Difference between Intercom vs Zendesk Median Cobrowse

Appy Pie Connect offers a powerful integration platform that enables you to connect different apps and automate your workflow. One of the most popular integrations on the platform is between Zendesk and Intercom. By integrating these two apps, you can streamline your workflow and automate repetitive tasks. For basic chat and messaging, Intercom charges a flat fee of $39 per month for its basic plan with one user and $99 per month for its team plan with up to 5 users. If you want automated options, Intercom starts at either $499 or $999 per month for up to ten users, depending on the level of automation you’re looking for.

That their customers are fully satisfied with their products and services, and so is the motto of our Desku chatbots. So, by holding Desku’s hand, you can open doors for a long list of happy and fully satisfied customers. You get a dashboard that makes creating, tracking, and organizing tickets easy. Compared to Intercom, Zendesk’s pricing starts at $49/month, which is still understandable but not meant for startups looking for affordable pricing plans. These plans are not inclusive of the add-ons or access to all integrations.

This feature is browser-based, so you don’t need additional software or hardware. 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. Zendesk does not provide its customers with email marketing tools for the basic subscriptions at the time of writing. However, the add-on Customer Lists available for Professional and Enterprise subscriptions does have mass email options. It offers more support features and includes more advanced analytics and reports.

Zendesk customers are switching to Intercom every single day

It feels very modern, and Intercom offers some advanced messenger features that Zendesk does not. Zendesk’s user face is quite intuitive and easy to use, allowing customers to quickly find what they are looking for. Additionally, the platform allows users to customize their experience by setting up automation workflows, creating ticket rules, and utilizing analytics. 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.

With a mix of productivity, collaboration, eCommerce, CRM, analytics, email marketing, social media, and other tools, you get the option to create an omnichannel suite. 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. 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.

Zendesk’s list of compliances and security memberships is very long, and they have won intercom zendesk integration a number of security seals and awards. Zendesk also has multiple security filters that range from where it stores its files to the people it hires. With Zendesk, you can anticipate customer questions, allowing for shorter reply periods.

Zendesk’s help center tools are slightly better, but Intercom’s chatbot is more robust

Intercom has more customization features for features like bots, themes, triggers, and funnels. For standard reporting like response times, leads generated by source, bot performance, messages sent, and email deliverability, you’ll easily find all the metrics you need. 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. Some of the links that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation.

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. When it comes to self-service portals for things like knowledgebases, Intercom has a useful set of resources.

If I had to describe Intercom’s helpdesk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools. Intercom has a very robust advanced chatbot set of tools for your business needs. There is a conversation routing bot, an operator bot, a lead qualification bot, and an article-suggesting bot, among others. It is also not too difficult to program your own bot rules using Intercon’s system. For Intercom’s pricing plan, on the other hand, there is much less information on their website. There is a Starter plan for small businesses at $74 per month billed annually, and there are add-ons like a WhatsApp add-on at $9 per user per month or surveys at $49 per month.

Intercom Vs. Zendesk: Pricing, Features, Integrations in 2023

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. The Zendesk Support app gives you access to live Intercom customer intercom versus zendesk data in Zendesk, and lets you create new tickets in Zendesk directly from Intercom conversations. This gives your team the context they need to provide fast and excellent support. Typically manual tagging is done by support agents who already deal with large daily volumes of chat and support tickets.

Overall, Zendesk wins out on plan flexibility, especially given that it has a lower price plan for dipping your toes in the water. We give the edge to Zendesk here, as it’s typically aimed for more complex environments. It’s also more exclusively focused on providing help support, whereas Intercom sometimes moonlights as being part-time sales.

Today, both companies offer a broad range of customer support features, making them both strong contenders in the market. Zendesk offers more advanced automation capabilities than Intercom, which may be a deciding factor for businesses that require complex workflows. The dashboard’s left-hand column organizes and sorts all tickets by urgency.

I just found Zendesk’s help center to be slightly better integrated into their workflows and more customizable. 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 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.

In any case, if you choose Zendesk or Intercom, you get wide chatting possibilities. The cherry on top is that Intercom provides free migration to make onboarding as smooth as possible without data loss. The Advanced & Enterprise is ideal for medium-sized and large organizations due to features like lead routing, Fastlane, multiple languages, and custom RBAC. Businesses have a specific combination of needs, which Intercom alternatives can provide. Zendesk, less user-friendly and with higher costs for quality vendor support, might not suit budget-conscious or smaller businesses.

This SaaS leader entered into the competition in 2011, intending to help its clients reach their target audiences and engage them in a conversation right away. For $395/month the Pro tier allows up to 5 users and eliminates the volume restriction. This tier provides everything a small or medium-sized business will need, including better ticket management and advanced workflow automation tools. Intercom offers an easy way to nurture your qualified leads (prospects) into customers with Intercom Series. Now that we’ve discussed the customer service-focused features of Zendesk and Intercom, let’s turn our attention to how these platforms can support sales and marketing efforts.

Intercom’s chatbot feels a little more robust than Zendesk’s (though it’s worth noting that some features are only available at the Engage and Convert tiers). You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. A customer service department is only as good as its support team members, and these highly-prized employees need to rely on one another. Tools that allow support agents to communicate and collaborate are important aspect of customer service software. In this article, we comprehensively do a comparison of Zendesk vs Intercom, examining their key features, benefits, and industry use cases. By exploring their distinct offerings, we aim to assist businesses in making informed decisions when selecting a customer service platform.

