Intercom vs Zendesk: Which Customer Support Solution is Right For Your Business?

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. 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. HubSpot and Salesforce are also available when support needs to work with marketing and sales teams.

• Intercom has your back if you’re looking to supercharge your sales efforts.
• Intercom is a fully-featured customer support platform that provides powerful automation and AI tools to enable more efficient and effective customer engagement.
• As mentioned before, the bot builder is a visual drag-and-drop system that requires no coding knowledge; this is also how other basic workflows are designed.
• If you’re spending more than one day formulating strategy, you’re missing out on countless opportunities.
• While there is an abundance of help desk tools available out there, only a few get the fervour when it comes to value for money.
• Moreover, you can view in-depth information about who you’re chatting with right alongside conversations.

Test any of HelpCrunch pricing plans for free for 14 days and see our tools in action right away. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. Besides, the prices differ depending on the company’s size and specific needs.

Zendesk vs. Intercom: Features comparison

You can leverage chatbots to handle basic customer queries and reduce the burden on your support team. You can add agents, create teams, and set agent roles & permissions to decide their level of access to the tool. Automated ticket routing ensures that all tickets have an owner and are shared with the most capable agents. You can also choose their Round-robin ticket assignment feature to equally distribute tickets among your agents. Moreover, you can keep your dashboard tidy with ticket organization features such as ticket prioritization, labels, and filters. However, if you look at Zendesk’s high pricing and complicated features, the tool doesn’t work well for small businesses that have limited needs.

We’re big fans of Zendesk’s dashboard with built-in collaboration tools, but we wish the Agent Workspace came with the Team or Growth plans–not just Professional. Zendesk for Service sells three plans, ranging from $49 to $99 monthly per user, with a 30-day free trial available for each plan. The admin and manager dashboard provides a zoomed-out view of all activity taking place in each inbox, for whole departments and individual agents. Agents can respond in any channel by typing in the text box and have access to deep customer experience history and background in the right-hand column. The Sell dashboard, different from the Service dashboard, features pre-built widgets that agents can organize however they want, to view the metrics they care most about. 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.

Pros of Zendesk

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. Team package starts at $14 per agent per month and includes unlimited chats, a few triggers, and some additional customization options.

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. Intercom, of course, allows its customer support team to collaborate and communicate too, but overall, Zendesk wins this group. Zendesk has many amazing team collaboration and communication features, like whisper mode, which lets multiple agents chime in to help each other without the customer knowing.

You can try any plan free for 15 days and get the look and feel of the tool before making any commitments. Considering its affordable pricing, ProProfs can be a great option for small to medium-scale businesses. The interface of Intercom’s native apps for iOS and Android is equally impressive.

Both Zendesk and Intercom are excellent customer service solutions. However, the right fit for your business will depend on your particular needs and budget. If you’re looking for a comprehensive solution with lots of features and integrations, then Zendesk would be a good choice. On the other hand, if you need something that is more tailored to your customer base and is less expensive, then Intercom might be a better fit. Zendesk offers a free 30-day trial, after which customers will need to upgrade to one of their paid plans.

You can set up email sequences that specify how and when leads and contacts are engaged. With Zendesk Sell, you can also customize how deals move through your pipeline by setting pipeline stages that reflect your sales cycle. Learn more about the differences between leading chat support solutions Intercom and Zendesk so that you can choose the right tool for your needs. Now that we’ve covered a bit of background on both Zendesk and Intercom, let’s dive into the features each platform offers. However, as Monese grew and eyed a European expansion, it became clear that the company needed to centralize data in a single solution that would scale along with them. Sales teams can also view outbound communications, and any support agent can access resources from the Intercom workspace.

What truly sets Intercom apart is its data-driven approach to customer engagement. It actively collects and utilizes customer data to facilitate highly personalized conversations. For instance, it can use past interactions and behaviors to tailor recommendations or responses. If your organization aims to enhance customer engagement through live chat, in-app messaging, and proactive outreach, Intercom might serve as a viable alternative to Zendesk.

Robust self-service and knowledge management

That not only saves them the headache of having to constantly switch between dashboards while streamlining resolution processes—it also leads to better customer and agent experience overall. Drift is the closest alternative to Intercom in that it also focuses heavily on sales and marketing. But because of its live chat and custom chatbot tools, we wanted to include them on this list as an alternative your business may want to consider.

• So when someone becomes a customer or once you have their email address or something else, then you be able to send messages across different channels.
• It doesn’t require a team of administrators to manage and its toolset is robust without being complex.
• Easily track your service team’s performance and unlock coaching opportunities with AI-powered insights.
• This makes it a great choice for businesses that want to provide their customers with a more personal experience.
• Tidio’s easy-to-use interface makes it a great tool for quick setup within your customer support and marketing teams.

With the integrations provided through each product, you can make use of both platforms to provide your customers with comprehensive customer service. While Intercom Zendesk integration is uncommon, as they both offer very similar products, it can be useful for unique use cases or during migrations from one platform to the other. 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.

Intercom vs Zendesk

Other chatbots don’t sit natively within the agent desk, but with Netomi, virtual and human agents work alongside each other, creating an efficient and ultra-powerful customer service team. 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. They may be utilized to alert consumers about product updates, provide assistance, and promote specials that are relevant to them. What makes Intercom stand out from the crowd are their chatbots and lots of chat automation features that can be very helpful for your team.

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. 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. 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. It doesn’t require a team of administrators to manage and its toolset is robust without being complex. When evaluating the cost of any software tool, you have to look beyond the price tag.

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