Zendesk vs Intercom: Which is better? 2023

Our plans range from Suite Team ($49/month per user when billed annually) all the way up to Suite Enterprise ($150/month per user when billed annually). And don’t forget – all our plans come with a 30-day free trial, so you can test them out before making your final decision. It also offers advanced analytics so that you can measure the effectiveness of your customer service strategy and identify areas of improvement. If you’re looking for an alternative to Zendesk that provides a comprehensive set of features, Front might be the perfect solution for you. In a nutshell, both these companies provide great customer support. I tested both of their live chats and their support agents were answering in very quickly and right to the point.

• Additionally, its AI-powered chatbot allows you to automate conversations with customers and answer their questions instantly.
• There are even instances where customers don’t receive the first response in more than seven days.
• Let it be custom properties, custom surveys, or custom reports; you can shape everything according to your team’s and customers’ needs.
• There is also a help center where customers’ requests can be seen by support staff.
• What’s really nice about this is that even within a ticket, you can switch between communication modes without changing views.
• Altogether, this can significantly impact affordability in the long term.

Jetdocs is the top choice for teams focusing on ticketing solutions, while Intercom excels in offering a comprehensive customer experience platform. Gist presents an affordable option with unlimited seats, JitBit caters to businesses seeking a self-hosted solution, and Crisp.Chat provides an amazing free live chat service. Crisp is the next-level customer engagement platform that takes customer service to a whole new level. It’s designed for modern businesses and offers powerful features such as automated conversations, real-time analytics, and multi-channel messaging. Plus, it’s incredibly easy to set up and use – so you can get started quickly and start delighting customers right away. Zoho Desk is an intuitive customer service platform designed to help streamline the way you interact with your customers.

Zendesk vs Intercom: Help Desk Software Comparison

Here, we’ve outlined the support options that Intercom and Zendesk provide to companies using their platforms. The Zendesk Admin Center panels allow administrators to control settings, accessibility, automations, and workflows for everything from chatbots to integrations and custom APIs. Intercom offers admin full visibility and control over all company inboxes, as well as agent access controls and role management.

• It provides you with all of the tools you need to develop a trusting relationship with your customers and resolve their issues with personalized support.
• Zendesk is around the same price for its smallest suite offering.
• Chatbots help you assist customers with their basic queries and generate more leads.
• With HappyFox, you can manage customers across multiple channels such as email, phone, chat, and social media.
• Sales teams can also view outbound communications, and any support agent can access resources from the Intercom workspace.
• As we could see, Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk’s messaging and style are quite different in terms of tone, approach, and visual content.

The only downside to this Zendesk alternative is that it is a bit costly, and pricing can be confusing. Moreover, companies that have customer-centric teams may not like that Kustomer offers so many deflecting requests. This live chat software allows companies, such as ours, to have real conversations with customers. Intercom software is designed to resemble the messaging apps we use every day, Intercom allows you to talk to consumers from inside your app, across your website, and via email.

Feature Set Comparison: Zendesk vs Intercom

User icons would be a great addition to replace chat icons or messaging buttons. The Intercom live chat is familiar to those entrepreneurs who have recently decided to go online and raise their own loyal client base by individually working with each one of them. In 2013, Intercom was featured on Product Hunt, where it collected a number of reviews from appreciative partners and garnered the reputation of the most efficient tool of its kind.

Whether it is about organizing customer issues or communicating with team members, dashboards can make an impactful difference. With a shared view of email, Facebook, SMS, calendars, live chat, CRMs, and 80+ apps in one space, you’ll have all the context you need to deliver a personalized touch. As a freelancer, I don’t need all the integrations and support that Intercom provides. It enables you to get quality product feedback from the right customers at the right time through the app or by email. Intercom assists with the onboarding and retention of customers through targeted email and in-app messages triggered by time or behavior.

Zendesk is angled more for managing customer support, while Intercom is better for managing customer relationships

Unify Customer Queries from multiple platforms in one and never miss out on any customers. Self-Service smart features like AI-powered Knowledge Base help customers or visitors to first go through guidance before reaching out to your support team. Yes, you heard it right, Jetdocs does not feature block users or place limitations, or make you buy extra add-ons to access core features. All the features Jetdocs has is accessible to all the premium members without any segregation. More than channels, Crisp lets you gather your teams around the inbox to improve collaboration and reduce the time to resolution of each conversation. Combined with data accessible to your fingertips, Crisp helps you to personalize each interaction on every channel to build the best customer experience possible.

