Zendesk vs Intercom: Which Solution to Choose in 2024?

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. I tested both options (using Zendesk’s Suite Professional trial and Intercom’s Support trial) and found clearly defined differences between the two. Here’s what you need to know about Zendesk vs. Intercom as customer support and relationship management tools. The Zendesk support system stands out in particular because of its enormous integration ecosystem, which includes a wide variety of plugins and applications developed by third-party developers.

Intercom self-service chatbot widgets, highly customizable and capable of conversing in 32 different languages, embed into your website or application. Zendesk’s Admin Center provides tools that automate agent ticket workflows. While Intercom lacks some common customer-service channels like voice calling and video conferencing, it supports other unique features that transfer across channels. The Agent Workspace highlights tickets based on the issue and urgency, assigning each one a priority–agents can also tag tickets based on recency, hold-vs-open status, and urgency.

She loves finding innovative ways for your support team to scale and grow, always putting the customer first. She also loves to run marathons and play softball in her spare time. 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. Any business knows that the front desk is where everything happens.

Zendesk

This way, your clients will never have to repeat themselves or get frustrated because their new representative doesn’t know their background. You don’t have to pay per contact on your database, and you there are many free features you can use. Zendesk, on the other hand, has revamped its security since its security breach in 2016.

• Intercom’s advanced chatbots, coupled with customizability, give it an edge over Zendesk in this category.
• Further, if companies plan to create multi-channel campaigns, Intercom makes a great fit.
• Intercom also does not offer a free trial period for users to examine the software prior to joining up for their services.
• Businesses should always consider a tool’s TCO before committing to a purchase.
• Pro plan is rather a team plan that costs $395/mo and includes 5 seats.

Zendesk’s messaging system makes it easier for customers to ask questions and get help, and it makes sure that every question is properly recorded and handled. Intercom is second to none when it comes to providing great customer service, particularly in terms of proactive contact and the customisation of in-app experiences. The extensive automation and robust ticketing operations that Zendesk offers are among the numerous capabilities that the company possesses. Basically, provides you with a knowledge base to create, organize, and store the articles that answer your customers’ questions.

When he isn’t writing content, poetry, or creative nonfiction, he enjoys traveling, baking, playing music, reliving his barista days in his own kitchen, camping, and being bad at carpentry. Understanding these fundamental differences should go a long way in helping you pick between the two, but does that mean you can’t use one platform to do what the other does better? These are both still very versatile products, so don’t think you have to get too siloed into a single use case. HelpScout, Freshdesk, Drift, and LiveChat are some other popular choices. KindGeek was founded in Ukraine; our co-founders are from Ukraine, and all of our team members call Ukraine home.

Zendesk vs Intercom: customer support

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. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer varying flavors when it comes to curating the whole customer support experience. When comparing Zendesk and Intercom, evaluating their core features and functionalities is essential to determine which platform best suits your organization’s customer support needs.

When making your decision, consider factors such as your budget, the scale of your business, and your specific growth plans. Explore alternative options like ThriveDesk if you’re looking for a more budget-conscious solution that aligns with your customer support needs. In summary, choosing Zendesk and Intercom hinges on your business’s unique requirements and priorities.

As your business grows, so does the volume of customer inquiries and support tickets. Managing everything manually is becoming increasingly difficult, and you need a robust customer support platform to streamline your operations. It’s an opportunity for Zendesk to differentiate itself, but unfortunately it didn’t get very high marks from users, either. Reviewers were frustrated by how long it took for their tickets to get resolved, as well as the complexity with which they were tossed around from department to department. Given that these are two services predicated on making you better at customer support, you’d think they’d be able to handle it better themselves. However, reading the reviews, it’s probably more accurate to say that Zendesk is “mixed” on customer support, whereas Intercom doesn’t have a stellar record.

Zendesk’s mobile app is also good for ticketing, helping you create new support tickets with macros and updates. It’s also good for sending and receiving notifications, as well as for quick filtering through the queue of open tickets. There are pre-built workflows to help with things like ticket sharing, as well as conversation routing based on metrics like agent skill set or availability. There are even automations to help with things like SLAs, or service level agreements, to do things like send out notifications when headlights are due. Intercom has a full suite of email marketing tools, although they are part of a pricier package.

