Zendesk vs Intercom in 2023: Detailed Analysis of Features, Pricing, and More

We provide a wealth of excellent resources to aid you in establishing Customer Friendship™, and our team is always available for consultation. View the attached screenshots to easily evaluate the similarities and differences between Intercom and Zendesk Chat user interfaces. Experience the amazing capabilities of Intercom and Zendesk Chat on desktop and mobile devices for unparalleled productivity and flexibility. Examine Intercom and Zendesk Chat prices and plans to make sure you get the best deal for your needs.

This unpredictability in pricing might lead to higher costs, especially for larger companies. While it offers a range of advanced features, the overall costs and potential inconsistencies in support could be a concern for some businesses​​​​. Intercom’s UI excels in modern design and intuitive functionality, particularly noted for its real-time messaging and advanced features. It is tailored for automation and quick access to insights, offering a user-friendly experience.

Zendesk, unlike Intercom, is a more affordable and predictable customer service platform. Also, it’s the pioneer in the support and communication tools market. You can always count on it if you need a reliable customer support platform to process tickets, support users, and get advanced reporting. You can also use Intercom intercom vs zendesk as a customer service platform, but given its broad focus, you may not get the same level of specialized expertise. Intercom and Zendesk are both powerful support solutions with unique features. Intercom excels in real-time messaging and customer engagement, while Zendesk focuses on ticketing and strong customer support.

So, by holding Desku’s hand, you can open doors for a long list of happy and fully satisfied customers. 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. We need a powerful chat tool that can enable immediate engagement, have some basic automation, and allows users to drop in. This multichannel approach is especially important for companies that support customers in different regions and countries as access to communication tools can vary. While Intercom is great for tracking user-centric metrics, Zendesk can provide a more comprehensive look at overall customer support performance.

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Zendesk’s AI (Fin) helps with automated responses, ensuring your customers get quick answers. On the other hand, Intercom’s AI-powered chatbots and messaging are designed to enhance your marketing and sales efforts, giving you an edge in the competitive market. Experience the comprehensive power of Intercom for effective customer communication, automation, support tools, integrations, and analytics. Intercom’s messaging system enables real-time interactions through various channels, including chat, email, and in-app messages. Connect with customers wherever they are for timely assistance and personalized experiences. So, get ready for an insightful journey through the landscapes of Zendesk and Intercom, where support excellence converges with AI innovation.

Additionally, you can trigger incoming messages to automatically assign an agent and create dashboards to monitor the team’s performance on live chat. 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. For small businesses, the choice depends on the complexity of their CRM needs. Zendesk’s more affordable plans may be suitable if essential CRM functions are enough.

With Zendesk’s Answer Bot, relevant articles are automatically suggested to your customers, saving them time while they look for solutions. Zendesk has many amazing team collaboration and communication features, like whisper mode, which lets multiple agents chime in to help each other without the customer knowing. There is also something called warm transfers, which let one rep add contextual notes to a ticket before transferring it to another rep. You also get a side conversation tool. In the category of customer support, Zendesk appears to be just slightly better than Intercom based on the availability of regular service and response times. However, it is possible Intercom’s support is superior at the premium level. There are 3 Basic support plans at $19, $49 and $99 per user per month billed annually, and 5 Suite plans at $49, $79, $99, $150, and $215 per user per month billed annually.

This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site (including, for example, the order in which they appear). 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. Integrations are the best way to enhance the toolkit of your apps by connecting them for interoperable actions and features.

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You can even improve efficiency and transparency by setting up task sequences, defining sales triggers, and strategizing with advanced forecasting and reporting tools. Starting at $19 per user per month, it’s also on the cheaper end of the spectrum compared to high-end CRMs like ActiveCampaign and HubSpot. You can create articles, share them internally, group them for users, and assign them as responses for bots—all pretty standard fare.

This is an AI assistant that will help anyone navigate Guide by providing results as you type your query. The bot also ensures that the customer or employee will find the right article before contacting an agent. Thus, it leaves your team to solve more important customer requests.

