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

The customer support platform starts at just $5 per agent per month, which is a very basic customer support tool. If you want dashboard reporting and integrations, you’ll need to pay $19 per agent per month. Multilingual content and other advanced features come with a $49 price per agent per month. Ultimately, it’s important to consider what features each platform offers before making a decision, as well as their pricing options and customer support policies.

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 for customer support, but that’s not its core strength. Intercom built additional tools to aid in marketing and engagement to supplement its customer service solution.

I just found Zendesk’s help center to be slightly better integrated into their workflows and more customizable. Triggers should prove especially useful for agents, allowing them to do things like automate notifications for actions like ticket assignments, ticket closing/reopening, or new ticket creation. Their template triggers are fairly limited with only seven options, but they do enable users to create new custom triggers, which can be a game-changer for agents with more complex workflows. 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. Use ticketing systems to manage the influx and provide your customers with timely responses.

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One more thing to add, there are ways to integrate Intercom to Zendesk. Visit either of their app marketplaces and look up the Intercom Zendesk integration. Like with many other apps, Zapier seems to be the best and most simple way to connect Intercom to Zendesk. Survey composer allows you to create the question and answer format, also customizing color, rating scales, and greetings. The Sell dashboard’s Tasks page sorts all of an agent’s tasks by due date. Agents can prioritize overdue tasks, today’s tasks, or future tasks.

Further, if companies plan to create multi-channel campaigns, Intercom makes a great fit. However, customers should keep in mind that Intercom does not offer voice. Intercom focuses on real-time customer messaging, while Zendesk provides a comprehensive suite for ticketing, knowledge base, and self-service support. But keep in mind that Zendesk is viewed more as zendesk or intercom a support and ticketing solution, while Intercom is CRM functionality-oriented. Which means it’s rather a customer relationship management platform than anything else. 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.

Customer support and data security

Altogether, this can significantly impact affordability in the long term. In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the hardest on your pocket. Zendesk can be more flexible and predictable in this area as you can buy different tools separately (or even use their limited versions for free). The cheapest (aka Essential) ‘All of Intercom’ package will cost you $136 per month, but if you only need their essential chat tools only, you can get them for $49 per month. As I’ve already mentioned, they started as a help desk/ticketing tool, and honestly, they perfected every bit of it over the years.

ThriveDesk empowers small businesses to manage real-time customer communications. Intercom has a different approach, one that’s all about sales, marketing, and personalized messaging. Intercom has your back if you’re looking to supercharge your sales efforts. It’s like having a toolkit for lead generation, customer segmentation, and crafting highly personalized messages.

All these features are necessary for operational efficiency and help agents deliver fast, personalized customer experiences. 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 better for smaller companies that are looking for a simple and capable customer service platform.

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. Intercom’s ticketing system and help desk SaaS is also pretty great, just not as amazing as Zendesk’s.

You can also contact Zendesk support 24/7, whereas Intercom support only has live agents during business hours. Both Zendesk and Intercom have their own “app stores” where users can find all of the integrations for each platform. Since Intercom is so intuitive, the time you’ll need to spend training new users on how to interact with the platform is greatly reduced. Users also point out that it can take a couple of hours to get used to the flow of tickets, which doesn’t happen in CRM, and they aren’t pleased with the product’s downtime. Then, you can begin filling in details such as your account’s name and icon and your agents’ profiles and security features. Zendesk also has a clear and customizable interface, but it has more features, so it might take a bit longer to learn.

If you thought Zendesk’s pricing was confusing, let me introduce you to Intercom’s pricing. It’s virtually impossible to predict what you’re going to pay for Intercom at end of the day. 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.

Zendesk’s per-agent pricing structure makes it a budget-friendly option for smaller teams, allowing costs to scale with team growth. When comparing the user interfaces (UI) of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms exhibit distinct characteristics and strengths catering to different user preferences and needs. Intercom, on the other hand, is ideal for those focusing on CRM capabilities and personalized customer interactions. The offers that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site (including, for example, the order in which they appear).

Intercom users often mention how impressed they are with its ease of use and their ability to quickly create useful tasks and set up automations. Even reviewers who hadn’t used the platform highlight how beautifully designed it is and how simple it is to interact with for both users and clients alike. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer varying flavors when it comes to curating the whole customer support experience. Gain valuable insights with Intercom’s analytics and reporting capabilities. Track key metrics, measure campaign success, and optimize customer engagement strategies. Experience targeted communication with Intercom’s automation and segmentation features.

