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

This 24/7 support model is designed to provide continuous, real-time solutions to clients, enhancing the overall reliability and responsiveness of Hivers’ services. This exploration aims to provide a detailed comparison, aiding businesses in making an informed decision that aligns with their customer service goals. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer robust solutions, but the choice ultimately depends on specific business needs. 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. In short, Zendesk is perfect for large companies looking to streamline their customer support process; Intercom is great for smaller companies looking for advanced customer service features.

You can create different inboxes for support and sales, add permissions, and use mentions to collaborate on challenging customer questions. A helpdesk solution’s user experience and interface are crucial in ensuring efficient and intuitive customer support. Let’s evaluate the user experience and interface of both Zendesk and Intercom, considering factors such as ease of navigation, customization options, and overall intuitiveness. We will also consider customer feedback and reviews to provide insights into the usability of each platform. 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.

Pre-selected assignment rules customize each ticket’s destination, assigning routing paths to agents or departments based on customer priority status, query type, or issue details. 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. Learn how top CX leaders are scaling personalized customer service at their companies. We hope that this Intercom VS Zendesk comparison helps you choose one that matches your support, marketing, and sales needs. But in case you are in search of something beyond these two, then ProProfs Chat can be an option.

The goal is to make it easier for new users to get around the site and use all of its features without having to go through extra steps. This focus on making things easier for users is meant to make users happier generally and get more people to use the Intercom platform. In addition, you can evaluate their strengths and weaknesses feature by feature, including their contract conditions and costs. By comparing products you are more likely to pick the best software for your business. It’s clear you must understand your specific needs to realize which solution matches those needs.

Zendesk features

If you’re an enterprise team, check out Zendesk, otherwise, stay away, and check out another option like Help Scout. They “integrate” with almost everything (what that even means is many things… does that mean it’ll do what you want it to do? questionable), they have help docs, an included community platform even. It brings with it anxiety of responding (had one client that wouldn’t use the restroom out of fear they weren’t there to respond to a customer shortly after implementing Intercom into their business. Zendesk is designed to fit your business needs whether you’re a fast-growing startup or a well-established company.

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. 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.

When visitors click on it, they’ll be directed to one of your customer service teammates. Intercom has a unique pricing structure, offering three separate solutions, each intended for a distinct use case. We wish some of their great features were offered in multiple plans, but none features overlap among plans. Again, Zendesk has surpassed the number of reviewers when compared to Intercom.

Zendesk vs Intercom: Reporting and Analytics

Zendesk Suite includes all features for email, live chat, voice, and social media support. There are four options available— Team ($49/agent/month), Growth ($79/agent/month), Professional ($99/agent/month), and Enterprise ($150/agent/month). Moreover, your customer service operators can anticipate what a visitor or customer is going to type next and accordingly transfer chats to relevant members to reduce the resolution time.

There is automatic email archiving and incoming email authentication. Help desk SaaS is how you manage general customer communication and for handling customer questions. Intercom also does not offer a free trial period for users to examine the software prior to joining up for their services. That being said, in your search for the best customer support tool, you must have come across Zendesk and Intercom. In today’s hyper-competitive, hyper-connected globalized economy, customer experience has become a fundamental differentiator. As customers’ needs are constantly evolving, businesses must adapt and keep up to guarantee the best customer experience and satisfaction.

Like Zendesk, Intercom allows you to chat with online visitors and assist with their issues. Both Zendesk and Intercom have knowledge bases to help customers get the most out of their platforms. Although it can be pricey, Zendesk’s platform is a very robust one, with powerful reporting and insight tools, a large number of integrations, and excellent scalability features. The Zendesk Admin Center panels allow administrators to control settings, accessibility, automations, and workflows for everything from chatbots to integrations and custom APIs. Zendesk wins the self-service tools category because it provides extensive help center customization options. Users with light access–such as knowledgeable agents and supervisors–can be added to tickets for browsing and feedback.

But we doubled down and created a truly full-service CX solution capable of handling any support request. Zendesk offers robust, pre-built reports for sales and support teams. Here are our top reporting and analytics features and an overview of where Intercom’s reporting limitations lie. We make it easy for anyone within your company to access contextual customer information—including their conversation and purchase history—to provide better experiences.

Operator, Intercom’s automation engine, empowers Intercom chatbots to gather key information from each website visitor to qualify leads and route customers to the right destination. In an omnichannel contact center, agents can manage customer interactions across channels, no matter which channel a customer uses to contact the company. Intercom and Zendesk are two of the most popular customer service platforms, each with its own set of distinct advantages and drawbacks. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Provide self-service alternatives so customers can resolve their own issues. This serves the dual benefit of adding convenience to the customer experience and lightening agents’ workloads. All customer questions, be it via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel, are landing in one dashboard, where your agents can solve them quickly and efficiently.

