Automation and AI save resources and time–every automated workflow and routing decision frees an agent to work on more complex issues. Intercom and Zendesk are primarily classified as “Engagement/Lifecycle Marketing” and “Help Desk” tools respectively. If that’s not detailed enough, then surely their visitor browsing details will leave you surprised.

When you see pricing plans starting for $79/month, you should get a clear understanding of how expensive other plans can become for your business. What’s worse, Intercom doesn’t offer a free trial to its prospect to help them test https://www.metadialog.com/blog/intercom-vs-zendesk/ the product before onboarding with their services. Instead, they offer a product demo when prospects reach out to learn more about their pricing structure. Intercom’s large series of bots obviously run on automations as well.

Intercom vs Zendesk: Which One is Right for Your Business?

Intercom’s help center allows you to draft and organize collections of articles, accessible to customers via a search bar in the Messenger widget. With Intercom workload management tools, administrators can ensure that incoming conversations, traffic, and workload are evenly distributed among team members. Zendesk for Sales, or Zendesk Sell, is Zendesk’s sales pipeline and CRM tool with its own dashboard for lead generation and conversion.

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. 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.

Best Zendesk Alternatives to Give Your Support a Boost in 2023

Integrations are the best way to enhance the toolkit of your apps by connecting them for interoperable actions and features. Both Zendesk and Intercom have integration libraries, and you can also use a connecting tool like Zapier for added integrations and add-ons. No matter what Zendesk Suite plan you are on, you get workflow triggers, which are simple business rules-based actions to streamline many tasks.

Every company needs to build a better relationship for rapid growth. Intercom helps build, scale, and nurture solid customer relationships for brands. It’s an all-in-one communication platform for sales, marketing, and customer support teams to interact and come to meet the rising demand of customer needs. Zendesk is a comprehensive CRM and support suite that offers a variety of features for customer support, sales, and marketing.

Zendesk vs Intercom: customer support

Both solutions provide a campaign tool, live chat, and a knowledge base. We will compare those customer service solutions in terms of functionality and price. Winner of our Supreme Software Award, Zendesk is a customer support solution that helps boost customer service and improve customer retention. The platform’s modules include chat support, call center solutions, help desk applications, and knowledge base, so you’ll cover all the bases of efficient customer services.

Customers won’t need to leave your app or website to find the help they need.Zendesk, on the other hand, will redirect the customer to a new web page. Intercom does not offer a native call center tool, so it cannot handle calls through a cloud-based phone system or calling app on its own. However, you can connect Intercom with over 40 compatible phone and video integrations. See for yourself how transforming your customer support can help improve ROI.

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Since then, it has evolved into a full-fledged CRM that offers a suite of software applications to its over 160,000 customers like Uber, Siemens, and Tesco. Streamline the support you give by enabling customers to self-service with our knowledge base feature. The two essential things that Zendesk lacks in comparison to Intercom are in-app messages and email marketing tools.

• Agents can use the desktop chatbox to respond to customers in any outbound channel.
• I’ll dive into their chatbots more later, but their bot automation features are also stronger.
• Create a help center combining knowledge base articles and a customer contact request form, embeddable into any webpage or mobile app.
• Intercom, on the other hand, was built for business messaging, so communication is one of their strong suits.
• Powered by Explore, Zendesk’s reporting capabilities are pretty impressive.
• Lots of users complain that Intercom support is not available most of the time, so you’re forced to repeat your question over and over again to a bot.

With mParticle, you can connect your Zendesk and Intercom data with other marketing, analytics, and business intelligence platforms without any custom engineering effort. Zendesk’s Help Center and Intercom’s Articles both offer features to easily embed help centers into your website or product using their web widgets, SDKs, and APIs. With help centers in place, it’s easier for your customers to reliably find answers, tips, and other important information in a self-service manner. Research by Zoho reports that customer relationship management (CRM) systems can help companies triple lead conversion rates. Those same tools also increase customer retention by 27% while saving 23% on sales and marketing costs.

Specialization vs Customization

Because Intercom started as a live chat service, its messenger functionality is very robust. It feels very modern, and Intercom offers some advanced messenger features that Zendesk does not. A complete set of customer service management offerings to help you create human relationships with your customers. There’s plenty of information about customer support and ticketing software options. Read these resources to learn more about why users choose Zendesk vs Intercom. One place Intercom really shines as a standalone CRM is its data utility.

For instance, customers and staff alike can channel messages through it. The methods that help desks use, however, are meant to cater to possibly thousands to millions of messages. Because there could be a thousand customers complaining at any given hour to all your staff having problems with business protocols. Generally, humans can’t handle this volume of exchange, that’s why help desk software was made.

Zendesk vs. Intercom at a glance

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. Zendesk also packs some pretty potent tools into their platform, so you can empower your agents to do what they do with less repetition. Agents can use basic automation (like auto-closing tickets or setting auto-responses), apply list organization to stay on top of their tasks, or set up triggers to keep tickets moving automatically.

With Intercom, you can send targeted email, push, and in-app messages which can be based on relevant time or behavior triggers. Zendesk also has the Z Bot, which will take your knowledge base game to the next level instantly. It can automatically suggest relevant articles to customers reducing the workload for your support agents. Whether you’ve just started searching for a customer support metadialog.com tool or have been using one for a while, chances are you know about both Zendesk and Intercom. The former is one of the oldest and most reliable solutions on the market, while the latter sets the bar high in terms of innovative and out-of-the-box features. Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates.

Our Integrations

Self-service tools let customers resolve their own issues quickly and 24/7, improving satisfaction and reducing excessive agent workload. Zendesk wins the collaboration tools category because of its easy-to-use side conversations feature. The ticket display’s Side Conversations tab allows agents to initiate internal conversations via email, Slack, or ticketing system notes–without leaving the ticket.

• If you do go with ActiveCampaign, I HIGHLY recommend that you take their paid training.
• 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.
• Zendesk for Service, a customer service solution, provides unified customer-facing communication channels, self-service, collaboration, customer routing, and analytics–all organized in one dashboard.
• With help centers in place, it’s easier for your customers to reliably find answers, tips, and other important information in a self-service manner.
• Again, Zendesk has surpassed the number of reviewers when compared to Intercom.
• Since Zendesk’s inception, its ticketing system has remained the best in the business.