Intercom vs Zendesk: Which One is Right for Your Business?

Fintech startup Novo had to pivot to new ways of working in 2020, just like everyone else. But the company’s story isn’t just one of pandemic-induced change—in the first half of the year, Novo’s client base grew from 2,000 to tens of thousands. With over 100,000 customers across all industries and regions, Zendesk knows what it takes to interact with customers while retaining and growing relationships. Check out the research-backed comparison below to better understand how each solution can add value to your organization. Compare Zendesk versus Intercom to determine who will be the best partner for your business at every phase of the customer journey.

We make it easy for anyone within your company to access contextual customer information—including their conversation and purchase history—to provide better experiences. In fact, the Zendesk Marketplace has 1,300+ apps and integrations, from billing software to marketing automation tools. But keep in mind that Zendesk is viewed more as a support and ticketing solution, while Intercom is CRM functionality-oriented. Which means it’s rather a customer relationship management platform than anything else.

Resolutions in minutes—not months

Choose Zendesk for a scalable, team-size-based pricing model and Intercom for initial low-cost access with flexibility in adding advanced features. When comparing Zendesk and Intercom, various factors come into play, each focusing on different aspects, strengths, and weaknesses of these customer support platforms. You can contact the sales team if you’re just looking around, but you will not receive decent customer support unless you buy their service. Overall, Zendesk empowers businesses to deliver exceptional customer support experiences across channels, making it a popular choice for enhancing support operations. When it comes to which company is the better fit for your business, there’s no clear answer.

Experience the comprehensive power of Intercom for effective customer communication, automation, support tools, integrations, and analytics. Streamline support processes with Intercom’s ticketing system and knowledge base. Efficiently manage customer inquiries and empower customers to find answers independently. So, get ready for an insightful journey through the landscapes of Zendesk and Intercom, where support excellence converges with AI innovation.

You can even save custom dashboards for a more tailored reporting experience. 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 set office hours, live chat with logged-in users via their user profiles, and set up a chatbot. 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.

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. 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.

While both Zendesk and Intercom are great and robust platforms, none of them are able to provide you with the same value Messagely gives you at such an  affordable price. And while many other chatbots take forever to set up, you can set up your first chatbot in under five minutes. However, if you’re looking for a streamlined, all-in-one messaging platform, there is no better option than Messagely. Zendesk, on the other hand, has revamped its security since its security breach in 2016.

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. Yes—as your business’s needs grow, you will require a more sophisticated case management system. But that doesn’t mean you have to completely switch from your current provider if you’re not quite ready. The support team faced spiking ticket volumes, numerous new customer accounts, and the need to shift to remote work. Sendcloud adopted these solutions to replace siloed systems like Intercom and a local voice support provider in favor of unified, omnichannel support.

Intercom vs Zendesk: overall impression

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. 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. 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.

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. 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 vs. Intercom: Sales Pipeline and Lead Nurturing Tools

Zendesk has a help center that is open to all to find out answers to common questions. Apart from this feature, the customer support options at Zendesk are quite limited. First, you can only talk to the support team if you are a registered user. Intercom’s user interface is also quite straightforward and easy to understand; it includes a range of features such as live chat, messaging campaigns, and automation workflows. Additionally, the platform allows for customizations such as customized user flows and onboarding experiences. Zendesk’s user face is quite intuitive and easy to use, allowing customers to quickly find what they are looking for.

If you thought Zendesk prices were confusing, let me introduce you to the Intercom charges. It’s virtually impossible to predict what you’ll pay for Intercom at the end of the day. They charge for customer service representative seats and people reached, don’t reveal their prices, and offer tons of custom add-ons at additional cost. You can publish your self-service resources, divide them by categories, and integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience.

When comparing the reporting and analytics features of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms offer robust tools, but with distinct focuses and functionalities. Both platforms have their unique strengths in multichannel support, with Zendesk offering a more comprehensive range of integrated channels and Intercom focusing on a dynamic, chat-centric experience. Key offerings include automated support with help center articles, a messenger-first ticketing system, and a powerful inbox to centralize customer queries.

