Zendesk vs Intercom Head to Head Comparison in 2024

We update you on the latest trends, dive into technical topics, and offer insights to elevate your business. You can use this support desk to help customers or you can forward potential new users to your sales department. You can create a help platform to assist users in guiding themselves, or you can use AI-enabled responses to create a more “human” like effect. 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.

Intercom is an all-in-one solution, and compared to Zendesk, Intercom has a less intuitive design and can be complicated for new users to learn. It also offers a confusing pricing structure and fewer integrations, making it less scalable and cost-effective. The Zendesk Marketplace offers over 1,500 no-code apps and integrations. You need a complete customer service platform that’s seamlessly integrated and AI-enhanced. Zendesk lacks in-app messages and email marketing tools, which are essential for big companies with heavy client support loads.

Zendesk vs Intercom for customer support

Zendesk can also save key customer information in their platform, which helps reps get a faster idea of who they are dealing with as well as any historical data that might assist in the support. Zendesk Sunshine is a separate feature set that focuses on unified customer views. 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. Your typical Zendesk review will often praise the platform’s simplicity and affordability, as well as its constant updates and rolling out of new features, like Zendesk Sunshine.

• If you’re exploring popular chat support tools Zendesk and Intercom, you may be trying to understand which solution is right for you.
• Connecting Zendesk Support and Zendesk Sell allows its customer service and sales-oriented wholesale team to work together effortlessly.
• Our robust, no-code integrations enable you to adapt our software to new and growing use cases.
• 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.
• Zendesk allows businesses to group their resources in the help center, providing customers with self-service personalized support.
• 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.

If you’re a sales-oriented corporation, use Intercom for its automation options. 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. Missouri Star Quilt Company is one of the world’s largest online retailers of fabric and quilting supplies, shipping thousands of orders a day.

But sooner or later, you’ll have to decide on the subscription plan, and here’s what you’ll have to pay. Like Zendesk, Intercom offers its Operator bot, which automatically suggests relevant articles to clients right in a chat widget. If that’s not detailed enough, then surely their visitor browsing details will leave you surprised.

Install the Intercom App

Intercom is a customer relationship management (CRM) software company that provides a suite of tools for managing customer interactions. The company was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Intercom’s products are used by over 25,000 customers, from small tech startups to large enterprises. A helpdesk solution’s user experience and interface are crucial in ensuring efficient and intuitive customer support.

Intercom is praised as an affordable option with high customization capabilities, allowing businesses to create a personalized support experience. Although the interface may require a learning curve, users find the platform effective and functional. However, Intercom has fewer integration options than Zendesk, which may limit its capabilities for businesses seeking extensive integrations.

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. Zendesk and Intercom offer basic features, including live chat, a help desk, and a pre-built knowledge base. 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. Intercom has a wider range of uses out of the box than Zendesk, though by adding Zendesk Sell, you could more than make up for it.

Intercom vs Zendesk: Key Differences & Best Choice for 2024

It can automatically suggest relevant articles for agents to share during business hours with clients, reducing your support agents’ workload. Chat features are integral to modern business communication, enabling real-time customer interaction and team collaboration. Often, it’s a centralized platform for managing inquiries and issues from different channels.

On the other hand, Intercom catches up with Zendesk on ticket handling capabilities but stands out due to its automation features. Considering that Zendesk and Intercom are leading the market for customer service software, it becomes difficult for businesses to choose the right tool. Sometimes, businesses do not even realize the importance of various aspects you must consider while making this choice. Zendesk is billed more as a customer support and ticketing solution, while Intercom includes more native CRM functionality.

This can be a bummer for many as they can always stumble upon an issue. 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. 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.

However, it offers a limited channel scope compared to Zendesk, and users will have to get paid add-ons for channels like WhatsApp. The primary function of Intercom’s mobile app is the business messenger suite, including personalized messaging, real-time support tools, push notifications, in-app messaging and emailing. Intercom also does mobile carousels to help please the eye with fresh designs. Intercom, of course, allows its customer support team to collaborate and communicate too, but overall, Zendesk wins this group. 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.

Intercom’s live chat reports aren’t just offering what your customers are doing or whether they are satisfied with your services. They offer more detailed insights like lead generation sources, a complete message report to track customer engagement, and detailed information on the support team’s performance. A collection of these reports can enable your business to identify the right resources responsible for bringing engagement to your business. If ticket management and workflow optimization are your primary concerns, Zendesk’s automation capabilities might be a better fit.

