Zendesk vs Intercom: A comparison guide for 2024

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. Zendesk’s AI offers automated responses to customer inquiries, increasing the team’s productivity, as they can spend time on the most crucial things. Zendesk allows businesses to group their resources in the help center, providing customers with self-service personalized support.

• By using its workforce management functionality, businesses can analyze employee performance, and implement strategies to improve them.
• Intercom’s reporting is less focused on getting a fine-grained understanding of your team’s performance, and more on a nuanced understanding of customer behavior and engagement.
• Intercom has limited scalability compared to Zendesk, which is unsuitable for large-scale enterprises.
• This structured approach ensures that no customer query goes unnoticed or unattended, regardless of the channel through which it was initiated.

Lastly, the tool is easy to set up and implement, meaning no additional knowledge or expertise makes the businesses incur additional costs. Zendesk is an all-in-one omnichannel platform offering various channel integrations in one place. The dashboard of Zendesk is sleek, simple, and highly responsive, offering a seamless experience for managing customer interactions. It’s much easier if you decide to go with the Zendesk Suite, which includes Support, Chat, Talk, and Guide tools.

Zendesk has a slight edge when it comes to ticketing, but Intercom’s automation makes up for it

It offers a comprehensive suite of features that empowers businesses to foster immediate connections with their customers. It delivers a multi-channel support system with customer service automation. You can set business rules, SLA, and ticket routing based on the agent’s skills, language, and expertise. Each message will have identifiers so that they will be easy to recognize at a glance. As a result, you’ll be able to see the sender, anyone who replied, and the dates of their interaction. As well as Intercom, it allows sharing of private notes with other support agents.

Here, agents can deal with customers directly, leave notes for each other to enable seamless handovers, or convert tickets into self-help resources. Plus, Intercom’s modern, smooth interface provides a comfortable environment for agents to work in. It even has some unique features, like office hours, real-time user profiles, and a high-degree https://chat.openai.com/ of customization. As the more recent of the two, offering a modern look-and-feel and frictionless experience is a key magnet for Intercom. It effortlessly brings together in-app chat, automated chatbots, and a unified inquiry inbox in its help center. One of Zendesk’s other key strengths has also been its massive library of integrations.

Zendesk has an app available for both Android and iOS, which makes it easy to stay connected with customers while on the go. The app includes features like push notifications and real-time customer engagement — so businesses can respond quickly to customer inquiries. One of the things that sets Zendesk apart from other customer service software providers is its focus on design. The company’s products are built with an emphasis on simplicity and usability. This has helped to make Zendesk one of the most popular customer service software platforms on the market.

If your business values a feature-rich and customizable solution for customer interactions, Zendesk may be the better choice. As businesses strive to enhance their customer support capabilities, the integration of chatbots has emerged as a pivotal trend. Intercom is a customer messaging platform that enables businesses to engage with customers through personalized and real-time communication.

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Get all the help desk functionalities without the complexity and hidden costs. It also offers a Proactive Support Plus as an Add-on with push notifications, a series campaign builder, news items, and more. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk, though is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. Moreover, these are new prices as they’re in the middle of changing their pricing policy right now (and they’re definitely not getting cheaper). If you thought Zendesk’s pricing was confusing, let me introduce you to Intercom’s pricing.

Drift offers live chat software that allows real-time, personalized conversations between agents and customers. Drift also has automated support through AI-powered chatbots and knowledge base integrations. These self-service options help deflect tickets to make ticket queues more manageable. Intercom’s automation features enable businesses to deliver a personalized experience to customers and scale their customer support function effectively.

The ticketing system on Zendesk is feature-rich, unlike Intercom, which allows agents to create, assign, and categorize tickets. Agents can create custom product tours in-app for better customer experience when onboarding. Zendesk also provides extensive self-help resources like a blog, a knowledge base, and a vibrant forum. Intercom integrates with systems like e-commerce, CRMs, communication, and analytics. The intercom interface is responsive to mobile devices, allowing agents and customers access remotely.

Compare Intercom and Zendesk Chat based on their key features and functions to find the right one for your business. Compare Intercom and Zendesk Chat to find the best solution for your particular requirements. By evaluating their key features, pricing, specifications, and ratings, you’ll gather valuable information to make a well-informed decision. 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. 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

For small businesses, the choice depends on the complexity of their CRM needs. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Zendesk’s more affordable plans may be suitable if essential CRM functions are enough. However, if businesses seek a more personalized customer experience, Intercom’s advanced features could be beneficial.

Intercom’s reporting is average compared to Zendesk, as it offers some standard reporting and analytics tools. Its analytics do not provide deeper insights into consumer interactions as well. However, customer service (and the ways how a company delivers it) creates a centerpiece of a brand.

