Zendesk vs Intercom: A comprehensive comparison guide
Zendesk can also save key customer information in their platform, which helps reps get a faster idea of who they are dealing with as well as any historical data that might assist in the support. Zendesk Sunshine is a separate feature set that focuses on unified customer views. Zendesk is quite 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. You can construct an omnichannel suite by combining productivity, e-commerce, CRM, analytics, social media, and other applications.
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. 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. Just like Zendesk, Intercom also offers its Operator bot, which will automatically suggest relevant articles to clients right in a chat widget. Which platform is “better” depends on the precise requirements and objectives that you have.
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Each additional 1,000 contacts on a Starter plan will cost you $25/mo. Pro plan is rather a team plan that costs $395/mo and includes 5 seats. 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 is more for improving sales cycle and customer relationships, while Zendesk has everything a customer support representative can dream about, but it does lack wide email functionality.
Intercom bills itself first and foremost as a platform to make the business of customer service more personalized, among other things. They offer an advanced feature for customer data management that goes beyond basic CRM stuff. It gives detailed contact profiles enriched by company data, behavioral data, conversation data, and other custom fields. Intercom’s solution aims to streamline high-volume ticket influx and provide personalized, conversational support. It also includes extensive integrations with over 350 CRM, email, ticketing, and reporting tools.
Other customer service add-ons with Zendesk include custom training and professional services. Zendesk provides limited customer support for its basic plan users, along with costly premium assistance options. On the other hand, Intercom is generally praised for its support features, despite facing challenges with its AI chatbot and the complexity of its help articles. Intercom generally receives positive feedback for its customer support, with users appreciating the comprehensive features and team-oriented tools.
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. Intercom stands out for its modern and user-friendly messenger functionality, which includes advanced features with a focus on automation and real-time insights. Its AI Chatbot, Fin, is particularly noted for handling complex queries efficiently. Key offerings include automated support with help center articles, a messenger-first ticketing system, and a powerful inbox to centralize customer queries. Zendesk chat allows you to talk with your visitors in real time through a small chat bar at the bottom of your site.
Intercom, on the other hand, lacks key ticketing features that are critical for large firms with a high volume of customer assistance. To automate operations and reduce your employees’ workload, it is critical that customer support systems allow integration with other products. This enables organizations to work more efficiently and easily integrate their software without having to alter their present business processes.
The customer support platform starts at just $5 per agent per month, which is a very basic customer support tool. If you want dashboard reporting and integrations, you’ll need to pay $19 per agent per month. Multilingual content and other advanced features come with a $49 price per agent per month.
Zendesk, unlike Intercom, is a more affordable and predictable customer service platform. Also, it’s the pioneer in the support and communication tools market. You can always count on it if you need a reliable customer support platform to process tickets, support users, and get advanced reporting. Zendesk, on the other hand, may not stress the same conversation-driven method, even though it has powerful team management tools. Its strength is that it offers a wide range of tools for organising teams, such as booking systems, knowledge bases, and customer service features.
Intercom User Assistance and Support
It can automatically suggest relevant articles for agents during business hours to share with clients, reducing your support agents’ workload. 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.
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. Triggers should prove especially useful for agents, allowing them to do things like automate zendesk chat vs intercom 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.
Send surveys at key points throughout the customer buying cycle, utilizing multiple types of question formats. Surveys turn customer insights into action, with triggers and campaign response adjustments depending on customer responses. Behavior-based messaging allows you to customize every last detail of triggers and rules including–which channel sends the message, when it sends, where it sends, and who gets targeted. If a customer isn’t satisfied with Answer Bot’s response, Answer Bot quickly routes them to an agent best suited to help. Create code-free screencast tours of products, websites, webpages, and applications within your website.
