Zendesk vs Intercom in 2023: Detailed Analysis of Features, Pricing, and More

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. Having only appeared in 2011, Intercom lacks a few years of experience on Zendesk. It also https://chat.openai.com/ made its name as a messaging-first platform for fostering personalized conversational experiences for customers. You need a complete customer service platform that’s seamlessly integrated and AI-enhanced. Zendesk provides comprehensive security and compliance features, ensuring customer data privacy.

Intercom is geared toward sales, whereas Zendesk includes everything a customer service rep desires. When choosing between Zendesk and Intercom for your customer support needs, it’s essential to consider various factors that align with your business goals, operational requirements, and budget. Both platforms offer distinct strengths, catering to customer support and engagement aspects. ThriveDesk is a help desk software tailor-made for businesses seeking extensive features and a powerful yet simple live chat assistant.

But I don’t want to sell their chat tool short as it still has most of necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers and live chat analytics. If you’re a huge corporation with a complicated customer support process, go Zendesk for its help desk functionality. If you’re smaller more sales oriented startup with enough money, go Intercom. Zendesk has over 1,300 integrations, compared to Intercom’s 300+ apps, making it the leader in this category. However, you can browse their respective sites to find which tools each platform supports. Intercom allows visitors to search for and view articles from the messenger widget.

You can publish your knowledge base articles and divide them by categories and also integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience. Also, their in-app messenger is worth a separate mention as it’s one of their distinctive tools (especially since Zendesk doesn’t really have one). With Intercom you can send targeted email, push, and in-app messages which can be based on the most relevant time or behavior triggers. On one hand, Zendesk offers a great many features, way more than Intercom, but it lacks in-app messenger and email marketing tools.

Zendesk vs Intercom: all the functionalities in a glance

With help centers in place, it’s easier for your customers to reliably find answers, tips, and other important information in a self-service manner. 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.

It also features an AI-driven ticketing system, an omnichannel dashboard to manage all customer communications in one place, and customizable chat widgets to enhance user engagement. Zendesk excels with its powerful ticketing and customer support capabilities, making it ideal for streamlining service operations. On the contrary, Intercom’s pricing is far less predictable and can cost hundreds/thousands of dollars per month. But this solution wins because it’s an all-in-one tool with a modern live chat widget, allowing you to improve your customer experiences easily.

Finally, you can pay $199 per month per user for unlimited sales pipelines and advanced reporting along with other features. Depending on your needs, you can set up Intercom on your website or mobile app and add your automations. Setting up Intercom help centers is also very easy and intuitive, with no previous knowledge required.

Zendesk is a much larger company than Intercom; it has over 170,000 customers, while Intercom has over 25,000. While this may seem like a positive for Zendesk, it’s important to consider that a larger company may not be as agile or responsive to customer needs as a smaller company. Now that we’ve covered a bit of background on both Zendesk and Intercom, let’s dive into the features each platform offers. Our evaluation of ‘Tone’ understands that a conversation can be a tapestry of emotions, with various tones interwoven throughout. Each tone is assigned a different weight, where positive tones contribute positively and negative tones affect the score accordingly.

In other words, based on criteria AI has customized for your support team. Pay attention to how your quality management software provider defines Auto QA, though. While many quality assurance tools offer automation, not many can actually score your support conversation automatically like Zendesk QA. It tends to perform well on the marketing and sales side of things, which is key for a growing company.

The price levels can even be much higher if we talk of a larger company. Like Zendesk, Intercom offers its Operator bot, which automatically suggests relevant articles to clients right in a chat widget. If I had to describe Intercom’s helpdesk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools.

Zendesk vs Intercom: An Honest Comparison in 2024

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. Check these 7 Zendesk alternatives to improve your customer support.

Businsses need to do a cost analysis whenever they select customer service software for their business. You cannot invest much in this software if you are a small business, as it would exceed the budget requirements. Intercom also provides fast time to value for smaller and mid-sized businesses with limitations for large-scale companies.

