Intercom vs Zendesk: Comparing features, integrations, and pricing
It is quite the all-rounder as it even has a help center and ticketing system that completes its omnichannel support cycle. One of the standout features of Intercom’s user interface is the ability to view customer conversations in a single thread, regardless of the channel they were initiated on. This makes it easy to see the full context of a customer’s interactions with a business, which can lead to more personalized and practical support. With Messagely, you can increase your customer satisfaction and solve customers’ issues while they’re still visiting your site. In short, Zendesk is perfect for large companies looking to streamline their customer support process; Intercom is great for smaller companies looking for advanced customer service features. For basic chat and messaging, Intercom charges a flat fee of $39 per month for its basic plan with one user and $99 per month for its team plan with up to 5 users.
Customer expectations are already high, but with the rise of AI, customers are expecting even more. Customers want speed, anticipation, and a hyper-personalized experience conveniently on their channel of choice. Intelligence has become key to delivering the kinds of experiences customers expect at a lower operational cost. As more organizations adopt AI, it will be critical to choose a data model that aligns with how your business operates.
Compared to Zendesk, Intercom offers few integrations, which may hinder its scalability. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer customer service software with AI capabilities—however, they are not created equal. With Zendesk, you get next-level AI-powered support software that’s intuitively designed, scalable, and cost-effective. Compare Zendesk vs. Intercom and future-proof your business with reliable, easy-to-use software.
First, you can only talk to the support team if you are a registered user. Zendesk’s automation features are limited to offering basic automation to streamline repetitive tasks. While Zeendesk provides automation services for ticket support systems, notifications, chatbots, etc., it may not be an extensive feature compared to Intercom. If your goal is to deliver outstanding customer support to your audience, then Zendesk is a good option. It comes with a unified omnichannel dashboard, custom reports, and an advanced ticketing system. However, if you aim to nurture leads and grow sales, then Intercom is the better option.
What’s more, it helps its clients build an integrated community forum and help center to improve the support experience in real-time. Intercom and Zendesk offer competitive pricing plans with various features to suit different business needs. Businesses should carefully evaluate their requirements and choose the best method for their needs and budget. Zendesk also offers a community forum where users can ask questions and get help from others. This can be a valuable resource for users looking for solutions to specific problems or wanting to learn more about the platform. Intercom also offers a community forum where users can ask questions and get help from other users.
In this paragraph, let’s explain some common issues users usually ask about when choosing between Zendesk and Intercom platforms. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how its tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. To resolve common customer questions with the vendor’s new tool, Fin bot, you must pay $0.99 per resolution per month. 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 platform for your business, so let’s talk money now.
They have a dedicated help section that provides instructions on how to set up and effectively use Intercom. It also provides mid-sized businesses with comprehensive customer relationship management software, as they require more advanced features to handle customer support. Similarly, the ability of Zendesk to scale also makes it the best fit for enterprise-level organizations. Zendesk offers robust reporting capabilities, providing businesses with detailed insights into consumer interactions, ticketing systems, agent performance, and more. Businesses can also track their performance, identify trends, and make informed decisions using its advanced analytics tool and creative dashboards that can customized according to the business needs.
Integration Ecosystem:
If transparency in pricing is not an issue for you and you are a small business, contact Intercom. If, after the additional prices they charge, the plan works for you, Intercom is a great way to manage your customer relationships. Every CRM software comes with some limitations along with the features it offers. You can analyze if that weakness is something that concerns your business model. The final prices are revealed after engaging in sales demos and are not revealed upfront.
If you want automated options, Intercom starts at either $499 or $999 per month for up to ten users, depending on the level of automation you’re looking for. If you want both customer support and CRM, you can choose between paying $79 or $125 per month per user, depending on how many advanced features you require. Its $99 bracket includes advanced options, such as customer satisfaction prediction and multi-brand support, and in the $199 bracket, you also get advanced security and other very advanced features.
