Zendesk vs Intercom: Which Is Right For Your Business in 2023?

Its strength is that it offers a wide range of tools for organising teams, such as booking systems, knowledge bases, and customer service features. These tools are great for keeping track of tasks and making sure workflows run smoothly, but they might not put as much emphasis on real-time conversations for teams as Intercom does. Intercom, while it doesn’t offer an omnichannel dashboard, is still robust in its ticketing capabilities. Intercom offers extensive automation features for ticket management, enabling businesses to streamline and speed up their customer service. They offer an omnichannel live chat solution that integrates with multiple messaging platforms and marketing channels and even automates incoming support processes with bots. It is quite the all-rounder as it even has a help center and ticketing system that completes its omnichannel support cycle.

As it turns, it’s quite difficult to compare Zendesk against Intercom as they serve different purposes and will fit different businesses. While doing my research for this article, I’ve not only tested both Intercom and Zendesk myself, but also read a pile of different articles, comparisons, guides, showdowns and all this kind of stuff. What really struck me though is that people seemed to like Zendesk more.

The platform is recognized for its ability to resolve a significant portion of common questions automatically, ensuring faster response times. While both platforms have a significant presence in the industry, they cater to varying business requirements. Zendesk, with its extensive toolkit, is often preferred by businesses seeking an all-encompassing customer support solution.

Intercom stands out for its modern and user-friendly messenger functionality, which includes advanced features with a focus on automation and real-time insights. Its AI Chatbot, Fin, is particularly noted for handling complex queries efficiently. 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. Both Zendesk and Intercom have knowledge bases to help customers get the most out of their platforms.

Zendesk vs. Intercom pricing

This enables organizations to work more efficiently and easily integrate their software without having to alter their present business processes. It’s clear that both of these tools are designed for different use cases. Intercom is geared toward sales, whereas Zendesk includes everything a customer service rep desires. Zendesk is a customer service platform that allows you to communicate with customers via any channel. Again, Zendesk has surpassed the number of reviewers when compared to Intercom. Some of the highly-rated features include ticket creation user experience, email to case, and live chat reporting.

There is a better user experience with Intercom because the layout is more streamlined. 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. This focus on making things easier for users is meant to make users happier generally and get more people to use the Intercom platform.

Zendesk vs Intercom: Which One Is Right for You?

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. Since Intercom doesn’t offer a CRM, its pricing is divided zendesk vs intercom into basic messaging and messaging with automations. You can also contact Zendesk support 24/7, whereas Intercom support only has live agents during business hours. Since Zendesk has many features, it takes a while to learn how to use the options you’ll be needing.

The program is simple to use and includes all of the necessary capabilities for providing good customer service. 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. Zendesk has received a rating of 4.4 out of 5 from 2,693 reviewers.

Zendesk vs Intercom: Key features and functionalities

In 2016, Zendesk reported that 87,000 paid customers from over 150 countries used its products. Their help desk is a single inbox to handle customer requests, where your customer support agents can leave private notes for each other and automatically assign requests to the right people. ThriveDesk is a help desk software tailor-made for businesses seeking extensive features and a powerful yet simple live chat assistant. Even better, it’s the most cost-effective, lightweight, and speedy live chat solution available for Shopify business owners. Experience the comprehensive power of Intercom for effective customer communication, automation, support tools, integrations, and analytics. Streamline support processes with Intercom’s ticketing system and knowledge base.

The setup is designed to seamlessly connect your customer support team with customers across all platforms. AI and ML make customer service functionalities like chatbots, sentiment analysis, ticket creation, and workflow automation possible. All these features are necessary for operational efficiency and help agents deliver fast, personalized customer experiences. In today’s world of fast-paced customer service and high customer expectations, it’s essential for business leaders to equip their teams with the best support tools available.

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. 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.

Does Zendesk have Intercom integration?

Operators can easily switch from one conversation to another, therefore helping operators manage more interactions simultaneously. Pricing for both services varies based on the specific needs and scale of your business. When comparing the omnichannel support functionalities of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms show distinct strengths and weaknesses. When comparing the automation and AI features of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms come with unique strengths and weaknesses. Messagely also provides you with a shared inbox so anyone from your team can follow up with your users, regardless of who the user was in contact with first.

Intercom live chat is modern, smooth, and has many advanced features that other chat tools don’t. It’s highly customizable, too, so you can adjust it according to your website or product’s style. 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.

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.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Working on customer queries from Gmail was exactly what we needed. Before you make your choice, check out Messagely’s features and compare them to discover which platform is best for you. Zendesk’s list of compliances and security memberships is very long, and they have won a number of security seals and awards. Zendesk also has multiple security filters that range from where it stores its files to the people it hires.

