Zendesk vs Intercom: Which Ticketing Tool is Best for You?

Businesses should carefully evaluate their requirements and choose the best method for their needs and budget. Zendesk’s user interface is also modern and user-friendly but with a slightly different design aesthetic than Intercom. The dashboard is highly customizable, allowing users to access the features they use most frequently easily. The clean and professional design focuses on bold typography and contrasting colors. They’ve been rated as one of the easy live chat solutions with more integrated options. The only relief is that they do reach out to customers, but it gets too late.

Users can submit support tickets through the platform, and customer support teams can manage and track those tickets to ensure they are resolved promptly. This feature ensures that users receive the support they need when needed. One of the standout features of Intercom’s customer support is its chatbot functionality. The chatbot can help users with common support issues and answer frequently asked questions. This feature can reduce the workload of customer support teams and provide faster response times to users. Intercom and Zendesk are two of the most popular customer support tools available.

Lastly, Intercom offers an academy that offers concise courses to help users make the most out of their Intercom experience. 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. Easily track your service team’s performance and unlock coaching opportunities with AI-powered insights. 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.

Zendesk vs Intercom in 2023: Detailed Analysis of Features, Pricing, and More

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.

Utilizing modern CRM software can help your sales team boost their productivity and sales performance. Pipedrive also includes lead management features like automatic lead nurturing, labeling, and bulk imports. However, Pipedrive does not include native desktop text messaging features. One user noted that, in some cases, it can take Pipedrive at least eight hours to populate saved leads, making it difficult to quickly communicate with hot leads. CX platforms empower you with social listening, using which you can monitor the digital space for specific keywords and sentiments related to your brand.

Since both are such well-established market leader companies, you can rest assured that whichever one you choose will offer a quality customer service solution. 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. Today, both companies offer a broad range of customer support features, making them both strong contenders in the market.

One of Zendesk’s other key strengths has also been its massive library of integrations. It works seamlessly with over 1,000 business tools, like Salesforce, Slack, and Shopify. With its features and pricing, Zendesk is geared toward businesses that full in the range from mid-sized to enterprise-level. Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates. 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.

Both Zendesk and Intercom offer automation features to streamline workflows and improve efficiency, but the way they do it is different. It’s modern, it’s smooth, it looks great and it has so many advanced features. Also, their in-app messenger is worth a separate mention as it’s one of their distinctive tools (especially since Zendesk doesn’t really have one). With Intercom you can send targeted email, push, and in-app messages which can be based on the most relevant time or behavior triggers.

However, you’ll likely end up paying more for Zendesk, and in-app messenger and other advanced customer communication tools will not be included. Zendesk pricing is divided between a customer support product called “Zendesk for support”, and a fully-fledged CRM called “Zendesk for sales”. Depending on your needs, you can set up Intercom on your website or mobile app and add your automations. Setting up Intercom help centers is also very easy and intuitive, with no previous knowledge required. Hit the ground running – Master Tidio quickly with our extensive resource library.

Qualtrics XM is a tool designed to optimize customer interactions by combining surveys, feedback and data into one platform, giving businesses a clear view of customer experiences. From tracking brand performance to diving deep into user experience, Qualtrics XM helps you respond swiftly to market shifts and fine-tune your strategy with actionable insights. Zendesk also offers various integrations with third-party tools, including CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and analytics tools.

Its Gainsight CS tool provides a comprehensive view of your customers, making it easier to boost product adoption, reduce churn and build customer communities. Top companies widely use it for its ability to deliver real-time insights into customer behaviors and https://chat.openai.com/ sentiments. Intercom and Zendesk offer a range of features to help businesses manage their customer interactions. While Intercom focuses more on customer messaging and personalization, Zendesk focuses more on traditional customer support ticket management.

Zendesk has sales forecasting features that leverage previous sales data to help predict future outcomes, including revenue growth, cash flow, and the likelihood of winning a deal. This data can help eliminate unwanted surprises and give your sales team valuable insights to improve their strategy. Pipedrive uses historical data to help predict cash flow and provide performance metrics for your sales team.

