Zendesk vs Intercom A Detailed Comparison

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. The highlight of Zendesk’s ticketing software is its omnichannel-ality (omnichannality?). 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. 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.

Ultimately, your choice should reflect whether your priority is comprehensive customer support (Zendesk) or a blend of CRM and sales support (Intercom). 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. 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.

A collection of these reports can enable your business to identify the right resources responsible for bringing engagement to your business. Zendesk, just like its competitor, offers a knowledge base solution that is easy to customize. Their users can create a knowledge repository to create articles or edit existing ones as per the changes in the services or product. It also provides detailed reports on how each self-help article performs in your knowledge base and helps you identify how each piece can be improved further.

Intercom vs. Zendesk: the final verdict

You can either track your performance on a pre-built dashboard or customize and build one for yourself. This customized dashboard will help you see metrics that you’d like to focus on regularly. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer varying flavors when it comes to curating the whole customer support experience. While both Zendesk and Intercom offer robust features, their pricing models might still be a hurdle for businesses looking to just start out with a help desk on a comparatively smaller budget. So, the actual pricing of Intercom would depend on whether or not you’re going to need their AI features – the AI Copilot and AI Agent. The AI Copilot is limited to assisting ten conversations per support agent and for anything more, it costs $35 per month per agent.

The dashboard of Zendesk is sleek, simple, and highly responsive, offering a seamless experience for managing customer interactions. Zendesk chat allows you to talk with your visitors in real time through a small chat bar at the bottom of your site. When visitors click on it, they’ll be directed to one of your customer service teammates.

You can use the dashboards to understand customer journeys in-depth and identify areas of improvement. While it helps track some basic support metrics, Intercom’s strength lies in helping companies understand user behavior, product usage, and friction points along the journey. It offers robust features for automating routine tasks such as ticket routing, creating queues, creating ticket statuses and more.

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. Zendesk also offers detailed reports that can be shared with others and enable team members to collaborate on them simultaneously.

Zendesk vs Intercom: Which one should you choose?

For instance, Zendesk’s automation rules can help support teams automatically assign tickets based on specific criteria – like subject line or specific keywords. 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. So yeah, two essential things that Zendesk lacks in comparison to Intercom are in-app messages and email marketing tools.

Over the years, Zendesk has expanded its offerings to include features such as live chat, knowledge base, and customer feedback. Intercom is an all-in-one business communications tool that offers support, marketing, and sales features. It is known for its automation options and customizable capabilities, making it a popular choice for small-to-medium businesses. On the other hand, Zendesk is primarily a customer service platform that now offers a sales module. It is designed for larger enterprises and offers more comprehensive features than Intercom.

Zendesk vs Intercom: Which is Better for Customer Care

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. 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. There are many features to help bigger customer service teams collaborate more effectively, such as private notes or a real-time view of who’s handling a given ticket at the moment.

Fin enables businesses to set new standards for offering customer service. 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.

This can be a valuable resource for users looking for solutions to specific problems or wanting to learn more about the platform. Intercom also offers a community forum where users can ask questions and get help from other users. While they like the ease of use this product offers its users, they’ve indeed rated them low in terms of services.

When it comes to Sprinklr, you can rest easy knowing no piece of consumer intelligence slips through the cracks. To ensure every interaction racks in minimal customer effort scores, you need all your internal tools (like CRM, marketing automation and research tools) to talk to each other. Sprinklr dissolves point-solution chaos to help you deliver consistent omnichannel customer experiences to all your customers at every single touchpoint, without fail, each time.

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 zendesk vs intercom 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.

Startups & Small Businesses

Zendesk’s mission is to build software designed to improve customer relationships. According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2023, 78 percent of business leaders want to combine their customer service and sales data. The Zendesk sales CRM integrates seamlessly with the Zendesk Suite, our top-of-the-line customer service software. Unlike Zendesk, Pipedrive is limited to third-party integrations and doesn’t connect with native customer support software. Podium simplifies customer interactions with tools for text marketing, payment handling, review collection, live chat and an integrated agent inbox. With AI-driven responses available around the clock, Podium boosts lead conversion and revenue.

Intercom’s pricing isn’t very transparent, with the starter pack costing $74 per month for two seats. The lack of transparency can make it harder for businesses to determine the actual costs and compare different plans. However, this is somewhat subjective, and depending on your business needs and favorite tools, you may argue we got it all mixed up, and Intercom is truly superior. 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.