I tested both of their live chats and their support agents were answering in very quickly and right to the point. Zendesk team can be just a little bit faster depending on the time of the day. Intercom is praised as an affordable option with high customization capabilities, allowing businesses to create a personalized support experience. Although the interface may require a learning curve, users find the platform effective and functional. However, Intercom has fewer integration options than Zendesk, which may limit its capabilities for businesses seeking extensive integrations. One of Zendesk’s standout features that we need to shine a spotlight on is its extensive marketplace of third-party integrations and extensions.

Novo has been a Zendesk customer since 2019 but didn’t immediately start taking full advantage of all our features and capabilities. With Zendesk, organizational data silos can be a thing of the past. We make it easy for anyone within your company to access contextual customer information—including their conversation and purchase history—to provide better experiences.

Zendesk has traditionally been more focused on customer support management, while Intercom has been more focused on live support solutions like its chat solution. Zendesk, unlike Intercom, is a more affordable and predictable customer service platform. Also, it’s the pioneer in the support and communication tools market. You can always count on it if you need a reliable customer support platform to process tickets, support users, and get advanced reporting.

Zendesk also offers a number of integrations with third-party applications. 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. Intercom is the go-to solution for businesses seeking to elevate customer support and sales processes. With its user-friendly interface and advanced functionalities, Intercom offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed to effectively communicate and engage with customers. Intercom offers an integrated knowledge base functionality to its user base.

If you seek a comprehensive customer support solution with a strong emphasis on traditional ticketing, Zendesk is a solid choice, particularly for smaller to mid-sized businesses. 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.

Both Zendesk and Intercom are excellent customer service solutions. However, the right fit for your business will depend on your particular needs and budget. If you’re looking for a comprehensive solution with lots of features and integrations, then Zendesk would be a good choice. On the other hand, if you need something that is more tailored to your customer base and is less expensive, then Intercom might be a better fit. Intercom also offers a 14-day free trial, after which customers can upgrade to a paid plan or use the basic free plan. Unlike Zendesk, the prices for Intercom are based on the number of seats and contacts, with each plan tailored to each customer, meaning that the pricing can be quite flexible.

To sum things up, one can get really confused trying to make sense of Zendesk’s pricing, let alone to calculate costs. You’d probably want to know how much it costs to get Zendesk or Intercom for your business, so let’s talk money now. It’s highly customizable, so you can adjust it according to your website or product’s style. So when I realized lots of companies actually prefer Zendesk over Intercom, I was surprised.

If money is limited for your business, a help desk that can be a Zendesk alternative or an Intercom alternative is ThriveDesk. Choose the plan that suits your support requirements and budget, whether you’re a small team or a growing enterprise. The Zendesk Help Center allows for the easy creation and grouping of resources, offering customizability to match your brand.

Still on the fence about customer service and sales SaaS solutions? Check out our list of unified communications providers for more information. You need a complete customer service platform that’s seamlessly integrated and AI-enhanced.

• She loves finding innovative ways for your support team to scale and grow, always putting the customer first.
• In fact, the Zendesk Marketplace has 1,300+ apps and integrations, from billing software to marketing automation tools.
• Agents can respond in any channel by typing in the text box and have access to deep customer experience history and background in the right-hand column.
• Zendesk’s pricing structure provides increasing levels of features and capabilities as businesses move up the tiers.
• HelpScout, Freshdesk, Drift, and LiveChat are some other popular choices.

Zendesk supports teams that can then field these issues from a nice unified dashboard. Zendesk has great intelligent routing and escalation protocols as well. It tends to perform well on the marketing and sales side of things, which is key for a growing company. And considering that its tools (including live chat options) are so easy to use, it’s probably going to be easier for a small business to get integrated and set up. Intercom generally receives positive feedback for its customer support, with users appreciating the comprehensive features and team-oriented tools. However, there are occasional criticisms regarding the effectiveness of its AI chatbot and some interface navigation challenges.

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. Both companies provide a set of services that are intended to simplify communication, support, and the overall customer experience. In a nutshell, both these companies provide great customer support.

Businesses of all sizes can rely on the Zendesk customer service platform and benefit from workflow management, powerful AI tools, robust insights, and more. If that sounds good to you, sign up for a free demo to see our software in action and get started. Intercom also has an omnichannel customer service solution, but it’s fairly limited, with no native voice capabilities and minimal voice integrations. Intercom is more for improving sales cycle and customer relationships, while Zendesk has everything a customer support representative can dream about, but it does lack wide email functionality. On the other hand, it provides call center functionalities, unlike Intercom. Zendesk is one of the biggest players in the realm of customer support platforms.

Rated 5 stars out of 5 on G2, ThriveDesk is highly regarded by users. Rest assured, ThriveDesk’s lightweight design and speed won’t impact the performance of your Wix-powered eCommerce website. The optimized agent interface ensures rapid responses for maximum efficiency, all while keeping your website running smoothly.