To sum it all up, you need to consider various aspects of your business before choosing CRM software. While deciding between Zendesk and Intercom, you should ensure the customization, AI automation, and functionalities align with your business goals. Intecom’s pricing strategies are not as transparent as Zendesk’s pricing. While Zendesk features are plenty, someone using it for the first time can find it overwhelming.

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. Intercom offers fewer integrations, supporting just over 450 third-party apps. This makes it challenging to customize the software as your business grows. Furthermore, data on customer reviews, installation numbers, and ecommerce integrations is not readily available. Conversely, Intercom has a shared inbox tool that routes conversations from every channel, including live chat, email, SMS, and more, into one place. However, it offers a limited channel scope compared to Zendesk, and users will have to get paid add-ons for channels like WhatsApp.

On the other hand, Intercom’s AI-powered chatbots and messaging are designed to enhance your marketing and sales efforts, giving you an edge in the competitive market. Experience the comprehensive power of Intercom for effective customer communication, automation, support tools, integrations, and analytics. As your business grows, so does the volume of customer inquiries and support tickets. Managing everything manually is becoming increasingly difficult, and you need a robust customer support platform to streamline your operations.

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. 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. On one hand, Zendesk offers a great many features, way more than Intercom, but it lacks in-app messenger and email marketing tools. 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. Both Zendesk and Intercom provide omnichannel messaging dashboards, which allow companies to communicate with customers through various channels in a seamless manner.

Intercom’s Integration

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.

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. Zendesk also offers a straightforward interface to operators that helps them identify the entire interaction pathway with the customers. Compared to being detailed, Zendesk gives a tough competition to Intercom. Operators can easily switch from one conversation to another, therefore helping operators manage more interactions simultaneously. Zendesk has also introduced its chatbot to help its clients send automated answers to some frequently asked questions to stay ahead in the competitive marketplace.

Zendesk also packs some pretty potent tools into their platform, so you can empower your agents to do what they do with less repetition. I tested both options (using Zendesk’s Suite Professional trial and Intercom’s Support trial) and found clearly defined differences between the two. Here’s what you need to know about Zendesk vs. Intercom as customer support and relationship management tools. Intercom live chat is modern, smooth, and has many advanced features that other chat tools lack.

Zendesk is quite famous for designing its platform to be intuitive and its tools to be quite simple to learn. This is aided by the fact that the look and feel of Zendesk’s user interface are neat and minimal, with few cluttering features. For Intercom’s pricing plan, on the other hand, there is much less information on their website. There is a Starter plan for small businesses at $74 per month billed annually, and there are add-ons like a WhatsApp add-on at $9 per user per month or surveys at $49 per month. Intercom has limited scalability compared to Zendesk, which is unsuitable for large-scale enterprises.

With Zendesk, you can use lead tracking features to filter and segment your leads in real time. For example, you can create a smart list that only includes leads that haven’t responded to your message, allowing you to separate prospects for lead nurturing. You can then leverage customizable sequences, email automation, and desktop text messaging to help keep these prospects engaged. Whether you’re looking for a CRM for small businesses or an enterprise, the Zendesk sales CRM has the flexibility to grow with you, supporting up to 2 million deals across all of our plans. On the other hand, entry-level Pipedrive users are limited to only 3,000 open deals per company, making it an insufficient CRM for enterprises and growing companies. The goal of CX software is to optimize these interactions to increase customer loyalty and retention by making the experience smoother and more responsive.

Other customer service add-ons with Zendesk include custom training and professional services. 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.

Pricing Structure

However, the latter is more of a support and ticketing solution, while Intercom is CRM functionality-oriented. This means it’s a customer relationship management platform rather than anything else. If you thought Zendesk prices were confusing, let me introduce you to Intercom prices.

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. Triggers should prove especially useful for agents, allowing them to do things like automate notifications for actions like ticket assignments, ticket closing/reopening, or new ticket creation.

