Intercom vs Zendesk Why HubSpot is the Best Alternative

Intercom vs Zendesk Suite 2024 Comparison

We will discuss these differentiating factors to help you make the right choice for your business and help it excel in offering extraordinary customer service. The ProProfs Live Chat Editorial Team is a passionate group of customer service experts dedicated to empowering your live chat experiences with top-notch content. We stay ahead of the curve on trends, tackle technical hurdles, and provide practical tips to boost your business. With our commitment to quality and integrity, you can be confident you’re getting the most reliable resources to enhance your customer support initiatives. If you are looking for a comprehensive customer support solution with a wide range of features, Zendesk is a good option. As you dive deeper into the world of customer support and engagement, you’ll discover that Zendesk and Intercom offer some distinctive features that set them apart.

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. Zendesk is not far behind Intercom when it comes to email features.

Intercom, on the other hand, offers more advanced automation features than Zendesk. It allows businesses to automate a wide range of business interactions. Its automation tools help companies see automated responses and triggers based on the customer journey and response time. Intercom’s automation features enable businesses to deliver a personalized experience to customers and scale their customer support function effectively. It’s an invaluable tool for businesses aiming to enhance customer satisfaction, increase conversions, and build lasting relationships.

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. In some cases, Zendesk may be considered a more cost-effective option compared to Intercom, particularly for businesses with smaller budgets or those looking for more predictable pricing. When comparing the pricing of Zendesk and Intercom, there are significant differences to take into account.

Intercom vs Zendesk: overall impression

Once you add live chat to your website, your visitors will be able to reach you through the chat widget. However, customer service (and the ways how a company delivers it) creates a centerpiece of a brand. But if you’re not familiar with them, think of the software as an online human resource department. For intercom versus zendesk 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.

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. In the dynamic landscape of customer support platforms, choosing between Zendesk and Intercom depends on various factors such as budget, specific business requirements, and long-term goals. Businesses should carefully evaluate their needs and consider scalability, user-friendliness, and integration capabilities before deciding on the platform that best suits their requirements. Zendesk is a leading customer service software that offers a comprehensive suite of tools for businesses to manage customer support, engagement, and relationships.

Depending on the seat type (subscription plan), users get access to different features. For example, the Messaging feature is not available in the Support plan, while Articles aren’t available in the Engage and Conver plans. Unfortunately, you can’t calculate the price by yourself since Intercom hid its pricing table. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Though, you can sum up the price together with the Intercom sales team accurately if you contact them. Zendesk does not provide its customers with email marketing tools for the basic subscriptions at the time of writing.

Consider your budget, team size, and integration requirements before making a decision. Intercom’s pricing typically includes different plans designed to accommodate businesses of various sizes and needs. While Intercom offers a free trial, it’s important to note that the cost can increase as you scale and add more features or users. However, if your organization heavily relies on Intercom’s real-time communication features, in-app messaging, and chat-based support, transitioning entirely to Zendesk may not cover all your needs. Intercom’s focus on instant interactions and personalized engagement is particularly valuable for businesses prioritizing chat-first customer support and real-time communication. Founded in 2007, Zendesk started off as a ticketing tool for customer support teams.

Known for its scalability, Zendesk is suitable for various business sizes, from startups to large corporations. Intercom offers a unique pricing model based on the number of people you engage with, which includes both customers and team members. On the other hand, Zendesk offers plans based on the number of support agents, making it more suitable for businesses that have a dedicated support team. For businesses looking for a comprehensive customer service and support tool, Zendesk reigns supreme. Its feature offering is second to none and for growing companies, Zendesk scales as well or better than any other customer support platform on the market. Intercom has positioned itself as a messaging platform rather than a comprehensive CRM solution.

Considering that Zendesk and Intercom are leading the market for customer service software, it becomes difficult for businesses to choose the right tool. Sometimes, businesses do not even realize the importance of various aspects you must consider while making this choice. Pop-up chat, in-app messaging, and notifications are some of the highly-rated features of this live chat software. Zendesk is another popular customer service, support, and sales platform that enables clients to connect and engage with their customers in seconds.

