Zendesk vs Intercom: Which is better?

Intercom, on the other hand, can be a complicated system, creating a steep learning curve for new users. 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. Discover customer and product issues with instant replays, in-app cobrowsing, and console logs. Now that we’ve covered a bit of background on both Zendesk and Intercom, let’s dive into the features each platform offers.

Meanwhile, our WFM software enables businesses to analyze employee metrics and performance, helping them identify improvements, implement strategies, and set long-term goals. Zendesk is built to grow alongside your business, resulting in less downtime, better cost savings, and the stability needed to provide exceptional customer support. Many customers start using Zendesk as small or mid-sized businesses (SMBs) and continue to use our software as they scale their operations, hire more staff, and serve more customers. Our robust, no-code integrations enable you to adapt our software to new and growing use cases.

When it’s intelligent and accessible, reporting can provide deep insights into your customer interactions, agent efficiency, and service quality at a glance. Zendesk’s reporting tools are arguably more advanced while Intercom is designed for simplicity and ease of use. Zendesk also prioritizes operational metrics, while Intercom focuses on behavior and engagement. Far from impersonalizing customer service, chatbots offer an immediate and efficient way to address common queries that end in satisfaction. Nowadays, it’s a crucial component in helping businesses focus on high-priority interactions and scale their customer service.

Customerly CRM

Customers won’t need to leave your app or website to find the help they need.Zendesk, on the other hand, will redirect the customer to a new web page. The business landscape of 2024 is more customer-centric than ever before. intercom vs. zendesk In this environment, understanding and managing customer interactions isn’t just a nice-to-have;… However, for businesses seeking a more cost-effective and user-friendly solution, Hiver presents a compelling alternative.

However, after patting yourself on the back, you now realize you’re faced with the daunting task of choosing between the two. With so many features to consider, not to mention pricing, user experience, and scalability, we don’t blame you if you feel your head spinning. Intercom primarily focuses on messaging but offers limited channel breadth compared to Zendesk, requiring paid add-ons for critical channels like WhatsApp. Zendesk is designed with the agent in mind, delivering a modern, intuitive experience. The customizable Zendesk Agent Workspace enables reps to work within a single browser tab with one-click navigation across any channel.

Intercom and Zendesk are two of the most popular customer support tools available. Both platforms offer a range of features that enable businesses to communicate with their customers seamlessly. In this section, we will briefly overview Intercom and Zendesk, including their history and key features. The customer support platform starts at just $5 per agent per month, which is a very basic customer support tool.

Many use cases call for different approaches, and Zendesk and Intercom are but two software solutions for each case. The Zendesk marketplace is also where you can get a lot of great add-ons. There are also several different Shopify integrations to choose from, as well as CRM integrations like HubSpot and Salesforce. No matter what Zendesk Suite plan you are on, you get workflow triggers, which are simple business rules-based actions to streamline many tasks.

Customerly allows you to rate prospects, either manually or automatically, so you can prioritize the most valuable leads. Our platform also supports dynamic list building, enabling you to run targeted surveys, send newsletters, and automate marketing actions, all from one place. It makes sure that you don’t miss a single inquiry by queuing tickets for agent handling.

Lead management

Other customer service add-ons with Zendesk include custom training and professional services. To select the ideal fit for your business, it is crucial to compare these industry giants and assess which aligns best with your specific requirements. Intercom’s reporting is average compared to Zendesk, as it offers some standard reporting and analytics tools. Its analytics do not provide deeper insights into consumer interactions as well.

• It lets customers reach out via messaging, a live chat tool, voice, and social media.
• Zendesk and Intercom each have their own marketplace/app store where users can find all the integrations for each platform.
• Zendesk’s Help Center and Intercom’s Articles both offer features to easily embed help centers into your website or product using their web widgets, SDKs, and APIs.
• The dashboard is customizable, allowing users to efficiently access the features they use most frequently.
• Powered by AI, Intercom’s Fin chatbot is purportedly capable of solving 50% of all queries autonomously — in multiple languages.

With Zendesk, even our most basic plans include a robust selection of features, including custom data fields, sales triggers, email tracking, text messaging, and call tracking and recording. The Zendesk sales CRM offers tiered pricing plans designed to support businesses of all sizes, from startups to enterprises. The Professional and Enterprise plans offer advanced features that build on those in the Team and Growth plans, including lead scoring, call scripts, and unlimited email sequences. The Zendesk sales CRM hits all of the functions you’d expect from CRM software, like reporting and analytics tools that can deliver key sales metrics with pre-built dashboards right out of the box. On top of that, you can use drag-and-drop widgets to create custom CRM reports with the data most important to your goals. With Pipedrive, users have access to visual reporting dashboards, but adding custom fields is limited to their Professional, Power, and Enterprise plans.