ThriveDesk is a feature-rich helpdesk solution that offers a comprehensive set of tools to manage customer support effectively. Intercom is praised as an affordable option with high customization capabilities, allowing businesses to create a personalized support experience. Although the interface may require a learning curve, users find the platform effective and functional. However, Intercom has fewer integration options than Zendesk, which may limit its capabilities for businesses seeking extensive integrations. 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.

These plans are not inclusive of the add-ons or access to all integrations. Once you add them all to the picture, their existing plans can turn out to be quite expensive. Zendesk also offers a straightforward interface to operators that helps them identify the entire interaction pathway with the customers. Compared to being detailed, Zendesk gives a tough competition to Intercom. Operators can easily switch from one conversation to another, therefore helping operators manage more interactions simultaneously.

Customers increasingly expect to receive fast, convenient, and personalized support. No matter how a customer contacts your business, your agents will have access to the tools and information they need to continue and close conversations on any channel. You can publish your self-service resources, divide them by categories, and integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience.

Intercom puts a lot of effort into making a sleek and easy-to-use interface. They want to make a space that makes it easy for people to find their way around and quickly adopt the app. The design philosophy is based on keeping things as simple as possible so that even people who have never used the site before can quickly figure out how it works. Both systems include pricing plans that are tiered and vary according to the amount of user seats or active contacts. Intercom is primarily concerned with price on a per-user basis, in contrast to Zendesk, which blends user seats with contact tiers when it comes to pricing.

Intercom vs Zendesk

Both Zendesk and Intercom offer varying flavors when it comes to curating the whole customer support experience. Gain valuable insights with Intercom’s analytics and reporting capabilities. Track key metrics, measure campaign success, and optimize customer engagement strategies. Seamlessly integrate Intercom with popular third-party tools and platforms, centralizing customer data and improving workflow efficiency. Experience targeted communication with Intercom’s automation and segmentation features.

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. Intercom’s products are used by over 25,000 customers, from small tech startups to large enterprises. If you are looking for more integration options and budget is not an issue, Intercom can be the perfect live chat solution for your business. It is also ideal for businesses who are searching for conversational chatbot functionality.

Tools that allow support agents to communicate and collaborate are important aspect of customer service software. There are 3 Basic support plans at $19, $49 and $99 per user per month billed annually, and 5 Suite plans at $49, $79, $99, $150, and $215 per user per month billed annually. Moreover, for users who require more dedicated and personalized support, Zendesk charges an additional premium. These premium support services can range in cost, typically between $1,500 and $2,800. This additional cost can be a considerable factor for businesses to consider when evaluating their customer support needs against their budget constraints.

ProProfs offers incredible live chat features that help you offer 24×7 assistance and close more sales. You can leverage chatbots to handle basic customer queries and reduce the burden on your support team. ProProfs Help Desk offers all the necessary ticket management and reporting features that any help desk manager will find useful. No matter if your team receives just 10 customer requests via live chat or a thousand customer issues via email, you can easily manage an influx of customer conversations over multiple channels. Zendesk Service offers the right platform for tracking, prioritizing, and solving customer support tickets. Support agents can easily view all ongoing and past conversations in a central location so that communication between your business and customers is fast as well as personal.

In today’s world of fast-paced customer service and high customer expectations, it’s essential for business leaders to equip their teams with the best support tools available. Zendesk and Intercom both offer noteworthy tools, but if you’re looking for a full-service solution, there is one clear winner. There are many features to help bigger customer service teams collaborate more effectively — like private notes or a real-time view of who’s handling a given ticket at the moment, etc. At the same time, the vendor offers powerful reporting capabilities to help you grow and improve your business.

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. zendesk chat vs intercom 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.

One of the most significant downsides of Intercom is its customer support. Existing customers have complained consistently about how they aren’t available at the right time to offer support to customers. There are even instances where customers don’t receive the first response in more than seven days. Compared to Intercom, Zendesk’s pricing starts at $49/month, which is still understandable but not meant for startups looking for affordable pricing plans.

The Zendesk chat tool has most of the necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers, and live chat analytics. Both Intercom and Zendesk are widely recognised as leaders in their respective industries. Zendesk is one of the biggest players in the realm of customer support platforms. In 2016, Zendesk reported that 87,000 paid customers from over 150 countries used its products.