Zendesk or Intercom: CRM
It can also handle complex interactions and provide real-time insight to customer support agents. Overall, Intercom is a better option if personalized and robust chatbots are something you are looking for when managing customer support strategy. Intercom’s CRM features include customer journey tracking, custom data parameters, and list segmentation, which are useful for targeted marketing and engagement.
It is designed for larger enterprises and offers more comprehensive features than Intercom. Zendesk and Intercom offer help desk management solutions to their users. In summary, Intercom and Zendesk are powerful customer support tools offering various features to help businesses communicate with their customers effectively. While Intercom has a more modern and user-friendly interface, Zendesk has a broader range of features and integrations. Ultimately, the choice between Intercom and Zendesk will depend on the specific needs of your business.
Intercom has a community forum where users can engage with each other and gain insights from their experiences. To sum it all up, you need to consider various aspects of your business before choosing CRM software. While deciding between Zendesk and Intercom, you should ensure the customization, AI automation, and functionalities align with your business goals. As we delve into the features of Zendesk, we can identify the following weaknesses regarding user experience. Intecom’s pricing strategies are not as transparent as Zendesk’s pricing. When it comes to Intercom, it reserves SSO and identity management for its higher-priced tier plan as an add-on.
Intercom does not have a dedicated workforce management solution, either. 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. Pipedrive offers five total plans, with their entry-level Essential plan offering significantly fewer features than the others. For example, bulk email send, email templates, email scheduling, and automation features are only available to those who purchase the Advanced plan and above.
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When it comes to customer support and services, both Intercom and Zendesk offer robust solutions. In this section, we will take a closer look at the customer support options provided by each platform. On the other hand, Intercom prides itself on being the only complete customer service solution that provides a seamless experience across automation and human support.
For those of you who have been waiting for the big showdown between these two customer support heavyweights, we are glad to present the ultimate Zendesk vs Intercom comparison article. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. Lastly, Intercom offers an academy that offers concise courses to help users make the most out of their Intercom experience. We’d also recommend checking out this blog on suspended ticket management in ZenDesk.
Plus, visit tagging and geolocation features allow your sales team to effortlessly log in-person sales visits, letting you monitor all your sales interactions in one centralized place. Pipedrive provides a mobile app to manage sales leads, view your calendar, and access your to-do list. And while Pipedrive’s mobile app can help you look at where your leads are on the map, you won’t be able to log sales visits using geolocation features.
This enables them to speed up the support process and build experiences that customers like. One of the standout features of Zendesk’s customer support is its ticketing system. Users can submit support tickets through the platform, and customer support teams can manage and track those tickets to ensure they are resolved promptly. This feature ensures that users receive the support they need when needed. Intercom is better for smaller companies that are looking for a simple and capable customer service platform. Instead, using it and setting it up is very easy, and very advanced chatbots and predictive tools are included to boost your customer service.
Its proactive support features, unified inbox, and customizable bots are highly beneficial for businesses looking to engage customers dynamically and manage conversations effortlessly. In general, Zendesk offers a wide range of live chat features such as customizable chat widgets, automatic greetings, offline messaging, and chat triggers. In addition to these features, Intercom offers messaging automation and real-time visitor insights.
When factoring in AI-first tools for all agents, multi-channel campaigns, and proactive support, it could easily cost significantly more than Zendesk. 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.
The pricing structure of Intercom is complex, making it difficult for Intercom users to understand their final costs. Intercom charges the price based on representative seats and people reached, with additional expenses for add-ons. In comparison, Intercom’s reporting and analytics are limited in scope when it comes to consumer behavior metrics, custom reporting, and custom metrics. Intercom has more customization features for features like bots, themes, triggers, and funnels. What’s really nice about this is that even within a ticket, you can switch between communication modes without changing views. So if an agent needs to switch from chat to phone to email (or vice versa) with a customer, it’s all on the same ticketing page.
