Zendesk vs Intercom A Detailed Comparison

For example, you can assign all inbound technical queries to an engineer; or, assign all pricing queries to the sales team. Automation and AI save resources and time–every automated workflow and routing decision frees an agent to work on more complex issues. Set automatic triggers so that certain events send push notifications to targeted customers, or use them as part of communication campaigns and series, and run A/B testing to compare two notifications. Agents can use the desktop chatbox to respond to customers in any outbound channel. Yes, you can support multiple brands or businesses from a single Help Desk, while ensuring the Messenger is a perfect match for each of your different domains.

We’re big fans of Zendesk’s dashboard with built-in collaboration tools, but we wish the Agent Workspace came with the Team or Growth plans–not just Professional. Zendesk for Sales offers three plans, ranging from $19 to $99 monthly per user, with free trials available for each plan. The workspace left-hand column notifies agents of all ticket updates. The top of the agent workspace shows an agent’s open tickets, ticket statistics, and satisfaction statistics, as well as tabs depicting all current tickets. Intercom’s role-based permissions allow administrators full control over each department’s and agent’s capabilities, and access to channels and information.

During the full-scale russian invasion, we continue developing high-quality innovative technological products while volunteering and donating funds. We work for Ukraine’s economy as our army resists the unprovoked Russian war against Ukraine. KindGeek was founded in Ukraine; our co-founders are from Ukraine, and all of our team members call Ukraine home. It means that Zendesk’s prices are slightly easier to figure out than Intercom’s.

It is quite the all-rounder as it even has a help center and ticketing system that completes its omnichannel support cycle. ThriveDesk empowers small businesses to manage real-time customer communications. Zendesk also offers digital support during business hours, and their website has a chatbot.

The admin and manager dashboard provides a zoomed-out view of all activity taking place in each inbox, for whole departments and individual agents. The dashboard’s left-hand column organizes and sorts all tickets by urgency. 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 and analytics provide metrics, trends, and key performance indicators (KPIs) that offer insights to agents and administrators.

It’s a comprehensive knowledge base where customers can find answers to common questions, reducing the need for direct customer support. Messagely’s pricing starts at just $29 per month, which includes live chat, targeted messages, shared inbox, mobile apps, and over 750 powerful integrations. Messagely’s chatbots are powerful tools for qualifying and converting leads while your team is otherwise occupied or away. With chatbots, you can generate leads to hand over to your sales team and solve common customer queries without the need of a customer service representative behind a keyboard.

Intercom vs Zendesk for knowledgebase & learning

This is essential for providing a great customer experience while processing customer orders. Zendesk, on the other hand, is known for its powerful ticketing system and smart analytics tools. Zendesk might be a better choice if your company puts a lot of value on full customer help, keeping track of issues, and making decisions based on data.

Customers increasingly expect to receive fast, convenient, and personalized support. No matter how a customer contacts your business, your agents will have access to the tools and information they need to continue and close conversations on any channel. A customer service plan defines a clear strategy so you can deliver exceptional support with every interaction. By using our profit margin calculator, you’ll see that Sweat’s Gym profits $12—a 60 percent profit margin.

It features the Intercom Messenger, which works with existing support tools for self-serve or live support. Founded in 2007, Zendesk started as a ticketing tool for customer success teams. It was later that they started adding all kinds of other features, like live chat for customer conversations. They bought out the Zopim live chat solution and integrated it with their toolset. 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. Both options are well designed, easy to use, and share some pretty key functionality like behavioral triggers and omnichannel-ality (omnichannel-centricity?).

Choosing the right customer service platform is pivotal for enhancing business-client interactions. In this context, Zendesk and Intercom emerge as key contenders, each offering distinct features tailored to dynamic customer service environments. Zendesk has an app available for both Android and iOS, which makes it easy to stay connected with customers while on the go. The app includes features like push notifications and real-time customer engagement — so businesses can respond quickly to customer inquiries. Zendesk offers a free 30-day trial, after which customers will need to upgrade to one of their paid plans. In an omnichannel contact center, agents can manage customer interactions across channels, no matter which channel a customer uses to contact the company.

This makes it an excellent choice if you want to engage with support and potential and existing customers in real time. Intercom bills itself first and foremost as a platform to make the business of customer service more personalized, among other things. They offer an advanced feature for customer data management that goes beyond basic CRM stuff. It gives detailed contact profiles enriched by company data, behavioral data, conversation data, and other custom fields. What sets Zendesk apart is its user-friendly interface, customizable workflows, and scalability.