Zendesk provides an all-in-one customer service platform with a powerful help desk, live chat, and CRM. Its ticketing system is its standout feature, where every submission automatically creates a ticket and gets queued. This structure may appeal to businesses with specific needs but could be less predictable for budget-conscious organizations.

These plans are not inclusive of the add-ons or access to all integrations. Once you add them all to the picture, their existing plans can turn out to be quite expensive. Zendesk has also introduced its chatbot to help its clients send automated answers to some frequently asked questions to stay ahead in the competitive marketplace. What’s more, it helps its clients build an integrated community forum and help center to improve the support experience in real-time.

In contrast, Zendesk primarily relies on a knowledge base, housing articles, FAQs, and self-help resources. While this resource center can reduce the dependency on agent assistance, it lacks the interactive element found in Intercom’s onboarding process. 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.

Those same tools also increase customer retention by 27% while saving 23% on sales and marketing costs. Zendesk excels in providing in-depth performance metrics for your support team. It offers  comprehensive insights on ticket volume, agent performance, customer satisfaction, first contact resolution rates zendesk chat vs intercom and more. By integrating seamlessly into your app, it offers an intuitive in-app chat experience that fosters direct customer engagement. Intercom isn’t quite as strong as Zendesk in comparison to some of Zendesk’s customer support strengths, but it has more features for sales and lead nurturing.

The latter offers a chat widget that is simple, outdated, and limited in customization options, while the former puts all of its resources into its messenger. Your customer service agents can leave private notes for each other and enjoy automatic ticket assignments to the right specialists. It’s designed so well that you really enjoy staying in their inbox and communicating with clients.

What truly sets Intercom apart is its data-driven approach to customer engagement. It actively collects and utilizes customer data to facilitate highly personalized conversations. For instance, it can use past interactions and behaviors to tailor recommendations or responses. Whether it’s syncing data with your CRM, enhancing communication via messaging platforms, or automating tasks with productivity apps, Zendesk makes it possible. Intercom also excels in real-time chat solutions, making it a strong contender for businesses seeking dynamic customer interaction. This unpredictability in pricing might lead to higher costs, especially for larger companies.

While both Zendesk and Intercom offer strong ticketing systems, they differ in the depth of automation capabilities. Zendesk and Intercom each have their own marketplace/app store where users can find all the integrations for each platform. You can also add apps to your Intercom Messenger home to help users and visitors get what they need, without having to start a conversation. Learn more about the differences between leading chat support solutions Intercom and Zendesk so that you can choose the right tool for your needs. To sum up, if you are looking for a helpdesk with no advanced AI capabilities, you can choose Intercom. Their basic plan is cheaper than Zendesk, but you’ll not get to use any of their AI-powered add-ons.

Customization is more nuanced than Zendesk’s, but it’s still really straightforward to implement. You can opt for code via JavaScript or Rails or even integrate directly with the likes of Google Tag Manager, WordPress, or Shopify. Zendesk’s help center tools should also come in handy for helping customers help themselves—something Zendesk claims eight out of 10 customers would rather do than contact support. To that end, you can import themes or apply your own custom themes to brand your help center the way you want it.

The strength of Zendesk’s UI lies in its structured and comprehensive environment, adept at managing numerous customer interactions and integrating various channels seamlessly. Zendesk chatbot software is a suite of support app that helps transform your customer service into actionable customer retention and lead source via agent deployment. It has one of the most flexible plan structures, making it ideal for businesses of any size. It consists of support, chats, calls center solution, and knowledge base modules that you can upgrade separately. Zendesk makes support, sales, and customer engagement software for everyone with a quick to implement, easy to use, platform.

It allows agents to customize the canned responses by creating snippets or templates with formatting and images. Zendesk and Intercom provide an omnichannel communication messaging function. Agents can manage conversations from a centralized dashboard and track analytics. Zendesk lacks a money-back guarantee, and like Intercom, it doesn’t offer a free plan. Consolidating all these features in a central spot helps maximize productivity. Running an e-commerce store and looking for the best live chat for support?

With Zendesk Sell, you can also customize how deals move through your pipeline by setting pipeline stages that reflect your sales cycle. Intercom allows visitors to search for and view articles from the messenger widget. Customers won’t need to leave your app or website to find the help they need.Zendesk, on the other hand, will redirect the customer to a new web page. While both Zendesk and Intercom offer robust features, their pricing models might still be a hurdle for businesses looking to just start out with a help desk on a comparatively smaller budget. If you prioritize detailed support performance metrics and the ability to create custom reports, Zendesk’s reporting capabilities are likely to be more appealing. Intercom’s analytics focuses more on user behavior and engagement metrics, with insights into customer interactions, and important retention metrics.

