Intercom Vs Zendesk: Pricing, Features, Integrations in 2023

The overall sentiment from users indicates a satisfactory level of support, although opinions vary. Zendesk is a customer service software offering a comprehensive solution for managing customer interactions. It integrates customer support, sales, and marketing communications, aiming to improve client relationships. Known for its scalability, Zendesk is suitable for various business sizes, from startups to large corporations. ThriveDesk empowers small businesses to manage real-time customer communications.

The product has an elegant, minimalist design implemented in Ruby on Rails and provide… This site does not include all software companies or all available software companies offers. However, this is somewhat subjective, and depending on your business needs and favorite tools, you may argue we got it all mixed up, and Intercom is truly superior. Some startups and small businesses may prefer one app, while large companies and enterprise operations will have their own requirements. When it comes to ease-of-use, Zendesk undeniably takes the lead over Intercom. Zendesk’s intuitive design caters to beginners and non-technical users, offering a seamless experience right from the start.

Generally, humans can’t handle this volume of exchange, that’s why help desk software was made. Formerly known as Insights, Zendesk now uses Explore to provide analytics to help businesses tailor their services to increase customer satisfaction. Intercom Inbox has features that vaguely remind Zendesk Support, but the offered package Acquire customer (Messages and Inbox) is more paralleled with Zendesk Support + Chat. Zendesk outshines Intercom for customer support workflows with its core feature, the ticketing system.

Winner — Intercom edges out Zendesk here due mainly to its customizable workflow capabilities. When it comes to which company is the better fit for your business, there’s no clear answer. It really depends on what features you need and what type of customer service strategy you plan to implement. When it comes to advanced workflows and ticketing systems, Zendesk boasts a more full-featured solution. Due to our intelligent routing capabilities and numerous automated workflows, our users can free up hours to focus on other tasks.

No Code Platforms

Their chat widget looks and works great, and they invest a lot of effort to make it a modern, convenient customer communication tool. Zendesk also has an Answer Bot, which instantly takes your knowledge base game to the next level. It can automatically suggest relevant articles for agents during business hours to share with clients, reducing your support agents’ workload.

For small companies and startups, Zendesk offers a six-month free trial of up to 50 agents redeemable for any combination of Zendesk Support and Sell products. Using Zendesk, you can create community forums where customers can connect, comment, and collaborate, creating a way to harness customers’ expertise and promote feedback. Community managers can also escalate posts to support agents when one-on-one help is needed. Intercom allows visitors to search for and view articles from the messenger widget.

The company was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Intercom’s products are used by over 25,000 customers, from small tech startups to large enterprises. Novo has been a Zendesk customer since 2019 but didn’t immediately start taking full advantage of all our features and capabilities. Here are our top reporting and analytics features and an overview of where Intercom’s reporting limitations lie. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. The cheapest plan for small businesses – Starter – costs $89 monthly, including 2 seats and 1,000 people reached/mo. Each additional 1,000 contacts on a Starter plan will cost you $25/mo.

User experience: Zendesk Vs. Intercom

Intercom feels more wholesome and is more client-success-oriented, but it can be too costly for smaller companies. You can create dozens of articles in a simple, intuitive WYSIWYG text editor, divide them by categories and sections, and customize with your custom themes. When comparing the user interfaces (UI) of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms exhibit distinct characteristics and strengths catering to different user preferences and needs.

Yes, you can integrate the Intercom solution into your Zendesk account. It will allow you to leverage some Intercom capabilities while keeping your account at the time-tested platform. In this paragraph, let’s explain some common issues that users usually ask about when choosing between Zendesk and Intercom platforms. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously.

While the pricing can be flexible, it may become more costly as your organization’s requirements and usage increase. Hivers offers round-the-clock proactive support across all its plans, ensuring that no matter the time or issue, expert assistance is always available. This 24/7 support model is designed to provide continuous, real-time solutions to clients, enhancing the overall reliability and responsiveness of Hivers’ services.

As for the category of voice and phone features, Zendesk is a clear winner. Zendesk Support has voicemail, text messages, and embedded voice, and it displays the phone number on the widget. However, we will say that Intercom just edges past Zendesk when it comes to self-service resources. Both products are so full-featured that they both take quite a while to learn. Finally, we also have some B2B customers (funeral homes) and expect this part of our business to grow significantly in 2021.

Zendesk offers a free 30-day trial, after which customers will need to upgrade to one of their paid plans. Businesses of all sizes can rely on the Zendesk customer service platform and benefit from workflow management, powerful AI tools, robust insights, and more. If that sounds good to you, sign up for a free demo to see our software in action and get started. Intercom enables customers to self-serve through its messaging platform.

This exploration aims to provide a detailed comparison, aiding businesses in making an informed decision that aligns with their customer service goals. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer robust solutions, but the choice ultimately depends on specific business needs. While both platforms have a significant presence in the industry, they cater to varying business requirements.

