Zendesk vs Intercom: A comparison guide for 2024

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 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.

The company’s products are built with an emphasis on simplicity and usability. This has helped to make Zendesk one of the most popular customer service software platforms on the market. With Zendesk, you can use lead tracking features to filter and segment your leads in real time.

Zendesk meets global security and privacy compliance standards and includes features like single sign-on (SSO) to help provide protection against cyberattacks and keep your data safe. Zendesk helps you manage and update your leads, analyze your pipeline, and create customizable reports on the go with our mobile CRM app. Plus, visit tagging and geolocation features allow your sales team to effortlessly log in-person sales visits, letting you monitor all your sales interactions in one centralized place. Pipedrive provides a mobile app to manage sales leads, view your calendar, and access your to-do list. And while Pipedrive’s mobile app can help you look at where your leads are on the map, you won’t be able to log sales visits using geolocation features.

Intercom’s automation features enable businesses to deliver a personalized experience to customers and scale their customer support function effectively. 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. Zendesk and Intercom offer help desk management solutions to their users. Zendesk offers simple chatbots and provides businesses with straightforward chatbot creation tools, allowing them to set up automated responses and assist customers with common queries.

Intercom and Zendesk offer competitive pricing plans with various features to suit different business needs. Businesses should carefully evaluate their requirements and choose the best method for their needs and budget. When choosing the right customer support tool, pricing is an essential factor to consider. In this section, we will compare the pricing structures of Intercom and Zendesk. 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.

You could say something similar for Zendesk’s standard service offering, so it’s at least good to know they have Zendesk Sell, a capable CRM option to supplement it. You can use Zendesk Sell to track tasks, streamline workflows, improve engagement, nurture leads, and much more. In this paragraph, let’s explain some common issues users usually ask about when choosing between Zendesk and Intercom platforms. 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.

In-app messages and email marketing tools are two crucial features that Zendesk lacks when compared to Intercom. Intercom, on the other hand, lacks key ticketing features that are critical for large firms with a high volume of customer assistance. 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. It’s clear that both of these tools are designed for different use cases.

This method helps offer more personalized support as well as get faster response and resolution times. 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. Zendesk supports teams that can then field these issues from a nice unified dashboard. Zendesk also offers digital support during business hours, and their website has a chatbot. Premiere Zendesk plans have 24/7 proactive support with faster response times.

Features:

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. When deciding between Intercom and Zendesk, businesses should consider their specific needs and goals. For those with a complicated customer support process, Zendesk may be the better option.

We also provide real-time and historical reporting dashboards so you can take action at the moment and learn from past trends. 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 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. 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.

This comparison will delve into the features, similarities, differences, pros, cons, and use cases of Zendesk and Intercom, providing you with the insights needed to make an informed decision. Basically, you can create new articles, divide them by categories and sections — make it a high end destination for customers when they have questions or issues. If you’re a huge corporation with a complicated customer support process, go Zendesk for its help desk functionality. If you’re smaller more sales oriented startup with enough money, go Intercom. Zendesk is a customer service platform that allows you to communicate with customers via any channel. The offers that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation.

This feature can reduce the workload of customer support teams and provide faster response times to users. 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. Intercom offers advanced customer service through its automated functions and is suitable for businesses looking for a sophisticated customer support solution. Another advantage of using Intercom is that it not only enhances customer engagement but is also a great way to increase customer support teams’ productivity.

Currently based in Albuquerque, NM, Bryce Emley holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NC State and nearly a decade of writing and editing experience. 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. 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.

• In addition to third-party integrations, Zendesk offers a range of native integrations with its products, including Zendesk Support, Zendesk Chat, and Zendesk Talk.
• Intercom has a very robust advanced chatbot set of tools for your business needs.
• It will allow you to leverage some Intercom capabilities while keeping your account at the time-tested platform.
• That means all you have to do is add the code to your website and enable it right away.
• Collaborate with your teammates by easily assigning the right rep to best handle a customer query.

