Intercom vs Zendesk: Comparing features, integrations, and pricing

Zendesk is another popular customer service, support, and sales platform that enables clients to connect and engage with their customers in seconds. Just like Intercom, Zendesk can also integrate with multiple messaging platforms and ensure that your business never misses out on a support opportunity. 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 effective a chatbot is at assisting human reps is an important factor for this category. We have already mentioned several times above how chat tools are one of the main ways that customers can reach out to a help desk or support team, but let us delve deeper into advanced chat widget features.

• On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zendesk writes “Useful customization features, robust security, and easy to use “.
• The only relief is that they do reach out to customers, but it gets too late.
• While both Intercom and Zendesk excel in customer support and engagement, the decision between the two depends on your specific requirements.
• So, Intercom Articles will be opposed to Zendesk Suite – in that way the contrast is (more or less) fair.
• With this tool, you can automate your lead routing so that it ends up with the right sales rep.

Zendesk offers a built-in chat option (paid separately), a mobile app (both for iOS and Android) integrated apps so that you can offer fully scalable customer support. If someone has a question, they wanna talk to someone on the sales team, and then their messages. So when someone becomes a customer or once you have their email address or something else, then you be able to send messages across different channels.

Overview of all products

Zendesk Suite includes all features for email, live chat, voice, and social media support. There are four options available— Team ($49/agent/month), Growth ($79/agent/month), Professional ($99/agent/month), and Enterprise ($150/agent/month). Once, the ticket is created, customers get a notification that their issue or request has been received and registered. Meanwhile, robust ticketing features such as ticket routing, time tracking, CSAT ratings, service level agreements, etc. ensure your agents are always a step ahead.

Ultimately, it’s important to consider what features each platform offers before making a decision, as well as their pricing options and customer support policies. Since both are such well-established market leader companies, you can rest assured that whichever one you choose will offer a quality customer service solution. The forever free plan comes with basic features such as a single inbox, file attachments, and can be used to handle upto 100 tickets/month. Not only does Zendesk offer a free trial, it’s actually sort of a freemium tool, which means you can choose one their tools (live chat, knowledge base, call center software) and use it for free forever. As any free tool, the functionalities there are quite limited, but nevertheless.

Live chat and messaging

It can automatically suggest relevant articles for agents during business hours to share with clients, reducing your support agents’ workload. Whether you’ve just started searching for a customer support tool or have been using one for a while, chances are you know about Zendesk and Intercom. The former is one of the oldest and most reliable solutions on the market, while the latter sets the bar high in terms of innovative and out-of-the-box features.

• Intercom’s pricing structure offers different plans to cater to various customer support and engagement needs, accommodating users with different budgets.
• Businesses have specific needs per the market and industry requirements, and no single software package can meet all those requirements in the right proportion.
• You can use it for customer support, but that’s not its core strength.
• Your knowledge base is easily customizable to ensure it matches your branding and overall website’s look and feel to create a cohesive experience.

So Twilio is a platform for being able to dial a phone call from SMS, so you have to set that up through them. That will take some implementation work, but if you really want SMS, that’ll be the way to do it. Intercom Customer Communications Platform is ranked 11th in CRM Customer Engagement Centers with 1 review while Zendesk is ranked 3rd in CRM Customer Engagement Centers with 9 reviews. Intercom Customer Communications Platform is rated 9.0, while Zendesk is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Intercom Customer Communications Platform writes “A good tool that can be used to capture inbound leads and manage all customer interactions”. On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zendesk writes “Useful customization features, robust security, and easy to use “.

Both Zendesk and Intercom have integration libraries, and you can also use a connecting tool like Zapier for added integrations and add-ons. There are pre-built workflows to help with things like ticket sharing, as well as conversation routing based on metrics like agent skill set or availability. There are even automations to help with things like SLAs, or service level agreements, to do things like send out notifications when headlights are due. Email marketing, for example, is a big deal, but less so when it comes to customer service. Still, for either of these platforms to have some email marketing or other email functionality is common sense.

