Zendesk vs Intercom: In-Depth Features & Price Comparison

As your business grows, so does the volume of customer inquiries and support tickets. Managing everything manually is becoming increasingly difficult, and you need a robust customer support platform to streamline your operations. Efficient customer service and support capabilities are fundamental for maintaining high customer satisfaction levels. Evaluating the customer service and support features of Zendesk and Intercom aids businesses in understanding which platform facilitates more effective and prompt customer issue resolution.

By leveraging automated customer support, companies can significantly enhance their efficiency in addressing consumer queries. Furthermore, chatbot integration improves response time, leading to heightened customer satisfaction. The ability of virtual assistants to handle routine tasks allows human agents to focus on more complex and personalized interactions, thereby optimizing overall customer service operations. In the rapidly evolving landscape of customer service software in 2024, the competition between Zendesk and Intercom has intensified.

In addition to being pre-trained on billions of real support interactions, our AI powers bots, agent and admin assist, and intelligent workflows that lead to 83 percent lower administrative costs. Customers have also noted that they can implement Zendesk AI five times faster than other solutions. Customer expectations are already high, but with the rise of AI, customers are expecting even more.

Not only does Zendesk offer a free trial, it’s actually sort of a freemium tool, which means you can choose one their tools (live chat, knowledge base, call center software) and use it for free forever. As any free tool, the functionalities there are quite limited, but nevertheless. If you’re a really small business or a startup, you can benefit big time from such free tools. Zendesk provides limited customer support for its basic plan users, along with costly premium assistance options. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. 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.

This unpredictability in pricing might lead to higher costs, especially for larger companies. While it offers a range of advanced features, the overall costs and potential inconsistencies in support could be a concern for some businesses​​​​. It really shines in its modern messenger interface, making real-time chat a breeze.

Many businesses choose to work with Intercom because of its focus on personalization and flexibility, allowing companies to completely customize their customer service experience. Zendesk, unlike Intercom, is a more affordable and predictable customer service platform. You can always count on it if you need a reliable customer support platform to process tickets, support users, and get advanced reporting. In terms of usability, ProProfs Help Desk has been diligently designed to meet the needs of customer service teams of any size, business. Right from small startups to large enterprises, all businesses can manage their ticketing needs and stay available to their customers 24×7.

The best help desks are also ticketing systems, which lets support reps create a support ticket out of issues that can then be tracked. Ticket routing helps to send the ticket to the best support team agent. 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.

The cheapest plan costs about $74/month (when billed annually) and consists of one seat and 1,000 people reached/month. Yes, Zendesk offers an integration with Intercom available through the Zendesk Marketplace. This integration enables you to access live customer data from Intercom within Zendesk, customize the information displayed, and sync user tags between the two platforms. Additionally, you can forward Intercom conversations to Zendesk as tickets.

Should I use Zendesk vs. Intercom for customer support?

These pricing structures are flexible enough to cater to all business sizes and types. Moreover, the pricing model ensures customer transparency and reveals the costs that businesses will incur. Businsses need to do a cost analysis whenever they select customer service software for their business. You cannot invest much in this software if you are a small business, as it would exceed the budget requirements.

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.

Software

Understanding your budget constraints, specific business requirements, and long-term goals is crucial. Evaluate factors such as scalability, user-friendliness, integration capabilities, and the type of customer experience you aim to provide before making a decision. In the domain of customer onboarding, Intercom takes a definitive lead with its distinctive feature – the ability to create interactive product tours. These tours serve as virtual guides, leading customers through a website and product offerings in an engaging and personalized manner. This approach not only enhances user understanding but also significantly boosts user engagement.

When comparing the reporting and analytics features of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms offer robust tools, but with distinct focuses and functionalities. Understanding the unique attributes of Zendesk and Intercom is crucial in this comparison. Zendesk is renowned for its comprehensive range of functionalities, including advanced email ticketing, live chat, phone support, and a vast knowledge base. If agents want to offer their customers a great experience, they can spend an additional $50 to have the AI add-on.

Whether Zendesk can fully replace Intercom depends on your specific customer support and engagement requirements. It tends to perform well on the marketing and sales side of things, which is key for a growing company. And considering that its tools (including live chat options) are so easy to use, it’s probably going to be easier for a small business to get integrated and set up.