Administrator reports allow managers to observe real-time CSAT scores, conversation volume, first response time, and time to close. Intercom’s Inbox organizes all of an agent’s core functions into one interface. Below, we’ve compared the usability of Zendesk’s and Intercom’s agent dashboards and administrator controls. Send surveys at key points throughout the customer buying cycle, utilizing multiple types of question formats.

It’s known for its unified agent workspace which combines different communication methods like email, social media messaging, live chat, and SMS, all in one place. This makes it easier for support teams to handle customer interactions without switching between different systems. Plus, Zendesk’s integration with various channels ensures customers can always find a convenient way to reach out.

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. Set automatic triggers so that certain events send push notifications to targeted customers, or use them as part of communication campaigns and series, and run A/B testing to compare two notifications. Agents can use the desktop chatbox to respond to customers in any outbound channel.

Zendesk, just like its competitor, offers a knowledge base solution that is easy to customize. Their users can create a knowledge repository to create articles or edit existing ones as per the changes in the services or product. It also provides detailed Chat PG reports on how each self-help article performs in your knowledge base and helps you identify how each piece can be improved further. Users can benefit from using Intercom’s CX platform and AI software as a standalone tool for business messaging.

But it’s designed so well that you really enjoy staying in their inbox and communicating with clients. The Zendesk chat tool has most of the necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers, and live chat analytics. Basically, if you have a complicated support process, go with Zendesk, an excellent Intercom alternative, for its help desk functionality. If you’re a sales-oriented corporation, use Intercom for its automation options. Both tools can be quite heavy on your budget since they mainly target big enterprises and don’t offer their full toolset at an affordable price. Intercom, on the other hand, was built for business messaging, so communication is one of their strong suits.

When it comes to advanced workflows and ticketing systems, Zendesk boasts a more full-featured solution. Due to our intelligent routing capabilities and numerous automated workflows, our users can free up hours to focus on other tasks. The cheapest plan for small businesses – Essential – costs $39 monthly per seat. 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. Intercom live chat is modern, smooth, and has many advanced features that other chat tools don’t.

Zendesk, less user-friendly and with higher costs for quality vendor support, might not suit budget-conscious or smaller businesses. They have a 2-day SLA, no phone support, and the times I have had to work with them they have been incredibly difficult to work with. Very rarely do they understand the issue (mostly with Explore) that I am trying to communicate to them. Pricing for both services varies based on the specific needs and scale of your business.

Multilingual content and other advanced features come with a $49 price per agent per month. Zendesk is a customer service software company that provides businesses with a suite of tools to manage https://chat.openai.com/ customer interactions. The company was founded in 2007 and today serves over 170,000 customers worldwide. Zendesk’s mission is to build software designed to improve customer relationships.

Both Zendesk and Intercom are customer support management solutions that offer features like ticket management, live chat and messaging, automation workflows, knowledge centers, and analytics. Zendesk has traditionally been more focused on customer support management, while Intercom has been more focused on live support solutions like its chat solution. Intercom is a customer messaging platform that enables businesses to engage with customers through personalized and real-time communication. While the company is smaller than Zendesk, Intercom has earned a reputation for building high-quality customer service software. The company’s products include a messaging platform, knowledge base tools, and an analytics dashboard. Many businesses choose to work with Intercom because of its focus on personalization and flexibility, allowing companies to completely customize their customer service experience.

Intercom Live Chat is a software platform you can use to track and engage your visitors, and convert them into your customers. Zendesk Chat shows up as a chat bar docked at the bottom of your site. It should be noted that Intercom can integrate with Zendesk, so if there are Zendesk products that you like, aside from the chat feature, you can still use those. Therefore, Intercom may be a better fit for larger businesses with multiple agents helping people. 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. 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.