• It brings all your customer interactions to a single dashboard so that you can track all your support requests, answer questions quickly, and monitor performance from one place.
• Today, thanks to the virtual technology revolution, you can find numerous help desk software, but our vote goes for Zendesk and Intercom.
• They have great UX and a normal pricing range, making it difficult for businesses to choose one, as both software almost looks similar in their offerings.

As more organizations adopt AI, it will be critical to choose a data model that aligns with how your business operates. Customer experience will be no exception, and AI models that are purpose-built for CX lead to better results at scale. Intercom is a customer relationship management and messaging tool for web businesses. Compare Intercom and Zendesk Chat to find the best solution for your particular requirements.

But it’s also a given that many people will approach their reviews to Zendesk and Intercom with some specific missions in mind, and that’s bound to change how they feel about the platforms. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Zendesk and Intercom offer various pricing plans, but Intercom is generally more expensive. Zendesk’s pricing plans start at $19 per month, while Intercom’s pricing plans start at $74 per month. Your best pricing plan will depend on your specific needs and budget. If you are a small business with basic CRM needs, then the Zendesk Support Team or Intercom Starter may be a good option for you. If you are a growing business with more complex CRM needs, then the Zendesk Enterprise or Intercom Pro plan may be a better option for you.

It excels in real-time customer communication and helps support teams create personalized customer experiences. Zendesk is a comprehensive CRM and support suite that offers a variety of features for customer support, sales, and marketing. One of Zendesk’s most notable aspects is its robust ticketing system. As Zendesk initially began as a help desk ticketing system, it’s no surprise that the platform makes tracking and managing customer inquiries seamless. Apart from a live chat, it has a feature called ‘Business Messenger’ that comes with its own AI chatbot.

How easy it is to program a chatbot and how effective a chatbot is at assisting human reps is an important factor for this category. The Intercom vs. Zendesk pricing may be justified by the Chat GPT value-added services and minor features that they have for their all-in-one pricing. For example, for businesses that want just a couple of features, there are subscription packages.

Intercom Alternatives for 2024: Discover Budget-Friendly Solutions

Some of the highly-rated features include ticket creation user experience, email to case, and live chat reporting. When you see pricing plans starting for $79/month, you should get a clear understanding of how expensive other plans can become for your business. What’s worse, Intercom doesn’t offer a free trial to its prospect to help them test the product before onboarding with their services. Instead, they offer a product demo when prospects reach out to learn more about their pricing structure. 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 is aided by the fact that the look and feel of Zendesk’s user interface are neat and minimal, with few cluttering features. When it comes to self-service portals for things like knowledgebases, Intercom has a useful set of resources. Intercom also has a community forum where users can help one another with questions and solutions. For Intercom’s pricing plan, on the other hand, there is much less information on their website. There is a Starter plan for small businesses at $74 per month billed annually, and there are add-ons like a WhatsApp add-on at $9 per user per month or surveys at $49 per month. They have similar features, but Intercom has lots of features and tools that better integrate each other.

If you are looking for more integration options and budget is not an issue, Intercom can be the perfect live chat solution for your business. It is also ideal for businesses who are searching for conversational chatbot functionality. Their AI-powered chatbot can enable your business to boost engagement and improve marketing efforts in real-time. 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. You can create these knowledge base articles in your target audience’s native language as their software is multilingual.

Compare Intercom to other tools

Zendesk and Intercom are robust tools with a wide range of customer service and CRM features. For small companies and startups, Intercom offers a Starter plan — with a balanced suite of features from each of the solutions below — at $74 per month per user, billed annually. Intercom offers an easy way to nurture your qualified leads (prospects) into customers with Intercom Series.

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.

Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates. Overall, I actually liked Zendesk’s user experience better than Intercom’s in terms of its messaging dashboard. Intercom has a dark mode that I think many people will appreciate, and I wouldn’t say it’s lacking in any way. But I like that Zendesk just feels slightly cleaner, has easy online/away toggling, more visual customer journey notes, and a handy widget for exploring the knowledge base on the fly.

