Zendesk vs Intercom: Which is better?

Initially, the platform was designed to help businesses communicate with their customers through targeted messaging. However, over the years, Intercom has evolved into a complete customer communication platform with features like live chat, email marketing, and customer support. Zendesk’s ‘Explore’ feature offers robust reporting capabilities, providing insights into various aspects Chat GPT of customer service operations. This allows businesses to identify trends, monitor agent performance, and make data-driven decisions. 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.

However, if you’re interested in understanding customer behavior, product usage, and in need of AI-powered predictive insights, Intercom’s user analytics might be a better fit. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer a range of channels for businesses to interact with their customers. 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. Intercom, on the other hand, focuses on automating tasks that help improve customer engagement.

Guru GPT integrates your company’s internal knowledge with ChatGPT, making it easy to access and use information from Guru and connected apps. Zendesk which is less user-friendly and charges more for quality support, might not work for smaller businesses. What differentiates them is the kind of reports they equip your teams with. Honestly, when it comes to Zendesk, it is not the most modern tool out there.

If ticket management and workflow optimization are your primary concerns, Zendesk’s automation capabilities might be a better fit. However, if you’re looking to improve your customer’s user journey with personalized conversations, Intercom’s automation features and AI assistant are likely to be beneficial. 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. I tested both of their live chats and their support agents were answering in very quickly and right to the point. Zendesk team can be just a little bit faster depending on the time of the day.

So if an agent needs to switch from chat to phone to email (or vice versa) with a customer, it’s all on the same ticketing page. There’s even on-the-spot translation built right in, which is extremely helpful. 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.

Customer support and data security

Zendesk offers robust reporting capabilities, providing businesses with detailed insights into consumer interactions, ticketing systems, agent performance, and more. Zendesk excels with its powerful ticketing and customer support capabilities, making it ideal for streamlining service operations. Unlike Intercom, Zendesk is scalable, intuitively designed for CX, and offers a low total cost of ownership. You can also use Intercom as a customer service platform, but given its broad focus, you may not get the same level of specialized expertise. 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. Additionally, Zendesk offers a wide range of customization options, allowing users to tailor the user interface to their needs.

The features in Zendesk can scale with growing companies, so Startups can easily customize their plan to changing needs. The Essential customer support plan for individuals, startups, and businsses costs $39. This plan includes a shared inbox, unlimited articles, proactive support, and basic automation. 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.

It can filter engageable from non-engageable messages, deflect them to your agents and even alert them in case of potential PR crises, keeping your brand perception positive and proactive. A CX tool is equipped with conversational AI that can resolve a good chunk of your queries on its own. The AI acts like a smart filter, triaging through incoming issues to find and bring urgent ones, such as service disruptions, to the forefront. When an agent takes on one of these critical cases, they aren’t starting cold — they already see case histories and details such as recent service changes or recurring issues on their dashboard. This proactive information delivery cuts down on the typical hunt-and-peck for details, enabling agents to address the problem directly. Zendesk also offers a community forum where users can ask questions and get help from others.

And according to research, brands adopting omnichannel customer service software experience a decline in cost per contact by 7.5% every year, so having this feature is definitely a plus. The company’s products include a ticketing system, live chat software, knowledge base software, and a customer satisfaction survey tool. Zendesk also offers a number of integrations with third-party applications. 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.

Some of the popular integrations include Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and Google Analytics. Zendesk’s integration with these tools allows businesses to track customer interactions, personalize messaging, and automate workflows. Intercom offers a wide range of integrations with various third-party tools, including CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and analytics tools. Intercom’s integration with these tools allows businesses to track customer interactions, personalize messaging, and automate workflows.

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. Intercom does have a ticketing dashboard that has omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk. 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. If you want to test Intercom vs Zendesk before deciding on a tool for good, they both provide free 14-day trials.

Connecting Zendesk Support and Zendesk Sell allows its customer service and sales-oriented wholesale team to work together effortlessly. 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.