Intercom has a very robust advanced chatbot set of tools for your business needs. There is a conversation routing bot, an operator bot, a lead qualification bot, and an article-suggesting bot, among others. It is also not too difficult to program your own bot rules using Intercon’s system. 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.

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. The Intercom versus Zendesk conundrum is probably the greatest problem https://chat.openai.com/ in customer service software. They both offer some state-of-the-art core functionality and numerous unusual features. Basically, if you have a complicated support process, go with Zendesk for its help desk functionality.

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. 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.

Unified sales and service platforms

You can share these reports one-time or on a recurring basis with anyone in your organization. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer a range of channels for businesses to interact with their customers. Essentially, Fin AI Copilot acts as a personal assistant for every support staff, helping them resolve customer issues faster and more efficiently. Whereas, Fin AI Agent is an actual chatbot that responds on its own to customers’ questions. We will start syncing the last 24 hours of data from your Intercom account. This may take some time depending on the options you selected and your conversation volume.

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. There’s even on-the-spot translation built right in, which is extremely helpful. If you require a robust helpdesk with powerful ticketing and reporting features, Zendesk is the better choice, particularly for complex support queries. Customerly’s CRM is designed to help businesses build stronger relationships by keeping customer data organized and actionable. Customerly is a forward-thinking, all-in-one customer service platform.

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. 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 intercom to zendesk is at assisting human reps is an important factor for this category. 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. Tracking the ticket progress enables businesses to track what part of the resolution customer complaint has reached.

View your users’ Zendesk tickets in Intercom and create new ones directly from conversations. You can test any of HelpCrunch’s pricing plans for free for 14 days and see our tools in action immediately. 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.

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. Help desk SaaS is how you manage general customer communication and for handling customer questions. Zendesk has more pricing options, and its most affordable plan is likely cheaper than Intercom’s, although without exact Intercom numbers, it is not easy to truly know the cost. 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. Zendesk also allows Advanced AI and Advanced data privacy and protection plans, which cost $50 per month for each Advanced add-on.

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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. This organization is important because it brings together customer interactions from all channels in this one place. And, Zendesk is nothing if not geared for helping agents deal with large ticket volumes efficiently.

This structure may appeal to businesses with specific needs but could be less predictable for budget-conscious organizations. Zendesk fully utilizes AI tools to enhance user experiences at every stage of the customer journey. Its AI chatbots leverage machine learning to gain a deeper understanding of customer interactions.

You cannot invest much in this software if you are a small business, as it would exceed the budget requirements. Intercom’s messaging platform is very similar to Zendesk’s dashboard, offering seamless integration of multiple channels in one place for managing customer interactions. Although Intercom offers an omnichannel messaging dashboard, it has slightly less functionality than Zendesk. Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates. Using this, agents can chat across teams within a ticket via email, Slack, or Zendesk’s ticketing system.

Customerly’s Helpdesk is designed to boost efficiency and collaboration with the help of AI. 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.

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. For small companies and startups, Intercom offers a Starter Chat GPT plan — with a balanced suite of features from each of the solutions below — at $74 per month per user, billed annually. Research by Zoho reports that customer relationship management (CRM) systems can help companies triple lead conversion rates.

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. These products range from customer communication tools to a fully-fledged CRM.

• It’s built for function over form — the layout is highly organized and clearly designed around ticket management.
• If your business requires a centralized platform to manage a high volume of customer inquiries across various channels, Zendesk is a solid choice.
• That means automating customer service and sales processes so the people visiting your website don’t actually have to interact with anyone before they take action.
• Intercom, on the other hand, focuses on automating tasks that help improve customer engagement.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. You can also contact Zendesk support 24/7, whereas Intercom support only has live agents during business hours. While both Zendesk and Intercom offer ways to track your sales pipeline, each platform handles the process a bit differently. No matter what Zendesk Suite plan you are on, you get workflow triggers, which are simple business rules-based actions to streamline many tasks.

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. If you’re exploring popular chat support tools Zendesk and Intercom, you may be trying to understand which solution is right for you. These include chatbot automation features, customer segmentation, and targeted SMS messaging to reach the right audience efficiently.