For large-scale businesses, the budget for such investments is usually higher than for startups, but they need to analyze if the investment is worth it. They need to comprehensively analyze if they are getting the value of the invested money. Zendesk also offers detailed reports that can be shared with others and enable team members to collaborate on them simultaneously. You can either track your performance on a pre-built dashboard or customize and build one for yourself.

You can opt for code via JavaScript or Rails or even integrate directly with the likes of Google Tag Manager, WordPress, or Shopify. Zendesk AI is the intelligence layer that infuses CX intelligence into every step of the customer journey. In addition to being pre-trained on billions of real support interactions, our AI powers bots, agent and admin assist, and intelligent workflows that lead to 83 percent lower administrative costs.

When comparing the reporting and analytics features of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms offer robust tools, but with distinct focuses and functionalities. But keep in mind that Zendesk is viewed more as a support and ticketing solution, while Intercom is CRM functionality-oriented. Which means it’s rather a customer relationship management platform than anything else. The cheapest plan for small businesses – Essential – costs $39 monthly per seat.

Their reports are attractive, dynamic, and integrated right out of the box. You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads. 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. Understanding these fundamental differences should go a long way in helping you pick between the two, but does that mean you can’t use one platform to do what the other does better?

Zendesk stands out as a champion of delivering personalized customer support due to its easy-to-use work-frame, many useful add-ons, and features in all tiers. The platform offers Zendesk Talk as its call center solution to keep up with other help desks. This feature is browser-based, so you don’t need additional software or hardware. Intercom offers call center features for your business via add-ons. Services such as CallHippo, Ozonetel, Toky, Aircall Now are just a few of many more add-ons in lieu of call center tools built into the help desk software. What makes it different from other help desk tools is the Answer Bot.

Dominic scrutinizes how Zendesk and Intercom handle ticketing, evaluating response times, ease of use, and customization options. Viewers gain valuable insights into which platform excels in managing and resolving customer queries efficiently. 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 provides real-time visitor tracking, allowing businesses to see who is currently browsing their website or using their app.

However, users often find Intercom’s live chat more user-friendly and feature rich. Intercom’s live chat functionality goes beyond the basics, incorporating targeted messaging, proactive messaging, and sophisticated chatbot capabilities. If your organization aims to enhance customer engagement through live chat, in-app messaging, and proactive outreach, Intercom might serve as a viable alternative to Zendesk. Zendesk is renowned for its comprehensive toolset that aids in automating customer service workflows and fine-tuning chatbot interactions.

Fin uses seamless communication across customer bases, breaking language barriers and catering to global audiences. AI is integral to customer relationship management software and facilitates consumer interactions. AI helps businesses gain detailed insight into consumer data in real-time.

Agents can assign sales inquiries and support requests to the respective team or team members. Selecting an ideal helpdesk software that suits your business needs is critical for the success of your customer support. In this article, we will directly compare two customer service providers—Zendesk vs Intercom, to help you evaluate what would work best for your business. While Zendesk offers a wide array of support features, many more than Intercom, there are a couple of major features it lacks that Intercom has.

At the same time, Zendesk looks slightly outdated and can’t offer some features. It’s known for its unified agent workspace which combines different communication methods like email, social media messaging, live chat, and SMS, all in one place. This makes it easier for support teams to handle customer interactions without switching between different systems. Plus, Zendesk’s integration with various channels ensures customers can always find a convenient way to reach out.

Existing customers have complained consistently about how they aren’t available at the right time to offer support to customers. There are even instances where customers don’t receive the first response in more than seven days. After this live chat software comparison, you’ll get a better picture of what’s better for your business. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer varying flavors when it comes to curating the whole customer support experience. Customer support and security are vital aspects to consider when evaluating helpdesk solutions like Zendesk and Intercom. Let’s examine and compare how each platform addresses these crucial areas to ensure effective support operations and data protection.

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). 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.

It caters to a wide range of industries, particularly excelling in e-commerce, SaaS, technology, and telecommunications. It is favored by customer support, helpdesk, IT service management, and contact center teams. Helplama positions itself as a cloud-based helpdesk solution that helps brands turn customer service into a marketing pipeline.