Zendesk boasts incredibly robust sales capabilities and security features. 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.

Just keep in mind that, while Intercom’s upfront pricing may seem cheaper, there are additional costs to factor in. When factoring in AI-first tools for all agents, multi-channel campaigns, and proactive support, it could easily cost significantly more than Zendesk. Similar to Zendesk, Intercom’s pricing reserves its most powerful automations for higher-paying customers, the good news is that Fin AI comes with all plans.

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. 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. This structure may appeal to businesses with specific needs but could be less predictable for budget-conscious organizations.

The integration of apps plays a significant role in creating a seamless experience or a 360-degree view of customers across the company. Zendesk allows the integration of 1300 apps ranging from billing apps, marketing tools, and other software, adding overall to the value of the business. It also excels in the silo approach in a company and allows easy access to information to anyone in the company through this integration. Zendesk’s automation features are limited to offering basic automation to streamline repetitive tasks. While Zeendesk provides automation services for ticket support systems, notifications, chatbots, etc., it may not be an extensive feature compared to Intercom. Considering that Zendesk and Intercom are leading the market for customer service software, it becomes difficult for businesses to choose the right tool.

Intercom offers a simplistic dashboard with a detailed view of all customer details in one place. 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.

Zendesk’s chatbots are simple to deploy and are highly effective in providing automated customer support. They can handle simple queries, freeing up your support agents to deal with more complex issues. 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.

It’s also highly customizable, so you can adjust it according to the style of your website or product. Whether you’ve just started searching for a customer support tool or have been using one for a while, chances are you know about Zendesk and Intercom. 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. Use ticketing systems to efficiently manage high ticket volume, deliver timely customer support, and boost agent productivity. Zendesk AI is the intelligence layer that infuses CX intelligence into every step of the customer journey. 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.

Messaging Platform

This makes it a strong choice for businesses prioritizing customer engagement. Choosing the right customer service platform is critical for any business. It enables you to streamline all incoming customer queries, and ensure your support team is equipped to provide prompt, efficient solutions. Intercom also offers reporting features, but they aren’t as extensive as Zendesk’s.

However, for more advanced CRM needs like lead management and sales forecasting, Intercom may not make the cut, unfortunately. What’s even cooler is its ability to use AI to forecast customer behavior. Agents can use this to anticipate and proactively address issues before the escalate, or even arise in the first place.

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.

Both Zendesk and Intercom have knowledge bases to help customers get the most out of their platforms. Although it can be pricey, Zendesk’s platform is a very robust one, with powerful reporting and insight tools, a large number of integrations, and excellent scalability features. You need a complete customer service platform that’s seamlessly integrated and AI-enhanced. Yes, you can continue using Intercom as the consumer-facing CRM experience, but integrate with Zendesk for customer service in the back end for more customer support functionality. These include chatbot automation features, customer segmentation, and targeted SMS messaging to reach the right audience efficiently. Customerly’s Helpdesk is designed to boost efficiency and collaboration with the help of AI.

• This allows businesses to identify trends, monitor agent performance, and make data-driven decisions.
• The company was founded in 2007 and today serves over 170,000 customers worldwide.
• Some of the popular integrations include Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and Google Analytics.
• Zendesk’s automation features are limited to offering basic automation to streamline repetitive tasks.

While it is designed to help support agents be efficient,  it might not be as visually appealing or intuitive for users who aren’t very tech-savvy. The platform converts all customer queries into “tickets” that agents can handle with ease and track till the point of resolution. To sum things up, Zendesk is a great customer support oriented tool which will be a great choice for big teams with various departments. Intercom feels more wholesome and is more customer success oriented, but can be too costly for smaller companies.

Popular Features

Sometimes, businesses do not even realize the importance of various aspects you must consider while making this choice. Intercom is ideal for personalized messaging, while Zendesk offers robust ticket management and self-service options. Zendesk has a help center that is open to all to find out answers to common questions. Apart from this feature, the customer support options at Zendesk are quite limited.

