Compare Zendesk vs Intercom for Ecomm Businesses

You can even save custom dashboards for a more tailored reporting experience. One place Intercom really shines as a standalone CRM is its data utility. You can create articles, share them internally, group them for users, and assign them as responses for bots—all pretty standard fare. 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. 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).

Zendesk Sunshine is a separate feature set that focuses on unified customer views. Help desk SaaS is how you manage general customer communication and for handling customer questions. 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.

Its ability to seamlessly integrate with various applications further amplifies its versatility. Pop-up chat, in-app messaging, and notifications are some of the highly-rated features of this live chat software. It enables them to engage with visitors who are genuinely interested in their services. You get to engage with them further and get to know more about their expectations. This becomes the perfect opportunity to personalize the experience, offer assistance to prospects as per their needs, and convert them into customers. Intercom is a customer support messenger, bot, and live chat service provider that empowers its clients to provide instant support in real-time.

Unique Features

Here are our top reporting and analytics features and an overview of where Intercom’s reporting limitations lie. Intercom’s integration capabilities are limited, and some apps don’t integrate well with third-party customer service technology. This can make it more difficult to import CRM data and obtain complete context from customer data. For example, Intercom’s Salesforce integration doesn’t create a view of cases in Salesforce. The cheapest plan for small businesses – Starter – costs $89 monthly, including 2 seats and 1,000 people reached/mo.

If that sounds good to you, sign up for a free demo to see our software in action and get started. Advanced workflows are useful to customer service teams because they automate processes that make it easier for agents to provide great customer service. Zendesk offers robust, pre-built reports for sales and support teams.

Agents can respond in any channel by typing in the text box and have access to deep customer experience history and background in the right-hand column. The dashboard’s left-hand column organizes and sorts all tickets by urgency. When an agent clicks on a conversation, the full conversation history populates the middle screen. Intercom wins the reporting and analytics category due to its unique visualization and display formats for contact center and article data. Send surveys at key points throughout the customer buying cycle, utilizing multiple types of question formats. Surveys turn customer insights into action, with triggers and campaign response adjustments depending on customer responses.

Intercom’s pricing can be divided into basic messaging and messaging with automation. For businesses looking for basic chat and messaging features, Intercom charges a flat fee of $59 per month for its Start plan with one user and $119 per month for its Grow plan with up to 5 users. You can even create multiple help centers that cater to different audiences, regions, brands and create content in multiple languages. Zendesk also offers an Answer Bot that can help you eliminate wait times. It can automatically suggest necessary help articles to customers and connect them to an agent if the need arises. Moreover, your customer service operators can anticipate what a visitor or customer is going to type next and accordingly transfer chats to relevant members to reduce the resolution time.

Proactive Customer Support

Zendesk Service offers the right platform for tracking, prioritizing, and solving customer support tickets. Support agents can easily view all ongoing and past conversations in a central location so that communication between your business and customers is fast as well as personal. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. 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. ThriveDesk empowers small businesses to manage real-time customer communications. A helpdesk solution’s user experience and interface are crucial in ensuring efficient and intuitive customer support.

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. Intercom’s user interface is also quite straightforward and easy to understand; it includes a range of features such as live chat, messaging campaigns, and automation workflows. Additionally, the platform allows for customizations such as customized user flows and onboarding experiences. This integration allows companies to quickly collect feedback from their customers and use it to improve customer service. Experience firsthand how our software can transform your customer support strategy and drive overall business success.

Intercom vs Zendesk: pricing

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. What sets Zendesk apart is its user-friendly interface, customizable workflows, and scalability. It caters to a wide range of industries, particularly excelling in e-commerce, SaaS, technology, and telecommunications.

Intercom does have a ticketing dashboard that has omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk. 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. This is not a huge difference; however, it does indicate that customers are generally more satisfied with Intercom’s offerings than Zendesk’s.

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. Both Intercom and Zendesk offer seamless integrations with other tools and platforms. Intercom integrates well with popular CRM systems like Salesforce and HubSpot, as well as marketing automation tools like Mailchimp and Marketo. Zendesk also offers a wide range of integrations, including CRM, ecommerce, and productivity tools. Consider the tools and platforms you currently use in your business and ensure that the chosen tool integrates seamlessly with them.