Both are known for their range of features – AI, analytics, automation, and ticketing, amongst others. The offers that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site (including, for example, the order in which they appear). This site does not include all software companies or all available software companies offers. So, by now, you can see that according to this article, Zendesk inches past Intercom as the better customer support platform. There are pre-built workflows to help with things like ticket sharing, as well as conversation routing based on metrics like agent skill set or availability.

Intercom is a complete customer communication platform for small businesses. Still, considering that such companies do not have a large budget for investing in CRM software, they should carefully consider all plans. While some of these functionalities related to AI are included in the Zendesk suite, others are part of advanced AI add-ons. If agents want to offer their customers a great experience, they can spend an additional $50 to have the AI add-on.

Overall, Intercom and Zendesk offer intuitive and user-friendly user interfaces, prioritizing ease of use and customization. The choice between the two may be personal preference or specific feature requirements. Intercom’s user interface is known for being modern, intuitive, and user-friendly. The dashboard is customizable, allowing users to efficiently access the features they use most frequently. Intercom’s clean and minimalistic design focuses on white space and easy-to-read fonts. The user interface is also highly responsive, making it easy to use on mobile devices.

The ticket view often includes detailed information about the customer, history of interactions, and other details. Intercom also offers extensive integrations with over 350 tools that include Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Analytics, Amplitude, Zoho, JIRA, and more. The platform is recognized for its ability to resolve a significant portion of customer questions automatically, ensuring faster response times.

Easily reply to customer conversations and manage workload in a smart & automated way. Personalized messaging, in-app messaging, product tours, and chatbot capabilities set Intercom apart from Zendesk. Intercom has limited scalability compared to Zendesk, which is unsuitable for large-scale enterprises.

Reporting

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. It will allow you to leverage some Intercom capabilities while keeping your account at the time-tested platform. Though the Intercom chat window says that their customer success team typically replies in a few hours, don’t expect to receive any real answer in chat for at least a couple of days.

The API is well-documented and easy to use, making it a popular choice for companies that want to create their integrations. Intercom and Zendesk offer integration capabilities to help businesses streamline their workflow and improve customer support. In this section, we will take a closer look at the integration capabilities of both platforms. Intercom is used by over 30,000 businesses worldwide, including Shopify, Atlassian, and New Relic. The platform is known for its user-friendly interface, powerful automation capabilities, and robust analytics tools. In 2023, businesses will have an abundance of options when it comes to choosing a customer support and relationship management tool.

With this data, businesses identify friction points where the customer journey breaks down as well as areas where it’s performing smoothly. While both Zendesk and Intercom offer strong ticketing systems, they differ in the depth of automation capabilities. If delivering an outstanding customer experience and employee experience is your top priority, Zendesk should be your top pick over Intercom. Zendesk has the CX expertise to help businesses of all sizes scale their service experience without compromise. Learn how top CX leaders are scaling personalized customer service at their companies.

Zendesk has an app available for both Android and iOS, which makes it easy to stay connected with customers while on the go. The app includes features like push notifications and real-time customer engagement — so businesses can respond quickly to customer inquiries. Why don’t you try something equally powerful yet more affordable, like HelpCrunch? Zendesk helps you manage and update your leads, analyze your pipeline, and create customizable reports on the go with our mobile CRM app.

It also features an AI-driven ticketing system, an omnichannel dashboard to manage all customer communications in one place, and customizable chat widgets to enhance user engagement. 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. Whether you want to integrate Slack for internal team communication or PandaDoc to send and track sales proposals, Zendesk supports easy-to-set-up app integrations to help boost employee productivity. Additionally, the Zendesk sales CRM seamlessly integrates with the Zendesk Support Suite, allowing your customer service and sales teams to share information in a centralized place.

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. Intercom’s CRM can work as a standalone CRM and requires no additional service to operate robustly. It offers comprehensive customer data management and lead-tracking features. Some businesses may require supplemental products to meet specific needs.

This enables your operators to understand visitor intent faster and provide them with a personalized experience. When it comes to choosing a help desk software, security is a top priority. Intercom and Zendesk have implemented various security measures to protect their clients’ data.

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. It is favored by customer support, helpdesk, IT service management, and contact center teams. Agents can quickly grasp the context of customer interaction through these support tickets and sentiment analysis that AI facilitates. Intercom is also a customer service software that integrates entirely with third-party vendors, especially those offering messaging services. Using any plan, this integration is available to all customers, making the customer support experience and onboarding smooth.