It works seamlessly with over 1,000 business tools, like Salesforce, Slack, and Shopify. With its features and pricing, Zendesk is geared toward businesses that full in the range from mid-sized to enterprise-level. Zendesk’s Help Center and Intercom’s Articles both offer features to easily embed help centers into your website or product using their web widgets, SDKs, and APIs.

Intercom’s AI has the transformative power to enhance customer service by offering multilingual support and contextual responses. Fin uses seamless communication across customer bases, breaking language barriers and catering to global audiences. Although it provides businesses with valuable messaging and automation tools, they may require more than this to achieve a higher level of functionality. Companies might assume that using Intercom increases costs, potentially impacting businesses’ ROI.

This can make it challenging to estimate the cost yourself during your research and you need to speak with Intercom for more information. Therefore, a helpdesk with a good inbox can make your team efficient in solving problems. As a conversational relationship platform, Zendesk gives you the option of live chatting with customers via your website, mobile, and messaging. Though, if you compare Zendesk chat vs Intercom, the plugin is a bit hard to use as reviewed by customers. Installing it might take some technical skill and even when installed, could malfunction a bit. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to assist customers through self-help options or access to the relevant articles before connecting them to your team.

An example of the platforms’ different focus is that Intercom includes an email marketing feature, whereas Zendesk doesn’t. While both Intercom and Zendesk excel in customer support and engagement, the decision between the two depends on your specific requirements. It’s well-suited for organizations aiming to enhance customer engagement through real-time communication. Determining whether Zendesk zendesk chat vs intercom is better than Intercom hinges on your unique customer support and engagement requirements. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Zendesk excels as a robust and versatile customer support platform, offering comprehensive tools for managing customer inquiries and support operations across various channels.

Keeping this general theme in mind, I’ll dive deeper into how each software’s features compare, so you can decide which use case might best fit your needs. If you want to test Intercom vs Zendesk before deciding on a tool for good, they both provide free 14-day trials. But sooner or later, you’ll have to decide on the subscription plan, and here’s what you’ll have to pay. Both products are so full-featured that they both take quite a while to learn.

The company was founded in 2007 and today serves over 170,000 customers worldwide. Zendesk’s mission is to build software designed to improve customer relationships. This method helps offer more personalized support as well as get faster response and resolution times. ThriveDesk empowers small businesses to manage real-time customer communications. Its messaging also has real-time notifications and automated responses, enhancing customer communication.

It allows businesses to organize and share helpful documentation or answer customers’ common questions. Self-service resources always relieve the burden on customer support teams, and both of our subjects have this tool in their packages. This makes it an excellent choice if you want to engage with support and potential and existing customers in real time.

Our comprehensive comparison cuts through the noise, revealing all three platforms’ true strengths, limitations, and standout features. Chatbots are software applications that can simulate human-like conversation and boost the effectiveness of your customer service strategy. Omnichannel is an approach that makes it easier to communicate with customers across different channels.

The ProProfs Live Chat Editorial Team is a passionate group of customer service experts dedicated to empowering your live chat experiences with top-notch content. We stay ahead of the curve on trends, tackle technical hurdles, and provide practical tips to boost your business. Zendesk and Intercom are both incredibly powerful customer support tools, and they have their own strengths and weaknesses. Zendesk excels in traditional ticket management and offers a robust set of feature.

In addition, Zendesk and Intercom feature advanced sales reporting and analytics that make it easy for sales teams to understand their prospects and customers more deeply. Intercom offers a wide range of integrations with other popular tools and platforms, allowing businesses to connect their customer support with other systems. Zendesk also offers integrations, but the ecosystem may not be as extensive as Intercom’s. Intercom offers a comprehensive customer database with detailed profiles, enabling businesses to gather and analyze customer data easily.

While it offers a range of advanced features, the overall costs and potential inconsistencies in support could be a concern for some businesses​​​​. Zendesk is a great option for large companies or companies that are looking for a very strong sales and customer service platform. It offers more support features and includes more advanced analytics and reports. It offers a chat-first approach, making it ideal for companies looking to prioritize interactive and personalized customer interactions. This structured approach ensures that no customer query goes unnoticed or unattended, regardless of the channel through which it was initiated. Zendesk is another popular customer service, support, and sales platform that enables clients to connect and engage with their customers in seconds.

On the other hand, if you require robust ticketing and support management features, Zendesk might be the more suitable choice. Consider your budget, team size, and integration requirements before making a decision. There are many features to help bigger customer service teams collaborate more effectively, such as private notes or a real-time view of who’s handling a given ticket at the moment. At the same time, the vendor offers powerful reporting capabilities to help you grow and improve your business.