This organization is important because it brings together customer interactions from all channels in this one place. And, Zendesk is nothing if not geared for helping agents deal with large ticket volumes efficiently. Right off the bat, Intercom’s Chatbot is more advanced and customizable. If you prioritize seamless, personalized customer interactions, it’s arguably the better option of the two. That being said, it sometimes lacks the advanced customization and automation offered by other AI-powered chatbots, like Intercom’s.

Zendesk vs Intercom Comparison 2024: Which One Is Better?

You can also follow up with customers after they have left the chat and qualify them based on your answers. Since Intercom doesn’t offer a CRM, its pricing is divided into basic messaging and messaging with automations. 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. Zendesk also offers detailed reports that can be shared with others and enable team members to collaborate on them simultaneously. You can either track your performance on a pre-built dashboard or customize and build one for yourself.

It’s much easier if you decide to go with the Zendesk Suite, which includes Support, Chat, Talk, and Guide tools. There are two options there — Professional for $109 or Enterprise for $179 if you pay monthly. The difference between the two is that the Professional subscription lacks some things like chat widget unbranding, custom agent roles, multiple help centers, etc. Zendesk also has the Answer Bot, which can take your knowledge base game to the next level instantly. It can automatically suggest your customer relevant articles reducing the workload for your support agents.

It offers comprehensive customer data management and lead-tracking features. Some businesses may require supplemental products to meet specific needs. Intercom’s CRM utility is a solid foundation for managing customer relationships and sales in one platform.

Some startups and small businesses may prefer one app, while large companies and enterprise operations will have their own requirements. There is a simple email integration tool for whatever email provider you regularly use. This gets you unlimited email addresses and email templates in both text form and HTML. The final prices are revealed after engaging in sales demos and are not revealed upfront. The pricing structure of Intercom is complex, making it difficult for Intercom users to understand their final costs. Intercom charges the price based on representative seats and people reached, with additional expenses for add-ons.

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. One of the standout features of Zendesk’s user interface is the ability to view customer interactions in a timeline format, which can help track the progress of a customer’s support request.

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.

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If your team needs Fin to help with more than that, you’ll need to pay an extra $35 per agent per month for unlimited use. Essentially, Fin AI Copilot acts as a personal assistant for every support staff, helping them resolve customer issues faster and more efficiently. Whereas, Fin AI Agent is an actual chatbot that responds on its own to customers’ questions. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer automation features to streamline workflows and improve efficiency, but the way they do it is different. You can publish your knowledge base articles and divide them by categories and also integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience. It’s modern, it’s smooth, it looks great and it has so many advanced features.

However, when it comes to choosing between the two, it ultimately depends on the specific needs and preferences of the user. When choosing a customer support tool, it’s essential to consider what other users have to say about their experience with the platform. Intercom also offers an API enabling businesses to build custom integrations with their tools. 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 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. It is also not too difficult to program your own bot rules using Intercon’s system. 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 also allows Advanced AI and Advanced data privacy and protection plans, which cost $50 per month for each Advanced add-on. 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. Let us dive deeper into the offerings of Zendesk and Intercom https://chat.openai.com/ to make a comparison at a glance. This comparison is going to help you understand the features of both tools. Lastly, Intercom offers an academy that offers concise courses to help users make the most out of their Intercom experience. Boost your lead gen and sales funnels with Flows – no-code automation paths that trigger at crucial moments in the customer journey.

But with perks like more advanced chatbots, automation, and lead management capabilities, Intercom could have an edge for many users. Intercom offers reporting and analytics tools with limited capabilities for custom reporting, user behavior metrics, and advanced visualization. It also lacks advanced features like collaboration reporting, custom metrics, metric correlation, and drill-in attribution.

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. 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.

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• On the other hand, Zendesk’s customer support includes a knowledge base that’s very intuitive and easy to navigate.
• Intercom and Zendesk have implemented various security measures to protect their clients’ data.
• Test any of HelpCrunch pricing plans for free for 14 days and see our tools in action right away.
• Zendesk’s user face is quite intuitive and easy to use, allowing customers to quickly find what they are looking for.
• Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates.

Not to mention marketing and sales tools, like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Google Analytics. Zendesk lacks in-app messages and email marketing tools, which are essential for big companies with heavy client support loads. Conversely, Intercom lacks ticketing functionality, which can also be essential for big companies. Zendesk also has an Answer Bot, instantly taking your knowledge base game to the next level. It can automatically suggest relevant articles for agents to share during business hours with clients, reducing your support agents’ workload.