The only other downside is that the chat widget can feel a bit static and outdated. When comparing chatbots, it’s important to consider their level of intelligence, “trainability,” and customization. According to G2, Intercom has a slight edge over Zendesk with a 4.5-star rating, but from just half the number of users. Similar to Zendesk, though, users praise its ease of use and feature set. While no area of concern really stands out, there are some complaints about the company’s billing practices. While both Zendesk and Intercom offer the essentials, like ticketing, issue resolution, and automation, the devil’s in the details when it comes to which is best for your unique needs.
The choice between the two platforms would depend on the specific needs and preferences of each business. This live chat service provider offers 200+ integrations to its user base. With a mix of productivity, collaboration, eCommerce, CRM, analytics, email marketing, social media, and other tools, you get the option to create an omnichannel suite. Intercom is an excellent option for businesses prioritizing personalized communication and customer engagement.
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 the standout features of Zendesk’s user interface is the ability to view customer interactions in a timeline format, which can help track the progress of a customer’s support request. Additionally, Zendesk offers a wide range of customization options, allowing users to tailor the user interface to their needs.
You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. When deciding on choosing between Zendesk or Pipedrive for your business, there is a lot to keep in mind. With Zendesk, you can connect your sales and support teams, empowering them with the information they need to deliver better customer experiences. On the other hand, Pipedrive doesn’t offer a customer service solution, limiting users to third-party integrations. Intercom and Zendesk offer a range of features to help businesses manage their customer interactions. While Intercom focuses more on customer messaging and personalization, Zendesk focuses more on traditional customer support ticket management. Ultimately, the choice between these two platforms will depend on the specific needs of the business and the type of customer interactions they are looking to manage.
However, the latter is more of a support and ticketing solution, while Intercom is CRM functionality-oriented. This means it’s a customer relationship management platform rather than anything else. If you thought Zendesk prices were confusing, let me introduce you to Intercom prices. At first glance, they seem like simple three packages for small, medium, and big businesses. But it’s virtually impossible to predict what you’ll pay for Intercom at the end of the day.
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. Zendesk and Intercom also both offer analytics and reporting capabilities that allow businesses to analyze and monitor customer agents’ productivity. As a result, companies can identify trends and areas for improvement, allowing them to continuously improve their support processes and provide better service to their customers. 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.
You can even save custom dashboards for a more tailored reporting experience. 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.
By exploring their distinct offerings, we aim to assist businesses in making informed decisions when selecting a customer service platform. For smaller teams that have to handle multiple tasks, do Chat GPT not forget to check JustReply.ai, which is a user-friendly customer support tool. It will seamlessly integrate with Slack and offers everything you need for your favorite communication platform.
One of Zendesk’s other key strengths has also been its massive library of integrations. 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. When it comes to which company is the better fit for your business, there’s no clear answer.
Since Intercom doesn’t offer a CRM, its pricing is divided into basic messaging and messaging with automations. Users also point out that it can take a couple of hours to get used to the flow of tickets, which doesn’t happen in CRM, and they aren’t pleased with the product’s downtime. Learn more about the differences between leading chat support solutions Intercom and Zendesk so that you can choose the right tool for your needs.
After an in-depth analysis such as this, it can be pretty challenging for your business to settle with either option. That’s why it would be better to review where both the options would be ideal to use. 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. This customized dashboard will help you see metrics that you’d like to focus on regularly.
When deciding between Intercom and Zendesk, businesses should consider their specific needs and goals. For those with a complicated customer support process, Zendesk may be the better option. However, Intercom may be the better choice if a business is more sales-oriented. Ultimately, the decision between these two tools will depend on company size, budget, and specific business needs. Intercom, on the other hand, excels in providing a seamless customer service experience by merging automation with human support.
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. 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.
He’s passionate about helping companies to succeed with marketing and business development tips. Customerly’s reporting tools are built on the principle that you can’t improve what you can’t measure. What’s more, we support live video support for moments when your customers need in-depth guidance. However, for more advanced CRM needs like lead management and sales forecasting, Intercom may not make the cut, unfortunately. What’s even cooler is its ability to use AI to forecast customer behavior. Agents can use this to anticipate and proactively address issues before the escalate, or even arise in the first place.