On the other hand, Zendesk is a more comprehensive customer support tool that offers a broader range of features, including ticket management, knowledge base creation, and reporting and analytics. Its robust ticketing system and automation capabilities make it an excellent option for businesses with high-volume customer support needs. Additionally, Zendesk’s customizable dashboards and reporting features provide valuable insights into customer support performance. Intercom’s customer service software offers a range of features designed to enhance the customer experience. It lets businesses set up multilingual help centers, so customers from different regions can self-serve. With tools for managing workloads and assigning tasks, it ensures that issues reach the right agents efficiently.

Analytics and reporting

Intercom’s app store has popular integrations for things like WhatsApp, Stripe, Instagram, and Slack. There is a really useful one for Shopify to provide customer support for e-commerce operations. HubSpot and Salesforce are also available when support needs to work with marketing and sales teams. Chatbots are automated customer support tools that can assist with low-level ticket triage and ticket routing in real-time. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. How easy it is to program a chatbot and how effective a chatbot is at assisting human reps is an important factor for this category.

Their help desk software has a single inbox to handle customer inquiries. Your customer service agents can leave private notes for each other and enjoy automatic ticket assignments to the right specialists. It’s designed so well that you really enjoy staying in their inbox and communicating with clients. Intercom also has a mobile app available for both Android and iOS, which makes it easy to stay connected with customers even when away from the computer. The app includes features like automated messages and conversation routing — so businesses can manage customer conversations more efficiently.

Simply because of just how easily one puts your customer engagement on auto-pilot so you can intervene when you absolutely need to. A good customer experience platform should be powered with state-of-the-art AI to help you with the following use cases. Still, they are independent picks by Sprinklr’s editorial team based on our research and publicly available information on the review sites.

Intercom has a community forum where users can engage with each other and gain insights from their experiences. Before you make your choice, check out Messagely’s features and compare them to discover which platform is best for you. While both Zendesk and Intercom are great and robust platforms, none of them are able to provide you with the same value Messagely gives you at such an  affordable price. Messagely also provides you with a shared inbox so anyone from your team can follow up with your users, regardless of who the user was in contact with first.

Today, Zendesk is used by over 200,000 businesses worldwide, including Airbnb, Uber, and Slack. The platform is known for its ease of use, customizable workflows, and extensive integrations with other business tools. Again, Zendesk has surpassed the number of reviewers when compared to Intercom.

Intercom isn’t as great with sales, but it allows for better communication. With Intercom, you can keep track of your customers and what they do on your website in real time. Like Zendesk, Intercom allows you to chat with online visitors and assist with their issues.

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. It allows businesses to organize and share helpful documentation or answer customers’ common questions. Self-service resources always relieve the burden on customer support teams, and both of our subjects have this tool in their packages.

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. When deciding between Intercom and Zendesk, businesses should consider their specific needs and goals.

At first glance, they seem like simple three packages for small, medium, and big businesses. But it’s virtually impossible to predict what you’ll pay for Intercom at the end of the day. They charge not only for customer service representative seats but also for feature usage and offer tons of features as custom add-ons at additional cost. So when it comes to chatting features, the choice is not really Intercom vs Zendesk. The latter offers a chat widget that is simple, outdated, and limited in customization options, while the former puts all of its resources into its messenger.

Its ability to scale with the businesses makes it an attractive option for growing companies. Its customizable options enable businesses to quickly gain value from its features by enhancing agility. Zendesk is an all-in-one omnichannel platform offering various channel integrations in one place.

However, we will say that Intercom just edges past Zendesk when it comes to self-service resources. For large-scale businesses, the budget for such investments is usually higher than for startups, but they need to analyze if the investment is worth it. They need to comprehensively analyze if they are getting the value of the invested money. With only the Enterprise tier offering round-the-clock email, phone, and chat help, Zendesk support is sharply separated by tiers. This way, your clients will never have to repeat themselves or get frustrated because their new representative doesn’t know their background.