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. Core features include automated support powered by a knowledge base, a streamlined ticketing system built around messaging, and a powerful inbox to centralize all customer queries. Intercom’s chatbots not only provide automated customer support but also come with advanced features and customizability without sacrificing simplicity.

It is crucial to note that software or platforms may evolve over time and the company may address some of these concerns in newer updates or versions. Redefine customer service zendesk vs intercom with an AI-powered platform that unifies voice, digital and social channels. Power channel-less interactions and seamless resolution no matter the channel of contact.

Use HubSpot Service Hub to provide seamless, fast, and delightful customer service. 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.

Zendesk offers a free 30-day trial, after which customers will need to upgrade to one of their paid plans. The last thing you want is your sales data or the contact information of potential customers to end up in the wrong hands. Because of this, you’ll want to make sure Chat GPT you’re selecting a cloud-based CRM, like Zendesk, with strong security features. 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.

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. Although Zendesk isn’t hard to use, it’s not a perfectly smooth experience either. Users report feeling as though the interface is outdated and cluttered and complain about how long it takes to set up new features and customize existing ones. After this, you’ll have to set up your workflows, personalizing your tickets and storing them by topic. You can then add automations and triggers, such as automatically closing a ticket or sending a message to a user.

Intercom feels modern and is more client-success-oriented, but it can be too costly for smaller companies. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how its tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. 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, on the other hand, can be a complicated system, creating a steep learning curve for new users.

Automation Tools

After an in-depth analysis such as this, it can be pretty challenging for your business to settle with either option. That’s why it would be better to review where both the options would be ideal to use. Now that we know a little about both tools, it is time to make an in-depth analysis and identify which one of these will be perfect for your business.

In this article, we comprehensively do a comparison of Zendesk vs Intercom, examining their key features, benefits, and industry use cases. By exploring their distinct offerings, we aim to assist businesses in making informed decisions when selecting a customer service platform. If your goal is to deliver outstanding customer support to your audience, then Zendesk is a good option. It comes with a unified omnichannel dashboard, custom reports, and an advanced ticketing system.

• This structure may appeal to businesses with specific needs but could be less predictable for budget-conscious organizations.
• Its tiered plans offer everything from basic contact management to advanced features and automation, making it a solid choice for diverse business needs.
• Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates.
• Its proactive support features, unified inbox, and customizable bots are highly beneficial for businesses looking to engage customers dynamically and manage conversations effortlessly.

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 to make a comparison at a glance.

One of Zendesk’s standout features that we need to shine a spotlight on is its extensive marketplace of third-party integrations and extensions. Imagine having the power to connect your helpdesk solution with a wide range of tools and applications that your team already uses. Whether it’s syncing data with your CRM, enhancing communication via messaging platforms, or automating tasks with productivity apps, Zendesk makes it possible. This makes it an ideal choice for businesses looking to engage customers directly within their product, app or website. It also supports email and other channels – like Whatsapp, SMS, social media channels and more, through integrations. But its core strength lies in providing a seamless, conversational experience for customers.

It’s great, it’s convenient, it’s not nearly as advanced as the one by Zendesk. Just as Zendesk, Intercom also offers its own Operator bot which will automatically suggest relevant articles to customers who ask for help. Zendesk also provides automation features, but they aren’t as extensive as Intercom’s.

Configure Settings

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. 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. If you create a new chat with the team, land on a page with no widget, and go back to the browser for some reason, your chat will puff. Given that we’re neither Intercom nor Zendesk, we ourselves were curious to see how these two titans of customer service differ. Learn how top CX leaders are scaling personalized customer service at their companies.

• Intercom generally receives positive feedback for its customer support, with users appreciating the comprehensive features and team-oriented tools.
• When comparing Zendesk and Intercom, evaluating their core features and functionalities is essential to determine which platform best suits your organization’s customer support needs.
• You’d need to chat with Intercom sales team for get the costs for the Premium subscription, though.