MParticle is a Customer Data Platform offering plug-and-play integrations to Zendesk and Intercom, along with over 300 other marketing, analytics, and data warehousing tools. With mParticle, you can connect your Zendesk and Intercom data with other marketing, analytics, and business intelligence platforms without any custom engineering effort. Zendesk excels in providing in-depth performance metrics for your support team.
The only relief is that they do reach out to customers, but it gets too late. In terms of customer service, Zendesk fails to deliver an exceptional experience. One of the most significant downsides of Intercom is its customer support. 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. Compared to Intercom, Zendesk’s pricing starts at $49/month, which is still understandable but not meant for startups looking for affordable pricing plans.
However, businesses must choose between Zendesk vs Intercom based on their needs and requirements. The Suite Team plan, priced at $69 per agent, adds features like live chat and messaging, while the Suite Growth plan at $115 per agent introduces automation and advanced analytics. The top-tier Suite Professional plan, available at $149 per agent, provides the full range of Zendesk’s capabilities, including custom reporting, advanced AI features, and enterprise-grade support. When comparing Zendesk and Intercom, it’s essential to understand their core features and their differences to choose the right solution for your customer support needs. These include ticketing, chatbots, and automation capabilities, to name just a few.Here’s a side-by-side comparison to help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of each platform. Unlike Intercom, Zendesk is scalable, intuitively designed for CX, and offers a low total cost of ownership.
A sales CRM should also provide you with the benefits of pipeline management software. Pipedrive has workflow automation features, like setting triggers and desired actions, scheduling customer interactions, and automating lead assignment. However, one user noted that important features like automation are often down for an extensive amount of time.
- Agents can quickly grasp the context of customer interaction through these support tickets and sentiment analysis that AI facilitates.
- Intercom has a dark mode that I think many people will appreciate, and I wouldn’t say it’s lacking in any way.
- Intercom generally has the edge when it comes to user interface and design.
- Intercom offers a wide range of integrations with other popular tools and platforms, allowing businesses to connect their customer support with other systems.
Although quite functional, Zendesk’s interface can sometimes feel a bit dated compared to other helpdesks. While it is designed to help support agents be efficient, it might not be as visually appealing or intuitive for users who aren’t very tech-savvy. The platform converts all customer queries into “tickets” that agents can handle with ease and track till the point of resolution. Because of the app called Intercom Messenger, one can see that their focus is less on the voice and more on the text.
- One of the most significant downsides of Intercom is its customer support.
- Both also use a two-pronged pricing system, based on the number of agents/seats and the level of features needed.
- Zendesk offers simple chatbots and provides businesses with straightforward chatbot creation tools, allowing them to set up automated responses and assist customers with common queries.
- What better way to start a Zendesk vs. Intercom than to compare their features?
- That means all you have to do is add the code to your website and enable it right away.
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. The platform also allows teams to track queries, enabling supervisors to monitor progress and ensure timely responses. Intercom’s analytics focuses more on user behavior and engagement metrics, with insights into customer interactions, and important retention metrics. If your business requires a centralized platform to manage a high volume of customer inquiries across various channels, Zendesk is a solid choice. When you’re choosing the right tool that can help you do this, Zendesk and Intercom are two popular names that are likely to come up.
Intercom has received generally positive customer reviews, with an overall rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars on Gartner Peer Insights. Customers appreciate the platform’s ease of use, flexibility, and robust feature set. However, some users have reported issues with the platform’s pricing and customer support.
To help keep up with its growing customer base, CoinJar turned to Zendesk for a user-friendly and easily scalable solution after testing other CRMs, including Pipedrive and HubSpot. Leveraging the sequencing and bulk email features of the Zendesk sales CRM, CoinJar increased its visibility and productivity at scale. Zendesk has sales forecasting features that leverage previous sales data to help predict future outcomes, including revenue growth, cash flow, and the likelihood of winning a deal. This data can help eliminate unwanted surprises and give your sales team valuable insights to improve their strategy. Pipedrive uses historical data to help predict cash flow and provide performance metrics for your sales team. With Zendesk, you can use lead tracking features to filter and segment your leads in real time.