Zendesk is among the industry’s best ticketing and customer support software, and most of its additional functionality is icing on the proverbial cake. Intercom, on the other hand, is designed to be more of a complete solution for sales, marketing, and customer relationship nurturing. 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.

The top-tier plan includes SSO and identity management integrations for secure data access. Both software solutions offer core customer service features like live chat for sales, help desk management capabilities, and customer self-service options like a knowledge base. They’re also known for their user-friendly interfaces and reliable support team. Zendesk and Intercom are both incredibly powerful customer support tools, and they have their own strengths and weaknesses.

This is especially helpful for smaller businesses that may not need a lot of features. 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, zendesk vs intercom 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.

The Zendesk Help Center allows for the easy creation and grouping of resources, offering customizability to match your brand. It’s a comprehensive knowledge base where customers can find answers to common questions, reducing the need for direct customer support. A customer service department is only as good as its support team members, and these highly-prized employees need to rely on one another. Tools that allow support agents to communicate and collaborate are important aspect of customer service software. Intercom’s AI has the transformative power to enhance customer service by offering multilingual support and contextual responses. Fin uses seamless communication across customer bases, breaking language barriers and catering to global audiences.

Intercom actively enhances its analytics capabilities by leveraging AI to forecast customer behavior. This feature helps businesses anticipate and address potential issues before they escalate. Intercom’s analytics focuses more on user behavior and engagement metrics, with insights into customer interactions, and important retention metrics. Although quite functional, Zendesk’s interface can sometimes feel a bit dated compared to other helpdesks.

Plus, Aura AI’s global, multilingual support breaks down language barriers, making it an ideal solution for businesses with an international customer base. Unlike Zendesk, which requires more initial setup for advanced automation, Customerly’s out-of-the-box automation features are designed to be user-friendly and easily customizable. Not to brag 😏, but we specifically developed our platform to address the shortcomings in the current market. By going with Customerly for your customer service needs, you can get the best of both worlds (Zendesk and Intercom), plus some extra features and benefits you haven’t even thought of, yet. You can then add features like advanced AI agents, workforce management, and QA. Zendesk offers a slightly broader selection of plans, with an enterprise solution for customers with bespoke needs.

Let’s look at how help desk features are represented in our examinees’ solutions. The Intercom versus Zendesk conundrum is probably the greatest problem in customer service software. They both offer some state-of-the-art core functionality and numerous unusual features. Basically, if you have a complicated support process, go with Zendesk for its help desk functionality. If you’re a sales-oriented corporation, use Intercom for its automation options.

Intercom is an excellent option for businesses prioritizing personalized communication and customer engagement. Its live chat feature and ability to send targeted messages and notifications make it a powerful tool for customer https://chat.openai.com/ engagement. Intercom’s user-friendly interface and easy integration with other tools make it a popular choice for many businesses. One of the standout features of Zendesk’s customer support is its ticketing system.

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. 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?

So when I realized lots of companies actually prefer Zendesk over Intercom, I was surprised. Let’s delve deeper into their features to see how they fare in various categories. Our mission is to break apart what CRM is and means.Here we discuss anything that helps create more meaningful lasting work relationships.

Plus, our transparent pricing doesn’t have hidden fees or endless add-ons, so customers know exactly what they’re paying for and can calculate the total cost of ownership ahead of time. In comparison, Intercom’s confusing pricing structure that features multiple add-ons may be unsuitable for small businesses. Zendesk’s user face is quite intuitive and easy to use, allowing customers to quickly find what they are looking for. Additionally, the platform allows users to customize their experience by setting up automation workflows, creating ticket rules, and utilizing analytics. One of the things that sets Zendesk apart from other customer service software providers is its focus on design. The company’s products are built with an emphasis on simplicity and usability.

But sooner or later, you’ll have to decide on the subscription plan, and here’s what you’ll have to pay. If you’re already using Intercom and want to continue using it as the front-end CRM experience, integrating with Zendesk can improve it. The bank seizes this opportunity to reach out with a well-informed proposal.