Zendesk vs Intercom: A comprehensive comparison guide

Both Zendesk and Intercom are standout performers when it comes to providing comprehensive multi channel support, catering to diverse customer needs. Zendesk offers a versatile array of communication channels, including email, chat, social media, phone, and web forms. This breadth of options ensures that businesses can effectively engage with their customers through their preferred communication method.

With its integrated suite of applications, Intercom provides a comprehensive solution that caters to businesses seeking a unified ecosystem to manage customer interactions. This scalability ensures businesses can align their support infrastructure with their evolving requirements, ensuring a seamless customer experience. Both Zendesk and Intercom are customer support management solutions that offer features like ticket management, live chat and messaging, automation workflows, knowledge centers, and analytics.

Yes, you can integrate the Intercom solution into your Zendesk account. It will allow you to leverage some Intercom capabilities while keeping your account at the time-tested platform. In this paragraph, let’s explain some common issues that users usually ask about when choosing between Zendesk and Intercom platforms. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously.

Another critical difference between Zendesk and Intercom is their approach to CRM. It’s an invaluable tool for businesses aiming to enhance customer satisfaction, increase conversions, and build lasting relationships. While triggers run immediately after a support ticket has been created or updated, automation includes an element of time.

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. Zendesk also packs some pretty potent tools into their platform, so you can empower your agents to do what they do with less repetition. You can publish your self-service resources, divide them by categories, and integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience. If you create a new chat with the team, land on a page with no widget, and go back to the browser for some reason, your chat will go puff. Yes, you can install the Messenger on your iOS or Android app so customers can get in touch from your mobile app.

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However, you can connect Intercom with over 40 compatible phone and video integrations. Use ticketing systems to manage the influx and provide your customers with timely responses. Provide self-service alternatives so customers can resolve their own issues.

Intercom can even integrate with Zendesk and other sources to import past help center content. I just found Zendesk’s help center to be slightly better integrated into their workflows and more customizable. Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates.

Intercom isn’t quite as strong as Zendesk in comparison to some of Zendesk’s customer support strengths, but it has more features for sales and lead nurturing. When comparing Zendesk and Intercom, Zendesk stands out with its robust and versatile customer support solutions. It offers a comprehensive platform for managing customer inquiries and support tickets across multiple channels, providing businesses with a powerful toolset for customer service management. Zendesk’s extensive feature set and customizable workflows are particularly appealing to organizations looking to streamline and scale their customer support operations efficiently.

Ticket routing helps to send the ticket to the best support team agent. Choose Zendesk for a scalable, team-size-based pricing model and Intercom for initial low-cost access with flexibility in adding advanced features. 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 choice between the two platforms would depend on the specific needs and preferences of each business.

Zendesk vs. Intercom: Head to Head Comparison

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. Zendesk’s pricing is very competitive for the market and is presented in a straightforward way that makes predicting costs simple and accurate. Intercom is also easy to learn and its guided onboarding and training resources are especially helpful to new users. Discover customer and product issues with instant replays, in-app cobrowsing, and console logs.

The overall sentiment from users indicates a satisfactory level of support, although opinions vary. Zendesk is a customer service software offering a comprehensive solution for managing customer interactions. It integrates customer support, sales, and marketing communications, aiming to improve client relationships. Known for its scalability, Zendesk is suitable for various business sizes, from startups to large corporations. ThriveDesk empowers small businesses to manage real-time customer communications.

Say goodbye to manual data transfers and hello to a more efficient way of conducting business. Trust us for your Zendesk data migration needs and discover the convenience of a bulk user import feature that streamlines the process from start to finish. When it comes to Zendesk import, Help Desk Migration is your trusted partner. Help Desk Migration is your ultimate solution for a seamless Zendesk import and Zendesk data migration process.

Zendesk has traditionally been more focused on customer support management, while Intercom has been more focused on live support solutions like its chat solution. You can use it for customer support, but that’s not its core strength. Most Zendesk users say the CRM software is a solid tool for customer relationship management. However, some are unhappy about the occasional platform crash and slowdown, which reduces their productivity. A few users also complained of integration issues that caused errors and delayed response times with their clients.

Depending on the seat type (subscription plan), users get access to different features. For example, the Messaging feature is not available in the Support plan, while Articles aren’t available in the Engage and Conver plans. Unfortunately, you can’t calculate the price by yourself since Intercom hid its pricing table. Though, you can sum up the price together with the Intercom sales team accurately if you contact them.

However, compared to Zendesk, Intercom might not offer the same breadth in terms of integrating a wide range of external channels. On the other hand, Intercom brings a dynamic approach to customer support. Its suite of tools goes beyond traditional ticketing and focuses on customer engagement and messaging automation. From in-app chat to personalized autoresponders, Intercom provides a unified experience across multiple channels, creating a support ecosystem that nurtures and converts leads.

Zendesk customers are switching to Intercom every single day

While the pricing can be flexible, it may become more costly as your organization’s requirements and usage increase. Hivers offers round-the-clock proactive support across all its plans, ensuring that no matter the time or issue, expert assistance is always available. This 24/7 support model is designed to provide continuous, real-time solutions to clients, enhancing the overall reliability and responsiveness of Hivers’ services.

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. The best help desks are also ticketing systems, which lets support reps create a support ticket out of issues that can then be tracked.

You can then add automations and triggers, such as automatically closing a ticket or sending a message to a user. Erika is Groove’s Customer Success Manager, committed to helping you find the right software solution for your business needs. She loves finding innovative ways for your support team to scale and grow, always putting the customer first. Help desk software creates a sort of “virtual front desk” for your business.

