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

Use them to quickly resolve customer question on, for example, how to use your product. You can then create linked tickets for any bug reports or issues that require further troubleshooting by technical teams. Powered by Explore, Zendesk’s reporting capabilities are pretty impressive. Right out of the gate, you’ve got dozens of pre-set report options on everything from satisfaction ratings and time in status to abandoned calls and Answer Bot resolutions. You can even save custom dashboards for a more tailored reporting experience.

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.

• Intercom focuses on real-time customer messaging, while Zendesk provides a comprehensive suite for ticketing, knowledge base, and self-service support.
• Our customer experience solution is designed to handle use cases for companies of all shapes, sizes, and industries.
• Here’s a list of criteria we’ve used to differentiate the two for you.
• Help Scout’s customer service software features a shared inbox that allows multichannel support.

It offers more support features and includes more advanced analytics and reports. These products range from customer communication tools to a fully-fledged CRM. Zendesk boasts incredibly robust sales capabilities and security features. 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. Zendesk, like Intercom, offers multilingual language functionality.

If you thought Zendesk prices were confusing, let me introduce you to the Intercom charges. It’s virtually impossible to predict what you’ll pay for Intercom at the end of the day. They charge for customer service representative https://chat.openai.com/ seats and people reached, don’t reveal their prices, and offer tons of custom add-ons at additional cost. Zendesk also has an Answer Bot, which instantly takes your knowledge base game to the next level.

This will provide live data on who your users are and what they do in your app. 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 Chat GPT multiple agents. What’s really nice about this is that even within a ticket, you can switch between communication modes without changing views. 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.

Intercom or Zendesk: Chatbot features

But with perks like more advanced chatbots, automation, and lead management capabilities, Intercom could have an edge for many users. Intercom doesn’t have native voice capabilities and its voice integrations are minimal. Its reporting tools are less comprehensive than those offered by Zendesk putting the solutions on different levels. Additionally, Intercom is missing content management and publishing workflow capabilities in its knowledge base, though they do provide self-service options. Olark’s customer service software features real-time live chat and continuous messaging.

Learn effective strategies to calculate, analyze, and reduce customer acquisition cost. Pricing for both services varies based on the specific needs and scale of your business. When comparing the user interfaces (UI) of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms exhibit distinct characteristics and strengths catering to different user preferences and needs. Many use cases call for different approaches, and Zendesk and Intercom are but two software solutions for each case. One more thing to add, there are ways to integrate Intercom to Zendesk. Visit either of their app marketplaces and look up the Intercom Zendesk integration.

Intercom stands out for its modern and user-friendly messenger functionality, which includes advanced features with a focus on automation and real-time insights. Its AI Chatbot, Fin, is particularly noted for handling complex queries efficiently. Intercom, of course, allows its customer support team to collaborate and communicate too, but overall, Zendesk wins this group. Zendesk has many amazing team collaboration and communication features, like whisper mode, which lets multiple agents chime in to help each other without the customer knowing. There is also something called warm transfers, which let one rep add contextual notes to a ticket before transferring it to another rep. You also get a side conversation tool.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. HubSpot helps seamlessly integrate customer service tools that you and your team already leverage. Ultimately, the choice between Zendesk and Intercom depends on your business needs. If you need a solution that can rapidly scale and offer strong self-service features, Zendesk may be the best fit.

This is one of the best ways to qualify high-quality leads for your business and improve your chances of closing a sale faster. If compared to Intercom’s chatbot, Zendesk offers a relatively latest platform that makes support automation possible. So far, the chatbot can transfer chats to agents or resolve less complex queries in seconds. That means all you have to do is add the code to your website and enable it right away.

Its ability to seamlessly integrate with various applications further amplifies its versatility. 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.

Best Hiver Alternative Platforms for Customer Support Teams in 2023

Here’s what you need to know about Zendesk vs. Intercom as customer support and relationship management tools. In a nutshell, none of the customer support software companies provide decent assistance for users. The cheapest plan for small businesses – Essential – costs $39 monthly per seat.

Zendesk, less user-friendly and with higher costs for quality vendor support, might not suit budget-conscious or smaller businesses. They have a 2-day SLA, no phone support, and the times I have had to work with them they have been incredibly difficult to work with. Very rarely do they understand the issue (mostly with Explore) that I am trying to communicate to them. Some of the links that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation. Intercom’s native mobile apps are good for iOS, Android, React Native, and Cordova, while Zendesk only has mobile apps for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. Every single bit of business SaaS in the world needs to leverage the efficiency power of workflows and automation.

Since Zendesk has many features, it takes a while to learn how to use the options you’ll be needing. Though Intercom chat window says that their team typically replies in a few hours, I received the answer in a couple of minutes. Their agent was always trying to convert me into a lead along the way, but heck, that’s a side effect of our job. With only the Enterprise tier offering round-the-clock email, phone, and chat help, Zendesk support is sharply separated by tiers.