Intercom lets businesses send their customers targeted in-app messages. On one hand, Zendesk offers a great many features, way more than Intercom, but it lacks in-app messenger and email marketing tools. On the other hand, Intercom has all its (fewer) tools and features integrated with each other way better, which makes your experience with the tool as smooth as silk. On the other hand, if you prioritize customer engagement, sales, and personalized messaging, Intercom is a compelling option, especially for startups and rapidly scaling businesses. If you are looking for a comprehensive customer support solution with a wide range of features, Zendesk is a good option. Zendesk receives positive feedback for its intuitive interface, wide range of integrations, and robust reporting tools.

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. Whether your customers prefer to communicate via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel, Zendesk unifies all of your customer interactions into one platform. The software helps you to keep track of all support requests, quickly respond to questions, and track the effectiveness of your customer service reps. Pop-up chat, in-app messaging, and notifications are some of the highly-rated features of this live chat software.

Imagine having the power to connect your helpdesk solution with a wide range of tools and applications that your team already uses. Whether it’s syncing data with your CRM, enhancing communication via messaging platforms, or automating tasks with productivity apps, Zendesk makes it possible. While in Intercom, advanced chatbots, a modern and well-developed chat widget, email marketing services, product demonstrations, and in-app messaging all contribute to a better customer experience. Zendesk provides limited customer support for its basic plan users, along with costly premium assistance options. On the other hand, Intercom is generally praised for its support features, despite facing challenges with its AI chatbot and the complexity of its help articles. Zendesk is a great option for large companies or companies that are looking for a very strong sales and customer service platform.

In 2018, Intercom raised $125 million in funding, which brought its value up to $1.25 billion and provided the company with all the rights to call itself a unicorn. First of all, Intercom positions itself as a business messenger, the primary aim of which is to deliver modern and reliable customer communication tool. 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. It’s much easier if you decide to go with the Zendesk Suite, which includes Support, Chat, Talk, and Guide tools.

With Intercom, you get email features like targeted and personalized outbound emailing, dynamic content fields, and an email-to-inbox forwarding feature. 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. For example, you can read in many Zendesk Sell reviews how adding sales tools benefits Zendesk Support users.

The difference in prices between plans is so significant because of the features each of them provides. Intercom doesn’t really provide free stuff, but they have a tool called Platform, which is free. The free Intercom Platform lets you see who your customers are and what they do in your workspace. If I had to describe Intercom’s help desk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools.

In fact, the Zendesk Marketplace has 1,300+ apps and integrations, from billing software to marketing automation tools. Apps and integrations are critical to creating a 360 view of the customer across the company and ensuring agents zendesk vs intercom 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.

This keeps any data sent private and stops people from getting to it without permission. Both Intercom and Zendesk are widely recognised as leaders in their respective industries. 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.

Compare Zendesk versus Intercom to determine who will be the best partner for your business at every phase of the customer journey. In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the most expensive tools on the market. And there’s still no way to know how much you’ll pay for them since the prices are only revealed after you go through a few sale demos with the Intercom team. To sum things up, one can get really confused trying to make sense of the Zendesk suite pricing, let alone calculate costs. Zendesk is a ticketing system before anything else, and its ticketing functionality is overwhelming in the best possible way. Currently based in Albuquerque, NM, Bryce Emley holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NC State and nearly a decade of writing and editing experience.

Intercom has a community forum where users can engage with each other and gain insights from their experiences. With only the Enterprise tier offering round-the-clock email, phone, and chat help, Zendesk support is sharply separated by tiers. While Intercom does not offer free trials, they do offer demo versions of each plan. Send surveys at key points throughout the customer buying cycle, utilizing multiple types of question formats. Surveys turn customer insights into action, with triggers and campaign response adjustments depending on customer responses.

Respond to all conversations across different messaging platforms in one place and avoid juggling between dozens of tabs. Collaborate with your teammates by easily assigning the right rep to best handle a customer query. Zendesk is primarily a ticketing system, and its ticketing capability is overwhelming in the best conceivable manner. All client contacts, whether via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel, land in one dashboard, where your agents can quickly and efficiently resolve them. It also has an Answer Bot that reduces the workload for employees.

Top Features

Zendesk’s chatbot, Answer Bot, automatically answers customer questions asynchronously in up to 40 languages–via any text-based channel. Self-service tools let customers resolve their own issues quickly and 24/7, improving satisfaction and reducing excessive agent workload. In fact, agents can even add customers to private messaging chats when necessary, and the customer will receive the whole conversation history by email to ensure they’re up to date. Automatic assignment rules establish criteria that automatically route tickets to the right agent or team, based on message or user data. An inbound customer message through any of these channels becomes a ticket for your support agents, whose reply reaches the customer through the same channel they originally used.