Like Intercom, Zendesk has received generally positive customer reviews, with an overall rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars on Gartner Peer Insights. Customers appreciate the platform’s ease of use, customization options, and robust reporting capabilities. However, some users have reported issues with the platform’s customer support and pricing. Intercom was founded in 2011 by Eoghan McCabe, Ciaran Lee, Des Traynor, and David Barrett. Initially, the platform was designed to help businesses communicate with their customers through targeted messaging.

However, when it comes to choosing between the two, it ultimately depends on the specific needs and preferences of the user. In addition to third-party integrations, Zendesk offers a range of native integrations with its products, including Zendesk Support, Zendesk Chat, and Zendesk Talk. These integrations allow businesses to streamline workflow and provide a seamless customer experience across multiple channels.

Startups usually have low budgets for such investments, making it easier for these small businesses to choose the right plan. The features in Zendesk can scale with growing companies, so Startups can easily customize their plan to changing needs. Intercom also charges additional charges for specific features, such as charging $0.99 for every resolution. This eventually adds to overall business costs, so they carefully need to consider all plans and budgets before making a decision.

Operators will find its dashboard quite beneficial as it will take them seconds to find necessary features during an ongoing chat with the customers. Admins will also like the fact that they can see the progress of all their teams and who all are actively answering a customer’s query in real-time. 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.

Its AI chatbots leverage machine learning to gain a deeper understanding of customer interactions. On the other hand, Intercom enables agents to convert a conversation into a ticket with one click. This helps support teams to resolve customer issues without losing context. Handle conversations, manage tickets, and resolve issues quickly to improve your CSAT.

Overall, I actually liked Zendesk’s user experience better than Intercom’s in terms of its messaging dashboard. Intercom has a dark mode that I think many people will appreciate, and I wouldn’t say it’s lacking in any way. But I like that Zendesk just feels slightly cleaner, has easy online/away toggling, more visual customer journey notes, and a handy widget for exploring the knowledge base on the fly. You’ll still be able to get your eyes on basic support metrics, like response times and bot performance, that will help you improve your service quality.

Chat agents also get a comprehensive look at their entire customer’s journey, so they will have a better idea of what your customers need, without needing to ask many questions. Both Zendesk and Intercom have their own “app stores” where users can find all of the integrations for each platform. Intercom users often mention how impressed they are with its ease of use and their ability to quickly create useful tasks and set up automations. Even reviewers who hadn’t used the platform highlight how beautifully designed it is and how simple it is to interact with for both users and clients alike. With a very streamlined design, Intercom’s interface is far better than many alternatives, including Zendesk. It has a very intuitive design that goes far beyond its platform and into its articles, product guides, and even its illustrations.

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. Zendesk and Intercom both have an editor preview feature that makes it easier to add images, videos, call-to-action buttons, and interactive guides to your help articles. Our mission is to break apart what CRM is and means.Here we discuss anything that helps create more meaningful lasting work relationships.

You can publish your self-service resources, divide them by categories, and integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience. Well, I must admit, the tool is gradually transforming from a platform for communicating with users to a tool that helps you automate every aspect of your routine. If I had to describe Intercom’s helpdesk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools. At the end of the day, the best sales CRM delivers on the features that matter most to you and your business. To determine which one takes the cake, let’s dive into a feature comparison of Pipedrive vs. Zendesk. If you don’t go with ActiveCampaign, then Zoho would be my second choice.

It offers  comprehensive insights on ticket volume, agent performance, customer satisfaction, first contact resolution rates and more. For instance, Zendesk’s automation rules can help support teams automatically assign tickets based on specific criteria – like subject line or specific keywords. It offers robust features for automating routine tasks such as ticket routing, creating queues, creating ticket statuses and more. Features like macros, triggers, and automations allow businesses to create custom workflows tailored to their specific needs. A customer service department is only as good as its support team members, and these highly-prized employees need to rely on one another.

Zendesk is a robust choice for businesses seeking quick setup, scalability, and powerful AI-driven support. Its strength in creating a comprehensive self-service knowledge base and its extensive integration ecosystem make it a versatile option. Zendesk and Intercom are both incredibly powerful customer support tools, and they have their own strengths and weaknesses.

Their reports are attractive, dynamic, and integrated right out of the box. You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads. Intercom’s reporting is less focused on getting a fine-grained understanding of your team’s performance, and more on a nuanced understanding of customer behavior and engagement. It’s definitely something that both your agents and customers will feel equally comfortable using. However, you won’t miss out on any of the essentials when it comes to live chat. Automated triggers, saved responses, and live chat analytics are all baked in.