While they like the ease of use this product offers its users, they’ve indeed rated them low in terms of services. 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. 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.

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 is better for smaller companies that are looking for a simple and capable customer service platform.

Intercom is the clear victor in terms of user experience, leaving all of its competitors in the dust. Zendesk is designed to fit your business needs whether you’re a fast-growing startup or a well-established company. While Zendesk features are plenty, someone using it for the first time can find it overwhelming. Intercom has a community forum where users can engage with each other and gain insights from their experiences. With only the Enterprise tier offering round-the-clock email, phone, and chat help, Zendesk support is sharply separated by tiers.

It can be the right option for big enterprises that have global customers and big support teams. With AI-powered reports, you can track key customer service metrics and improve your ticket response time. Chatbots help you assist customers with their basic queries and generate more leads. Moreover, with collaboration features such as internal notes, parent-child ticketing, and canned responses, your team can delight customers together.

• You can publish your self-service resources, divide them by categories, and integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience.
• The program is simple to use and includes all of the necessary capabilities for providing good customer service.
• Zendesk lets you chat with customers through email, chat, social media, or phone.
• Still, for either of these platforms to have some email marketing or other email functionality is common sense.
• In this article, we’ll compare Zendesk vs Intercom to find out which is the right customer support tool for you.

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. If compared to Intercom’s chatbot, Zendesk offers a relatively latest platform that makes support automation possible.

Advanced workflows and automation

When you authorize your account to work with Influx, we’ll use this access to read the content of tickets. Freshdesk can be considered a powerful Intercom alternative designed for small businesses. Drift is a close alternative to Intercom because it adds weight to sales and marketing. Besides, plans and licenses can be costly for businesses that want to use Zendesk.

You can enjoy the complete freedom to organize content to make it easier for customers to find the right solutions to their problems. The interface of Intercom’s native apps for iOS and Android is equally impressive. Agents can use the app to support customers who need help, even while they are away from their desk or working remotely. Moreover, internal collaboration feels a bit more engaging and effortless with notes and mentions. For any help desk software to succeed, the dashboard interface is extremely crucial.

Gmail-Based Interface

From there, you can include FAQs, announcements, and article guides and then save them into pre-set lists for your customers to explore. 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. The only relief is that they do reach out to customers, but it gets too late.

The best help desks are also ticketing systems, which lets support reps create a support ticket out of issues that can then be tracked. Ticket routing helps to send the ticket to the best support team agent. HubSpot helps seamlessly integrate customer service tools that you and your team already leverage. When it comes to advanced workflows and ticketing systems, Zendesk boasts a more full-featured solution.

It is also not too difficult to program your own bot rules using Intercon’s system. Use ticketing systems to manage the influx and provide your customers with timely responses. Provide self-service alternatives so customers can resolve their own issues. This serves the dual benefit of adding convenience to the customer experience and lightening agents’ workloads. Intercom live chat is modern, smooth, and has many advanced features that other chat tools don’t.

Therefore, businesses that have small customer service teams and are on a budget, will struggle with Zendesk’s high pricing. Intercom, while differing from Zendesk, offers specialized features aimed at enhancing customer relationships. Founded as a business messenger, it now extends to enabling support, engagement, and conversion.

Our integration with Intercom enables bi-directional contact and case synchronization, so you can continue using Intercom as your front-end digital experience and use Zendesk for case management. Like so many others, Monese determined that Zendesk was the best solution to provide seamless, omnichannel support because of its scalability and reliability. With over 100,000 customers across all industries and regions, Zendesk knows what it takes to interact with customers while retaining and growing relationships. Compare Zendesk versus Intercom to determine who will be the best partner for your business at every phase of the customer journey. In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the most expensive tools on the market. And there’s still no way to know how much you’ll pay for them since the prices are only revealed after you go through a few sale demos with the Intercom team.