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. Zendesk, with its extensive toolkit, is often preferred by businesses seeking an all-encompassing customer support solution. 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. Zendesk boasts robust reporting and analytics tools, plus a dedicated workforce management system.

It will really help you get up faster and understand the product deeper, and not waste time. ActiveCampaign is difficult to learn on your own since it is so full featured. Sign up for a trial through a salesperson and then ask if it is possible to get in the class for less money. We sell a high-touch, high ASP product (caskets) and have scaled to where we’re adding several more customer service agents to our company.

The optimized agent interface ensures rapid responses for maximum efficiency, all while keeping your website running smoothly. 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. Groove has put together an informative review of both brands to highlight the similarities and differences to allow you to make the right choice. We are easy-going yet knowledgeable team of experts who will make sure that what’s important gets done skillfully. Easily track your service team’s performance and unlock coaching opportunities with AI-powered insights.

Alternatives to Zendesk & Intercom

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. Whether you’re focused on customer service, sales, or a combination of both, Dominic’s insights will guide you towards the platform that best suits your unique business needs.

Besides its easy navigation, it also offers a mesmerizing ticketing system, multichannel communication, and analytics reporting. So, Zendesk’s users are always going to have a smooth experience with it. For businesses aiming to seamlessly integrate customer communication with sales efforts, the sales functionalities of Zendesk and Intercom become paramount. Dominic evaluates the CRM capabilities, lead generation tools, and overall sales support offered by each platform, giving viewers a clear picture of which one aligns better with their business goals. A lot can be gleaned from a customer support tool’s ticketing features.

This multichannel approach is especially important for companies that support customers in different regions and countries as access to communication tools can vary. While Intercom is great for tracking user-centric metrics, Zendesk can provide a more comprehensive look at overall customer support performance. Reporting tools are essential to helping support leaders analyze and improve their customer support operations. Personalized messaging, in-app messaging, product tours, and chatbot capabilities set Intercom apart from Zendesk. However, it simplifies sorting and filtering options based on multiple parameters—date, priority, ticket, tags, sources, etc.

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. On practice, I can’t promise you anything when it comes to Intercom. 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).

• Seamlessly integrate Intercom with popular third-party tools and platforms, centralizing customer data and improving workflow efficiency.
• Visit either of their app marketplaces and look up the Intercom Zendesk integration.
• It also helps promote automation in routine tasks by automating repetitive processes and helps agents save time and errors.
• Intercom also excels in real-time chat solutions, making it a strong contender for businesses seeking dynamic customer interaction.

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. However, it’s essential to consider the strengths of Zendesk, which offers a comprehensive and versatile customer support platform. While Intercom excels in certain aspects of customer communication, Zendesk offers its own set of strengths that cater to different aspects of customer support and engagement. Zendesk and Intercom are prominent players in the field of customer support and engagement platforms, each offering unique capabilities and advantages to address varying user requirements.

Zendesk VS. Intercom for Customer Support: Pricing

This becomes the perfect opportunity to personalize the experience, offer assistance to prospects as per their needs, and convert them into customers. Intercom offers a simplistic dashboard with a detailed view of all customer details in one place. Operators will find its dashboard quite beneficial as it will take them seconds to find necessary features during an ongoing chat with the customers.

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. Overall, when comparing Zendesk to Intercom, Zendesk’s features will probably win out over time. But the most important thing is that you get a help desk that you believe in—and that you integrate it into a website as thoroughly as possible. Learn how top CX leaders are scaling personalized customer service at their companies.

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. 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. Discover the top automated ticketing systems to enhance your customer support efficiency and team productivity. Zendesk’s per-agent pricing structure makes it a budget-friendly option for smaller teams, allowing costs to scale with team growth. When comparing the automation and AI features of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms come with unique strengths and weaknesses.

The future of customer service is integrated, AI-enhanced—and powered by Intercom

But that’s not it, if you want to resolve customer common questions with the help of the vendor’s new tool – Fin bot, you will have to pay $0.99 per resolution per month. So when it comes to chatting features, the choice is not really Intercom vs Zendesk. The latter offers a chat widget that is simple, outdated, and limited in customization options, while the former puts all of its resources into its messenger. You could technically consider Intercom a CRM, but it’s really more of a customer-focused communication product. It isn’t as adept at purer sales tasks like lead management, list engagement, advanced reporting, forecasting, and workflow management as you’d expect a more complete CRM to be.