We need a powerful chat tool that can enable immediate engagement, have some basic automation, and allows users to drop in. Messagely’s live chat platform is smooth, effective, and easy to set up. With Messagely, you can increase your customer satisfaction and solve customers’ issues while they’re still visiting your site. However, you’ll likely end up paying more for Zendesk, and in-app messenger and other advanced customer communication tools will not be included. 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.

Say goodbye to manual data transfers and hello to a more efficient way of conducting business. Trust us for your Zendesk data migration needs and discover the convenience of a bulk user import feature that streamlines the process from start to finish. When it comes to Zendesk import, Help Desk Migration is your trusted partner. Help Desk Migration is your ultimate solution for a seamless Zendesk import and Zendesk data migration process.

Its tight focus on customer support keeps things simple, especially when people are learning the software. See how leading multi-channel consumer brands solve E2E customer data challenges with a real-time customer data platform. Leave your email below and a member of our team will personally get in touch to show you how Fullview can help you solve support tickets in half the time. Use HubSpot Service Hub to provide seamless, fast, and delightful customer service. The support team faced spiking ticket volumes, numerous new customer accounts, and the need to shift to remote work. Sendcloud is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that allows users to generate packing slips and labels to help online retailers streamline their shipping process.

You could technically consider Intercom a CRM, but it’s really more of a customer-focused communication product. It isn’t as adept at purer sales tasks like lead management, list engagement, advanced reporting, forecasting, and workflow management as you’d expect a more complete CRM to be. The highlight of Zendesk’s ticketing software is its omnichannel-ality (omnichannality?). Whether agents are facing customers via chat, email, social media, or good old-fashioned phone, they can keep it all confined to a single, easy-to-navigate dashboard.

Great live chat

Zendesk’s ticketing system is renowned for its highly organized approach, which empowers businesses to manage customer support requests with unparalleled efficiency. These tickets can then be systematically tracked, prioritized, and responded to. This structured approach ensures that no customer query goes unnoticed or unattended, regardless of the channel through which it was initiated. These plans make Hiver a versatile tool, catering to a range of business sizes and needs, from startups to large enterprises looking for a comprehensive customer support solution within Gmail.

Zendesk, unlike Intercom, is a more affordable and predictable customer service platform. You can always count on it if you need a reliable customer support platform to process tickets, support users, and get advanced reporting. Intercom offers a unique pricing model based on the number of people you engage with, which includes both customers and team members. On the other hand, Zendesk offers plans based on the number of support agents, making it more suitable for businesses that have a dedicated support team. Sign up for a trial through a salesperson and then ask if it is possible to get in the class for less money.

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. Zendesk’s pricing is very competitive for the market and is presented in a straightforward way that makes predicting costs simple and accurate. Intercom is also easy to learn and its guided onboarding and training resources are especially helpful to new users. Discover customer and product issues with instant replays, in-app cobrowsing, and console logs.

This live chat software provider also enables your business to send proactive chat messages to customers and engage effectively in real-time. This is one of the best ways to qualify high-quality leads for your business and improve your chances of closing a sale faster. Intercom offers a simplistic dashboard with a detailed view of all customer details in one place.

The future of customer service is integrated, AI-enhanced—and powered by Intercom

Intercom is a customer messaging platform that enables businesses to engage with customers through personalized and real-time communication. Collaboration tools enable agents to work together in resolving customer tickets and making sales. Automatic assignment rules establish criteria that automatically route tickets to the right agent or team, based on message or user data. In an omnichannel contact center, agents can manage customer interactions across channels, no matter which channel a customer uses to contact the company. Intercom and Zendesk are two of the most popular customer service platforms, each with its own set of distinct advantages and drawbacks.

When an agent clicks on a conversation, the full conversation history populates the middle screen. Survey responses automatically save as data in users’ profiles, and Intercom provides survey data in analytics and reporting. Reporting intercom and zendesk and analytics provide metrics, trends, and key performance indicators (KPIs) that offer insights to agents and administrators. The Sell dashboard, different from the Service dashboard, features pre-built widgets that agents can organize however they want, to view the metrics they care most about. It is great to have CRM functionality inside your customer service platform because it helps maintain great customer experiences by storing all past customer engagements and conversation histories. This method helps offer more personalized support as well as get faster response and resolution times.

We’ll even flag any content you need to review and give you advice on how to fix it. Just visit Articles in Intercom, click Get started with articles and then Migrate from Zendesk. All plans come with a 7-day free trial, and no credit card is required to sign up for the trial. We have an intention to direct you through each step of the way to make the Zendesk importing process as easy as possible. The offers that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site (including, for example, the order in which they appear).

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. It also provides detailed reports on how each self-help article performs in your knowledge base and helps you identify how each piece can be improved further. Intercom offers an integrated knowledge base functionality to its user base. Using the existing knowledge base functionality, they can display self-help articles in the chat window before the customer approaches your team for support.

However, if you compare Zendesk vs Intercom chat in ease of use, the letter wins. Create a chatbot with minimal coding and customize it to your heart’s content. For instance, a customer inquiry about product availability can trigger an automated response providing real-time stock information within Zendesk.

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. 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 status of their order.