Yes, you can replace Zendesk with Intercom as both platforms have a rich set of features and integrations. They have similar features, but Intercom has lots of features and tools that better integrate each other. Formerly known as Insights, Zendesk now uses Explore to provide analytics to help businesses tailor their services to increase customer satisfaction. Intercom has Articles as a knowledge base solution for self-support, as well as internal support. This feature is available on all the channels your customers use to get in touch with your brand. 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 vs Intercom for customer support

Zendesk also makes it easy to customize your help center, with out-of-the-box tools to design color, theme, and layout–both on mobile and desktop. Self-service tools let customers resolve their own issues quickly and 24/7, improving satisfaction and reducing excessive agent workload. Zendesk’s Admin Center provides tools that automate agent ticket workflows. With Intercom workload management tools, administrators can ensure that incoming conversations, traffic, and workload are evenly distributed among team members. Design and send out mobile push messages–phone pop-ups containing text and images that prompt customers to take action and redirect to a specific app page when clicked.

Other features that Freshdesk offers include help desk software, messaging and chatbot support, and omnichannel communication to reach customers across various platforms. If your team is looking for a robust live chat option to engage website visitors, Olark is the perfect Intercom alternative for you. Zendesk has strong positive reviews especially since the software has mobile apps for access. Though some complained that it’s not easy to check the tickets using the apps.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

While Intercom offers a “Starter Plan” for very small businesses, the price for larger companies is scaled upward, too. If you only need the services Intercom offers, then you’ll only spend around $75 a month for two seats. Zendesk is around the same price for its smallest suite offering.

Intercom costs can go even higher with custom add-ons such as Product Tours (from $199/month, Advanced lead generation (from $499/month), Advanced customer engagement (from $499/month), etc. 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.

Pricing plans: Zendesk vs. Intercom

However, Intercom’s pricing can be prohibitive for smaller businesses with limited budgets. ClickDesk’s support features are unique in this list, as they offer voice and video support in addition to live chat. This can help support agents to help customers through complex issues that simply don’t translate well via live chat. It also provides customers with yet another way to reach your company based on their support preferences. Intercom is a popular customer communications platform, but its focus has always been on sales and marketing. After starting life as a simple chat widget, Intercom has added lots of new features to its messaging platform, but catering for customer support seems like more of an afterthought.

Besides, Skyvia supports the UPSERT operation — inserting new records and updating records already existing in the target. This allows importing data without creating duplicates for existing target records. Having an knowledge base can dramatically lift your site’s customer experience, so if you’re planning on building one go with LiveAgent. Anyone looking for a customer relationship management metadialog.com (CRM) tool to run and improve the whole customer journey can use and benefit from Zendesk. By means of this perk, you can leave a comment, which is called a private note, on an email for your colleague to review before sending it. This beneficial feature can be achieved via even a basic plan and is a big advantage for larger teams that need to keep in touch regularly for email ticketing.

Zendesk Chat vs Intercom – Which One Should You Use?

Based on that, for software companies that have mobile apps or cross-platform, they might have a mobile app or a web app, Intercom tends to stand out as a really solid option. The marketing has been quite good, despite what was a confusing product set. They’ve changed their products a little bit, they organized them a little bit differently over the past couple years.

The compared vendors share a strategy of delivering their services as either separate add-ons or all-in-one tools. 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. Zendesk is more robust in terms of its ticket management capabilities, it offers more customization options and advanced features like a virtual call center app.

If you’re a sales-oriented corporation, go with Intercom for its automation options. Both tools can be quite heavy on your budget, since they’re mainly targeting big enterprises and don’t offer their full toolset at an affordable price. Another great Intercom feature is that it allows users to create comprehensive knowledge bases.

• If you’ve been an Intercom user who’s unhappy with the features surrounding customer support, Help Scout is the perfect alternative for your team.
• Jetdocs is a collaborative ticketing solution that is integrated into Microsoft Teams and Slack.
• In fact, agents can even add customers to private messaging chats when necessary, and the customer will receive the whole conversation history by email to ensure they’re up to date.
• It’s also good for sending and receiving notifications, as well as for quick filtering through the queue of open tickets.
• We have numerous customers that do this and benefit greatly from our out-of-the-box integration with Intercom.
• The main difference is its connectivity with the Intercom Team Inbox.

Conversational Support and Engagement – Intercom takes a conversational approach to customer support and engagement. With live chat, chatbots, and targeted messaging, Intercom enables personalized interactions with customers. It shines in managing customer conversations and gathering user insights, making it an ideal choice for businesses focused on proactive engagement and customer success.