Zendesk’s automation is centered around streamlining ticket management by bringing together customer inquiries from various sources—email, phone, web, chat, and social media—into a single platform. If you’re here, it’s safe to assume that you’re looking for a new customer service solution to support your teams and delight your audience. As two of the giants of the industry, it’s only natural that you’d reach a point where you’re comparing Zendesk vs Intercom. Use ticketing systems to efficiently manage high ticket volume, deliver timely customer support, and boost agent productivity.

Intercom is also a customer service software that integrates entirely with third-party vendors, especially those offering messaging services. Using any plan, this integration is available to all customers, making the customer support experience and onboarding smooth. It allows businesses to automate repetitive tasks, such as ticket routing and in-built responses, freeing up time for support agents to deal with more crucial cases requiring more agent attention. This automation enhances support teams’ productivity as they do not have to spend too much responding to similar complaints they have already dealt with.

But Intercom’s friendliness for growing companies is something you can’t afford to ignore. If your business is established and you need to cut down on those ticket resolution times, Zendesk may be worth it. Basically, you can create new articles, divide them by categories and sections — make it a high end destination for customers when they have questions or issues.

• On one hand, Zendesk offers a great many features, way more than Intercom, but it lacks in-app messenger and email marketing tools.
• Provide a clear path for customer questions to improve the shopping experience you offer.
• If you’re a really small business or a startup, you can benefit big time from such free tools.
• Overall, Zendesk’s Chat is less customizable than Intercom’s but still has all the essentials.

While Zeendesk provides automation services for ticket support systems, notifications, chatbots, etc., it may not be an extensive feature compared to Intercom. On the other hand, Intercom’s zendesk and intercom 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 offers more flexibility with its pricing options and also has free services. In addition, the costs of Zendesk’s services are slightly easier to calculate. However, regardless of whether your choice is Zendesk or Intercom, you will be spending some time trying to figure out how much you will pay for the services. Has live chat analytics to monitor customer satisfaction, employee performance.

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, for example, a solution was offered but it didn’t Chat GPT happen to align with internal standards. Once you have your support conversations filtered and ready for review, it’s time to look into how Auto QA actually scores them. Auto QA serves as a vital bridge, addressing the gaps left by manual reviewing.

Community managers can also escalate posts to support agents when one-on-one help is needed. With both tools, you can also use support bots to automatically suggest specific articles, track customers’ ratings, and localize help center content to serve your customers in their native language. Zendesk’s Suite Team plan (the cheapest plan) costs $49 per user per month. You get multiple support channels at no extra cost with over 1000 APIs and integrations. They also offer several other features such as pre-defined responses, custom rules, and customizable online forms. To automate operations and reduce your employees’ workload, it is critical that customer support systems allow integration with other products.

Without having to open a single interaction, you can understand the breadth of both overall customer sentiment and team performance—regardless of ticket volume. Auto QA reduces labor and helps you understand your customer service quality faster than you’ve ever been able to before. Basically, provides you with a knowledge base to create, organize, and store the articles that answer your customers’ questions. Has a bot that suggests relevant articles to customers who have questions. There are four different subscription packages you can choose from, all of which also have Essential, Pro, and Premium options for businesses of different sizes. You’d need to chat with Intercom sales team for get the costs for the Premium subscription, though.

So, whether you’re a startup or a global giant, Zendesk’s got your back for top-notch customer support. Zendesk lets you chat with customers through email, chat, social media, or phone. 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.

Both options are well designed, easy to use, and share some pretty key functionality like behavioral triggers and omnichannel-ality (omnichannel-centricity?). But with perks like more advanced chatbots, automation, and lead management capabilities, Intercom could have an edge for many users. But they also add features like automatic meeting booking (in the Convert package), and their custom inbox rules and workflows just feel a little more, well, custom. I’ll dive into their chatbots more later, but their bot automation features are also stronger. The highlight of Zendesk’s ticketing software is its omnichannel-ality (omnichannality?).

It also offers a confusing pricing structure and fewer integrations, making it less scalable and cost-effective. Zendesk is designed with the agent in mind, delivering a modern, intuitive experience. The customizable Zendesk Agent Workspace enables reps to work within a single browser tab with one-click navigation across any channel.