This becomes the perfect opportunity to personalize the experience, offer assistance to prospects as per their needs, and convert them into customers. This live chat software provider also enables your business to send proactive chat messages to customers and engage effectively in real-time. This is one of the best ways to qualify high-quality leads for your business and improve your chances of closing a sale faster. Intercom is a customer support messenger, bot, and live chat service provider that empowers its clients to provide instant support in real-time.

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. I tested both options (using Zendesk’s Suite Professional trial and Intercom’s Support trial) and found clearly defined differences between the two.

Users also point out that it can take a couple of hours to get used to the flow of tickets, which doesn’t happen in CRM, and they aren’t pleased with the product’s downtime. Although Zendesk isn’t hard to use, it’s not a perfectly smooth experience either. Users report feeling as though the interface is outdated and cluttered and complain about how long it takes to set up new features and customize existing ones. Then, you can begin filling in details such as your account’s name and icon and your agents’ profiles and security features.

It also includes a list of common questions you can browse through at the bottom of the knowledge base home page so you can find answers to common issues. These plans make Hiver a versatile tool, catering to a range of business sizes and needs, from startups to large enterprises looking for a comprehensive customer support solution within Gmail. 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.

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. Personalized messaging, in-app messaging, product tours, and chatbot capabilities set Intercom apart from Zendesk. Here is a Zendesk vs. Intercom based on the customer support offered by these brands.

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. If I had to describe Intercom’s helpdesk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools. Just like Zendesk, Intercom also offers its Operator bot, which will automatically suggest relevant articles to clients right in a chat widget.

Zendesk wins the collaboration tools category because of its easy-to-use side conversations feature. 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.

While administrators can automatically assign tickets to certain agents or teams, they can also manually assign tickets to members of sales or customer service teams. Team inboxes aggregate tickets applicable to the whole team–or a specific department–that any agent can address. These products are able to integrate with each other, which offers customers more personalized customer experiences. Zendesk also offers tons of APIs to customize the software to the users’ needs. Messagely’s chatbots are powerful tools for qualifying and converting leads while your team is otherwise occupied or away.

It allows you to anticipate customers questions and offer help when and where they need it. Therefore, if you happen to have Zoho CRM and want to integrate your zendesk chat vs intercom chat feature with it, you should go with Zendesk. They can get the context of the customer’s questions and transfer questions from Chatbox into Message.

We do our best to extensively test each software, as a result we not only test it ourselves, but we also match our findings with views of other users from the SaaS community. Zendesk chat allows businesses to reach out and connect to customers before they ask a question. The clothing rental company, Le Tote, uses an automated trigger feature to offer help when its customers are lingering at the checkout. Zendesk pricing is divided between a customer support product called “Zendesk for support”, and a fully-fledged CRM called “Zendesk for sales”.

They’ve been rated as one of the easy live chat solutions with more integrated options. 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.

• Zendesk boasts incredibly robust sales capabilities and security features.
• In addition to Intercom vs Zendesk, alternative helpdesk solutions are available in the market.
• Understanding these fundamental differences should go a long way in helping you pick between the two, but does that mean you can’t use one platform to do what the other does better?
• This can make it more difficult to import CRM data and obtain complete context from customer data.

When comparing the user interfaces (UI) of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms exhibit distinct characteristics and strengths catering to different user preferences and needs. Now that we’ve covered a bit of background on both Zendesk and Intercom, let’s dive into the features each platform offers. After an in-depth analysis such as this, it can be pretty challenging for your business to settle with either option.

There’s even on-the-spot translation built right in, which is extremely helpful. Intercom’s role-based permissions allow administrators full control over each department’s and agent’s capabilities, and access to channels and information. The dashboard’s left-hand column organizes and sorts all tickets by urgency. When an agent clicks on a conversation, the full conversation history populates the middle screen.

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. Compared to Zendesk and Intercom, Helpwise offers competitive and transparent pricing plans. Its straightforward pricing structure ensures businesses get access to the required features without complex tiers or hidden costs, making it an attractive option for cost-conscious organizations. Zendesk offers a free 30-day trial, after which customers will need to upgrade to one of their paid plans.