With this kind of organization, you will not only find your favorite apps but also discover new ones to meet your needs. However, the Intercom app store is far more intuitive and is much easier to navigate. It not only shows you all of the apps you can use, but it also divides these into topics and categories. There are many powerful integrations included, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Slack, and Zapier. With all accounted for, it seems that Zendesk still has a number of user interface issues.

Intercom pricing

So yeah, all the features talk actually brings us to the most sacred question — the question of pricing. You’d probably want to know how much it costs to get each of the platforms for your business, so let’s talk money now. HubSpot and Salesforce are also available when support needs to work with marketing and sales teams.

In addition to its service features, Zendesk offers a fully integrated CRM solution, Zendesk Sell, available for an additional cost, starting at $19/agent/month. It includes tools for lead management, sales forecasting, and workflow management and automation. Its customer data platform lets you manage customer data, segmentation, and automated reminders. However, this may be sufficient for smaller businesses or those using an existing CRM that integrates with Intercom. Zendesk is renowned for its comprehensive toolset that aids in automating customer service workflows and fine-tuning chatbot interactions. Its strengths are prominently seen in multi-channel support, with effective email, social media, and live chat integrations, coupled with a robust internal knowledge base for agent support.

Ticket routing helps to send the ticket to the best support team agent. Choose Zendesk for a scalable, team-size-based pricing model and Intercom for initial low-cost access with flexibility in adding advanced features. 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. The choice between the two platforms would depend on the specific needs and preferences of each business.

Both Zendesk and Intercom are standout performers when it comes to providing comprehensive multi channel support, catering to diverse customer needs. Zendesk offers a versatile array of communication channels, including email, chat, social media, phone, and web forms. This breadth of options ensures that businesses can effectively engage with their customers through their preferred communication method.

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. This additional cost can be a considerable factor for businesses to consider when evaluating their customer support needs against their budget constraints. When comparing the reporting and analytics features of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms offer robust tools, but with distinct focuses and functionalities. With the base plan, you get some sweet facilities like a ticketing system, data analytics, customer chat history, and more.

• With the base plan, you get some sweet facilities like a ticketing system, data analytics, customer chat history, and more.
• Zendesk has more pricing options, which means you’re free to choose your tier from the get-go.
• However, if you compare Zendesk vs Intercom chat in ease of use, the letter wins.
• Every single bit of business SaaS in the world needs to leverage the efficiency power of workflows and automation.
• Zendesk and Intercom both have an editor preview feature that makes it easier to add images, videos, call-to-action buttons, and interactive guides to your help articles.

However, as Monese grew and eyed a European expansion, it became clear that the company needed to centralize data in a single solution that would scale along with them. Monese is another fintech company that provides a banking app, account, and debit card to make settling in a new country easier. By providing banking without boundaries, the company aims to provide users with quick access to their finances, wherever they happen to be. Businesses should always consider a tool’s TCO before committing to a purchase. Many software vendors aren’t upfront about the cost of using their products, maintenance costs, or integration fees.

However, the approach is far much wider than merely focusing on what would be more cost-effective but instead exploring ways through which a solution that would suit you best could be realized. Essentially, Desku is not an option but a reliable replacement for Zendesk and Intercom that companies can rely on at lower costs and improved performance. Customers will stay with you long if they are not getting any support from your company, especially when you are new to them. Zendesk is yet another powerful way to help businesses interact with their customers. Their most popular tier (Suite Professional) is $115/month and includes a feature set that is very hard to beat at that price. This approach aligns well with Intercom’s emphasis on direct customer communication.

If a customer starts an interaction by talking to a chatbot and can’t find a solution, our chatbot can open a ticket and intelligently route it to the most qualified agent. In 2023, conversational messaging will play an essential role in customer service. Customers increasingly expect to receive fast, convenient, and personalized support. 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.

Pro plan is rather a team plan that costs $395/mo and includes 5 seats. But that’s not it, if you want to resolve customer common questions with the help of the vendor’s new tool – Fin bot, you will have to pay $0.99 per resolution per month. 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?).

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. Intercom also does mobile carousels to help please the eye with fresh designs. Intercom is ideal for personalized messaging, while Zendesk offers robust ticket management and self-service options. Intercom offers a comprehensive customer database with detailed profiles, enabling businesses to gather and analyze customer data easily. This helps in providing personalized experiences and targeted messaging.

Though expensive and quality are synonymous in some worlds, such a principle cannot define Desku where it stands out as one of such affordable companies. However, competitive pricing is a promise and not a compromise to make decent customer support accessible for all. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer varying flavors when it comes to curating the whole customer support experience.

The result is that Zendesk generally wins on ratings when it comes to support capacity. Automated service to migrate your data between help desk platforms without programming skills — just follow simple Migration Wizard. As a rule, Intercom reviews are positive as many users praise the intercom versus zendesk interface, the ease of use, and the deployment of the software. However, some users remarked that a developer is needed to properly install the software or run the risks of problems in the future. The Intercom Messenger, in particular, performs well compared to the Zendesk alternative.