MOBILE APPS

By integrating seamlessly into your app, it offers an intuitive in-app chat experience that fosters direct customer engagement. The primary function of Intercom’s mobile app is the business messenger suite, including personalized messaging, real-time support tools, push notifications, in-app messaging and emailing. Intercom also does mobile carousels to help please the eye with fresh designs.

You can create dozens of articles in a simple, intuitive WYSIWYG text editor, divide them by categories and sections, and customize them with your custom themes. All customer questions, whether via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel, are landed in one dashboard, where your agents can solve them quickly and efficiently. This guarantees continuous omnichannel support that meets customer expectations. While they like the ease of use this product offers its users, they’ve indeed rated them low in terms of services. You can also follow up with customers after they have left the chat and qualify them based on your answers.

Meanwhile, Intercom excels with its comprehensive AI automation capabilities, all built on a unified AI system. Intercom also uses AI and features a chatbot called Fin, but negative reviews note basic reporting and a lack of customization. Fin is priced at $0.99 per resolution, so companies handling large volumes of queries might find it costly. In comparison, Zendesk customers pay a fixed price of $50 per agent—and only Zendesk AI is modeled on the world’s largest CX-specific dataset. Intercom also offers a 14-day free trial, after which customers can upgrade to a paid plan or use the basic free plan.

This is fine, as not every customer support team wants to be so available on the phone. 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. 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.

Customers of Zendesk can purchase priority assistance at the enterprise tier, which includes a 99.9% uptime service level agreement and a 1-hour service level goal. At all tiers, there is an additional fee to work with a member of the Zendesk success team on unique engagements. The best thing about this plan is that it is eligible for an advanced AI add-on, has integrated community forums, side conversations, skill-based routing, and is HIPAA-enabled. Zendesk has excellent reporting and analytics tools that allow you to decipher the underlying issues behind your help desk metrics. Discover how to awe shoppers with stellar customer service during peak season. Provide a clear path for customer questions to improve the shopping experience you offer.

However, over the years, Intercom has evolved into a complete customer communication platform with features like live chat, email marketing, and customer support. Zendesk is an AI-powered service solution that’s easy to set up, use, and scale. It works out-of-the-box and is easy to modify when changes arise, helping businesses move faster. In leveraging cutting-edge AI, Zendesk empowers service teams to resolve customer issues more quickly and accurately.

At the same time, Zendesk looks slightly outdated and can’t offer some features. Zendesk provides a range of customer support options, including email, phone, and live chat support. They also offer a comprehensive knowledge base that includes articles, videos, and tutorials to help users get the most out of the platform.

Intercom live chat is modern, smooth, and has many advanced features that other chat tools lack. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. It’s also highly customizable, so you can adjust https://chat.openai.com/ it according to the style of your website or product. So when it comes to chatting features, the choice is not really Intercom vs Zendesk.

This structure may appeal to businesses with specific needs but could be less predictable for budget-conscious organizations. 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. Zendesk is among the industry’s best ticketing and customer support software, and most of its additional functionality is icing on the proverbial cake.

Zendesk’s mobile app is also good for ticketing, helping you create new support tickets with macros and updates. It’s also good for sending and receiving notifications, as well as for quick filtering through the queue of open tickets. The main idea here is to rid the average support agent of a slew of mundane and repetitive tasks, giving them more time and mental energy to help customers with tougher issues.

By aiming to resolve most customer conversations without human intervention, Intercom allows teams to focus on higher-value interactions. This not only increases customer satisfaction but also reduces operational costs. Messagely’s chatbots are powerful tools for Chat GPT qualifying and converting leads while your team is otherwise occupied or away. With chatbots, you can generate leads to hand over to your sales team and solve common customer queries without the need of a customer service representative behind a keyboard.

Fin uses seamless communication across customer bases, breaking language barriers and catering to global audiences. In addition to all these features, Suite Growth Plan offers light agents, multilingual support, multiple ticket forms, and a self-service customer portal. On the other hand, Intercom may have a lower ROI when compared to Zendesk due to the limited depth of features it offers. Although it provides businesses with valuable messaging and automation tools, they may require more than this to achieve a higher level of functionality. Companies might assume that using Intercom increases costs, potentially impacting businesses’ ROI. Intercom’s messaging platform is very similar to Zendesk’s dashboard, offering seamless integration of multiple channels in one place for managing customer interactions.

These products range from customer communication tools to a fully-fledged CRM. Zendesk boasts incredibly robust sales capabilities and security features. This feature ensures that each customer request is handled by the best-suited agent, improving the overall efficiency of the support team.

It effortlessly brings together in-app chat, automated chatbots, and a unified inquiry inbox in its help center. Having only appeared in 2011, Intercom lacks a few years of experience on Zendesk. It also made its name as a messaging-first platform for fostering personalized conversational experiences for customers.