All client contacts, whether via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel, land in one dashboard, where your agents can quickly and efficiently resolve them. In today’s hyper-competitive, hyper-connected globalized economy, customer experience has become a fundamental differentiator. As customers’ needs are constantly evolving, businesses must adapt and keep up to guarantee the best customer experience and satisfaction. Easily reply to customer conversations and manage workload in a smart & automated way.

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. In addition to Intercom vs Zendesk, alternative helpdesk solutions are available in the market. ThriveDesk is a feature-rich helpdesk solution that offers a comprehensive set of tools to manage customer support effectively. The strength of Zendesk’s UI lies in its structured and comprehensive environment, adept at managing numerous customer interactions and integrating various channels seamlessly. However, compared to the more contemporary designs like Intercom’s, Zendesk’s UI may appear outdated, particularly in aspects such as chat widget and customization options.

This differentiates it from Zendesk, which offers a more traditional CRM experience. Intercom’s primary focus is engaging and communicating with customers through live chat, in-app messaging, and email. This makes it a great choice for businesses that want to provide their customers with a more personal experience. 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 enables them to speed up the support process and build experiences that customers like.

Intercom’s help center allows you to create and publish engaging articles around help topics. You can use its editor to effortlessly add images, videos, and call-to-action-buttons, wherever necessary. Zendesk’s interface is not the most modern interface out there and appears quite outdated. While using Zendesk for more than a couple of hours, you can easily get tired and feel there is a lot of room for improvement. Let us kickstart the comparison with our first parameter- types of users. This section will help us understand whether the software is made for your business or not.

The cheapest (aka Essential) ‘All of Intercom’ package will cost you $136 per month, but if you only need their essential chat tools only, you can get them for $49 per month. The three tiers—Suite Team, Suite Growth, and Suite Professional—also give you more options outside of Intercom’s static structure. Suite Team is more affordable than Intercom’s $79/month tier; Suite Professional is more expensive. Overall, Zendesk wins out on plan flexibility, especially given that it has a lower price plan for dipping your toes in the water. We give the edge to Zendesk here, as it’s typically aimed for more complex environments. It’s also more exclusively focused on providing help support, whereas Intercom sometimes moonlights as being part-time sales.

Their custom-made illustrations are beautifully crafted and their attention-to-detail is evident in almost every aspect of the tool. The difference in prices between plans is so significant because of the features each of them provides. Honestly, when it comes to Zendesk, it is not the most modern tool out there. Intercom doesn’t really provide free stuff, but they have a tool called Platform, which is free.

Pipedrive also offers integrations with other popular tools, such as Intercom, to help streamline processes and increase efficiency. Choosing the right customer support tool for your business is vital to providing exceptional customer experiences. Both Intercom and Zendesk offer powerful features, but their suitability depends on your specific business needs and budget. Consider the features and capabilities, user interface, pricing, integration options, and customer support offered by each platform.

Zendesk also offers a number of integrations with third-party applications. Although priced at $49/month/agent, the Suite Team plan lacks important features such as self-service zendesk or intercom customer portal, knowledge management, SLA management, multilingual support, etc. On the other hand, for plans that offer necessary help desk features, Zendesk costs a fortune.

Users build chatbots to automatically route customer conversations and streamline customer support processes. 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. The application, which has similar features to Intercom, has more economical plans. Intercom has a unique pricing structure, offering three separate solutions, each intended for a distinct use case. We wish some of their great features were offered in multiple plans, but none features overlap among plans.

But that doesn’t mean you have to completely switch from your current provider if you’re not quite ready. Brian Kale, the head of customer success at Bank Novo, describes how Zendesk helped Bank Novo boost productivity and streamline service. Sendcloud adopted these solutions to replace siloed systems like Intercom and a local voice support provider in favor of unified, omnichannel support. Though the Intercom chat window says that their customer success team typically replies in a few hours, don’t expect to receive any real answer in chat for at least a couple of days. Well, I must admit, the tool is gradually transforming from a platform for communicating with users to a tool that helps you automate every aspect of your routine. They’ve been marketing themselves as a messaging platform right from the beginning.