However, as Monese grew and eyed a European expansion, it became clear that the company needed to centralize data in a single solution that would scale along with them. As you can imagine, banking from anywhere requires a flexible, robust customer service experience. 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. Say what you will, but Intercom’s design and overall user experience are leaving all its competitors far behind. It’s beautifully crafted and thought through, and their custom-made illustrations are just next level stuff. You can see their attention to detail in everything — from their tools to their website.

Intercom or Zendesk: Help desk and ticketing

As it turns, it’s quite difficult to compare Zendesk against Intercom as they serve different purposes and will fit different businesses. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. 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.

This is aided by the fact that the look and feel of Zendesk’s user interface are neat and minimal, with few cluttering features. When it comes to self-service portals for things like knowledgebases, Intercom has a useful set of resources. Intercom also has a community forum where users can help one another with questions and solutions. Learn how top CX leaders are scaling personalized customer service at their companies. Here, we’ve outlined the support options that Intercom and Zendesk provide to companies using their platforms. Community forums enable customers to assist each other by asking questions and sharing tips, experiences, and best practices–creating a unique, user-based, searchable information hub.

With Intercom, you get email features like targeted and personalized outbound emailing, dynamic content fields, and an email-to-inbox forwarding feature. The best help desks are also ticketing systems, which lets support reps create a support ticket out of issues that can then be tracked. Ticket routing helps to send the ticket to the best support team agent. 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.

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. Moreover, for users who require more dedicated and personalized support, Zendesk charges an additional premium. These premium support services can range in cost, typically between $1,500 and $2,800. This additional cost can be a considerable factor for businesses to consider when evaluating their customer support needs against their budget constraints. This exploration aims to provide a detailed comparison, aiding businesses in making an informed decision that aligns with their customer service goals. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer robust solutions, but the choice ultimately depends on specific business needs.

Their reports are attractive, dynamic, and integrated right out of the box. You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads. Yes—as your business’s needs grow, you will require a more sophisticated case management system. But that doesn’t mean you have to completely switch from your current provider if you’re not quite ready. Brian Kale, the head of customer success at Bank Novo, describes how Zendesk helped Bank Novo boost productivity and streamline service.

Zendesk’s help center tools are slightly better, but Intercom’s chatbot is more robust

ThriveDesk is a feature-rich helpdesk solution that offers a comprehensive set of tools to manage customer support effectively. Both Zendesk and Intercom have AI capabilities that deserve special mention. Zendesk’s AI (Fin) helps with automated responses, ensuring your customers get quick answers.

Connect with customers wherever they are for timely assistance and personalized experiences. You get a dashboard that makes creating, tracking, and organizing tickets easy. The best part about Zendesk is that, along with its amazing features, it also provides its users with a magical wand for customizing them.

Zendesk is billed more as a customer support and ticketing solution, while Intercom includes more native CRM functionality. Intercom isn’t quite as strong as Zendesk in comparison to some of Zendesk’s customer support strengths, but it has more features for sales and lead nurturing. Intercom’s chatbot feels a little more robust than Zendesk’s (though it’s worth noting that some features are only available at the Engage and Convert tiers). 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.

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. Intercom’s large series of bots obviously run on automations as well. As mentioned before, the bot builder is a visual drag-and-drop system that requires no coding knowledge; this is also how other basic workflows are designed. The more expensive Intercom plans offer AI-powered content cues, triage, and conversation insights.

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. The strength of Zendesk’s UI lies in its structured and comprehensive environment, adept at managing numerous customer interactions and integrating various channels seamlessly. However, compared to the more contemporary designs like Intercom’s, Zendesk’s UI may appear outdated, particularly in aspects such as chat widget and customization options.

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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. With all accounted for, it seems that Zendesk still has a number of user interface issues.

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 has a mobile app available for both Android and iOS, which makes it easy to stay connected with customers even when away from the computer. The app includes features like automated messages and conversation routing — so businesses can manage customer conversations more efficiently.

Sendcloud adopted these solutions to replace siloed systems like Intercom and a local voice support provider in favor of unified, omnichannel support. Businesses should always consider a tool’s TCO before committing to a purchase. Many software vendors aren’t upfront about the cost of using their products, maintenance costs, or integration fees.

Though expensive and quality are synonymous in some worlds, such a principle cannot define Desku where it stands out as one of such affordable companies. However, competitive pricing is a promise and not a compromise to make decent customer support accessible for all. Choose https://chat.openai.com/ Zendesk for a scalable, team-size-based pricing model and Intercom for initial low-cost access with flexibility in adding advanced features. When comparing the automation and AI features of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms come with unique strengths and weaknesses.

Agents can participate in forums and turn forum posts into tickets; they also can turn community-post replies into articles for future customers. Intercom self-service chatbot widgets, highly customizable and capable of conversing in 32 different languages, embed into your website or application. The ticket display’s Side Conversations tab allows agents to initiate internal conversations via email, Slack, or ticketing system notes–without leaving the ticket. Agents can choose if the message is private or public, upon which a group thread is initiated in the ticket’s sidebar, where participants can chat and add files.