What sets Zendesk apart is its user-friendly interface, customizable workflows, and scalability. It caters to a wide range of industries, particularly excelling in e-commerce, SaaS, technology, and telecommunications. https://chat.openai.com/ It is favored by customer support, helpdesk, IT service management, and contact center teams. Intercom’s app store has popular integrations for things like WhatsApp, Stripe, Instagram, and Slack.

Intercom is also a customer service software that integrates entirely with third-party vendors, especially those offering messaging services. It can also handle complex interactions and provide real-time insight to customer support agents. Overall, Intercom is a better option if personalized and robust chatbots are something you are looking for when managing customer support strategy. Its messaging also has real-time notifications and automated responses, enhancing customer communication.

You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads. Keeping this general theme in mind, I’ll dive deeper into how each software’s features compare, so you can decide which use case might best fit your needs. With over 160,000 customers across all industries and regions, Zendesk has the CX expertise to provide you with best practices and thought leadership to increase your overall value.

There’s a plethora of features to help bigger teams collaborate more effectively — like private notes or real-time view of who’s handling a given ticket at the moment, etc. Choosing the right customer service platform is pivotal for enhancing business-client interactions. Intercom is more for improving sales cycle and customer relationships, while Zendesk has everything Chat GPT a customer support representative can dream about, but it does lack wide email functionality. On the other hand, it provides call center functionalities, unlike Intercom. Zendesk boasts robust reporting and analytics tools, plus a dedicated workforce management system. With custom correlation and attribution, you can dive deep into the root cause behind your metrics.

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.

So, communicating with customers on different communication channels would be difficult on Intercom. Apart from team conversations, it integrates with the ticketing system. Thus, the inbox is used to refer tickets to other customer service agents who can solve them. Therefore, a helpdesk with a good inbox can make your team efficient in solving problems.

Easily track your service team’s performance and unlock coaching opportunities with AI-powered insights. 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. Rest assured, ThriveDesk’s lightweight design and speed won’t impact the performance of your Wix-powered eCommerce website.

However, you can browse their respective sites to find which tools each platform supports. Using Zendesk, you can create community forums where customers can connect, comment, and collaborate, creating a way to harness customers’ expertise and promote feedback. You can also add apps to your Intercom Messenger home to help users and visitors get what they need, without having to start a conversation. Learn more about the differences between leading chat support solutions Intercom and Zendesk so that you can choose the right tool for your needs.

Intercom’s sales automation features encompass advanced functionalities like lead scoring, personalized lead nurturing, and streamlined pipeline management. These capabilities enable businesses to streamline their sales processes, prioritize leads effectively, and manage their sales pipelines with greater efficiency and precision. When it comes to integrations, Zendesk and Intercom both offer diverse possibilities, but here, Zendesk takes the lead.

The Zendesk Marketplace offers over 1,500 no-code apps and integrations. Intercom is a customer relationship management and messaging tool for web businesses. Compare Intercom and Zendesk Chat to find the best solution for your particular requirements. By evaluating their key features, pricing, specifications, and ratings, you’ll gather valuable information to make a well-informed decision. Intercom has a full suite of email marketing tools, although they are part of a pricier package. With Intercom, you get email features like targeted and personalized outbound emailing, dynamic content fields, and an email-to-inbox forwarding feature.

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Zendesk is popular due to its user-friendly interface, extensive customization options, scalability, multichannel support, robust analytics, and seamless integration capabilities. These features make it suitable for businesses of all sizes, helping them streamline their support operations and enhance the overall customer experience. Zendesk is a customer service software company that provides businesses with a suite of tools to manage 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. Intercom also excels in real-time chat solutions, making it a strong contender for businesses seeking dynamic customer interaction.

However, competitive pricing is a promise and not a compromise to make decent customer support accessible for all. So, by now, you can see that according to this article, Zendesk inches past Intercom as the better customer support platform. 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. The more expensive Intercom plans offer AI-powered content cues, triage, and conversation insights.