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. Since Intercom doesn’t offer a CRM, its pricing is divided into basic messaging and messaging with automations. Both Zendesk and Intercom have their own “app stores” where users can find all of the integrations for each platform. 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. After signing up and creating your account, you can start filling in your information, such as your company name and branding and your agents’ profiles and information.

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. 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. 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.

Both Zendesk and Intercom have knowledge bases to help customers get the most out of their platforms. Intercom users often mention how impressed they are with its ease of use and their ability to quickly create useful tasks and set up automations. Even reviewers who hadn’t used the platform highlight how beautifully designed it is and how simple it is to interact with for both users and clients alike.

Zendesk, with its extensive toolkit, is often preferred by businesses seeking an all-encompassing customer support solution. Understanding the unique attributes of Zendesk and Intercom is crucial in this comparison. Zendesk is renowned for its comprehensive range of functionalities, including advanced email ticketing, live chat, phone support, and a vast knowledge base.

The main idea here is to rid the average support agent of a slew of mundane and repetitive tasks, giving them more time and mental energy to help customers with tougher issues. 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.

It can automatically suggest relevant articles for agents during business hours to share with clients, reducing your support agents’ workload. 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 go puff. In today’s environment, where customer expectations are constantly evolving, choosing the right ticketing tool that aligns with your business needs is crucial. 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. 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.

Help Scout includes features like self-service resources and reporting and analytics tools. It’s known for its unified agent workspace which combines different communication methods like email, social media messaging, live chat, and SMS, all in one place. This makes it easier for support teams to handle customer interactions without switching between different systems. Plus, Zendesk’s integration with various channels ensures customers can always find a convenient way to reach out.

From Answer Bot to Fin AI Agent 🤖

Like Zendesk, Intercom offers an omnichannel customer service solution. But unlike Zendesk, its software has limited features, channels, and integrations. Despite its multichannel ticketing system, Freshdesk provides a disjointed agent experience by having different interfaces for each channel. That means agents must toggle between apps to manage tickets received via chat vs. phone. In addition to its cluttered, slow, and buggy interface, it offers limited and complicated reporting, and help center tools that make it difficult to update and edit content. Customerly’s customer experience management system offers tools that blend automation with human support.

If you’re smaller more sales oriented startup with enough money, go Intercom. Easily reply to customer conversations and manage workload in a smart & automated way. Personalized messaging, in-app messaging, product tours, and chatbot capabilities set Intercom apart from Zendesk. So, by now, you can see that according to this article, Zendesk inches past Intercom as the better customer support platform.

With Messagely, you can increase your customer satisfaction and solve customers’ issues while they’re still visiting your site. 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. Their help desk is a single inbox to handle customer requests, where your customer support agents can leave private notes for each other and automatically assign requests to the right people. Intercom focuses on real-time customer messaging, while Zendesk provides a comprehensive suite for ticketing, knowledge base, and self-service support. Moreover, for users who require more dedicated and personalized support, Zendesk charges an additional premium. These premium support services can range in cost, typically between $1,500 and $2,800.

It is also ideal for businesses who are searching for conversational chatbot functionality. Their AI-powered chatbot can enable your business to boost engagement and improve marketing efforts in real-time. Zendesk is another popular customer service, support, and sales platform that enables clients to connect and engage with their customers in seconds. Just like Intercom, Zendesk can also integrate with multiple messaging platforms and ensure that your business never misses out on a support opportunity.

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. You can use it for customer support, but that’s not its core strength.

It’s customizable, allowing you to tailor the look and feel of your chat windows and create custom greetings. Olark can identify website browsing activity and provide real-time updates so you can send proactive messaging if needed. Zendesk is a great option for large companies or companies that are looking for a very strong sales and customer service platform.

You can use Zendesk Sell to track tasks, streamline workflows, improve engagement, nurture leads, and much more. Before you start, you’ll need to retrieve your Zendesk credentials and create a Zendesk API key. You can do this by going to your settings within Zendesk (click on the cog on the left hand side), and navigating to API in the ‘Channels’ section. If you’d want to test Intercom vs Zendesk before deciding on a tool for good, they both provide free trials for 14 days.

Just like Intercom, Zendesk’s customer service is quite disappointing. The only relief is that they do reach out to customers, but it gets too late. In terms of customer service, Zendesk fails to deliver an exceptional experience. This can be a bummer for many as they can always stumble upon an issue.

Like with many other apps, Zapier seems to be the best and most simple way to connect Intercom to Zendesk. Zendesk has more pricing options, and its most affordable plan is likely cheaper than Intercom’s, although without exact Intercom numbers, it is not easy to truly know the cost. As for Intercom’s general pricing structure, there are three plans, but you’ll have to contact them to get exact prices. 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. 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.

Zendesk is a ticketing system before anything else, and its ticketing functionality is overwhelming in the best possible way. With the Webhook set up, Zendesk QA will be notified of your conversation events and will automatically know to display them in the conversation body. Once in the Developer Hub, click on New app, add a descriptive name and make sure it’s marked as an Internal integration. If that’s not enough, check out the Zendesk 14-day free trial to test out all our features risk-free. You’ll see a green confirmation banner indicating the removal has been successful and synced articles will be deleted from your Articles list.

