Zendesk vs Intercom: Choosing the best tool for your business

You cannot invest much in this software if you are a small business, as it would exceed the budget requirements. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Zendesk TCO is lower than Intercom due to its ability to scale, which does not require additional cost to update the software for a growing business. It also has a transparent pricing model so businesses know the price they will incur.

Intercom is ideal for personalized messaging, while Zendesk offers robust ticket management and self-service options. They have a dedicated help section that provides instructions on how to set up and effectively use Intercom. These products are able to integrate with each other, which offers customers more personalized customer experiences. Zendesk also offers tons of APIs to customize the software to the users’ needs. Intercom’s app store has popular integrations for things like WhatsApp, Stripe, Instagram, and Slack.

With its in-app messenger, the UI resembles a chat interface, making interactions feel conversational. This makes it a strong choice for businesses prioritizing customer engagement. 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. Intercom has a wider range of uses out of the box than Zendesk, though by adding Zendesk Sell, you could more than make up for it. Both options are well designed, easy to use, and share some pretty key functionality like behavioral triggers and omnichannel-ality (omnichannel-centricity?).

While clutter-free and straightforward, it does lack some of the more advanced features and capabilities that Zendesk has. Powered by AI, Intercom’s Fin chatbot is purportedly capable of solving 50% of all queries autonomously — in multiple languages. At the same time, Fin AI Copilot background support to agents, acting as a personal, real-time AI assistant for dealing with inquiries.

Intercom or Zendesk: Help desk and ticketing

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. Not only that, Intercom offers tools like an in-app messenger, product tours, and live chat.

• With over 100,000 customers across all industries and regions, Zendesk knows what it takes to interact with customers while retaining and growing relationships.
• On the other hand, Intercom’s chatbots have more advanced features but do not sacrifice simplicity and ease of use.
• This enables your operators to understand visitor intent faster and provide them with a personalized experience.
• If you prioritize seamless, personalized customer interactions, it’s arguably the better option of the two.
• ActiveCampaign is difficult to learn on your own since it is so full featured.

It’s well-suited for organizations aiming to enhance customer engagement through real-time communication. Zendesk would be a perfect option for businesses that are searching for a well-integrated support system. It offers a suite that compiles help desk, live chat, and knowledge base to their user base.

This feature helps businesses anticipate and address potential issues before they escalate. That makes the design very familiar and user-friendly, for both customers and agents. Although quite functional, Zendesk’s interface can sometimes feel a bit dated compared to other helpdesks.

Zendesk vs. the rest: Compare the software

It guarantees continuous omnichannel support that meets customer expectations. As time passes by, the line between Intercom and Zendesk becomes more blurred as they try to keep up with one another and implement new features, services, and pricing policies. At the end of the day, there is not a universally better option, zendesk chat vs intercom just one that suits your needs and preferences the most. ProProfs takes knowledge management to a whole different level by allowing you to create an online knowledge base, user manuals, documentation, and more. The overall design of Zendesk’s chat widget looks outdated and offers very limited customization options.

There is a really useful one for Shopify to provide customer support for e-commerce operations. To select the ideal fit for your business, it is crucial to compare these industry giants and assess which aligns best with your specific requirements. It also provides mid-sized businesses with comprehensive customer relationship management software, as they require more advanced features to handle customer support. Similarly, the ability of Zendesk to scale also makes it the best fit for enterprise-level organizations.

The software also features self-service options, including a customer portal and branded help center with self-help articles, videos, FAQs, and community forums. The platform’s speed and quality may not meet expectations, leading to switching costs. Additionally, Zoho falls short of a frictionless agent experience, with different agent interfaces for chat, phone, and ticketing.

Evaluating the customer service and support features of Zendesk and Intercom aids businesses in understanding which platform facilitates more effective and prompt customer issue resolution. The ease of use and customization options play a significant role in the seamless integration of a customer support platform within existing business operations. Analyzing the user-friendliness and customizability of Zendesk and Intercom provides insights into their adaptability to diverse business environments. Both Zendesk and Intercom facilitate sales automation, but Intercom’s sales automation tools are notably more sophisticated and comprehensive.

Analytics in Zendesk and Intercom

As the place where your agents will be spending most of their time, a functional and robust Helpdesk will be critical to their overall performance and experience. While there are some universal things to look out for, like the range of features, ease of use, and a seamless omnichannel experience, it’s also about your subjective experience. While both Zendesk and Intercom tick both those boxes, they each have their own distinct style. If you prioritize seamless, personalized customer interactions, it’s arguably the better option of the two. That being said, it sometimes lacks the advanced customization and automation offered by other AI-powered chatbots, like Intercom’s. Zendesk’s Answer Bot is capable of helping customers with common queries by providing canned responses and links to relevant help articles.

And this, undoubtedly, leaves your customer support agents free to solve urgent matters. You can also set up interactive product tours to highlight new features in-product and explain how they work. Zendesk started in 2007 as a web-based SaaS product for managing incoming customer support requests. Since then, it has evolved into a full-fledged CRM that offers a suite of software applications to its over 160,000 customers like Uber, Siemens, and Tesco.

ActiveCampaign is difficult to learn on your own since it is so full featured. Sign up for a trial through a salesperson and then ask if it is possible to get in the class for less money. We sell a high-touch, high ASP product (caskets) and have scaled to where we’re adding several more customer service agents to our company. Customers often call or chat with us multiple times prior to the purchase and post-purchase, as these are emotional, time-sensitive purchases. Examine Intercom and Zendesk Chat prices and plans to make sure you get the best deal for your needs. It can help you to reach out to customers and help them complete purchases.