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. In general, Zendesk offers a wide range of live chat features such as customizable chat widgets, automatic greetings, offline messaging, and chat triggers. In addition to these features, Intercom offers messaging automation and real-time visitor insights. Because Intercom started as a live chat service, its messenger functionality is very robust. It feels very modern, and Intercom offers some advanced messenger features that Zendesk does not.

What is Zendesk?

The final prices are revealed after engaging in sales demos and are not revealed upfront. This lack of transparency can create budgeting problems for businesses. Intercom also provides fast time to value for smaller and mid-sized businesses with limitations for large-scale companies. It may have limited abilities regarding the scalability or support of an enterprise-level company. Thus, due to its limited agility, businesses with complex business models may not find it appropriate. Let us dive deeper into the offerings of Zendesk and Intercom to make a comparison at a glance.

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. Intercom’s AI capabilities extend beyond the traditional chatbots; Fin is renowned for solving complex problems and providing safer, accurate answers.

Evaluate your company’s criteria to determine which set of standards best matches your goals. Examine Intercom and Zendesk Chat prices and plans to make sure you get the best deal for your needs. We provide a wealth of excellent resources to aid you in establishing Customer Friendship™, and our team is always available for consultation.

Zendesk also offers callback requests, call monitoring and call quality notifications, among other telephone tools. Intercom’s dashboards may not be as aesthetically pleasing as Zendesk’s, but they still allow users to navigate their tools with few distractions. As for Intercom’s general pricing structure, there are three plans, but you’ll have to contact them to get exact prices. Agents can easily track customer conversations, view unassigned tickets, and track their overall performance. It also makes the inter-team collaboration a bit more engaging and effortless.

Zendesk stands out as a champion of delivering personalized customer support due to its easy-to-use work-frame, many useful add-ons, and features in all tiers. The platform zendesk vs. intercom offers Zendesk Talk as its call center solution to keep up with other help desks. This feature is browser-based, so you don’t need additional software or hardware.

It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to assist customers through self-help options or access to the relevant articles before connecting them to your team. And this, undoubtedly, leaves your customer support agents free to solve urgent matters. Apart from a live chat, it has a feature called ‘Business Messenger’ that comes with its own AI chatbot. Moreover, Intercom bots can converse naturally with customers by using conversation starters, respond with self-help, and knowledge base articles. However, if you compare Zendesk vs Intercom chat in ease of use, the letter wins.

Intercom is ideal for personalized messaging, while Zendesk offers robust ticket management and self-service options. 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.

• Whether agents are facing customers via chat, email, social media, or good old-fashioned phone, they can keep it all confined to a single, easy-to-navigate dashboard.
• Intercom’s helpdesk is more of a complementary tool to their chat tools.
• Zendesk is popular due to its user-friendly interface, extensive customization options, scalability, multichannel support, robust analytics, and seamless integration capabilities.
• It offers comprehensive customer data management and lead-tracking features.
• Their agent was always trying to convert me into a lead along the way, but heck, that’s a side effect of our job.

Zendesk allows for the creation of predefined rules and workflows that efficiently route tickets to the appropriate agents, ensuring swift and precise issue resolution. Moreover, Zendesk excels in sending automated responses and escalating critical issues with precision. While there can be add-ons, such as premium customer support, you can generally anticipate what you’ll be paying for your Zendesk subscription. It calculates the cost of its Pro and Premium plans based on the number of AI resolutions, people reached, and seats (or users). This can make it challenging to estimate the cost yourself during your research and you need to speak with Intercom for more information.

Zendesk also packs some pretty potent tools into their platform, so you can empower your agents to do what they do with less repetition. Agents can use basic automation (like auto-closing tickets or setting auto-responses), apply list organization to stay on top of their tasks, or set up triggers to keep tickets moving automatically. Intercom is an all-in-one solution, and compared to Zendesk, Intercom has a less intuitive design and can be complicated for new users to learn. It also offers a confusing pricing structure and fewer integrations, making it less scalable and cost-effective. Zendesk AI is the intelligence layer that infuses CX intelligence into every step of the customer journey.