Unique Features

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. Simplicity is an important consideration when selecting the best customer service software. Having easy-to-use software is far more controllable and saves time whether you’re a tiny and growing business or a massive multinational. When comparing the reporting and analytics features of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms offer robust tools, but with distinct focuses and functionalities.

In-app messages and email marketing tools are two crucial features that Zendesk lacks when compared to Intercom. Intercom, on the other hand, lacks key ticketing features that are critical for large firms with a high volume of customer assistance. To automate operations and reduce your employees’ workload, it is critical that customer support systems allow integration with other products. This enables organizations to work more efficiently and easily integrate their software without having to alter their present business processes. On the other hand, Intercom, starting at a lower price point, could be more attractive for very small teams or individual users. However, additional costs for advanced features can quickly increase the total expense.

• While Intercom does not offer free trials, they do offer demo versions of each plan.
• Yes, you can install the Messenger on your iOS or Android app so customers can get in touch from your mobile app.
• The difference between margin and profit is that margin is expressed as a percentage, and profit is a numerical value.
• The goal is to make it easier for new users to get around the site and use all of its features without having to go through extra steps.
• It’s clear that both of these tools are designed for different use cases.

Messagely’s live chat platform is smooth, effective, and easy to set up. 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. Zendesk chat allows you to talk with your visitors in real time through a small chat bar at the bottom of your site. When visitors click on it, they’ll be directed to one of your customer service teammates.

And while many other chatbots take forever to set up, you can set up your first chatbot in under five minutes. You can also follow up with customers after they have left the chat and qualify them based on your answers. Chat agents also get a comprehensive look at their entire customer’s journey, so they will have a better idea of what your customers need, without needing to ask many questions.

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. Sequence all channels–chat, web post, email, chatbot outreach, tour message, banner, push notification, or carousel–mixing and matching modes of outreach to fit campaign goals. Intercom’s help center allows you to draft and organize collections of articles, accessible to customers via a search bar in the Messenger widget.

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. We give the edge to Zendesk here, as it’s typically aimed for more complex environments. It’s also more exclusively focused on providing help support, whereas Intercom sometimes moonlights as being part-time sales.

It guarantees continuous omnichannel support that meets customer expectations. Is it as simple as knowing whether you want software strictly for customer support (like Zendesk) or for some blend of customer relationship management and sales support (like Intercom)? One place Intercom really shines as a standalone CRM is its data utility. You can create articles, share them internally, group them for users, and assign them as responses for bots—all pretty standard fare. 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.

Advanced workflows are useful to customer service teams because they automate processes that make it easier for agents to provide great customer service. Profit margins are key performance indicators (KPIs) that provide important information about how your business performs and how much profit your business generates. These KPIs will tell you which products or services aren’t profitable so you can make informed business decisions. Profit margins should always be rising to keep your business growing.

Zendesk has over 150,000 customer accounts from 160 countries and territories. They have offices all around the world including countries such as Mexico City, Tokyo, New York, Paris, Singapore, São Paulo, London, and Dublin. If that’s not detailed enough, then surely their visitor browsing details will leave you surprised. This enables your operators to understand visitor intent faster and provide them with a personalized experience.

Intercom puts a lot of effort into making a sleek and easy-to-use interface. They want to make a space that makes it easy for people to find their way around and quickly adopt the app. The design philosophy is based on keeping things as simple as possible so that even people who have never used the site before can quickly figure out how it works. Both systems include pricing plans that are tiered and vary according to the amount of user seats or active contacts. Intercom is primarily concerned with price on a per-user basis, in contrast to Zendesk, which blends user seats with contact tiers when it comes to pricing. The difference in prices between plans is so significant because of the features each of them provides.

Comprehensive reporting and analytics

If you see either of these warnings, wait 60 seconds for your Zendesk rate limit to be reset and try again. If this becomes a persistent issue for your team, we recommend contacting Zendesk. In this blog, you’ll learn the various ways you can use Gmail labels to make email management easier.

It offers a suite that compiles help desk, live chat, and knowledge base to their user base. This enables them to speed up the support process and build experiences that customers like. Some people like Intercom’s conversational support tool, which lets customers talk to you in a more personalised and interactive way. Users like that the platform lets them have talks zendesk and intercom in real time, which makes it easier to answer customer questions quickly and correctly. People have also said nice things about Intercom’s proactive message features, which let businesses talk to users before they even complain, which improves the overall customer experience. Zendesk is perfect for businesses looking for comprehensive customer support tools.