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. There are 3 Basic support plans at $19, $49 and $99 per user per month billed annually, Chat GPT and 5 Suite plans at $49, $79, $99, $150, and $215 per user per month billed annually. Zendesk stands out as a champion of delivering personalized customer support due to its easy-to-use work-frame, many useful add-ons, and features in all tiers.

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. Zendesk, a customer service-focused tool, is renowned for its robust ticketing system and help desk capabilities. On the other hand, Intercom positions itself as a versatile solution, integrating customer communication with marketing and sales.

And we all know that receiving such continuous positive Customer feedback isn’t easy at all. If not, then you should because it will ease much of your workload as you would not have to waste your precious time in finding the helpdesk operator, plus zero management issues. Both products are so full-featured that they both take quite a while to learn. Finally, we also have some B2B customers (funeral homes) and expect this part of our business to grow significantly in 2021. Their most popular tier (Suite Professional) is $115/month and includes a feature set that is very hard to beat at that price.

Hivers offers round-the-clock proactive support across all its plans, ensuring that no matter the time or issue, expert assistance is always available. This 24/7 support model is designed to provide continuous, real-time solutions to clients, enhancing the overall reliability and responsiveness of Hivers’ services. Choose Zendesk for a scalable, team-size-based pricing model and Intercom for initial low-cost access with flexibility in adding advanced features.

Examining the roadmap of both platforms helps businesses envision how their customer support needs can align with the evolving market trends and technological innovations. 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. In contrast, Intercom follows a pricing structure that can be straightforward for businesses looking for specific functionalities.

However, The solution’s pricing doesn’t fit medium sized organizations well. Especially if you need to deal with SLAs and similar more advanced options. The sophisticated nature of its chatbot makes it more than a task automation tool — it takes customer interactions to the next level. What makes Desku unique is that it has competitively priced services with similar features as those provided by other companies but at a lower cost.

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. Zendesk is quite https://chat.openai.com/ famous for designing its platform to be intuitive and its tools to be quite simple to learn. This is aided by the fact that the look and feel of Zendesk’s user interface are neat and minimal, with few cluttering features.

To that end, you can import themes or apply your own custom themes to brand your help 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. Zendesk provides comprehensive security and compliance features, ensuring customer data privacy. This includes secure login options like SAML or JWT SSO (single sign-on) and native content redaction for sensitive information.

Admins will also like the fact that they can see the progress of all their teams and who all are actively answering a customer’s query in real-time. On the other hand, if you prioritize customer engagement, sales, and personalized messaging, Intercom is a compelling option, especially for startups and rapidly scaling businesses. Streamline support processes with Intercom’s ticketing system and knowledge base. Efficiently manage customer inquiries and empower customers to find answers independently. Zendesk’s Help Center and Intercom’s Articles both offer features to easily embed help centers into your website or product using their web widgets, SDKs, and APIs.

Instead, they offer a product demo when prospects reach out to learn more about their pricing structure. 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 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. Intercom offers call center features for your business via add-ons. Services such as CallHippo, Ozonetel, Toky, Aircall Now are just a few of many more add-ons in lieu of call center tools built into the help desk software. What makes it different from other help desk tools is the Answer Bot.

With ThriveDesk, you can supercharge your website’s growth and streamline customer interactions like never before. It can team up with tools like Salesforce and Slack, so everything runs smoothly. And considering how appropriate Zendesk is for larger companies, there’s a good chance you may need to take them up on that.

Zendesk has been ruling the market for ages due to its multi-communication and ticketing system. Whether it’s about communicating via phone, email, or social media, Zendesk will always stay upfront. Both the platforms have the knowledge base feature, and in my opinion, both of them are becoming winners. It will help you understand your customer’s issue and solve it instantly. Although you cannot be with your customers all the time in real-time, through Desku’s live chatting, you can actually have their back. Winner — Intercom edges out Zendesk here due mainly to its customizable workflow capabilities.