These tools are great for keeping track of tasks and making sure workflows run smoothly, but they might not put as much emphasis on real-time conversations for teams as Intercom does. Although priced at $49/month/agent, the Suite Team plan lacks important features such as self-service customer portal, knowledge management, SLA management, multilingual support, etc. On the other hand, for plans that offer necessary help desk features, Zendesk costs a fortune. Therefore, businesses that have small customer service teams and are on a budget, will struggle with Zendesk’s high pricing. It really shines in its modern messenger interface, making real-time chat a breeze. Its multichannel support is more focused on engaging customers through its chat and messaging systems, including mobile carousels and interactive communication tools.
As customers come closer to purchasing, they often find themselves weighing the same pros and cons. In our experience, when future clients start thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of Intercom vs. Zendesk, these are the questions they want answers to. The support team faced spiking ticket volumes, numerous new customer accounts, and the need to shift to remote work. 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. Intercom is the new guy on the block when it comes to help desk ticketing systems.
Users like that the platform lets them have talks in real time, which makes it easier to answer customer questions quickly and correctly. People have also said nice things about Intercom’s proactive message features, which let businesses talk to users before they even complain, which improves the overall customer experience. No Customer Support Software will manate to cover all the requirements of a business. Though key functionalities of Zendesk Chat and Intercom are obviously a priority you should also thoroughly study the integrations supported by each software. Very often your team will already be working with various kinds of SaaS software in your company and it’s much more beneficial to choose products that integrate well with one another. With that approach you can be certain of a smooth exchange of data between your teams and apps, which can significantly reduce time devoted to migrating between one software and the next.
This live chat service provider offers 200+ integrations to its user base. 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. The forever free plan comes with basic features such as a single inbox, file attachments, and can be used to handle upto 100 tickets/month.
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. 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. For example, you can read in many Zendesk Sell reviews how adding sales tools benefits Zendesk Support users. Simplicity is an important consideration when selecting the best customer service software. Having easy-to-use software is far more controllable and saves time whether you’re a tiny and growing business or a massive multinational. Choose Zendesk for a scalable, team-size-based pricing model and Intercom for initial low-cost access with flexibility in adding advanced features.
Intercom is a customer support messenger, bot, and live chat service provider that empowers its clients to provide instant support in real-time. 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. 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. 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.
They do have a ton of similarities, but recognizing the differences may help you to make the crucial decision about which one to use for your business. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. The trigger feature reduces cart abandonment and increases conversions. It plans on using this funding to research machine learning technology instead of just lining their own pockets. It is worthwhile to explore the features of both, prior to making a decision on which one you should use.
As for Intercom’s general pricing structure, there are three plans, but you’ll have to contact them to get exact prices. For those of you who have been waiting for the big showdown between these two customer support heavyweights, we are glad to present the ultimate Zendesk vs Intercom comparison article. They are great though and the industry standard for live chat (if you can justify having a few full-time employees to manage your live chat).
This is not a huge difference; however, it does indicate that customers are generally more satisfied with Intercom’s offerings than Zendesk’s. 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. If that’s not detailed enough, then surely their visitor browsing details will leave you surprised. This enables your operators to understand visitor intent faster and provide them with a personalized experience.
Intercom
Zendesk offers more flexibility with its pricing options and also has free services. In addition, the costs of Zendesk’s services are slightly easier to calculate. However, regardless of whether your choice is Zendesk or Intercom, you will be spending some time trying to figure out how much you will pay for the services.
Its $99 bracket includes advanced options, such as customer satisfaction prediction and multi-brand support, and in the $199 bracket, you also get advanced security and other very advanced features. Depending on your needs, you can set up Intercom on your website or mobile app and add your automations. Setting up Intercom help centers is also very easy and intuitive, with no previous knowledge required.
