Intercom vs Zendesk: Which Is Better?

However, do take note that this comes with custom pricing, so you will need to contact them to learn more. User icons would be a great addition to replace chat icons or messaging buttons. Insights provides advanced reporting and metrics but is available only for the Professional and Enterprise plans. The design of the interface is fresh and clean and the user dashboard offers a lot of information.

Zendesk also offers callback requests, call monitoring and call quality notifications, among other telephone tools. As customers come closer to purchasing, they often find themselves weighing the same pros and cons. In our experience, when future clients start thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of Intercom vs. Zendesk, these are the questions they want answers to.

Main strengths of Intercom

Intercom feels more wholesome and is more customer success oriented, but can be too costly for smaller companies. 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 publish your knowledge base articles and divide them by categories and also integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience.

Intercom on the other hand lacks many ticketing functionality that can be essential for big companies with a huge customer support load. 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.

Tools for the world’s most customer-centric businesses

As Zendesk initially began as a help desk ticketing system, it’s no surprise that the platform makes tracking and managing customer inquiries seamless. Intercom has positioned itself as a messaging platform rather than a comprehensive CRM solution. This differentiates it from Zendesk, which offers a more traditional CRM experience. Intercom’s primary focus is engaging and communicating with customers through live chat, in-app messaging, and email.

• Professional plan starts at $29 per agent per month and includes unlimited triggers, the ability to add operating hours, and chat reports.
• This allows clients to quickly and easily find the answers to both simple and more complex questions without needing to have a customer service rep step in.
• Because of the app called Intercom Messenger, one can see that their focus is less on the voice and more on the text.
• So yeah, all the features talk actually brings us to the most sacred question — the question of pricing.
• This means that you can send targeted messages to different groups of users based on how they interact with your product.
• Intercom, of course, allows its customer support team to collaborate and communicate too, but overall, Zendesk wins this group.

Discovering the answer, he built Freshwork in 2010 to tailor the experience to meet every brand’s needs to accelerate team productivity through efficient modern automation and collaboration tools. Feature-Rich and Scalable – Zendesk is a well-known customer service software that offers an extensive range of features. It excels in ticket management, live chat, self-service portals, and integrations with various business tools. Zendesk’s strength lies in its scalability, making it an excellent choice for larger organizations with complex support needs.

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Here is a short overview of how these tools started, where they stand today, and what they can bring to your business. While there is an abundance of help desk tools metadialog.com available out there, only a few get the fervour when it comes to value for money. Let’s compare Intercom and Zendesk using the help desk features they have.

This enables companies to reach out to the right people on the right platform, at exactly the right time. Additionally, Freshdesk enables agents to collaborate with other agents through features such as Team Huddle, Shared Inbox and Ownership, etc. to efficiently solve customer problems. Moreover, Freshdesk supports multi-channel communication management, allowing agents to interact with customers via email, phone, social media, live chat and WhatsApp. Help Scout, a help desk ticketing system and customer service software solution, is one of the more popular Zendesk alternatives due to the fact that it provides a variety of services to its users. Zendesk’s Knowledge capture app is a smart recommendation engine that gives agents content that they can use to add more value to their customer solutions.

Plan Flexibility: Which One Has More Flexible Pricing Options?

Moreover, Intercom bots can converse naturally with customers by using conversation starters, respond with self-help, and knowledge base articles. However, if you compare Zendesk vs Intercom chat in ease of use, the letter wins. Create a chatbot with minimal coding and customize it to your heart’s content.

As a result, you’ll be able to see the sender, anyone who replied, and the dates of their interaction. As well as Intercom, it allows sharing of private notes with other support agents. However, Intercom’s heavy chat focus can also be a disadvantage for some businesses.