Examining the roadmap of both platforms helps businesses envision how their customer support needs can align with the evolving market trends and technological innovations. Gathering insights from customer reviews and testimonials offers a comprehensive understanding of the first-hand experiences of businesses using Zendesk and Intercom. The feedback and recommendations from existing users serve as valuable guidance for businesses considering either platform. Real-world case studies illustrate how businesses leverage Zendesk and Intercom to enhance their customer support operations and drive business growth. Analyzing these case studies provides practical insights into the tangible benefits and outcomes achieved by implementing either platform.

However, you can connect Intercom with over 40 compatible phone and video integrations. Gain valuable insights with Intercom’s analytics and reporting capabilities. Track key metrics, measure campaign success, and optimize customer engagement strategies. Experience targeted communication with Intercom’s automation and segmentation features. Create personalized messages for specific customer segments, driving engagement and satisfaction. You get a dashboard that makes creating, tracking, and organizing tickets easy.

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. There are several notable alternatives to Intercom in the customer support and engagement space, including Zendesk, Freshdesk, Help Scout, HubSpot, and Zoho Desk. There are several notable alternatives to Zendesk in the customer support and engagement space, including Intercom, Freshdesk, Help Scout, and Zoho Desk.

• This makes things faster for support teams to access information without bothering other users.
• Just like Zendesk, Intercom also offers its Operator bot, which will automatically suggest relevant articles to clients right in a chat widget.
• They both offer some state-of-the-art core functionality and numerous unusual features.
• As a result, you’ll be able to see the sender, anyone who replied, and the dates of their interaction.

On the other hand, Intercom shines in its focus on conversational engagement and real-time communication with customers. Zendesk offers a more comprehensive suite of tools, including advanced call center features with Zendesk Talk and modular add-ons like Guide, Chat, and Explore for enhanced customization. It provides versatile communication channels, supporting web, mobile, and messaging, with robust AI-powered chatbots for improved efficiency. Additionally, Zendesk’s extensive analytics and reporting capabilities help businesses tailor their services to elevate customer service experience and increase customer satisfaction. Overall, Zendesk’s extensive features and customization options make it a powerful choice for diverse business requirements.

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. Yes, Zendesk has an Intercom integration that you can find in the Zendesk Marketplace—it’s free to install.

Research by Zoho reports that customer relationship management (CRM) systems can help companies triple lead conversion rates. When choosing between Zendesk and Intercom for your customer support needs, it’s essential to consider various factors that align with your business goals, operational requirements, and budget. Both platforms offer distinct strengths, catering to customer support and engagement aspects.

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.

Lastly, Intercom offers an academy that offers concise courses to help users make the most out of their Intercom experience. Moreover, research says that companies can reduce customer resolution times upto a great percentage through the helpdesk software. Today, thanks to the virtual technology revolution, you can find numerous help desk software, but our vote goes for Zendesk and Intercom. Some of the links that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation.

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. In addition to Intercom vs Zendesk, alternative helpdesk solutions are available in the market. A helpdesk solution’s user experience and interface are crucial in ensuring efficient and intuitive customer support.

With Zendesk, you get next-level AI-powered support software that’s intuitively designed, scalable, and cost-effective. Compare Zendesk vs. Intercom and future-proof your business with reliable, easy-to-use software. They have a dedicated help section that provides instructions on how to set up and effectively use Intercom. Say farewell to disjointed customer experiences and costly third-party consultants.

It’s beautifully crafted and thought through, and their custom-made illustrations are just next level stuff. You can see their attention to detail in everything — from their tools to their website. The cheapest (aka Essential) ‘All of Intercom’ package will cost you $136 per month, but if you only need their essential chat tools only, you can get them for $49 per month. If you’d want to test Zendesk and Intercom before deciding on a tool for good, they both provide free trials. Intercom has a standard trial period for a SaaS product which is 14 days, while Zendesk offers a 30-day trial. If I had to describe Intercom’s help desk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools.

You can use this support desk to help customers or you can forward potential new users to your sales department. You can create a help platform to assist users in guiding themselves, or you can use AI-enabled responses to create a more “human” like effect. Help desk software creates a sort of “virtual front desk” for your business. That means automating customer service and sales processes so the people visiting your website don’t actually have to interact with anyone before they take action. When it comes to which company is the better fit for your business, there’s no clear answer.