Sendcloud is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that allows users to generate packing slips and labels to help online retailers streamline their shipping process. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Intercom is the new guy on the block when it comes to help desk ticketing systems. This means the company is still working out some kinks and operating with limited capabilities. Track customer service metrics to gain valuable insights and improve customer service processes and agent performance. To sum up this Intercom vs Zendesk battle, the latter is a great support-oriented tool that will be a good choice for big teams with various departments.

Rest assured, ThriveDesk’s lightweight design and speed won’t impact the performance of your Wix-powered eCommerce website. The optimized agent interface ensures rapid responses for maximum efficiency, all while keeping your website running smoothly. It can help you to reach out to customers and help them complete purchases.

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. Intercom isn’t as great with sales, but it allows for better communication. 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.

Both Zendesk and Intercom offer varying flavors when it comes to curating the whole customer support experience. Customer support and security are vital aspects to consider when evaluating helpdesk solutions like Zendesk and Intercom. Let’s examine and compare how each platform addresses these crucial areas to ensure effective support operations and data protection. 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. Create personalized messages for specific customer segments, driving engagement and satisfaction.

Zapier Automation Platform

Inside a ticket, the workspace center console displays the ticket’s conversation. The right side of the screen displays all customer contact information and company interaction history, and the agent can contact the customer via any channel with just a few clicks. The admin and manager dashboard provides a zoomed-out view of all activity taking place in each inbox, for whole departments and individual agents. Intercom wins the reporting and analytics category due to its unique visualization and display formats for contact center and article data. Reporting and analytics provide metrics, trends, and key performance indicators (KPIs) that offer insights to agents and administrators.

• When he isn’t writing content, poetry, or creative nonfiction, he enjoys traveling, baking, playing music, reliving his barista days in his own kitchen, camping, and being bad at carpentry.
• You can either track your performance on a pre-built dashboard or customize and build one for yourself.
• Customers can search the help center by query keywords and sort through articles in 40 languages.
• While Intercom lacks some common customer-service channels like voice calling and video conferencing, it supports other unique features that transfer across channels.
• With its integrated suite of applications, Intercom provides a comprehensive solution that caters to businesses seeking a unified ecosystem to manage customer interactions.

Choose the plan that suits your support requirements and budget, whether you’re a small team or a growing enterprise. 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. Let’s explore these unique offerings and see how they can benefit your business. On the other hand, Zendesk’s customer support includes a knowledge base that’s very intuitive and easy to navigate. It divides all articles into a few main topics so you can quickly find the one you’re looking for.

Intercom wins the sales pipeline tools category because its campaigning and sequencing tools integrate all channels and unique services, like carousels and product tours. Zendesk receives positive feedback for its intuitive interface, wide range of integrations, and robust reporting tools. However, some users find customization challenging, and the platform is considered expensive, requiring careful cost evaluation.

Automation and AI save resources and time–every automated workflow and routing decision frees an agent to work on more complex issues. Set triggers to target particular audiences at the right time, utilize carousels as part of a communication campaign, and compare carousels with A/B testing. With ThriveDesk, you can supercharge your website’s growth and streamline customer interactions like never before. Rated 5 stars out of 5 on G2, ThriveDesk is highly regarded by users.

It has a very intuitive design that goes far beyond its platform and into its articles, product guides, and even its illustrations. After signing up and creating your account, you can start filling in your information, such as your company name and branding and your agents’ profiles and information. The setup can be so complex that there are tutorials by third parties to teach new users how to do it right.

Nevertheless, the platform’s support consistency can be a concern, and the unpredictable pricing structure might lead to increased costs for larger organizations. The strength of Zendesk’s UI lies in its structured and comprehensive environment, adept at managing numerous customer interactions and integrating various channels seamlessly. However, compared to the more contemporary designs like Intercom’s, Zendesk’s UI may appear outdated, particularly in aspects such as chat widget and customization options. This could impact user experience and efficiency for new users grappling with its complexity​​​​​​. Intercom is ideal for personalized messaging, while Zendesk offers robust ticket management and self-service options.