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Create code-free screencast tours of products, websites, webpages, and applications within your website. Automation and AI save resources and time–every automated workflow and routing decision frees an agent to work on more complex issues. G2 ranks Intercom higher than Zendesk for ease of setup, and support quality—so you can expect a smooth transition, effortless onboarding, and continuous success.

Zendesk’s chatbot, Answer Bot, automatically answers customer questions asynchronously in up to 40 languages–via any text-based channel. 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. Self-service tools let customers resolve their own issues quickly and 24/7, improving satisfaction and reducing excessive agent workload. Intercom wins the automation and AI category because its chatbots have some impressive capabilities, like lead qualification and advanced routing.

• Intercom self-service chatbot widgets, highly customizable and capable of conversing in 32 different languages, embed into your website or application.
• However, competitive pricing is a promise and not a compromise to make decent customer support accessible for all.
• Its ability to seamlessly integrate with various applications further amplifies its versatility.
• This gets you unlimited email addresses and email templates in both text form and HTML.
• With its user-friendly interface and advanced functionalities, Intercom offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed to effectively communicate and engage with customers.

Intercom also has an omnichannel customer service solution, but it’s fairly limited, with no native voice capabilities and minimal voice integrations. 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. 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.

Zendesk offers robust, pre-built reports for sales and support teams. Here are our top reporting and analytics features and an overview of where Intercom’s reporting limitations lie. Zendesk also has the Answer Bot, which can take your knowledge base game to the next level instantly. It can automatically suggest your customer relevant articles reducing the workload for your support agents.

Powered by Explore, Zendesk’s reporting capabilities are pretty impressive. Right out of the gate, you’ve got dozens of pre-set report options on everything from satisfaction ratings and time in status to abandoned calls and Answer Bot resolutions. You can even save custom dashboards for a more tailored reporting experience.

However, you’ll likely end up paying more for Zendesk, and in-app messenger and other advanced customer communication tools will not be included. Its sales CRM software starts at $19 per month per user, but you’ll have to pay $49 to get Zapier integrations and $99 for Hubspot integrations. Finally, you can pay $199 per month per user for unlimited sales pipelines and advanced reporting along with other features. Designed for all kinds of businesses, from small startups to giant enterprises, it’s the secret weapon that keeps customers happy. And that’s why it offers a long list of customization options like workflow automation, ticket management system, and layouts. Hivers offers round-the-clock proactive support across all its plans, ensuring that no matter the time or issue, expert assistance is always available.

What makes Intercom stand out from the crowd are their chatbots and lots of chat automation features that can be very helpful for your team. You can integrate different apps (like Google Meet or Stripe among others) with your messenger and make it a high end point for your customers. In summary, choosing Zendesk and Intercom hinges on your business’s unique requirements and priorities. 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. As you dive deeper into the world of customer support and engagement, you’ll discover that Zendesk and Intercom offer some distinctive features that set them apart.

And while many other chatbots take forever to set up, you can set up your first chatbot in under five minutes. Chat agents also get a comprehensive look at their entire customer’s journey, so they will Chat PG have a better idea of what your customers need, without needing to ask many questions. Since Intercom doesn’t offer a CRM, its pricing is divided into basic messaging and messaging with automations.

However, it is possible Intercom’s support is superior at the premium level. There are 3 Basic support plans at $19, $49 and $99 per user per month billed annually, and 5 Suite plans at $49, $79, $99, $150, and $215 per user per month billed annually. 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. Check out our list of unified communications providers for more information.

Intercom is the new guy on the block when it comes to help desk ticketing systems. This means the company is still working out some kinks and operating with limited capabilities. Sales teams can also view outbound communications, and any support agent can access resources from the Intercom workspace. Prioritize the agent experience to maximize productivity and customer satisfaction while reducing employee turnover. Though Intercom chat window says that their team typically replies in a few hours, I received the answer in a couple of minutes.

Intercom excels in real-time messaging and customer engagement, while Zendesk focuses on ticketing and strong customer support. The choice between the two depends on specific business needs and budget considerations. If you want to enjoy the benefits of both Zendesk and Intercom in one place and enjoy better value for money overall, Desku is a strong alternative. 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. Intercom generally receives positive feedback for its customer support, with users appreciating the comprehensive features and team-oriented tools.

Since Zendesk has many features, it takes a while to learn how to use the options you’ll be needing. 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. With ThriveDesk, you can supercharge your website’s growth and streamline customer interactions like never before.