Intercom has flexible prices that can change based on what your business needs, and they offer a 14-day free trial. Talking about the Intercom, it has flexible pricing plans that its experts can help adjust as per your requirements to match contacts and number of seats. The good news is that you enjoy a generous free 14-day trial by opting to get an idea if the particular service is suitable for your business or not.

• In this paragraph, let’s explain some common issues that users usually ask about when choosing between Zendesk and Intercom platforms.
• There is also something called warm transfers, which let one rep add contextual notes to a ticket before transferring it to another rep. You also get a side conversation tool.
• This additional cost can be a considerable factor for businesses to consider when evaluating their customer support needs against their budget constraints.

It can team up with tools like Salesforce and Slack, so everything runs smoothly. If you go through Zendesk’s reviews and ratings section, you will get to see a long list of positive appraisals. And we all know that receiving such continuous positive Customer feedback isn’t easy at all. Amid tight budgeting times, Desku proves to be the buddy for excellent worth and without any costly expenditure.

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To sum things up, one can get really confused trying to make sense of the Zendesk suite pricing, let alone calculate costs. Zendesk is a ticketing system before anything else, and its ticketing functionality is overwhelming in the best possible way. Understanding these fundamental differences should go a long way in helping you pick between the two, but does that mean you can’t use one platform to do what the other does better?

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. Its ability to seamlessly integrate with various applications further amplifies its versatility.

Zendesk vs. Intercom pricing

Intercom also offers a 14-day free trial, after which customers can upgrade to a paid plan or use the basic free plan. Unlike Zendesk, the prices for Intercom are based on the number of seats and contacts, with each plan tailored to each customer, meaning that the pricing can be quite flexible. This is especially helpful for smaller businesses that may not need a lot of features.

Zendesk wins the collaboration tools category because of its easy-to-use side conversations feature. The entire thread is saved within the ticket for future agents to reference. Agents can add each other to internal notes within a ticket, looping in team members to collaborate when necessary. zendesk or intercom For example, you can assign all inbound technical queries to an engineer; or, assign all pricing queries to the sales team. 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.

When making your decision, consider factors such as your budget, the scale of your business, and your specific growth plans. Explore alternative options like ThriveDesk if you’re looking for a more budget-conscious solution that aligns with your customer support needs. On the other hand, if you Chat PG prioritize customer engagement, sales, and personalized messaging, Intercom is a compelling option, especially for startups and rapidly scaling businesses. ThriveDesk is a help desk software tailor-made for businesses seeking extensive features and a powerful yet simple live chat assistant.

Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates. Intercom, on the other hand, was built for business messaging, so communication is one of their strong suits. Combine that with their prowess in automation and sales solutions, and you’ve got a really strong product that can handle myriad customer relationship needs. Businesses of all sizes can rely on the Zendesk customer service platform and benefit from workflow management, powerful AI tools, robust insights, and more. If that sounds good to you, sign up for a free demo to see our software in action and get started. 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.

Zendesk Sunshine is a separate feature set that focuses on unified customer views. Help desk SaaS is how you manage general customer communication and for handling customer questions. Zendesk is quite famous for designing its platform to be intuitive and its tools to be quite simple to learn.

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. Did you know that integrations between Zendesk and Intercom are possible? With the integrations provided through each product, you can make use of both platforms to provide your customers with comprehensive customer service.

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. 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. Now that we’ve covered a bit of background on both Zendesk and Intercom, let’s dive into the features each platform offers. We’re big fans of Zendesk’s dashboard with built-in collaboration tools, but we wish the Agent Workspace came with the Team or Growth plans–not just Professional.

You can opt for code via JavaScript or Rails or even integrate directly with the likes of Google Tag Manager, WordPress, or Shopify. 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 https://chat.openai.com/ center the way you want it. From there, you can include FAQs, announcements, and article guides and then save them into pre-set lists for your customers to explore. You can even moderate user content to leverage your customer community. Advanced workflows are useful to customer service teams because they automate processes that make it easier for agents to provide great customer service.

Intercom’s help center allows you to draft and organize collections of articles, accessible to customers via a search bar in the Messenger widget. Set automatic triggers so that certain events send push notifications to targeted customers, or use them as part of communication campaigns and series, and run A/B testing to compare two notifications. Zendesk wins the ticketing system category due to its easy-to-use interface and side conversations tool.

Zendesk offers a free 30-day trial, after which customers will need to upgrade to one of their paid plans. One of the things that sets Zendesk apart from other customer service software providers is its focus on design. The company’s products are built with an emphasis on simplicity and usability. This has helped to make Zendesk one of the most popular customer service software platforms on the market.

But we doubled down and created a truly full-service CX solution capable of handling any support request. Novo has been a Zendesk customer since 2019 but didn’t immediately start taking full advantage of all our features and capabilities. Apps and integrations are critical to creating a 360 view of the customer across the company and ensuring agents have easy access to key customer context. When agents don’t have to waste time toggling between different systems and tools to access the customer details they need, they can deliver faster, more personalized customer service. So yeah, two essential things that Zendesk lacks in comparison to Intercom are in-app messages and email marketing tools. Intercom on the other hand lacks many ticketing functionality that can be essential for big companies with a huge customer support load.

The workspace left-hand column notifies agents of all ticket updates. The top of the agent workspace shows an agent’s open tickets, ticket statistics, and satisfaction statistics, as well as tabs depicting all current tickets. Intercom offers admin full visibility and control over all company inboxes, as well as agent access controls and role management. Intercom wins the reporting and analytics category due to its unique visualization and display formats for contact center and article data. Survey responses automatically save as data in users’ profiles, and Intercom provides survey data in analytics and reporting. Reporting and analytics provide metrics, trends, and key performance indicators (KPIs) that offer insights to agents and administrators.