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. Considering all the features of Zendesk, including robust ticketing, messaging, a help center, and chatbots, we can say that Zendesk excels in being the top customer support platform. 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.
As an avid learner interested in all things tech, Jelisaveta always strives to share her knowledge with others and help people and businesses reach their goals. Discover how this Shopify store used Tidio to offer better service, recover carts, and boost sales. intercom vs. zendesk Intercom does have a ticketing dashboard that has omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk. 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.
There is a really useful one for Shopify to provide customer support for e-commerce operations. HubSpot and Salesforce are also available when support needs to work with marketing and sales teams. Chatbots are automated customer support tools that can assist with low-level ticket triage and ticket routing in real-time. How easy it is to program a chatbot and how https://chat.openai.com/ effective a chatbot is at assisting human reps is an important factor for this category. Intercom is ideal for personalized messaging, while Zendesk offers robust ticket management and self-service options. Intercom focuses on real-time customer messaging, while Zendesk provides a comprehensive suite for ticketing, knowledge base, and self-service support.
Chat features are integral to modern business communication, enabling real-time customer interaction and team collaboration. Intercom is more for improving sales cycles and customer relationships, while Zendesk, an excellent Intercom alternative, has everything a customer support representative can dream about. Given that we’re neither Intercom nor Zendesk, we ourselves were curious to see how these two titans of customer service differ. Pipedrive also includes lead management features like automatic lead nurturing, labeling, and bulk imports. However, Pipedrive does not include native desktop text messaging features. One user noted that, in some cases, it can take Pipedrive at least eight hours to populate saved leads, making it difficult to quickly communicate with hot leads.
The pricing strategies are covered below so you can analyze the pricing structure and select your customer service software. Zendesk TCO is lower than Intercom due to its ability to scale, which does not require additional cost to update the software for a growing business. It also has a transparent pricing model so businesses know the price they will incur. Lastly, the tool is easy to set up and implement, meaning no additional knowledge or expertise makes the businesses incur additional costs.
You can use these features to create custom funnels, segment users based on specific behaviors, and automate personalized communications. It started as a ticketing tool just for customer service teams and has evolved over the years into a complete customer support platform. Since, its name has become somewhat synonymous with customer service and support. Intercom offers reporting and analytics tools with limited capabilities for custom reporting, user behavior metrics, and advanced visualization. It also lacks advanced features like collaboration reporting, custom metrics, metric correlation, and drill-in attribution.
As the place where your agents will be spending most of their time, a functional and robust Helpdesk will be critical to their overall performance and experience. While there are some universal things to look out for, like the range of features, ease of use, and a seamless omnichannel experience, it’s also about your subjective experience. While both Zendesk and Intercom tick both those boxes, they each have their own distinct style. 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 of customization. While most of Intercom’s ticketing features come with all plans, it’s most important AI features come at a higher cost, including its automated workflows.
After signing up and creating your account, you can start filling in your information, such as your company name and branding and your agents’ profiles and information. Then, you can begin filling in details such as your account’s name and icon and your agents’ profiles and security features. The setup can be so complex that there are tutorials by third parties to teach new users how to do it right.
In this article, we will explore the key differences between Intercom and Zendesk, two popular customer support platforms. Both Intercom and Zendesk offer a range of features to help businesses manage customer interactions, but there are some distinct differences between the two. Zendesk also offers various integrations with third-party tools, including CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and analytics tools. Some of the popular integrations include Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and Google Analytics.
Also, all of Hiver’s pricing plans come with a 7-day free trial, and no credit card is required to sign up for the trial. 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. Pricing for both services varies based on the specific needs and scale of your business.
Zendesk has a low TCO because it has no hidden costs and can be easily set up without needing developers or third-party help, saving you time and money. Alternatively, Pipedrive users should prepare to pay more for even simple CRM features like email tracking, whereas email tracking is available for all Zendesk Sell plans. They’ve been rated as one of the easy live chat solutions with more integrated options. 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.