Customizable chatbots

Moreover, companies that have customer-centric teams may not like that Kustomer offers so many deflecting requests. HubSpot Service Hub is a cloud-based customer service platform that aims to simplify the process related to customer support. HubSpot can work for companies of nearly every size, allowing users to quickly connect via conversational bots, live chat, canned responses, and phone calls with live agents. Although its chat-based approach is different to traditional ticketing systems, Intercom still has a lot to offer customer support and service teams.

• It is worthwhile to explore the features of both, prior to making a decision on which one you should use.
• Ticket routing helps to send the ticket to the best support team agent.
• Like with many other apps, Zapier seems to be the best and most simple way to connect Intercom to Zendesk.
• On the other hand, Intercom is more focused on conversational customer support, and has more help desk features suited for live chat and messaging.
• The best Customer Support Software is a product that can deal with your company’s unique requirements.
• Moreover, Gorgias is one of the few platforms that place ticket limits on monthly plans.

If you’re looking for the best messaging option or a tool that offers the best interface, choose Intercom. If you wish to strengthen both your sales and customer support teams and enjoy plenty of integrated features, go for Zendesk. On the other hand, if you are looking for a feature-rich tool that comes at less than half the cost of Zendesk and Intercom, then ProProfs can be your ideal support partner. Apart from a live chat, it has a feature called ‘Business Messenger’ that comes with its own AI chatbot.

Intercom or Zendesk: Voice and phone tools

If a customer isn’t satisfied with Answer Bot’s response, Answer Bot quickly routes them to an agent best suited to help. 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. For example, you can assign all inbound technical queries to an engineer; or, assign all pricing queries to the sales team. Automation and AI save resources and time–every automated workflow and routing decision frees an agent to work on more complex issues.

Installing it might take some technical skill and even when installed, could malfunction a bit. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to assist customers through self-help options or access to the relevant articles before connecting them to your team. And this, undoubtedly, leaves your customer support agents free to solve urgent matters. The company helps answer customers’ questions and renders meaningful conversations irrespective of the buyer’s journey. With numerous features such as a ticketing system, a CRM or a knowledge base software, customer service software helps companies around the world.

Intercom Versus Zendesk: Support

Leveraging AI-powered chatbots, Zoho Desk employs Zia, an intelligent assistant, to share relevant knowledge base solutions with customers and agents. Zendesk was founded in 2007 and as such, is one of the oldest customer service management software offerings available on the market today. Zendesk provides a variety of solutions including customized ticketing automation, self-service solutions, and customizable configurations based on your business needs. It delivers a multi-channel support system with customer service automation. You can set business rules, SLA, and ticket routing based on the agent’s skills, language, and expertise. Each message will have identifiers so that they will be easy to recognize at a glance.

• After starting life as a simple chat widget, Intercom has added lots of new features to its messaging platform, but catering for customer support seems like more of an afterthought.
• This is done to ensure you’re comfortable using Zendesk, but also in part to try to get you to stay with their Enterprise package.
• This list of Freshdesk alternatives will help you find a tool that’s right for you.
• Many small businesses trust Hiver because their teams are already familiar with Gmail.
• Therefore, in order to carry a fair comparison, it is important to first figure out the criteria on which we can weigh the different tools.
• Intercom is better designed for smaller companies and teams, while Zendesk is suitable for large companies to skyrocket customer support.

Zendesk’s mobile app is also good for ticketing, helping you create new support tickets with macros and updates. It’s also good for sending and receiving notifications, as well as for quick filtering through the queue of open tickets. The best help desks are also ticketing systems, which lets support reps create a support ticket out of issues that can then be tracked. Ticket routing helps to send the ticket to the best support team agent.

That’s true, businesses vary by industry, size, purposes, the software they need, a budget for that software, and the list can go on. Intercom is a user intelligence and behavioral targeting platform to better understand, improve, and benefit from your customer communication. The best Customer Support Software is a product that can deal with your company’s unique requirements. It is possible to identify which alternative is best suited for your company if you review different products before you decide which one is the best. Zendesk for Service sells three plans, ranging from $49 to $99 monthly per user, with a 30-day free trial available for each plan.