Intercom has a full suite of email marketing tools, although they are part of a pricier package. With Intercom, you get email features like targeted and personalized outbound emailing, dynamic content fields, and an email-to-inbox forwarding feature. Email marketing, for example, is a big deal, but less so when it comes to customer service. Still, for either of these platforms to have some email marketing or other email functionality is common sense.

Intercom is also easy to learn and its guided onboarding and training resources are especially helpful to new users. Intercom has a community forum where users can engage with each other and gain insights from their experiences. Intercom live chat is modern, streamlined, and highly customisable compared to Zendesk. It’s Intercom VS Zendesk, the battle of two well-known software in the help desk category. If you have been wondering which to choose, Intercom or Zendesk, the good news is you aren’t alone. That’s true, businesses vary by industry, size, purposes, the software they need, a budget for that software, and the list can go on.

Its analytics do not provide deeper insights into consumer interactions as well. Intercom is also a customer service software that integrates entirely with third-party vendors, especially those offering messaging services. Using any plan, this integration is available to all customers, making the customer support experience and onboarding smooth. It can also handle complex interactions and provide real-time insight to customer support agents. Overall, Intercom is a better option if personalized and robust chatbots are something you are looking for when managing customer support strategy. Its messaging also has real-time notifications and automated responses, enhancing customer communication.

Also, this software offers a feature called ‘Business Messenger’ that comes with its own AI chatbot. Moreover, Intercom bots can converse naturally with customers by using conversation starters, and respond with self-help, and knowledge base articles. Live chat add-on provides you with personal customer communication (via the web, mobile, and conversational messaging) without interrupting their experience.

It empowers businesses with a robust suite of automation tools, enabling them to streamline their support processes seamlessly. Zendesk allows for the creation of predefined rules and workflows that efficiently route tickets to the appropriate agents, ensuring swift and precise issue resolution. Moreover, Zendesk excels in sending automated responses and escalating critical issues with precision. While there can be add-ons, such as premium customer support, you can generally anticipate what you’ll be paying for your Zendesk subscription. It calculates the cost of its Pro and Premium plans based on the number of AI resolutions, people reached, and seats (or users). This can make it challenging to estimate the cost yourself during your research and you need to speak with Intercom for more information.

However, if businesses seek a more personalized customer experience, Intercom’s advanced features could be beneficial. The ease of use and customization options play a significant role in the seamless integration of a customer support platform within existing business operations. Analyzing the user-friendliness and customizability of Zendesk and Intercom provides insights into their adaptability to diverse business environments. Intercom focuses on providing personalized customer messaging and support at every stage of the customer lifecycle.

This makes it an excellent choice if you want to engage with support and potential and existing customers in real time. One of Zendesk’s standout features that we need to shine a spotlight on is its extensive marketplace of third-party integrations and extensions. Imagine having the power to connect your helpdesk solution with a wide range of tools and applications that your team already uses. Whether it’s syncing data with your CRM, enhancing communication via messaging platforms, or automating tasks with productivity apps, Zendesk makes it possible. It tends to perform well on the marketing and sales side of things, which is key for a growing company. And considering that its tools (including live chat options) are so easy to use, it’s probably going to be easier for a small business to get integrated and set up.

When comparing Zendesk and Intercom, various factors come into play, each focusing on different aspects, strengths, and weaknesses of these customer support platforms. So yeah, all the features talk actually brings us to the most sacred question — the question of pricing. You’d probably want to know how much it costs to get each of the platforms for your business, so let’s talk money now. You can even improve efficiency and transparency by setting up task sequences, defining sales triggers, and strategizing with advanced forecasting and reporting tools.

Their template triggers are fairly limited with only seven options, but they do enable users to create new custom triggers, which can be a game-changer for agents with more complex workflows. Using this, agents can chat across teams within a ticket via email, Slack, or Zendesk’s ticketing system. 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. Use ticketing systems to manage the influx and provide your customers with timely responses. You need a complete customer service platform that’s seamlessly integrated and AI-enhanced. Compare Intercom and Zendesk Chat based on their key features and functions to find the right one for your business.