When comparing the omnichannel support functionalities of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms show distinct strengths and weaknesses. Lastly, Intercom offers an academy that offers concise courses to help users make the most out of their Intercom experience. Customers of Zendesk can purchase priority assistance at the enterprise tier, which includes a 99.9% uptime service level agreement and a 1-hour service level goal. At all tiers, there is an additional fee to work with a member of the Zendesk success team on unique engagements.

With Zendesk, you can easily sort or filter your tickets using parameters such as date, ticket priority, tags, source, and more. Now, when it comes to customizing your dashboard and making it suitable for your unique needs, Zendesk does a good job. The tool can be integrated with 500+ business apps including Zendesk Explore, which offers you relevant omnichannel analytics and customer engagement metrics.

• To cater to the needs of different businesses and teams, Zendesk offers multiple integration options.
• Zendesk, on the other hand, is another top customer service platform that uses strong security steps to keep customer data safe.
• Intercom has been marketing itself as a business messaging platform right from the start.
• Although it can be pricey, Zendesk’s platform is a very robust one, with powerful reporting and insight tools, a large number of integrations, and excellent scalability features.

Therefore, if you happen to have Zoho CRM and want to integrate your chat feature with it, you should go with Zendesk. When a customer works with two agents and receives two different answers, they’re going to be very frustrated and won’t value the experience. They can get the context of the customer’s questions and transfer questions from Chatbox into Message. Both Zendesk Chat and Intercom have similar features, but Intercom is more suited for small to mid-sized companies. It will also depend on the size of your business, how many features you’ll need to use, your budget, and how much support you need.

On the other hand, Intercom, starting at a lower price point, could be more attractive for very small teams or individual users. However, additional costs for advanced features can quickly increase the total expense. Personalized messaging, in-app messaging, product tours, and chatbot capabilities set Intercom apart from Zendesk. FinancesOnline is available for free for all business professionals interested in an efficient way to find top-notch SaaS solutions. We are able to keep our service free of charge thanks to cooperation with some of the vendors, who are willing to pay us for traffic and sales opportunities provided by our website.

The knowledge bases are usually well-organized and changed on a regular basis, so users can always find the most up-to-date and useful information. To create help articles, you can choose a template or create one from scratch, customize the template, import files or docs, and publish within minutes. Simply allow customers to find relevant help by themselves and reduce your ticket volume by up to 80%. You can even create an internal knowledge base to keep your agents well-trained and ready to delight customers. Once, the ticket is created, customers get a notification that their issue or request has been received and registered. Meanwhile, robust ticketing features such as ticket routing, time tracking, CSAT ratings, service level agreements, etc. ensure your agents are always a step ahead.

Intercom’s help center allows you to draft and organize collections of articles, accessible to customers via a search bar in the Messenger widget. Zendesk wins the omnichannel capabilities category because it offers voice as a service, which we think is absolutely critical. Design and send out mobile push messages–phone pop-ups containing text and images that prompt customers to take action and redirect to a specific app page when clicked. Zendesk also offers detailed reports that can be shared with others and enable team members to collaborate on them simultaneously.

Agents can participate in forums and turn forum posts into tickets; they also can turn community-post replies into articles for future customers. Intercom self-service chatbot widgets, highly customizable and capable of conversing in 32 different languages, embed into your website or application. Zendesk wins the collaboration tools category because of its easy-to-use side conversations feature. With Intercom workload management tools, administrators can ensure that incoming conversations, traffic, and workload are evenly distributed among team members.

Zendesk for Service transforms customer queries and conversations from all channels–call, web chat, tweet, text, or email–into tickets in the Agent Workspace. While they like the ease of use this product offers its users, they’ve indeed rated them low in terms of services. Just like Intercom, Zendesk’s customer service is quite disappointing. The only relief is that they do reach out to customers, but it gets too late. In terms of customer service, Zendesk fails to deliver an exceptional experience. This can be a bummer for many as they can always stumble upon an issue.

Intercom plan prices are determined based on your specific business needs, so interested users must contact them for specific price details. Intercom offers admin full visibility and control over all company inboxes, as well as agent access controls and role management. 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. Intercom’s Messenger lets users schedule timely, targeted, and personal messages sent based on triggers and customer actions, and is automatically translatable into over 30 languages.

Intercom offers an integrated knowledge base functionality to its user base. Using the existing knowledge base functionality, they can display self-help articles in the chat window before the customer approaches your team for support. You can create these knowledge base articles in your target audience’s native language as their software is multilingual.