Intercom vs Zendesk: Comparing features, integrations, and pricing

Plus, it has a number of integrations to make the process even easier for your team, like Slack, Zapier, Salesforce, and WhatsApp. LiveChat offers features for businesses looking for help with support, sales, and marketing, making it a similar tool to Intercom — but for a fraction of the cost. These HubSpot alternatives for customer support, sales, and marketing teams will help you streamline your work and save time and money. Help Scout’s shared inbox makes it easy to collaborate on customer support issues and ensures the customer experience is seamless from all sides. For automation and messaging at scale, you can choose from two plans- Accelerate ($499) or Scale ($999) per month for up to ten users, depending on your business needs.

Most businesses use live chats as their main customer communication channel. It is handy for both sides since users can get in touch with customer support teams via a chat widget placed right on the website. To begin with, putting help desk platforms “side by side” is a thankless job as software differs in functionality, price, and purposes. The compared vendors share a strategy of delivering their services as either separate add-ons or all-in-one tools. All of the customer success platforms mentioned here include chatbots and allow users to respond to inquiries, collect data, and connect with customers in real-time. Intercom is best for teams that want centralized messaging and connected platforms tailored to each customer-facing team.

Customer Service Training: Effective Techniques for Success

It’s highly customizable, too, so you can adjust it according to your website or product’s style. The Intercom versus Zendesk conundrum is probably the greatest problem in the world of customer support tools. They both offer some state-of-the-art core functionality and numerous unusual features.

• Zendesk started in 2007 as a web-based SaaS product for managing incoming customer support requests.
• “Favorable” and “Critical” user reviews are selected using the review helpfulness score.
• The Intercom vs. Zendesk pricing may be justified by the value-added services and minor features that they have for their all-in-one pricing.
• The more data you have, the longer it will take to transfer it from Zendesk to Intercom.
• Intercom is a complete customer communications platform with bots, apps, product tours, etc.
• On the other hand, if you are looking for a feature-rich tool that comes at less than half the cost of Zendesk and Intercom, then ProProfs can be your ideal support partner.

For standard reporting like response times, leads generated by source, bot performance, messages sent, and email deliverability, you’ll easily find all the metrics you need. Beyond that, you can create custom reports that combine all of the stats listed above (and many more) and present them as counts, columns, lines, or tables. Part of Intercom’s pricing structure is also focused on “people reached”.

What is the difference between Zendesk and Intercom?

This section will help us understand whether the software is made for your business or not. While on one hand, you have to scroll through multiple metadialog.com comparison websites, online reviews, etc. On the other hand, you need to be careful about the various needs and requirements of your support team.

Zendesk offers a built-in chat option (paid separately), a mobile app (both for iOS and Android) integrated apps so that you can offer fully scalable customer support. You can acquire new customers, retain existing customers, and provide quality customer support with Enterprise Plan with Zendesk or Intercom. Drift’s live chat tool allows businesses to set appointments, answer questions, share help center articles and videos, send pricing information, and more. Crisp is a great tool for startups and small businesses due to its completely free plan and simple interface. Use its desktop or mobile app for your team and easily access a number of their features without having a premium plan. These products are able to integrate with each other, which offers customers more personalized customer experiences.

Customers

Use simple routing rules and SLA warnings to get every conversation to the right rep right away. With a shared view of email, Facebook, SMS, calendars, live chat, CRMs, and 80+ apps in one space, you’ll have all the context you need to deliver a personalized touch. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk, though is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. Intercom doesn’t really provide free stuff, but they have a tool called Platform, which is free. The free Intercom Platform lets you see who your customers are and what they do in your workspace. It has very limited customization options in comparison to its competitors.

Plus, it integrates with popular tools like Facebook Messenger and Twitter so you can provide support on those channels as well. If you’re looking for a reliable Zendesk alternative with powerful features and an intuitive interface, then LiveAgent is worth checking out. HappyFox is a customer service platform that offers an easy-to-use interface and powerful features.

Integrate your favorite apps — or build your own

Intercom’s intuitive design makes for a seamless user experience— from onboarding to  daily use. Since Intercom supplements their chat functionality with apps and integrations, you can consolidate several communication channels in a single inbox. Additionally, you can automate manual tasks and workflows to save time—like creating canned responses for common questions—all wrapped up in a clean, easy-to-use interface.