However, there are occasional criticisms regarding the effectiveness of its AI chatbot and some interface navigation challenges. The overall sentiment from users indicates a satisfactory level of support, although opinions vary. Zendesk is a customer service software offering a comprehensive solution for managing customer interactions. It integrates customer support, sales, and marketing communications, aiming to improve client relationships. Known for its scalability, Zendesk is suitable for various business sizes, from startups to large corporations. With a multi-channel ticketing system, Zendesk Support helps you and your team to know exactly who you’re talking to and keep track of tickets throughout all channels without losing context.
On the other hand, it provides call center functionalities, unlike Intercom. The Intercom versus Zendesk conundrum is probably the greatest problem in the customer service software world. They both offer some state-of-the-art core functionality and numerous unusual features.
“The Zendesk Suite” (Chat + Support + Guide + Talk)
Collaborate with your teammates by easily assigning the right rep to best handle a customer query. Zendesk is primarily a ticketing system, and its ticketing capability is overwhelming in the best conceivable manner. All client contacts, whether via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel, land in one dashboard, where your agents can quickly and efficiently resolve them. In the world of customer service, setting clear expectations is key to maintaining customer satisfaction and loyalty. When comparing the automation and AI features of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms come with unique strengths and weaknesses.
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. For freelancers and enterprises, Zendesk is likely to be a better fit. In the duel between Zendesk vs Intercom, it seems that Zendesk chat rises slightly above Intercom.
You can either track your performance on a pre-built dashboard or customize and build one for yourself. This customized dashboard will help you see metrics that you’d like to focus on regularly. Intercom does have a ticketing dashboard that has omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk. 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? These are both still very versatile products, so don’t think you have to get too siloed into a single use case.
Their customer service management tools have a shared inbox for support teams. When you combine the help desk with Intercom Messenger, you get added channels for customer engagement. Intercom is a customer support platform known for its effective messaging and automation, enhancing in-context support within products, apps, or websites. It features the Intercom Messenger, which works with existing support tools for self-serve or live support. Intercom is better for smaller companies that are looking for a simple and capable customer service platform.
- This customized dashboard will help you see metrics that you’d like to focus on regularly.
- This way, your clients will never have to repeat themselves or get frustrated because their new representative doesn’t know their background.
- If that sounds good to you, sign up for a free demo to see our software in action and get started.
- With this extra layer of security, users must show two forms of ID before they can access their accounts.
- With a very streamlined design, Intercom’s interface is far better than many alternatives, including Zendesk.
- 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.
Finally, you’ll have to choose your reporting preferences including details about what you’ll be tracking and how often you want to be reported of changes. While Intercom does not offer free trials, they do offer demo versions of each plan. Intercom’s Inbox organizes all of an agent’s core functions into one interface.
Why don’t you try something equally powerful yet more affordable, like HelpCrunch? Both companies provide a set of services that are intended to simplify communication, support, and the overall customer experience. A messenger platform that helps engage customers on your website or app. It provides bots and chats automation features to make communication with clients more efficient. Based on the number of customer service agents you need to accommodate, you could be paying thousands of dollars every single month for the right customer support platform. Therefore, it becomes all the more important to review your options carefully.
ProProfs Help Desk is a decade-old SaaS company that offers an array of customer service and learning tools for businesses across the globe. Right from managing your support tickets to training your employees, you can take your support operations to the next level. Zendesk has tons of products that are similar to Intercom’s including Zendesk chatbot software, messaging, team collaboration, knowledge base, analytics and reporting. Intercom plays a very important role in the customer experience through messaging platforms, team collaboration products, and a valuable knowledge base solution. Zendesk wins the major category of help desk and ticketing system software. It lets customers reach out via messaging, a live chat tool, voice, and social media.
However, customers should keep in mind that Intercom does not offer voice. From the inbox, live agents and chatbots can refer to and link knowledge base articles, to elaborate on replies and help customers locate answers. 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. 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.
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So far, the chatbot can transfer chats to agents or resolve less complex queries in seconds. That means all you have to do is add the code to your website and enable it right away. Intercom offers a simplistic dashboard with a detailed view of all customer details in one place.