Who Is the Winner in This Zendesk vs Intercom Showdown? HDM

Zendesk for Sales offers three plans, ranging from $19 to $99 monthly per user, with free trials available for each plan. 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. Reporting and analytics provide metrics, trends, and key performance indicators (KPIs) that offer insights to agents and administrators. Community forums enable customers to assist each other by asking questions and sharing tips, experiences, and best practices–creating a unique, user-based, searchable information hub.

With Intercom, you can keep track of your customers and what they do on your website in real time. Like Zendesk, Intercom allows you to chat with online visitors and assist with their issues. The choice between the two platforms would depend on the specific needs and preferences of each business. Don’t miss out on the latest tips, tools, and tactics at the forefront of customer support. Formerly known as Insights, Zendesk now uses Explore to provide analytics to help businesses tailor their services to increase customer satisfaction. Zendesk chat vs Intercom offers similar chat features but still has a couple of differences.

In contrast, Intercom aims to provide an all-in-one business communication platform to support, engage, and convert customers with sales and marketing functions. An example of the platforms’ different focus is that Intercom includes an email marketing feature, whereas Zendesk doesn’t. On the contrary, Intercom is far less predictable when it comes to pricing and can cost hundreds/thousands of dollars per month. But this solution is great because it’s an all-in-one tool with a modern live chat widget, allowing you to easily improve your customer experiences. At the same time, Zendesk looks slightly outdated and can’t offer some features. The platform also integrates with some third-party apps to help businesses increase its capabilities.

• Reporting tools are essential to helping support leaders analyze and improve their customer support operations.
• Intercom is 4 years younger than Zendesk and has fancied itself as a messaging platform right from the beginning.
• When you see pricing plans starting for $79/month, you should get a clear understanding of how expensive other plans can become for your business.
• Say what you will, but Intercom’s design and overall user experience leave all its competitors far behind.
• Triggers should prove especially useful for agents, allowing them to do things like automate notifications for actions like ticket assignments, ticket closing/reopening, or new ticket creation.

You can even improve efficiency and transparency by setting up task sequences, defining sales triggers, and strategizing with advanced forecasting and reporting tools. Starting at $19 per user per month, it’s also on the cheaper end of the spectrum compared to high-end CRMs like ActiveCampaign and HubSpot. Triggers should prove especially useful for agents, allowing them to do things like automate notifications for actions like ticket assignments, ticket closing/reopening, or new ticket creation. 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.

To guide your decision-making, we explain the key features and qualities of each, and the role that a omnichannel conversational AI platform (Netomi!) can play, for the ultimate CX strategy. Agents can use basic automation (like auto-closing tickets or setting auto-responses), apply list organization to stay on top of their tasks, or set up triggers to keep tickets moving automatically. 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. Intercom’s app store has popular integrations for things like WhatsApp, Stripe, Instagram, and Slack. There is a really useful one for Shopify to provide customer support for e-commerce operations.

And in this post, we will analyze two popular names in the SaaS industry – Intercom & Zendesk. When it comes to ease-of-use, Zendesk undeniably takes the lead over Intercom. Zendesk’s intuitive design caters to beginners and non-technical users, offering a seamless experience right from the start.

Desku as an Alternative to Intercom and Zendesk

Intercom also offers scalability within its pricing plans, enabling businesses to upgrade to higher tiers as their support needs grow. With its integrated suite of applications, Intercom provides a comprehensive solution that caters to businesses seeking a unified ecosystem to manage customer interactions. Ultimately, it’s important to consider what features each platform offers before making a decision, as well as their pricing options and customer support policies. Since both are such well-established market leader companies, you can rest assured that whichever one you choose will offer a quality customer service solution. The company’s products include a ticketing system, live chat software, knowledge base software, and a customer satisfaction survey tool. Zendesk also offers a number of integrations with third-party applications.

If you are looking for a comprehensive customer support solution with a wide range of features, Zendesk is a good option. Both Zendesk and Intercom have AI capabilities that deserve special mention. Zendesk’s AI (Fin) helps with automated responses, ensuring your customers get quick answers. On the other hand, Intercom’s AI-powered chatbots and messaging are designed to enhance your marketing and sales efforts, giving you an edge in the competitive market. Intercom’s messaging system enables real-time interactions through various channels, including chat, email, and in-app messages.