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. You need a complete customer service platform that’s seamlessly integrated and AI-enhanced. Yes, HubSpot allows users to integrate with Zendesk in the same way Zendesk allows a smooth integration with HubSpot. Both Zendesk and HubSpot can get pricey as you combine products, but HubSpot is often more expensive than Zendesk, perhaps because it combines three hubs.

Intercom’s messaging system enables real-time interactions through various channels, including chat, email, and in-app messages. Connect with customers wherever they are for timely assistance and personalized experiences. Pop-up chat, in-app messaging, and notifications are some of the highly-rated features of this live chat software. Intercom is a customer support messenger, bot, and live chat service provider that empowers its clients to provide instant support in real-time.

Intercom compared to Zendesk

Since then, it has evolved into a full-fledged CRM that offers a suite of software applications to its over 160,000 customers like Uber, Siemens, and Tesco. Intercom also has a mobile app available for both Android and iOS, which makes it easy to stay connected with customers even when away from the computer. The app includes features like automated messages and conversation routing — so businesses can manage customer conversations more efficiently. 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.

If you are looking for a comprehensive customer support solution with a wide range of features, Zendesk is a good option. Zendesk receives positive feedback for its intuitive interface, wide range of integrations, and robust reporting tools. Intercom distinguishes itself by excelling in real-time customer engagement. It offers a comprehensive suite of features that empowers businesses to foster immediate connections with their customers.

It is a totally cloud-based service; you can operate this VOIP technology by sitting in any corner of the world. 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.

Its intuitive messenger can help your business boost engagement and improve sales and marketing efforts. Intercom stands out here due to its ability  to tailor sales workflows. You can also set up interactive product tours to highlight new features in-product and explain how they work.

Which means it’s rather a customer relationship management platform than anything else. The Zendesk chat tool has most of the necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers, and live chat analytics. Intercom isn’t quite as strong as Zendesk in comparison to some of Zendesk’s customer support strengths, but it has more features for sales and lead nurturing.

Plan Flexibility: Which One Has More Flexible Pricing Options?

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. 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. It will help you understand your customer’s issue and solve it instantly.

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. Zendesk is among the industry’s best ticketing and customer support software, and most of its additional functionality is icing on the proverbial cake. You can use it for customer support, but that’s not its core strength. Since Intercom is so intuitive, the time you’ll need to spend training new users on how to interact with the platform is greatly reduced. With a very streamlined design, Intercom’s interface is far better than many alternatives, including Zendesk.

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 and Zendesk both offer comprehensive customer support solutions. Intercom is a fully-featured customer support platform that provides powerful automation and AI tools to enable more efficient and effective customer engagement. Whichever solution you choose, mParticle can help integrate your data. MParticle is a Customer Data Platform offering plug-and-play integrations to Zendesk and Intercom, along with over 300 other marketing, analytics, and data warehousing tools. With mParticle, you can connect your Zendesk and Intercom data with other marketing, analytics, and business intelligence platforms without any custom engineering effort. Zendesk started in 2007 as a web-based SaaS product for managing incoming customer support requests.

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. In summary, choosing Zendesk and Intercom hinges on your business’s unique requirements and priorities. If you seek a comprehensive customer support solution with a strong emphasis on traditional ticketing, Zendesk is a solid choice, particularly for smaller to mid-sized businesses. Zendesk on the other hand offers tools that support a wide variety of customer service functions including robust ticket management capabilities. However, the right fit for your business will depend on your particular needs and budget.

These automations save both your agents and customers valuable time and improve the customer experience. Intercom’s helpdesk is complementary to their chat tools, which remain the core feature of their platform. It consolidates customer requests into one inbox and allows agents to leave private notes for each other. It is well designed and easy to use but lacks the advanced features offered by Zendesk.

• As for the category of voice and phone features, Zendesk is a clear winner.
• Both app stores include many popular integrations, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Zapier.
• Zendesk and Intercom offer help desk management solutions to their users.
• So, get ready for an insightful journey through the landscapes of Zendesk and Intercom, where support excellence converges with AI innovation.
• Intercom also has a mobile app available for both Android and iOS, which makes it easy to stay connected with customers even when away from the computer.

Zendesk also includes built-in CSAT and NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys and even allows you to track the effectiveness of your knowledge base articles and self-service resources. Reporting tools are essential to helping support leaders analyze and improve their customer support operations. Support requests are managed as ongoing conversations rather than tickets which are shared via a unified inbox allowing multiple team members to share knowledge and solutions. If your company is looking for customer support software, you have likely heard of Intercom and Zendesk.

Intercom’s pricing structure offers different plans to cater to various customer support and engagement needs, accommodating users with different budgets. Intercom, while differing from Zendesk, offers specialized features aimed at enhancing customer relationships. Founded as a business messenger, it now extends to enabling support, engagement, and conversion. 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.

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. Zendesk has also introduced its chatbot to help its clients send automated answers to some frequently asked questions to stay ahead in the competitive marketplace. What’s more, it helps its clients build an integrated community forum and help center to improve the support experience in real-time.