Intercom also uses AI and features a chatbot called Fin, but negative reviews note basic reporting and a lack of customization. Fin is priced at $0.99 per resolution, so companies handling large volumes of queries might find it costly. In comparison, Zendesk customers pay a fixed price of $50 per agent—and only Zendesk AI is modeled on the world’s largest CX-specific dataset. 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.

Zendesk’s AI (Fin) helps with automated responses, ensuring your customers get quick answers. On the other hand, Intercom’s AI-powered chatbots and messaging are designed to enhance your marketing and sales efforts, giving you an edge in the competitive market. Experience the comprehensive power of Intercom for effective customer communication, automation, support tools, integrations, and analytics. Intercom’s messaging system enables real-time interactions through various channels, including chat, email, and in-app messages. Connect with customers wherever they are for timely assistance and personalized experiences.

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. Unlike Intercom, Zendesk is scalable, intuitively designed for CX, and offers a low total cost of ownership.

Streamline support processes with Intercom’s ticketing system and knowledge base. Efficiently manage customer inquiries and empower customers to find answers independently. You get a dashboard that makes creating, tracking, and organizing tickets easy.

Many businesses choose to work with Intercom because of its focus on personalization and flexibility, allowing companies to completely customize their customer service experience. Intercom also offers scalability within its pricing plans, enabling businesses to upgrade to higher tiers as their support needs grow. 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. Zendesk and Intercom offer help desk management solutions to their users.

Zendesk’s mission is to build software designed to improve customer relationships. Founded in 2007, Zendesk started off as a ticketing tool for customer support teams. It was later when they started adding all kinds of other tools like when they bought out Zopim live chat and just integrated it with their toolset. Zendesk excels with its AI-enhanced user experience and robust omnichannel support, making it ideal for businesses focused on customer service.

However, you’ll likely end up paying more for Zendesk, and in-app messenger and other advanced customer communication tools will not be included. 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. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Like Zendesk, Intercom allows you to chat with online visitors and assist with their issues.

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. They charge not only for customer service representative seats but also for feature usage and offer tons of features as custom add-ons at additional cost. So when it comes to chatting features, the choice is not really Intercom vs Zendesk. 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. Overall, I actually liked Zendesk’s user experience better than Intercom’s in terms of its messaging dashboard.

• Our ‘Closing’ category is your tool to ensure that your agents conclude customer interactions on a high note.
• Don’t miss out on the latest tips, tools, and tactics at the forefront of customer support.
• They charge not only for customer service representative seats but also for feature usage and offer tons of features as custom add-ons at additional cost.
• Intercom has a community forum where users can engage with each other and gain insights from their experiences.
• Its customizable options enable businesses to quickly gain value from its features by enhancing agility.
• 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.

However, you can connect Intercom with over 40 compatible phone and video integrations. You can construct an omnichannel suite by combining productivity, e-commerce, CRM, analytics, social media, and other applications. Having more connectors accessible gives organizations the flexibility to select software that meets their specific needs. Zendesk is primarily a ticketing system, and its ticketing capability is overwhelming in the best conceivable manner.

Research by Zoho reports that customer relationship management (CRM) systems can help companies triple lead conversion rates. Those same tools also increase customer retention by 27% while saving 23% on sales and marketing costs. NovoChat, on the other hand, is great for businesses that primarily engage with their clients through messaging apps. The program is simple to use and includes all of the necessary capabilities for providing good customer service.

However, if you aim to nurture leads and grow sales, then Intercom is the better option. Its AI-powered tools and virtual assistants make it a formidable CRM-powered software. On the other hand, Intercom enables agents to convert a conversation into a ticket with one click. This helps support teams to resolve customer issues without losing context.

Messagely pulls together all of the information about the customer contacting you and gives your representatives information on each interaction they’ve had with them, all within a streamlined platform. This way, your clients will never have to repeat themselves or get frustrated because their new representative doesn’t know their background. And while many other chatbots take forever to set up, you can set up your first chatbot in under five minutes. With Zendesk, you can anticipate customer questions, allowing for shorter reply periods. With its CRM, you have the ability to place your clients in your sales funnels and follow through with them until conversion.