For instance, when you need to access specific features or information, Zendesk’s organized interface ensures that everything is easily locatable, reducing search time and user frustration. In the domain of customer onboarding, Intercom takes a definitive lead with its distinctive feature – the ability to create interactive product tours. These tours serve as virtual guides, leading customers through a website and product offerings in an engaging and personalized manner. This approach not only enhances user understanding but also significantly boosts user engagement. When comparing the pricing of Zendesk and Intercom, there are significant differences to take into account.

Is Intercom better than Zendesk?

While Intercom offers a “Starter Plan” for very small businesses, the price for larger companies is scaled upward, too. If you only need the services Intercom offers, then you’ll only spend around $75 a month for two seats. Another feature Intercom offers zendesk vs. intercom that Zendesk doesn’t is email marketing tools. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to communicate with your customers. Zendesk’s mobile app is also good for ticketing, helping you create new support tickets with macros and updates.

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. But it’s designed so well that you really enjoy staying in their inbox and communicating with clients. Intercom live chat is modern, smooth, and has many advanced features that other chat tools don’t. It’s highly customizable, too, so you can adjust it according to your website or product’s style. The Zendesk chat tool has most of the necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers, and live chat analytics. You could technically consider Intercom a CRM, but it’s really more of a customer-focused communication product.

If you seek to enhance customer engagement through chat-based support, in-app messaging, and proactive outreach, Intercom may be the superior option. Another critical difference between Zendesk and Intercom is their approach to CRM. In addition to its service features, Zendesk offers a fully integrated CRM solution, Zendesk Sell, available for an additional cost, starting at $19/agent/month. It includes tools for lead management, sales forecasting, and workflow management and automation.

Zendesk is a much larger company than Intercom; it has over 170,000 customers, while Intercom has over 25,000. While this may seem like a positive for Zendesk, it’s important to consider that a larger company may not be as agile or responsive to customer needs as a smaller company. Knowing how satisfied your customers are is not just valuable; it’s essential. All plans come with a 7-day free trial, and no credit card is required to sign up for the trial. Yes—as your business’s needs grow, you will require a more sophisticated case management system.

You can use it for customer support, but that’s not its core strength. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. In-app messages are notifications sent to users while they’re engaged with an app on mobile or PC. It allows companies to interact with customers while they’re active in the app, delivering information based on time or behavior.

In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the hardest on your pocket. Zendesk can be more flexible and predictable in this area as you can buy different tools separately (or even use their limited versions for free). Though Intercom chat window says that their team typically replies in a few hours, I received the answer in a couple of minutes. Their agent was always trying to convert me into a lead along the way, but heck, that’s a side effect of our job. Honestly, when it comes to Zendesk, it is not the most modern tool out there.

Its customer data platform lets you manage customer data, segmentation, and automated reminders. However, this may be sufficient for smaller businesses or those using an existing CRM that integrates with Intercom. Zendesk is more robust in terms of its ticket management capabilities, it offers more customization options and advanced features like a virtual call center app. On the other hand, Intercom is more focused on conversational customer support, and has more help desk features suited for live chat and messaging. Intercom, while differing from Zendesk, offers specialized features aimed at enhancing customer relationships.

It can automatically suggest your customer relevant articles reducing the workload for your support agents. On one hand, Zendesk offers a great many features, way more than Intercom, but it lacks in-app messenger and email marketing tools. On the other hand, Intercom has all its (fewer) tools and features integrated with each other way better, which makes your experience with the tool as smooth as silk. It’s an opportunity for Zendesk to differentiate itself, but unfortunately it didn’t get very high marks from users, either. Reviewers were frustrated by how long it took for their tickets to get resolved, as well as the complexity with which they were tossed around from department to department. Given that these are two services predicated on making you better at customer support, you’d think they’d be able to handle it better themselves.

Zendesk’s Admin Center provides tools that automate agent ticket workflows. While Intercom lacks some common customer-service channels like voice calling and video conferencing, it supports other unique features that transfer across channels. The Agent Workspace highlights tickets based on the issue and urgency, assigning each one a priority–agents can also tag tickets based on recency, hold-vs-open status, and urgency. Zendesk for Service transforms customer queries and conversations from all channels–call, web chat, tweet, text, or email–into tickets in the Agent Workspace.