When it comes to customer support and services, both Intercom and Zendesk offer robust solutions. In this section, we will take a closer look at the customer support options provided by each platform. 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. 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. ProProfs Live Chat Editorial Team is a passionate group of customer service experts dedicated to empowering your live chat experiences with top-notch content.

With Messagely, you can increase your customer satisfaction and solve customers’ issues while they’re still visiting your site. In short, Zendesk is perfect for large companies looking to streamline their customer support process; Intercom is great for smaller companies looking for advanced customer service features. For basic chat and messaging, Intercom charges a flat fee of $39 per month for its basic plan with one user and $99 per month for its team plan with up to 5 users. If you want automated options, Intercom starts at either $499 or $999 per month for up to ten users, depending on the level of automation you’re looking for. If you want both customer support and CRM, you can choose between paying $79 or $125 per month per user, depending on how many advanced features you require. Again, Zendesk has surpassed the number of reviewers when compared to Intercom.

Zendesk TCO is lower than Intercom due to its ability to scale, which does not require additional cost to update the software for a growing business. It also has a transparent pricing model so businesses know the price they will incur. Lastly, the tool is easy to set up and implement, meaning no additional knowledge or expertise makes the businesses incur additional costs. Zendesk is an all-in-one omnichannel platform offering various channel integrations in one place. The dashboard of Zendesk is sleek, simple, and highly responsive, offering a seamless experience for managing customer interactions.

How to Leverage SLAs in Ticketing Software to Improve Your Customer Service

Zendesk is a customer service software company that provides businesses with a suite of tools to manage customer interactions. The company was founded zendesk vs. intercom in 2007 and today serves over 170,000 customers worldwide. Zendesk’s mission is to build software designed to improve customer relationships.

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. Intercom, on the other hand, was built for business messaging, so communication is one of their strong suits. Combine that with their prowess in automation and sales solutions, and you’ve got a really strong product that can handle myriad customer relationship needs.

While they like the ease of use this product offers its users, they’ve indeed rated them low in terms of services. Use HubSpot Service Hub to provide seamless, fast, and delightful customer service. To sum up, if you are looking for a helpdesk with no advanced AI capabilities, you can choose Intercom. Their basic plan is cheaper than Zendesk, but you’ll not get to use any of their AI-powered add-ons.

On the other hand, Intercom has all its (fewer) tools and features integrated with each other way better, which makes your experience with the tool as smooth as silk. 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. Because of the app called Intercom Messenger, one can see that their focus is less on the voice and more on the text. This is fine, as not every customer support team wants to be so available on the phone. Intercom has a full suite of email marketing tools, although they are part of a pricier package.

You can see their attention to detail in everything — from their tools to their website. Intercom doesn’t really provide free stuff, but they have a tool called Platform, which is free. The free Intercom Platform lets you see who your customers are and what they do in your workspace. It has very limited customization options in comparison to its competitors. Respond to all conversations across different messaging platforms in one place and avoid juggling between dozens of tabs. Collaborate with your teammates by easily assigning the right rep to best handle a customer query.

Since Intercom’s focus is on driving customer engagement, the interface prominently displays important features like in-app messaging and chatbots. The dashboard also provides insights into user behavior and engagement metrics. It’s characterized by a clear, organized layout with a strong focus on ticket management. The dashboard provides an overview of ticket volume, agent performance, and other key metrics. The ticket view often includes detailed information about the customer, history of interactions, and other details. Choosing the right customer service platform is critical for any business.

Then, you can begin filling in details such as your account’s name and icon and your agents’ profiles and security features. The setup can be so complex that there are tutorials by third parties to teach new users how to do it right. Intercom works with any website or web-based product and aims to be your one-way stop for all of your customer communication needs. We hope that this Intercom VS Zendesk comparison helps you choose one that matches your support, marketing, and sales needs. But in case you are in search of something beyond these two, then ProProfs Chat can be an option.