Sales

Zendesk has traditionally been more focused on customer support management, while Intercom has been more focused on live support solutions like its chat solution. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. When deciding on choosing between Zendesk or Pipedrive for your business, there is a lot to keep in mind. With Zendesk, you can connect your sales and support teams, empowering them with the information they need to deliver better customer experiences.

Zendesk would be a perfect option for businesses that are searching for a well-integrated support system. It offers a suite that compiles help desk, live chat, and knowledge base to their Chat GPT user base. This enables them to speed up the support process and build experiences that customers like. This live chat service provider offers 200+ integrations to its user base.

To enhance customer satisfaction, businesses must equip their teams with customer support solutions and customer service software. Zendesk is a great option for large companies or companies that are looking for a very strong sales and customer service platform. It offers more support features and includes more advanced analytics and reports. These products range from customer communication tools to a fully-fledged CRM.

Eliminate guesswork & resolve customer issues at ⚡️ speed

This is where software platforms such as Zendesk and Intercom come into play, offering customer-centric tools like ticketing, issue resolution, automation, and messaging. But with each software boasting its unique strengths, which one should you choose? Let’s dive in and dissect the two, based on an in-depth trial experience. This method helps offer https://chat.openai.com/ more personalized support as well as get faster response and resolution times. It also provides mid-sized businesses with comprehensive customer relationship management software, as they require more advanced features to handle customer support. Similarly, the ability of Zendesk to scale also makes it the best fit for enterprise-level organizations.

• What’s more, we support live video support for moments when your customers need in-depth guidance.
• From there, you can include FAQs, announcements, and article guides and then save them into pre-set lists for your customers to explore.
• One of Zendesk’s other key strengths has also been its massive library of integrations.
• The former is one of the oldest and most reliable solutions on the market, while the latter sets the bar high regarding innovative and out-of-the-box features.
• The Zendesk chat tool has most of the necessary features, like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers, and live chat analytics.

And while many other chatbots take forever to set up, you can set up your first chatbot in under five minutes. However, if you’re looking for a streamlined, all-in-one messaging platform, there is no better option than Messagely. You don’t have to pay per contact on your database, and you there are many free features you can use. You can also contact Zendesk support 24/7, whereas Intercom support only has live agents during business hours. It’s divided into about 20 topics with dozens of articles each, so navigating through it can be complicated. Since Intercom is so intuitive, the time you’ll need to spend training new users on how to interact with the platform is greatly reduced.

• Agents can easily view ongoing interactions, and take over from Aura AI at any moment if they feel intervention is needed.
• One stand out automation feature is its co-pilot, also known as Fin AI Copilot.
• Powered by Explore, Zendesk’s reporting capabilities are pretty impressive.
• Over the years, Zendesk has expanded its offerings to include features such as live chat, knowledge base, and customer feedback.

Zendesk may be unable to give the agents more advanced features or customization options for chatbots. Zendesk and Intercom offer help desk management solutions to their users. While the company is smaller than Zendesk, Intercom has earned a reputation for building high-quality customer service software. The company’s products include a messaging platform, knowledge base tools, and an analytics dashboard. Many businesses choose to work with Intercom because of its focus on personalization and flexibility, allowing companies to completely customize their customer service experience. Gainsight offers a solid platform tailored to improve customer experience management.

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.

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. You can create articles, share them internally, group them for users, and assign them as responses for bots—all pretty standard fare. Intercom can even integrate with Zendesk and other sources to import past help center content. I just found Zendesk’s help center to be slightly better integrated into their workflows and more customizable. What’s really nice about this is that even within a ticket, you can switch between communication modes without changing views.

Its tiered plans offer everything from basic contact management to advanced features and automation, making it a solid choice for diverse business needs. Zendesk was founded in 2007 by Mikkel Svane, Morten Primdahl, and Alexander Aghassipour. The platform was created to provide a simple and effective way for businesses to manage customer support tickets.

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. 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. They fall within roughly the same price range, that most SMEs and larger enterprises should find within their budget. Both also use a two-pronged pricing system, based on the number of agents/seats and the level of features needed.

ProProfs Live Chat Editorial Team is a passionate group of customer service experts dedicated to empowering your live chat experiences with top-notch content. We stay ahead of the curve on trends, tackle technical hurdles, and provide practical tips to boost your business. With our commitment to quality and integrity, you can be confident you’re getting the most reliable resources to enhance your customer support initiatives. If you are looking for more integration options and budget is not an issue, Intercom can be the perfect live chat solution for your business.

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. ThriveDesk empowers small businesses to manage real-time customer communications. Intercom’s ticketing system and help desk SaaS is also pretty great, just not as amazing as Zendesk’s. Their customer service management tools have a shared inbox for support teams.