Generally, humans can’t handle this volume of exchange, that’s why help desk software was made. 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. Both Intercom and Zendesk have proven to be valuable tools for businesses looking to provide excellent customer support. Evaluate their features, compare them based on your business needs, and choose the one that aligns best with your goals and objectives. Pop-up chat, in-app messaging, and notifications are some of the highly-rated features of this live chat software.

There are also several different Shopify integrations to choose from, as well as CRM integrations like HubSpot and Salesforce. Both products are so full-featured that they both take quite a while to learn. If you don’t go with ActiveCampaign, then Zoho would be my second choice. But their support and quality is not as good, they feel like a new product even though they have been in business a while. You keep having to get around their bugs, which you can, it is just annoying. Finally, we also have some B2B customers (funeral homes) and expect this part of our business to grow significantly in 2021.

Zendesk Pros and Cons

You can opt for code via JavaScript or Rails or even integrate directly with the likes of Google Tag Manager, WordPress, or Shopify. Overall, I actually liked Zendesk’s user experience better than Intercom’s in terms of its messaging dashboard. 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. 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. Create a help center combining knowledge base articles and a customer contact request form, embeddable into any webpage or mobile app.

• However, The solution’s pricing doesn’t fit medium sized organizations well.
• However, some users find customization challenging, and the platform is considered expensive, requiring careful cost evaluation.
• And you would be surprised to know that the Intercom does not have a VOIP call service.
• 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.

Zendesk for Sales, or Zendesk Sell, is Zendesk’s sales pipeline and CRM tool with its own dashboard for lead generation and conversion. With so many solutions to choose from, finding the right option for your business can feel like an uphill battle. They will also offer support by email, but no telephone numbers are listed for reaching out to the team.

Zendesk is yet another powerful way to help businesses interact with their customers. This approach aligns well with Intercom’s emphasis on direct customer communication. Zendesk’s tried and true approach to ticketing is both familiar and effective. Zendesk and Intercom both have an editor preview feature that makes it easier to add images, videos, call-to-action buttons, and interactive guides to your help articles. So, whether you’re a startup or a global giant, Zendesk’s got your back for top-notch customer support.

In any case, if you choose Zendesk or Intercom, you get wide chatting possibilities. Get ahead of issues before they happen with in-context, automated messages. Intercom is fully integrated, omnichannel, and easy to use—so you can deliver quality, conversational support from start to finish. Zendesk raised their prices without improving their product—frustrating customers who struggle to justify further investments. Intercom does have a ticketing dashboard that has omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk.

It is quite the all-rounder as it even has a help center and ticketing system that completes its omnichannel support cycle. For instance, a customer inquiry about product availability can trigger an automated response providing real-time stock information within Zendesk. While Intercom does incorporate automated responses via chatbots, it doesn’t exhibit the same level of sophistication and versatility in its automation capabilities as Zendesk. Zendesk’s advanced automation features make it the preferred choice for businesses seeking to optimize their workflow and enhance customer support efficiency. For businesses that want to focus on simple and effective customer engagement, Intercom is an easy choice. It excels in real-time customer communication and helps support teams create personalized customer experiences.

Intercom’s focus on instant interactions and personalized engagement is particularly valuable for businesses prioritizing chat-first customer support and real-time communication. Both Zendesk Messaging and Intercom Messenger offer live chat features and AI-enabled chatbots for 24/7 support to customers. Additionally, you can trigger incoming messages to automatically assign an agent and create dashboards to monitor the team’s performance on live chat. Zendesk and Intercom also both offer analytics and reporting capabilities that allow businesses to analyze and monitor customer agents’ productivity. As a result, companies can identify trends and areas for improvement, allowing them to continuously improve their support processes and provide better service to their customers.

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. 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 Intercom and Zendesk provide you with their own Operator bot, which immediately suggests relevant material to clients via the chat widget. When it comes to creating an optimum knowledge base experience, both Intercom and Zendesk are excellent choices with similar capabilities for your needs. These campaigns are designed to be highly contextual and personalized.