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. Zendesk wins the major category of help desk and ticketing system software. It lets customers reach out via messaging, a live chat tool, voice, and social media.

• When comparing the user interfaces (UI) of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms exhibit distinct characteristics and strengths catering to different user preferences and needs.
• Collaboration tools enable agents to work together in resolving customer tickets and making sales.
• Its suite of tools goes beyond traditional ticketing and focuses on customer engagement and messaging automation.
• You can create these knowledge base articles in your target audience’s native language as their software is multilingual.
• With its user-friendly interface and advanced functionalities, Intercom offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed to effectively communicate and engage with customers.
• As time passes by, the line between Intercom and Zendesk becomes more blurred as they try to keep up with one another and implement new features, services, and pricing policies.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Its multichannel support is more focused on engaging customers through its chat and messaging systems, including mobile carousels and interactive communication tools. However, compared to Zendesk, Intercom might not offer the same breadth in terms of integrating a wide range of external channels. Zendesk is a customer service software company that provides businesses with a suite of tools to manage customer interactions. The company was founded in 2007 and today serves over 170,000 customers worldwide. Zendesk’s mission is to build software designed to improve customer relationships. Zendesk, on the other hand, may not stress the same conversation-driven method, even though it has powerful team management tools.

Because of the app called Intercom Messenger, one can see that their focus is less on the voice and more on the text. This is fine, as not every customer support team wants to be so available on the phone. Email marketing, for example, is a big deal, but less so when it comes to customer service. Still, for either of these platforms to have some email marketing or other email functionality is common sense. The best help desks are also ticketing systems, which lets support reps create a support ticket out of issues that can then be tracked.

Apart from this feature, the customer support options at Zendesk are quite limited. First, you can only talk to the support team if you are a registered user. 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.

Overall, when comparing Zendesk to Intercom, Zendesk’s features will probably win out over time. But the most important thing is that you get a help desk that you believe in—and that you integrate it into a website as thoroughly as possible. Intercom’s chatbots and product tours differentiate it from Zendesk.

Intercom has a dark mode that I think many people will appreciate, and I wouldn’t say it’s lacking in any way. 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. Intercom is great at making it easy for businesses and their customers to talk to each other instantly and back and forth.

There are many features to help bigger customer service teams collaborate more effectively — like private notes or a real-time view of who’s handling a given ticket at the moment, etc. At the same time, the vendor offers powerful reporting capabilities to help you grow and improve your business. 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. Zendesk is among the industry’s best ticketing and customer support software, and most of its additional functionality is icing on the proverbial cake.

Intercom’s products are used by over 25,000 customers, from small tech startups to large enterprises. On the other hand, Zendesk’s customer support includes a knowledge base that’s very intuitive and easy to navigate. It divides all articles into a few main topics so you can quickly find the one you’re looking for. It also includes a list of common questions you can browse through at the bottom of the knowledge base home page so you can find answers to common issues.

It can automatically suggest relevant articles for agents during business hours to share with clients, reducing your support agents’ workload. The Zendesk chat tool has most of the necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers, and live chat analytics. The Intercom versus Zendesk conundrum is probably the greatest problem in the customer service software world.

Intercom works with any website or web-based product and aims to be your one-way stop for all of your customer communication needs. Although it can be pricey, Zendesk’s platform is a very robust one, with powerful reporting and insight tools, a large number of integrations, and excellent scalability features. In this article, we’ll compare Zendesk vs Intercom to find out which is the right customer support tool for you.

Zendesk, on the other hand, is another top customer service platform that uses strong security steps to keep customer data safe. One of these steps is putting in place two-factor authentication (2FA). With this extra layer of security, users must show two forms of ID before they can access their accounts. This makes it even harder for people who aren’t supposed to be there to get in. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption is used by Intercom, a customer communication tool, to keep data sent between users and the platform safe. SSL encryption is a standard form of security that creates a safe and encrypted connection between a user’s computer and the Intercom servers.

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. Just like Zendesk, Intercom also offers its Operator bot, which will automatically suggest relevant articles to clients right in a chat widget. The Help Center software by Intercom is also a very efficient tool. You can publish your self-service resources, divide them by categories, and integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience. 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.