Automatic assignment rules establish criteria that automatically route tickets to the right agent or team, based on message or user data. While Intercom lacks some common customer-service channels like voice calling and video conferencing, it supports other unique features that transfer across channels. Zendesk for Service transforms customer queries and conversations from all channels–call, web chat, tweet, text, or email–into tickets in the Agent Workspace. It is none other than the modern customer support software of Helpwise. Here is a Zendesk vs. Intercom based on the customer support offered by these brands.

Zendesk’s customer support is also very fast, though their live chat is only available for registered users. Zendesk is a great option for large companies or companies that are looking for a very strong sales and customer service platform. It offers more support features and includes more advanced analytics and reports. Intercom’s UI excels in modern design and intuitive functionality, particularly noted for its real-time messaging and advanced features. It is tailored for automation and quick access to insights, offering a user-friendly experience. Nevertheless, the platform’s support consistency can be a concern, and the unpredictable pricing structure might lead to increased costs for larger organizations.

Behavior-based messaging allows you to customize every last detail of triggers and rules including–which channel sends the message, when it sends, where it sends, and who gets targeted. Sequence all channels–chat, web post, email, chatbot outreach, tour message, banner, push notification, or carousel–mixing and matching modes of outreach to fit campaign goals. If a customer isn’t satisfied with Answer Bot’s response, Answer Bot quickly routes them to an agent best suited to help. With Intercom workload management tools, administrators can ensure that incoming conversations, traffic, and workload are evenly distributed among team members.

Great live chat

This method helps offer more personalized support as well as get faster response and resolution times. Zendesk wins the major category of help desk and ticketing system software. It lets customers reach out via messaging, a live chat tool, voice, and social media. 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 also offers digital support during business hours, and their website has a chatbot.

This serves the dual benefit of adding convenience to the customer experience and lightening agents’ workloads. 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. Just as Zendesk, Intercom also offers its own Operator bot which will automatically suggest relevant articles to customers who ask for help. 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.

Intercom pros and cons

Just like Zendesk, Intercom also offers its Operator bot, which will automatically suggest relevant articles to clients right in a chat widget. You can create dozens of articles in a simple, intuitive WYSIWYG text editor, divide them by categories and sections, and customize with your custom themes. If you create a new chat with the team, land on a page with no widget, and go back to the browser for some reason, your chat will go puff. What’s really nice about this is that even within a ticket, you can switch between communication modes without changing views. So if an agent needs to switch from chat to phone to email (or vice versa) with a customer, it’s all on the same ticketing page. There’s even on-the-spot translation built right in, which is extremely helpful.

Messagely’s pricing starts at just $29 per month, which includes live chat, targeted messages, shared inbox, mobile apps, and over 750 powerful integrations. On the other hand, Zendesk’s customer support includes a knowledge base that’s very intuitive and easy to navigate. It divides all articles into a few main topics so you can quickly find the one you’re looking for. It also includes a list of common questions you can browse through at the bottom of the knowledge base home page so you can find answers to common issues. In addition to Intercom vs Zendesk, alternative helpdesk solutions are available in the market.

Companies looking for a more complete customer service product–without niche bells and whistles, but with all the basic channels you want–should look to Zendesk. Small businesses who prioritize collaboration will also enjoy Zendesk for Service. For very small companies and startups, Intercom also offers a Starter plan–with a balanced suite of features from each of the above solutions–at $74 monthly per user. In an omnichannel contact center, agents can manage customer interactions across channels, no matter which channel a customer uses to contact the company. Overall, Zendesk empowers businesses to deliver exceptional customer support experiences across channels, making it a popular choice for enhancing support operations. Zendesk also has an Answer Bot, which instantly takes your knowledge base game to the next level.

At the same time, the vendor offers powerful reporting capabilities to help you grow and improve your business. 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.

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. Zendesk is a customer service software offering a comprehensive solution for managing customer interactions. It integrates customer support, sales, and marketing communications, aiming to improve client relationships. Known for its scalability, Zendesk is suitable for various business sizes, from startups to large corporations. It is great to have CRM functionality inside your customer service platform because it helps maintain great customer experiences by storing all past customer engagements and conversation histories.

Whether you’re starting fresh with Intercom or migrating from Zendesk, set up is quick and easy. Currently based in Albuquerque, NM, Bryce Emley holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NC State and nearly a decade of writing and editing experience. When he isn’t writing content, poetry, or creative nonfiction, he enjoys traveling, baking, playing music, reliving his barista days in his own kitchen, camping, and being bad at carpentry. Keeping this general theme in mind, I’ll dive deeper into how each software’s features compare, so you can decide which use case might best fit your needs. Our integration with Intercom enables bi-directional contact and case synchronization, so you can continue using Intercom as your front-end digital experience and use Zendesk for case management. Check out the research-backed comparison below to better understand how each solution can add value to your organization.

So, by holding Desku’s hand, you can open doors for a long list of happy and fully satisfied customers. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. When comparing the reporting and analytics features of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms offer robust tools, but with distinct focuses and functionalities. Key offerings include automated support with help center articles, a messenger-first ticketing system, and a powerful inbox to centralize customer queries. Choosing the right customer service platform is pivotal for enhancing business-client interactions. In this context, Zendesk and Intercom emerge as key contenders, each offering distinct features tailored to dynamic customer service environments.

Create personalized messages for specific customer segments, driving engagement and satisfaction. You will be able to find the most common chatting system with a single communication channel. So, communicating with customers on different communication channels would be difficult on Intercom. 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. So, by now, you can see that according to this article, Zendesk inches past Intercom as the better customer support platform.