Zendesk can be more flexible and predictable in this area as you can buy different tools separately (or even use their limited versions for free). When the customer opens the LiveAgent widget, the support agents are alerted, who then reply with potential help from the knowledge base by analyzing user data. Its strong email management, categorized knowledge base for all stakeholders, and social media monitoring tools are the features you need as a mid-sized business to generate leads.

Comprehensive reporting and analytics

While Intercom lacks some common customer-service channels like voice calling and video conferencing, it supports other unique features that transfer across channels. Zendesk wins the ticketing system category due to its easy-to-use interface and side conversations tool. The Agent Workspace highlights tickets based on the issue and urgency, assigning each one a priority–agents can also tag tickets based on recency, hold-vs-open status, and urgency. Zendesk for Service transforms customer queries and conversations from all channels–call, web chat, tweet, text, or email–into tickets in the Agent Workspace. Pre-selected assignment rules customize each ticket’s destination, assigning routing paths to agents or departments based on customer priority status, query type, or issue details.

Premiere Zendesk plans have 24/7 proactive support with faster response times. Other customer service add-ons with Zendesk include custom training and professional services. Both Zendesk Messaging and Intercom Messenger offer live chat features and AI-enabled chatbots for 24/7 support to customers. Additionally, you can trigger incoming messages to automatically assign an agent and create dashboards to monitor the team’s performance on live chat. Zendesk takes the slight lead here because it offers some advanced help desk features, which Intercom does not. Today, both companies offer a broad range of customer support features, making them both strong contenders in the market.

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. They still have the same logic, you can still send messages based on things users did or didn’t do, or maybe properties, and tackle different aspects of email. So this might be something that might not be the best fit for a software company, but maybe for a non-software company, maybe like a e-commerce company, might actually be better suited for CustomerIO.

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Also, they succeed in building a familiar and personal feeling around their messages, wrapping the content simply and straightforwardly way. There’s not a secret anymore – competitors’ content marketing strategies can give you hints or directions on what/when/where you should post. If you want to communicate with your users, personalize the experience to their individual needs, and onboard new users to your platform, SendinBlue gets the job done perfectly well.

Zendesk would be a great recommendation if you’re already in the Zendesk world, that is, if you have Zendesk for ticket support, maybe have a few other things. So if you have a few of those, metadialog.com that could also be a good fit just naturally, you’re gonna be part of the same universe of tools. Skyvia offers a number of benefits for import Intercom data to Zendesk or vice versa.

The best help desks are also ticketing systems, which lets support reps create a support ticket out of issues that can then be tracked. Ticket routing helps to send the ticket to the best support team agent. 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.

Reporting and analytics provide metrics, trends, and key performance indicators (KPIs) that offer insights to agents and administrators. Agents can participate in forums and turn forum posts into tickets; they also can turn community-post replies into articles for future customers. When a customer asks a question in the Messenger widget, the Operator automatically suggests a handful of relevant articles based on keywords to help customers resolve their own issues. Intercom’s help center allows you to draft and organize collections of articles, accessible to customers via a search bar in the Messenger widget. Intercom self-service chatbot widgets, highly customizable and capable of conversing in 32 different languages, embed into your website or application. Zendesk wins the collaboration tools category because of its easy-to-use side conversations feature.

These features can add significant value for businesses aiming to implement more sophisticated support capabilities as they scale. Intercom’s ticketing system and help desk SaaS is also pretty great, just not as amazing as Zendesk’s. Their customer service management tools have a shared inbox for support teams. When you combine the help desk with Intercom Messenger, you get added channels for customer engagement. The company’s products include a ticketing system, live chat software, knowledge base software, and a customer satisfaction survey tool. Zendesk also offers a number of integrations with third-party applications.

The actual visual work is actually very similar to what you would see at somewhere like Mixpanel or Amplitude or really any event tracking analytics tool. You have events, you have user attributes, you identify users, and so on. So really from the visual perspective, all three of them would be very similar, if you look at just integrations, like an app store, or if you go to different tools, Intercom will do much better. So for the docs itself, we’ll tend to look at what are some of the libraries that are available.

Intercom built additional tools to aid in marketing and engagement to supplement its customer service solution. But we doubled down and created a truly full-service CX solution capable of handling any support request. 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.

Read more about https://www.metadialog.com/ here.