Ultimately, the choice between these two platforms will depend on the specific needs of the business and the type of customer interactions they are looking to manage. 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. Intercom’s CRM utility is a solid foundation for managing customer relationships and sales in one platform. Intercom offers advanced customer service through its automated functions and is suitable for businesses looking for a sophisticated customer support solution.

With Pipedrive, users have access to visual reporting dashboards, but adding custom fields is limited to their Professional, Power, and Enterprise plans. Intercom’s live chat reports aren’t just offering what your customers are doing or whether they are satisfied with your services. They offer more detailed insights like lead generation sources, a complete message report to track customer engagement, and detailed information on the support team’s performance.

Both Zendesk and Intercom have integration libraries, and you can also use a connecting tool like Zapier for added integrations and add-ons. 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. 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. There are even automations to help with things like SLAs, or service level agreements, to do things like send out notifications when headlights are due.

Its suite of tools goes beyond traditional ticketing and focuses on customer engagement and messaging automation. From in-app chat to personalized autoresponders, Intercom provides a unified experience across multiple channels, creating a support ecosystem that nurtures and converts leads. Intercom, while it doesn’t offer an omnichannel dashboard, is still robust in its ticketing capabilities. Intercom offers extensive automation features for ticket management, enabling businesses to streamline and speed up their customer service. When it comes to utility, Zendesk’s utility may not be as robust as a pure CRM solution. However, customers do have the option to go to Zendesk Sell for a more robust experience.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Intercom has more customization features for features like bots, themes, triggers, and funnels. 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.

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. When making your decision, consider factors such as your budget, the scale of your business, and your specific growth plans. Explore alternative options like ThriveDesk if you’re looking for a more budget-conscious solution that aligns with your customer support needs. Both Zendesk and Intercom have AI capabilities that deserve special mention. Zendesk’s AI (Fin) helps with automated responses, ensuring your customers get quick answers.

If you’re still on the fence about which platform to choose, consider exploring Tidio as a strong alternative. Tidio stands out with its advanced AI-powered chatbots and seamless automated workflows, making customer interactions efficient and personalized. 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. 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.

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. 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.

This helps companies resolve common customer queries without any human intervention. Zendesk’s customer support is also very fast, though their live chat is only available for registered users. Intercom can function as a standalone CRM, allowing businesses to track and manage customer interactions efficiently. However, larger businesses might need to supplement it with additional services for a more comprehensive solution. The platform’s omnichannel dashboard provides a seamless experience for agents, enabling streamlined resolution processes. Zendesk’s ticketing system allows for support tickets to be generated, tracked effectively, and routed to the most appropriate support team agent.

What’s more, it helps its clients build an integrated community forum and help center to improve the support experience in real-time. ProProfs Live Chat Editorial Team is a diverse group of professionals passionate about customer support and engagement. We update you on the latest trends, dive into technical topics, and offer insights to elevate your business.

Once you add them all to the picture, their existing plans can turn out to be quite expensive. Seamlessly integrate Intercom with popular third-party tools and platforms, centralizing customer data and improving workflow efficiency. Experience targeted communication with Intercom’s automation and segmentation features. Create personalized messages for specific customer segments, driving engagement and satisfaction. The platform also allows teams to track queries, enabling supervisors to monitor progress and ensure timely responses. If you prioritize detailed support performance metrics and the ability to create custom reports, Zendesk’s reporting capabilities are likely to be more appealing.

Overall, Zendesk has a slight edge over Intercom when it comes to ticketing capabilities. It provides a variety of customer service automation features like auto-closing tickets, setting auto-responses, and creating chat triggers to keep tickets moving automatically. The highlight of Zendesk is its help desk ticketing system, which brings several customer communication channels to one location. The software allows agents to switch between tickets seamlessly, leading to better customer satisfaction. Whether an agent wants to transition from live chat to phone or email with a customer, it’s all possible on the same ticketing page.