If not, then you should because it will ease much of your workload as you would not have to waste your precious time in finding the helpdesk operator, plus zero management issues. With ThriveDesk, you can supercharge your website’s growth and streamline customer interactions like never before. It can team up with tools like Salesforce and Slack, so everything runs smoothly. Zendesk also offers detailed reports that can be shared with others and enable team members to collaborate on them simultaneously.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Their chat widget looks and works great, and they invest a lot of effort to make it a modern, convenient customer communication tool. 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.

Analytics features Intercom has is done through add-ons such as Google Analytics, Statbot, Microsoft Teams, and more. It’s Intercom VS Zendesk, the battle of two well-known software in the help desk category. If you have been wondering which to choose Intercom or Zendesk, the good news is you aren’t alone. That’s true, businesses vary by industry, size, purposes, the software they need, a budget for that software, and the list can go on. Whether Intercom is cheaper than Zendesk depends on your specific usage, feature requirements, and the number of users in your organization.

With this kind of organization, you will not only find your favorite apps but also discover new ones to meet your needs. However, the Intercom app store is far more intuitive and is much easier to navigate. It not only shows you all of the apps you can use, but it also divides these into topics and categories. There are many powerful integrations included, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Slack, and Zapier. With all accounted for, it seems that Zendesk still has a number of user interface issues.

Winner — Intercom edges out Zendesk here due mainly to its customizable workflow capabilities. When it comes to which company is the better fit for your business, there’s no clear answer. It really depends on what features you need and what type of customer service strategy you plan to implement. When it comes to advanced workflows and ticketing systems, Zendesk boasts a more full-featured solution. Due to our intelligent routing capabilities and numerous automated workflows, our users can free up hours to focus on other tasks.

When an agent clicks on a conversation, the full conversation history populates the middle screen. Survey responses automatically save as data in users’ profiles, and Intercom provides survey data in analytics and reporting. Reporting intercom and zendesk and analytics provide metrics, trends, and key performance indicators (KPIs) that offer insights to agents and administrators. The Sell dashboard, different from the Service dashboard, features pre-built widgets that agents can organize however they want, to view the metrics they care most about. 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.

This live chat software provider also enables your business to send proactive chat messages to customers and engage effectively in real-time. This is one of the best ways to qualify high-quality intercom versus zendesk leads for your business and improve your chances of closing a sale faster. Intercom offers a simplistic dashboard with a detailed view of all customer details in one place.

We’ll even flag any content you need to review and give you advice on how to fix it. Just visit Articles in Intercom, click Get started with articles and then Migrate from Zendesk. All plans come with a 7-day free trial, and no credit card is required to sign up for the trial. We have an intention to direct you through each step of the way to make the Zendesk importing process as easy as possible. The offers that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site (including, for example, the order in which they appear).

The setup is designed to seamlessly connect your customer support team with customers across all platforms. While Zendesk incorporates live chat and messaging functionalities to facilitate proactive customer engagement, it falls short of matching Intercom’s level of personalization. Ultimately, the choice between Intercom and Zendesk depends on your specific needs and priorities. If you prioritize real-time messaging and customer engagement, Intercom may be the better option for you. On the other hand, if you require robust ticketing and support management features, Zendesk might be the more suitable choice. Consider your budget, team size, and integration requirements before making a decision.

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. Intercom’s native mobile apps are good for iOS, Android, React Native, and Cordova, while Zendesk only has mobile apps for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices.

Beyond this, Zendesk Chat also offers analytics so you can study your efforts and make better decisions going forward. You can learn about customer satisfaction, some common issues, questions customers ask, or how well your agents are doing. Finally, Intercom’s messenger comes with some great customization options.

In addition to its service features, Zendesk offers a fully integrated CRM solution, Zendesk Sell, available for an additional cost, starting at $19/agent/month. It includes tools for lead management, sales forecasting, and workflow management and automation. Its customer data platform lets you manage customer data, segmentation, and automated reminders. However, this may be sufficient for smaller businesses or those using an existing CRM that integrates with Intercom. Zendesk is renowned for its comprehensive toolset that aids in automating customer service workflows and fine-tuning chatbot interactions. 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.

While Intercom does incorporate automated responses via chatbots, it doesn’t exhibit the same level of sophistication and versatility in its automation capabilities as Zendesk. Zendesk’s advanced automation features make it the preferred choice for businesses seeking to optimize their workflow and enhance customer support efficiency. When it comes to customer support and engagement, choosing the right software can make a world of difference.

Intercom feels more wholesome and is more client-success-oriented, but it can be too costly for smaller companies. You can create dozens of articles in a simple, intuitive WYSIWYG text editor, divide them by categories and sections, and customize with your custom themes. When comparing the user interfaces (UI) of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms exhibit distinct characteristics and strengths catering to different user preferences and needs.

We will also consider customer feedback and reviews to provide insights into the usability of each platform. Intercom has a different approach, one that’s all about sales, marketing, and personalized messaging. Intercom has your back if you’re looking to supercharge your sales efforts. It’s like having a toolkit for lead generation, customer segmentation, and crafting highly personalized messages. This makes it an excellent choice if you want to engage with support and potential and existing customers in real time.

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. These plans make Hiver a versatile tool, catering to a range of business sizes and needs, from startups to large enterprises looking for a comprehensive customer support solution within Gmail.

• Its feature offering is second to none and for growing companies, Zendesk scales as well or better than any other customer support platform on the market.
• They offer an advanced feature for customer data management that goes beyond basic CRM stuff.
• Messagely’s live chat platform is smooth, effective, and easy to set up.
• What’s more, it helps its clients build an integrated community forum and help center to improve the support experience in real-time.

One of the most popular integrations on the platform is between Intercom and Zendesk. Intercom isn’t as great with sales, but it allows for better communication. With Intercom, you can keep track of your customers and what they do on your website in real time. Like Zendesk, Intercom allows you to chat with online visitors and assist with their issues.