When selecting a sales CRM, you’ll want to consider its total cost of ownership (TCO). Zendesk has a low TCO because it has no hidden costs and can be easily set up without needing developers or third-party help, saving you time and money. Alternatively, Pipedrive users should prepare to pay more for even simple CRM features like email tracking, whereas email tracking is available for all Zendesk Sell plans.

It allows businesses to automate repetitive tasks, such as ticket routing and in-built responses, freeing up time for support agents to deal with more crucial cases requiring more agent attention. This automation enhances support teams’ productivity as they do not have to spend too much responding to similar complaints they have already dealt with. Considering that Zendesk and Intercom are leading the market for customer service software, it becomes difficult for businesses to choose the right tool. Sometimes, businesses do not even realize the importance of various aspects you must consider while making this choice. In this article, we comprehensively do a comparison of Zendesk vs Intercom, examining their key features, benefits, and industry use cases.

The platform converts all customer queries into “tickets” that agents can handle with ease and track till the point of resolution. When you’re choosing the right tool that can help you do this, Zendesk and Intercom are two popular names that are likely to come up. Both are known for their range of features – AI, analytics, automation, and ticketing, amongst others. There are four different subscription packages you can choose from, all of which also have Essential, Pro, and Premium options for businesses of different sizes.

Intercom does have a ticketing dashboard that has omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk. It will allow you to leverage some Intercom capabilities while keeping your account at the time-tested platform. Like Zendesk, Intercom offers its Operator bot, which automatically suggests relevant articles to clients right in a chat widget. 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. But don’t just take our word for it—listen to what customers say about why they picked Zendesk. This is not a huge difference; however, it does indicate that customers are generally more satisfied with Intercom’s offerings than Zendesk’s.

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. The only other downside is that the chat widget can feel a bit static and outdated. When comparing chatbots, it’s important to consider their level of intelligence, “trainability,” and customization.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. It makes sure that you don’t miss a single inquiry by queuing tickets for agent handling. You can configure it to assign tickets using various methods, such as skills, load balancing, and round-robin to ensure efficient handling. In the process, it streamlines collaboration between team members as well as a unified interface to manage all help resources.

Zendesk’s Answer Bot is capable of helping customers with common queries by providing canned responses and links to relevant help articles. It relies on fairly basic automation while routing more complex issues to live agents. As the more recent of the two, offering a modern look-and-feel and frictionless experience is a key magnet for Intercom. 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.

Intercom is the clear victor in terms of user experience, leaving all of its competitors in the dust. Many use cases call for different approaches, and Zendesk and Intercom are but two software solutions for each case. Visit either of their app marketplaces and look up the Intercom Zendesk integration. Like with many other apps, Zapier seems to be the best and most simple way to connect Intercom to Zendesk. No matter what Zendesk Suite plan you are on, you get workflow triggers, which are simple business rules-based actions to streamline many tasks. The learning and knowledgebase category is another one where it is a close call between Zendesk and Intercom.

As expected, the right choice between Zendesk and Intercom will depend on your budget, your company, and your needs. Easily track your service team’s performance and unlock coaching opportunities with AI-powered insights. Moreover, these are new prices as they’re in the middle of changing their pricing policy right now (and they’re definitely not getting cheaper). If you thought Zendesk’s pricing was confusing, let me introduce you to Intercom’s pricing.

Zendesk excels in its ticketing system, offering users an intuitive platform for collaboration among support agents. Its robust workflows streamline the ticket resolution system and efficiently handle all customer complaints. It also enables agents to perform customized workflow management, assign tickets to the right agent for request handling, and track the ticket’s progress.

They’re also known for their user-friendly interfaces and reliable support team. Intercom and Zendesk offer robust customer support options, including email, phone, and live chat support, comprehensive knowledge bases, and community forums. Intercom’s chatbot functionality is a standout feature, while Zendesk’s ticketing system can help resolve support issues on time. 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. Zendesk and Intercom are both incredibly powerful customer support tools, and they have their own strengths and weaknesses.

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 Chat GPT and Salesforce are also available when support needs to work with marketing and sales teams. Intercom’s reporting is average compared to Zendesk, as it offers some standard reporting and analytics tools.