However, compared to Zendesk, Intercom might not offer the same breadth in terms of integrating a wide range of external channels. 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. When you combine the help desk with Intercom Messenger, you get added channels for customer engagement.

Intercom on the other hand lacks many ticketing functionality that can be essential for big companies with a huge customer support load. Zendesk’s customer support is also very fast, though their live chat is only available for registered users. As any free tool, the functionalities there are quite limited, but nevertheless. If you’re a really small business or a startup, you can benefit big time from such free tools. What makes Intercom stand out from the crowd are their chatbots and lots of chat automation features that can be very helpful for your team.

After this live chat software comparison, you’ll get a better picture of what’s better for your business. 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. 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.

And in this post, we will analyze two popular names in the SaaS industry – Intercom & Zendesk. 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.

However, it is possible Intercom’s support is superior at the premium level. There are 3 Basic support plans at $19, $49 and $99 per user per month billed annually, and 5 Suite plans at $49, $79, $99, $150, and $215 per user per month billed annually. With simple setup, and handy importers you’ll be up and running in no time, ready to unlock the Support Funnel and deliver fast and personal customer support. Is it as simple as knowing whether you want software strictly for customer support (like Zendesk) or for some blend of customer relationship management and sales support (like Intercom)? One place Intercom really shines as a standalone CRM is its data utility.

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. Your typical Zendesk review will often praise the platform’s simplicity and affordability, as well as its constant updates and rolling out of new features, like Zendesk Sunshine. For example, you can read in many Zendesk Sell reviews how adding sales tools benefits Zendesk Support users. If you’re not ready to make the full switch to Intercom just yet, you can integrate Intercom with your Zendesk account.

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. Intercom is ideal for personalized messaging, while Zendesk offers robust ticket management and self-service options. Compared to Zendesk and Intercom, Helpwise offers competitive and transparent pricing plans.

This includes customer location, website visits, preferences, and interaction notes. Its agent actions allow teams to tag, assign, and merge conversations to help keep requests organized. Our customer experience solution is designed to handle use cases for companies of all shapes, sizes, and industries. From startups and small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) to large enterprises, we have tons of customer-proof points to prove it.

You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads. Once connected, you can add Zendesk Support to your Help Desk, and start creating Zendesk tickets from Intercom conversations. Test any of HelpCrunch pricing plans for free for 14 days and see our tools in action right away. To sum up this Intercom vs Zendesk battle, the latter is a great support-oriented tool that will be a good choice for big teams with various departments.

It’s a customer service software that offers tools to provide multichannel support through a shared inbox. Zendesk and Intercom offer help desk management zendesk intercom solutions to their users. Intercom, while differing from Zendesk, offers specialized features aimed at enhancing customer relationships.

But sooner or later, you’ll have to decide on the subscription plan, and here’s what you’ll have to pay. They’ve been marketing themselves as a messaging platform right from the beginning. Whether it’s peer-to-peer, internal-to-external, or tool-to-tool, Zendesk makes all types of collaboration easy. Synced articles and their content will be retrievable from the Public API similar to Intercom articles.

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.

With its CRM, you have the ability to place your clients in your sales funnels and follow through with them until conversion. It’s divided into about 20 topics with dozens of articles each, so navigating through it can be complicated. If that’s not detailed enough, then surely their visitor browsing details will leave you surprised. This enables your operators to understand visitor intent faster and provide them with a personalized experience. In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the hardest on your pocket. Zendesk can be more flexible and predictable in this area as you can buy different tools separately (or even use their limited versions for free).

Crisp includes bots, @mentions to tag agents within tickets, video and audio chat, and prewritten responses. Intercom is a customer messaging platform that enables businesses to engage with customers through personalized and real-time communication. On the contrary, Intercom is far less predictable when it comes to pricing and can cost hundreds/thousands of dollars per month. But this solution is great because it’s an all-in-one tool with a modern live chat widget, allowing you to easily improve your customer experiences. At the same time, Zendesk looks slightly outdated and can’t offer some features.

Customer service systems like Zendesk and Intercom should provide a simple workflow builder as well as many pre-built automations which can be used right out of the box. Zendesk is not far behind Intercom when it comes to email features. 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 live chat app lets agents and customers communicate in real time. It offers automatic routing with prewritten responses and triggers, but for reporting and self-service options, you’ll need to turn to integrations to flesh it out. LiveAgent’s help desk is an omnichannel customer service platform that helps agents handle communications via phone, live chat, social messaging, text, and email.

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. This customized dashboard will help you see metrics that you’d like to focus on regularly. Say what you will, but Intercom’s design and overall user experience are leaving all its competitors far behind. It’s beautifully crafted and thought through, and their custom-made illustrations are just next level stuff.

You can even moderate user content to leverage your customer community. 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. Their template triggers are fairly limited with only seven options, but they do enable users to create new custom triggers, which can be a game-changer for agents with more complex workflows. I tested both options (using Zendesk’s Suite Professional trial and Intercom’s Support trial) and found clearly defined differences between the two.