While doing my research for this article, I’ve not only tested both Intercom and Zendesk myself, but also read a pile of different articles, comparisons, guides, showdowns and all this kind of stuff. What really struck me though is that people seemed to like Zendesk more. Struck not in a bad way, more like in a very neutral ‘huh, this may be interesting’ way. This list of Freshdesk alternatives will help you find a tool that’s right for you. You can do all this and more with Help Scout’s live chat functionality. Easily find customer profiles to ensure you’re providing them with the best possible service every single time.

Zendesk Support

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. Kustomer is one of the best Zendesk alternatives for teams that need CRM capabilities. Though help desk software and CRMs historically existed in their own worlds, Kustomer worked to combine the two concepts into one useful solution.

Its live chat tool has a lot to offer as well, from automation and canned responses to chat transfers and personalization. Managers can choose to automatically route tickets and agents can prioritize conversations that need immediate attention. You can create different inboxes for support and sales, add permissions, and use mentions to collaborate on challenging customer questions. With Zendesk, you can easily sort or filter your tickets using parameters such as date, ticket priority, tags, source, and more. Now, when it comes to customizing your dashboard and making it suitable for your unique needs, Zendesk does a good job.

Tools & Services

The application features a dedicated knowledge base or user community to resolve customer issues. Additionally, Zoho Desk’s mobile app allows agents to manage customer requests anytime, anywhere. Additionally, Hiver’s live chat feature integrates seamlessly with Gmail, providing real-time support to customers. The knowledge base functionality enables the creation and maintenance of a central library of help articles, promoting customer self-service and reducing support volume. With Intercom, users can provide multi channel support to their customers via live chat, email, and even in-app messaging and push notifications.

• There is a conversation routing bot, an operator bot, a lead qualification bot, and an article-suggesting bot, among others.
• Once you login you’ll notice that the interface is pretty intuitive and easy to use.
• But if you really want to enjoy Intercom’s advanced functionality, prepare to pay at least $499/mo (that’s supposedly the starting price for their premium subscription plans).
• Help desk tools come in different shapes and sizes- while one may offer a great user interface, the other may lead the way in affordability.
• Jetdocs is an internal communication platform where teams can streamline their internal processes.
• You can also easily schedule times of day when customers can view and interact with different chatbots.

Tailored to help you identify your customer support needs, this guide will help you find the right solution, simplify your purchase decision, and get leadership buy-in. If you’re looking for a dedicated support tool, Crisp may not be your best option. Best Intercom alternative for large businesses who are already HubSpot users. Your knowledge base is easily customizable to ensure it matches your branding and overall website’s look and feel to create a cohesive experience. It enables you to get quality product feedback from the right customers at the right time through the app or by email.

Direct to your Inbox

An inbound customer message through any of these channels becomes a ticket for your support agents, whose reply reaches the customer through the same channel they originally used. Zendesk has more pricing options, which means you’re free to choose your tier from the get-go. With Intercom, you’ll have more customizable options with the enterprise versions of the software, but you’ll have fewer lower-tier choices. If you don’t plan on building a huge enterprise just yet, we have to give the edge to Zendesk when it comes to flexible pricing options.

The software is effective for helping teams provide empathetic and quick customer service through Gmail. Users can easily manage, assign, or collaborate on customer issues while also taking advantage of automation and advanced analytics from Gmail. LiveAgent is often referred to as the best Zendesk alternative for cost value.

• For example, you can assign all inbound technical queries to an engineer; or, assign all pricing queries to the sales team.
• What an honor to be a part of this process to choose between intercom and Zendesk – 2 fantastic products.
• With Gist, you can provide the kind of exceptional customer service that will keep them coming back for more.
• This way, businesses can manage all their communications from a single center.
• Advanced AI powers Ortto’s next-generation live chat tool, Talk, which lets businesses leverage insights from their customer data platform to provide truly personalized conversations at scale.
• That said, Gorgias is not a well-rounded tool like Zendesk, and if not within their narrowed target audience, it might not be the right fit for your business needs.