One of Zendesk’s standout features that we need to shine a spotlight on is its extensive marketplace of third-party integrations and extensions. Imagine having the power to connect your helpdesk solution with a wide range of tools and applications that your team already uses. Zendesk’s extensive feature set and customizable workflows are particularly appealing to organizations looking to streamline and scale their customer support operations efficiently. Choose Zendesk for a scalable, team-size-based pricing model and Intercom for initial low-cost access with flexibility in adding advanced features. Key offerings include automated support with help center articles, a messenger-first ticketing system, and a powerful inbox to centralize customer queries. Zendesk and Intercom are robust tools with a wide range of customer service and CRM features.

All interactions with customers be it via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel are landing in one dashboard, where your agents can solve them fast and efficiently. There’s a plethora of features to help bigger teams collaborate more effectively — like private notes or real-time view of who’s handling a given ticket at the moment, etc. These plans make Chat GPT 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. Both Zendesk and Intercom are customer support management solutions that offer features like ticket management, live chat and messaging, automation workflows, knowledge centers, and analytics.

You would rather have to integrate Chat GPT it with third-party apps like Appy Pie Connect. Automating onboarding messages, product guides, newsletters, and the list goes on. With so many solutions to choose from, finding the right option for your business can feel like an uphill battle. After an in-depth analysis such as this, it can be pretty challenging for your business to settle with either option.

Zendesk has traditionally been more focused on customer support management, while Intercom has been more focused on live support solutions like its chat solution. LiveAgent’s help desk is an omnichannel customer service platform that helps agents handle communications via phone, live chat, social messaging, text, and email. Its help desk consists of a ticketing system that consolidates requests into a shared inbox, a live chat feature for real-time support, and call center software for inbound and outbound calls. Help Scout’s customer service software features a shared inbox that allows multichannel support. The shared inbox offers the familiarity of using email but with automation options, collaboration tools, and a sidebar that provides customer data and activities.

Automate marketing

If you’re a huge corporation with a complicated customer support process, go Zendesk for its help desk functionality. If you’re smaller more sales oriented startup with enough money, go Intercom. They’ve been rated as one of the easy live chat solutions with more integrated options. In terms of customer service, Zendesk fails to deliver an exceptional experience.

Zendesk’s core feature has always been its ticketing system, and it remains the industry’s finest. Since Zendesk’s inception, its ticketing system has remained the best in the business. Zendesk has over 160,000 customers, including some well-known brands like Siemens, Uber and Instacart. Discover how Intercom and Zendesk Chat can integrate to improve user experience overall and optimize workflow efficiency.

Intercom’s sales automation features encompass advanced functionalities like lead scoring, personalized lead nurturing, and streamlined pipeline management. These capabilities enable businesses to streamline their sales processes, prioritize leads effectively, and manage their sales pipelines with greater efficiency and precision. In the digital age, customer support platforms have become the cornerstone of ensuring customer satisfaction and retention.

Another critical difference between Zendesk and Intercom is their approach to CRM. 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.

Zendesk Explore allows you to create custom reports and visualizations in order to gain deeper insights into your support operations and setup. If your business requires a centralized platform to manage a high volume of customer inquiries across various channels, Zendesk is a solid choice. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer a range of channels for businesses to interact with their customers. 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.

Agents can easily view ongoing interactions, and take over from Aura AI at any moment if they feel intervention is needed. Our AI also accelerates query resolution by intelligently routing tickets and providing contextual information to agents in real-time. Simply put, we believe that our Aura AI chatbot is a game-changer when it comes to automating your customer service. Similar to Zendesk, Intercom’s pricing reserves its most powerful automations for higher-paying customers, the good news is that Fin AI comes with all plans. They fall within roughly the same price range, that most SMEs and larger enterprises should find within their budget. Both also use a two-pronged pricing system, based on the number of agents/seats and the level of features needed.

It’s modern, it’s smooth, it looks great and it has so many advanced features. After this live chat software comparison, you’ll get a better picture of what’s better for your business. They have similar features, but Intercom has lots of features and tools that better integrate each other. If your business has an app, in-app messaging can be used to send messages to customers. You can use this with the push notification of the app to keep your customers in the loop of possible promos, rewards, and more. The call center is another standout feature where agents can take or receive customer calls to solve inquiries.

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. These features make it suitable for businesses of all sizes, helping them streamline their support operations and enhance the overall customer experience. It tends to perform well on the marketing and sales side of things, which is key for a growing company.

Having only appeared in 2011, Intercom lacks a few years of experience on Zendesk. It also made its name as a messaging-first platform for fostering personalized conversational experiences for customers. 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 does not offer a native call center tool, so it cannot handle calls through a cloud-based phone system or calling app on its own. However, you can connect Intercom with over 40 compatible phone and video integrations.