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. Both Intercom and Zendesk have proven to be valuable tools for businesses looking to provide excellent customer support. Evaluate their features, compare them based on your business needs, and choose the one that aligns best with your goals and objectives.

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. But Intercom’s friendliness for growing companies is something you can’t afford to ignore. If your business is established and you need to cut down on those ticket resolution times, Zendesk may be worth it.

Whether Zendesk can fully replace Intercom depends on your specific customer support and engagement requirements. There are four different subscription packages you can choose from, all of which also have Essential, Pro, and Premium options for businesses of different sizes. You’d need to chat with Intercom sales team for get the costs for the Premium subscription, though.

• Services such as CallHippo, Ozonetel, Toky, Aircall Now are just a few of many more add-ons in lieu of call center tools built into the help desk software.
• The final prices are revealed after engaging in sales demos and are not revealed upfront.
• This is aided by the fact that the look and feel of Zendesk’s user interface are neat and minimal, with few cluttering features.
• Both tools can be quite heavy on your budget since they mainly target big enterprises and don’t offer their full toolset at an affordable price.

However, competitive pricing is a promise and not a compromise to make decent customer support accessible for all. Zendesk also includes built-in CSAT and NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys and even allows you to track the effectiveness of your knowledge base articles and self-service resources. Support requests are managed as ongoing conversations rather than tickets which are shared via a unified inbox allowing multiple team members to share knowledge and solutions. For an area of focus as critical as customer support, it can mean the difference between a satisfied customer and a lost account. When it comes to customer support software, Zendesk is #1 in popularity and brand recognition. It is none other than the modern customer support software of Helpwise.

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. There is power to be realized in partnerships and the strategic combination of forces, and companies using chatbots for customer service can further enhance the CX, taking it to new heights. Netomi’s virtual agents sit alongside human agents to supplement and enhance the capacity of support teams, ensuring the seamless resolution of customer queries. Intercom offers advanced customer service through its automated functions and is suitable for businesses looking for a sophisticated customer support solution. Another advantage of using Intercom is that it not only enhances customer engagement but is also a great way to increase customer support teams’ productivity. Zendesk’s pricing structure provides increasing levels of features and capabilities as businesses move up the tiers.

Zendesk outshines Intercom for customer support workflows with its core feature, the ticketing system. 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. 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. So yeah, two essential things that Zendesk lacks in comparison to Intercom are in-app messages and email marketing tools.

This 24/7 support model is designed to provide continuous, real-time solutions to clients, enhancing the overall reliability and responsiveness of Hivers’ services. Choose Zendesk for a scalable, team-size-based pricing model and Intercom for initial low-cost access with flexibility in adding advanced features. Intercom stands out for its modern and user-friendly messenger functionality, which includes advanced features with a focus on automation and real-time insights. Its AI Chatbot, Fin, is particularly noted for handling complex queries efficiently.

It’s much easier if you decide to go with the Zendesk Suite, which includes Support, Chat, Talk, and Guide tools. There are two options there — Professional for $109 or Enterprise for $179 if you pay monthly. The difference between the two is that the Professional subscription lacks some things like chat widget unbranding, custom agent roles, multiple help centers, etc. Their help desk is a single inbox to handle customer requests, where your customer support agents can leave private notes for each other and automatically assign requests to the right people. 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.

As well as Intercom, it allows sharing of private notes with other support agents. Intercom’s CRM can work as a standalone CRM and requires no additional service to operate robustly. It offers comprehensive customer data management and lead-tracking features. Some businesses may require supplemental products to meet specific needs. Intercom’s CRM utility is a solid foundation for managing customer relationships and sales in one platform.

Zendesk allows the integration of 1300 apps ranging from billing apps, marketing tools, and other software, adding overall to the value of the business. It also excels in the silo approach in a company and allows easy access to information to anyone in https://chat.openai.com/ the company through this integration. On the other hand, Intercom’s chatbots have more advanced features but do not sacrifice simplicity and ease of use. It helps businesses create highly personalized chatbots for interactive customer communication.