This site does not include all software companies or all available software companies offers. So, by now, you can see that according to this article, Zendesk inches past Intercom as the better customer support platform. Integrations are the best way to enhance the toolkit of your apps by connecting them for interoperable actions and features.

Since Zendesk has many features, it takes a while to learn how to use the options you’ll be needing. We hope that this Intercom VS Zendesk comparison helps you choose one that matches your support, marketing, and sales needs. But in case you are in search of something beyond these two, then ProProfs Chat can be an option. Zendesk also offers detailed reports that can be shared with others and enable team members to collaborate on them simultaneously.

The highlight of Zendesk's ticketing software is its omnichannel-ality (omnichannality?). Whether agents are facing customers via chat, email, social media, or good old-fashioned phone, they can keep it all confined to a single, easy-to-navigate dashboard. That not only saves them the headache of having to constantly switch between dashboards while streamlining resolution processes—it also leads to better customer and agent experience overall.

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. In the category of customer support, Zendesk appears to be just slightly better than Intercom based on the availability of regular service and response times.

You can set office hours, live chat with logged-in users via their user profiles, and set up a chatbot. Customization is more nuanced than Zendesk's, but it's still really straightforward to implement. You can opt for code via JavaScript or Rails or even integrate directly with the likes of Google Tag Manager, WordPress, or Shopify. Intercom, on the other hand, was built for business messaging, so communication is one of their strong suits. Combine that with their prowess in automation and sales solutions, and you've got a really strong product that can handle myriad customer relationship needs.

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 Zendesk chat tool has most of the necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers, and live chat analytics. All customer questions, be it via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel, are landing in one dashboard, where your agents can solve them quickly and efficiently.

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. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Intercom's products are used by over 25,000 customers, from small tech startups to large enterprises. Apps and integrations are critical to creating a 360 view of the customer across the company and ensuring agents have easy access to key customer context. When agents don’t have to waste time toggling between different systems and tools to access the customer details they need, they can deliver faster, more personalized customer service. Retaining customers and building customer loyalty are reliable ways to increase your profit margins.

When comparing Zendesk and Intercom, various factors come into play, each focusing on different aspects, strengths, and weaknesses of these customer support platforms. 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. You need a complete customer service platform that's seamlessly integrated and AI-enhanced. Companies looking for a more complete customer service product–without niche bells and whistles, but with all the basic channels you want–should look to Zendesk. Small businesses who prioritize collaboration will also enjoy Zendesk for Service.

With Intercom, you’ll have more customizable options with the enterprise versions of the software, but you’ll have fewer lower-tier choices. If you don’t plan on building a huge enterprise just yet, we have to give the edge to Zendesk when it comes to flexible pricing options. 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.

In this article, we comprehensively do a comparison of Zendesk vs Intercom, examining their key features, benefits, and industry use cases. By exploring their distinct offerings, we aim to assist businesses in making informed decisions when selecting a customer service platform. 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. 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.

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. 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.

Administrator reports allow managers to observe real-time CSAT scores, conversation volume, first response time, and time to close. Intercom’s Inbox organizes all of an agent’s core functions into one interface. Below, we’ve compared the usability of Zendesk’s and Intercom’s agent dashboards and administrator controls. Send surveys at key points throughout the customer buying cycle, utilizing multiple types of question formats.

In order to obtain an idea of the financial consequences that will be incurred by your team as well as the predicted number of clients, it is essential to compare their plans in a meticulous manner. There is also an opinion that Zendesk’s interface and design are slightly less convenient in comparison to Intercom’s, which provides a more streamlined user interface. Intercom does not have a built-in call center solution, but you can integrate Intercom with other call center software. Intercom wins the automation round due to its extensive range of automation features. Although it’s a close call, Zendesk’s responsive and sleek interface gives it an edge in the messaging category. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks.

Intercom is great at making it easy for businesses and their customers to talk to each other instantly and back and forth. With live chat, in-app messaging, and targeted messaging, among other features, the tool lets businesses talk to customers right away. People who work in fields like e-commerce or SaaS, where quick responses and personalised exchanges are very important, may benefit the most from this. To begin, both platforms have large knowledge bases that cover a lot of different topics and commonly asked questions.

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. 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.

This is one of the best ways to qualify high-quality 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. Operators will find its dashboard quite beneficial as it will take them seconds to find necessary features during an ongoing chat with the customers. Admins will also like the fact that they can see the progress of all their teams and who all are actively answering a customer’s query in real-time. After this live chat software comparison, you’ll get a better picture of what’s better for your business.