Crisp includes bots, @mentions to tag agents within tickets, video and audio chat, and prewritten responses. Zoho offers a suite of tools across many use cases, including its customer service software, Zoho Desk. Its standard plan offers multichannel support for up to five channels and basic ticket management.

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. Zendesk is a customer service software company that provides businesses with a suite of tools to manage customer interactions.

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. The help center in Intercom is also user-friendly, enabling agents to access content creation easily. It does help you organize and create content using efficient tools, but Zendesk is more suitable if you want a fully branded customer-centric experience.

You can add individual operator greetings, create canned responses, and engage potential leads by giving them product tours. In this section, we will be doing an in-depth analysis of the various help desk, live chat, and knowledge base features of these tools. With Zendesk, businesses can build a dedicated help center and a community forum to encourage customers to resolve issues at their own pace- while reducing the ticket volume.

Reporting

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. You can integrate different apps (like Google Meet or Stripe among others) with your messenger and make it a high end point for your customers. They offer an omnichannel chat solution that integrates with multiple messaging platforms and marketing channels and even automates incoming support processes with bots. It is quite the all-rounder as it even has a help center and ticketing system that completes its omnichannel support cycle.

And considering that its tools (including live chat options) are so easy to use, it’s probably going to be easier for a small business to get integrated and set up. Apart from a live chat, it has a feature called ‘Business Messenger’ that comes with its own AI chatbot. Moreover, Intercom bots can converse naturally with customers by using conversation starters, respond with self-help, and knowledge base articles.

Customers have also noted that they can implement Zendesk AI five times faster than other solutions. We need a solution that allows whoever picks up the chat or phone to quickly see the history of that customer, their request, notes, and the Chat GPT status of their order. We need a powerful chat tool that can enable immediate engagement, have some basic automation, and allows users to drop in. The result is that Zendesk generally wins on ratings when it comes to support capacity.

Intercom feels modern and is more client-success-oriented, but it can be too costly for smaller companies. 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. 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. Your support team can cut resolution time by 44% with Intercom’s industry-leading automation. So, if you have customers who prefer to call service with an Intercom, it wouldn’t be possible.

On the other hand, Intercom’s cutting-edge AI capabilities and in-app messaging features help companies provide a more intuitive and on-the-go customer support. The choice between the two platforms would depend on the specific needs and preferences of each business. So yeah, two essential things that Zendesk lacks in comparison to Intercom are in-app messages and email marketing tools.

But with perks like more advanced chatbots, automation, and lead management capabilities, Intercom could have an edge for many users. With custom correlation and attribution, you can dive deep into the root cause behind your metrics. We also provide real-time and historical reporting dashboards so you can take action at the moment and learn from past trends.

Both Zendesk and Intercom offer automation features to streamline workflows and improve efficiency, but the way they do it is different. You can test any of HelpCrunch’s pricing plans for free for 14 days and see our tools in action immediately. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how its tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. So yeah, all the features talk actually brings us to the most sacred question — the question of pricing.

AI is integral to customer relationship management software and facilitates consumer interactions. AI helps businesses gain detailed insight into consumer data in real-time. It also helps promote automation in routine tasks by automating repetitive processes and helps agents save time and errors.

Customerly’s reporting tools are built on the principle that you can’t improve what you can’t measure. What’s more, we support live video support for moments when your customers need in-depth guidance. According to G2, Intercom has a slight edge over Zendesk with a 4.5-star rating, but from just half the number of users.

These tickets can then be systematically tracked, prioritized, and responded to. When comparing the cost of Intercom to Zendesk, it’s important to consider the pricing structures and potential variations based on your specific customer support and engagement needs. Also, this software offers a feature called ‘Business Messenger’ that comes with its own AI chatbot. Moreover, Intercom bots can converse naturally with customers by using conversation starters, and respond with self-help, and knowledge base articles. Live chat add-on provides you with personal customer communication (via the web, mobile, and conversational messaging) without interrupting their experience. Efficient customer service and support capabilities are fundamental for maintaining high customer satisfaction levels.

Zendesk provides a holistic customer service solution built specifically for the customer experience whereas Intercom offers a vast CRM suite that isn’t as specialized in CX. But unlike Zendesk, its software has limited features, channels, and integrations. Intercom also offers scalability within its pricing plans, enabling businesses to upgrade to higher tiers as their support needs grow.

You don’t have to pay per contact on your database, and you there are many free features you can use. You can also contact Zendesk support 24/7, whereas Intercom support only has live agents during business hours. Since Intercom is so intuitive, the time you’ll need to spend training new https://chat.openai.com/ users on how to interact with the platform is greatly reduced. Zendesk offers a free 30-day trial, after which customers will need to upgrade to one of their paid plans. Our customer experience solution is designed to handle use cases for companies of all shapes, sizes, and industries.

However, compared to Zendesk, Intercom might not offer the same breadth in terms of integrating a wide range of external channels. Winner of our Supreme Software Award, Zendesk is a customer support solution that helps boost customer service and improve customer retention. The platform’s modules include chat support, call center solutions, help desk applications, and knowledge base, so you’ll cover all the bases of efficient customer services. 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. It’s a customer service software that offers tools to provide multichannel support through a shared inbox.

The optimized agent interface ensures rapid responses for maximum efficiency, all while keeping your website running smoothly. It can team up with tools like Salesforce and Slack, so everything runs smoothly. They need to comprehensively analyze if they are getting the value of the invested money. 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). Though Intercom chat window says that their team typically replies in a few hours, I received the answer in a couple of minutes.

Intercom offers just over 450 integrations, which can make it less cost-effective and more complex to customize the software and adapt to new use cases as you scale. The platform also lacks transparency in displaying reviews, install counts, and purpose-built customer service integrations. When evaluating the cost of any software tool, you have to look beyond the price tag.