Intercom vs Zendesk Software Comparison for2023

Without proper channels to reach you, usually, customers will take their business elsewhere. And, thanks to the internet, a few taps will lead them right to your competitor! Most businesses use live chats as their main customer communication channel. It is handy for both sides since users can get in touch with customer support teams via a chat widget placed right on the website.

Though some complained that it’s not easy to check the tickets using the apps. Because it’s something they believe the developers should fine-tune. However, the most common complaint is the pricing of some features. Shared inbox is a valuable tool for support teams to communicate. Apart from team conversations, it integrates with the ticketing system. Thus, the inbox is used to refer tickets to other agents who can solve them.

Different Criteria Used to Differentiate Zendesk & Intercom

See how our customer service solutions bring ease to the customer experience. Zendesk is one of the most widely known help desk tools out there. Check these 7 Zendesk alternatives that will help you improve your customer support, sales, and marketing. To sum up this Intercom vs Zendesk battle, Zendesk is a great customer support oriented tool which will be a great choice for big teams with various departments. Intercom feels more wholesome and is more customer success oriented, but can be too costly for smaller companies. In a nutshell, none of the companies provide any decent customer support software.

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 helps answer customers’ questions and renders meaningful conversations irrespective of the buyer’s journey. With numerous features such as a ticketing system, a CRM or a knowledge base software, customer service software helps companies around the world. Zendesk directly competes with Intercom when it comes to integrations.

What is the difference between Intercom and Zendesk?

There is a really useful one for Shopify to provide customer support for e-commerce operations. HubSpot and Salesforce are also available when support needs to work with marketing and sales teams. 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. A customer service department is only as good as its support team members, and these highly-prized employees need to rely on one another. Tools that allow support agents to communicate and collaborate are important aspect of customer service software.

• Both tools also allow you to connect your email account and manage it from within the application to track open and click-through rates.
• Behavior-based messaging allows you to customize every last detail of triggers and rules including–which channel sends the message, when it sends, where it sends, and who gets targeted.
• They also offer features that enhance collaboration amongst employees if you have a bigger team.
• This makes things faster for support teams to access information without bothering other users.
• Zendesk also makes it easy to customize your help center, with out-of-the-box tools to design color, theme, and layout–both on mobile and desktop.
• The learning and knowledgebase category is another one where it is a close call between Zendesk and Intercom.

While both Zendesk and Intercom offer ways to track your sales pipeline, each platform handles the process a bit differently. Zendesk and Intercom both have an editor preview feature that makes it easier to add images, videos, call-to-action buttons, and interactive guides to your help articles. Use HubSpot to deepen your relationship with your customers, elevate their voice, and provide a best-in-class experience. Search our comprehensive Knowledge Base to answer any question you might have about our products. There’s the cheapest plan for small businesses – Starter – that cost $74 per month and will include 1 seat and 1,000 people reached/mo. If you’d want to test Intercom vs Zendesk before deciding on a tool for good, they both provide free trials for 14 days.

Product Tours by Intercom videos

Therefore, a helpdesk with a good inbox can make your team efficient in solving problems. However, the customer service (and the ways how a company delivers it) creates a centerpiece of a brand. But if you’re not familiar with them, think of the software as online human resource departments.

After an in-depth analysis such as this, it can be pretty challenging for your business to settle with either option. That’s why it would be better to review where both the options would be ideal to use. Zendesk also offers detailed reports that can be shared with others and enable team members to collaborate on them simultaneously. You can either track your performance on a pre-built dashboard or customize and build one for yourself.

Here’s what reviewers on G2 have to say

Some help desk software provides call center tools as one of customer communication channels. Intercom offers different features such as marketing automation software, an omnichannel business messenger, dedicated analytics and solutions to build help centers. In-app messages are notifications sent to users while they’re engaged with an app on mobile or PC. It allows companies to interact with customers while they’re active in the app, delivering information based on time or behavior. They may be utilized to alert consumers about product updates, provide assistance, and promote specials that are relevant to them.

• This becomes the perfect opportunity to personalize the experience, offer assistance to prospects as per their needs, and convert them into customers.
• When an agent clicks on a conversation, the full conversation history populates the middle screen.
• Zendesk for Service transforms customer queries and conversations from all channels–call, web chat, tweet, text, or email–into tickets in the Agent Workspace.
• Zendesk is another popular customer service, support, and sales platform that enables clients to connect and engage with their customers in seconds.
• The ticket display’s Side Conversations tab allows agents to initiate internal conversations via email, Slack, or ticketing system notes–without leaving the ticket.
• Operators will find its dashboard quite beneficial as it will take them seconds to find necessary features during an ongoing chat with the customers.

Intercom, on the other hand, is designed to be more of a complete solution for sales, marketing, and customer relationship nurturing. You can use it metadialog.com for customer support, but that’s not its core strength. One study found that 67% of customers prefer calling an agent to help solve their query.

Intercom or Zendesk: Voice and phone tools

Basically, if you have a complicated customer support process, go with Zendesk for its help desk functionality. If you’re a sales-oriented corporation, go with Intercom for its automation options. Both tools can be quite heavy on your budget, since they’re mainly targeting big enterprises and don’t offer their full toolset at an affordable price.

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. Knowledge Base is one of the self-service sections that includes articles or documents providing technical help to customers and employees.

Platform

Agents can prioritize overdue tasks, today’s tasks, or future tasks. The entire thread is saved within the ticket for future agents to reference. Agents can add each other to internal notes within a ticket, looping in team members to collaborate when necessary. For example, you can assign all inbound technical queries to an engineer; or, assign all pricing queries to the sales team. With so many solutions to choose from, finding the right option for your business can feel like an uphill battle.

Their chat widget looks and works great, and they invest a lot of effort to make it a modern, convenient customer communication tool. 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 their messenger. The Zendesk chat tool has most of the necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers, and live chat analytics. You can enable some forms for collecting customer info on the go.

See which Zendesk plan works best for you.

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. However, if you are looking for a robust messaging solution with customer support features, go for Intercom. Its intuitive messenger can help your business boost engagement and improve sales and marketing efforts. Zendesk started in 2007 as a web-based SaaS product for managing incoming customer support requests.

Intercom is a customer support messenger, bot, and live chat service provider that empowers its clients to provide instant support in real-time. This SaaS leader entered into the competition in 2011, intending to help its clients reach their target audiences and engage them in a conversation right away. 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. 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.

• On this page, we compare two customer service options directly, Zendesk and Intercom, to help in your evaluation of potential customer service solutions.
• You get call recording, muting and holding, conference calling, and call blocking.
• “Favorable” and “Critical” user reviews are selected using the review helpfulness score.
• Intercom, of course, allows its customer support team to collaborate and communicate too, but overall, Zendesk wins this group.
• Zendesk is not far behind Intercom when it comes to email features.
• In this detailed comparison, we’ll explore the features and characteristics of Intercom and Zendesk, highlighting each of their unique capabilities, so you can identify the right solution for your needs.

Moreover, Intercom bots can converse naturally with customers by using conversation starters, and respond with self-help, and knowledge base articles. Live chat add-on provides you with personal customer communication (via the web, mobile, and messaging) without interrupting their experience. Once you add live chat to your website, your visitors will be able to reach you through the chat widget.

The Intercom vs. Zendesk pricing may be justified by the value-added services and minor features that they have for their all-in-one pricing. For example, for businesses that want just a couple of features, there are subscription packages. Each of such packages contains a set of tools from basic to advanced features. What makes it different from other help desk tools is the Answer Bot. This is an AI assistant that will help anyone navigate Guide by providing results as you type your query. The bot also ensures that the customer or employee will find the right article before contacting an agent.

This makes things faster for support teams to access information without bothering other users. Also, a customer experience form can be found at the end of each article. The answers are analyzed https://www.metadialog.com/blog/intercom-vs-zendesk/ to help streamline the AI and can also be collated into a report for your perusal. Also, this software offers a feature called ‘Business Messenger’ that comes with its own AI chatbot.