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

Zendesk and Intercom offer various pricing plans, but Intercom is generally more expensive. Zendesk’s pricing plans start at $19 per month, while Intercom’s pricing plans start at $74 per month. Your best pricing plan will depend on your specific needs and budget. If you are a small business with basic CRM needs, then the Zendesk Support Team or Intercom Starter may be a good option for you. If you are a growing business with more complex CRM needs, then the Zendesk Enterprise or Intercom Pro plan may be a better option for you. Overall, when comparing Zendesk to Intercom, Zendesk’s features will probably win out over time.

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. 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 the product before onboarding with their services.

Yes, Zendesk has an Intercom integration that you can find in the Zendesk Marketplace—it’s free to install. So, you can get the best of both worlds without choosing between Intercom or Zendesk. Check out our chart that compares the capabilities of Zendesk vs. Intercom.

Intercom calculates the price based on the number of seats (users) you request. Depending on the seat type (subscription plan), users get access to different features. For example, the Messaging feature is not available in the Support plan, while Articles aren’t available in the Engage and Conver plans.

To sum things up, 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. 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. 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.

Experience targeted communication with Intercom’s automation and segmentation features. Create personalized messages for specific customer segments, driving engagement and satisfaction. You get a dashboard that makes creating, tracking, and organizing tickets easy.

Its strengths are prominently seen in multi-channel support, with effective email, social media, and live chat integrations, coupled with a robust internal knowledge base for agent support. LiveAgent offers social media integrations so agents can respond to customer interactions across various social media platforms. The help desk also has self-service options, including a knowledge base tool that helps customers complete common tasks on their own.

So, whether you’re a startup or a global giant, Zendesk’s got your back for top-notch customer support. Zendesk lets you chat with customers through email, chat, social media, or phone. Now that we know a little about both tools, it is time to make an in-depth analysis and identify which one of these will be perfect for your business. Here’s a list of criteria we’ve used to differentiate the two for you. 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.

Can I use both Zendesk and Intercom?

Zendesk offers its users consistently high ROI due to its comprehensive product features, firm support, and advanced customer support, automation, and reporting features. It allows businesses to streamline operations and workflows, improving customer satisfaction and eventually leading to increased revenues, which justifies the continuous high ROI. 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. Since both are such well-established market leader companies, you can rest assured that whichever one you choose will offer a quality customer service solution. Zendesk is popular due to its user-friendly interface, extensive customization options, scalability, multichannel support, robust analytics, and seamless integration capabilities.

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. Zendesk is quite famous for designing its platform to be intuitive and its tools to be quite simple to learn. This is aided zendesk chat vs intercom 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.

What’s really nice about this is that even within a ticket, you can switch between communication modes without changing views. So if an agent needs to switch from chat to phone to email (or vice versa) with a customer, it’s all on the same ticketing page. There’s even on-the-spot translation built right in, which is extremely helpful. Experts share the strategies that make a big difference when you want to improve customer experience.

MParticle is a Customer Data Platform offering plug-and-play integrations to Zendesk and Intercom, along with over 300 other marketing, analytics, and data warehousing tools. With mParticle, you can connect your Zendesk and Intercom data with other marketing, analytics, and business intelligence platforms without any custom engineering effort. Both tools also allow you to connect your email account and manage it from within the application to track open and click-through rates. In addition, Zendesk and Intercom feature advanced sales reporting and analytics that make it easy for sales teams to understand their prospects and customers more deeply. Zendesk takes the slight lead here because it offers some advanced help desk features, which Intercom does not. Not only does Zendesk offer a free trial, it’s actually sort of a freemium tool, which means you can choose one their tools (live chat, knowledge base, call center software) and use it for free forever.

Some aspects give an edge or create differentiation in the operations of both software, which users may oversee while making a choice. We will discuss these differentiating factors to help you make the right choice for your business and help it excel in offering extraordinary customer service. The cheapest plan costs about $74/month (when billed annually) and consists of one seat and 1,000 people reached/month.

Does Zendesk have Intercom integration?

Sometimes, businesses do not even realize the importance of various aspects you must consider while making this choice. For $395/month the Pro tier allows up to 5 users and eliminates the volume restriction. This tier provides everything a small or medium-sized business will need, including better ticket management and advanced workflow automation tools. https://chat.openai.com/ Intercom and Zendesk both offer comprehensive customer support solutions. Intercom is a fully-featured customer support platform that provides powerful automation and AI tools to enable more efficient and effective customer engagement. One of the things that sets Zendesk apart from other customer service software providers is its focus on design.

If you are looking for more integration options and budget is not an issue, Intercom can be the perfect live chat solution for your business. It is also ideal for businesses who are searching for conversational chatbot functionality. Their AI-powered chatbot can enable your business to boost engagement and improve marketing efforts in real-time. Both Zendesk Messaging and Intercom Messenger offer live chat features and AI-enabled chatbots for 24/7 support to customers. Additionally, you can trigger incoming messages to automatically assign an agent and create dashboards to monitor the team’s performance on live chat.

Zendesk has a strong customer support reputation, a helpful community, and extensive resources. Salesforce Service Regarding live chat capabilities, both Zendesk and Intercom have integrated solutions. However, users often find Intercom’s live chat more user-friendly and feature rich. Intercom’s live chat functionality goes beyond the basics, incorporating targeted messaging, proactive messaging, and sophisticated chatbot capabilities.

Zendesk supports teams that can then field these issues from a nice unified dashboard. Zendesk has great intelligent routing and escalation protocols as well. Zendesk also offers digital support during business hours, and their website has a chatbot.

They charge for customer service representative seats and people reached, don’t reveal their prices, and offer tons of custom add-ons at additional cost. 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. If you create a new chat with the team, land on a page with no widget, and go back to the browser for some reason, your chat will go puff.

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 its messenger. The Intercom versus Zendesk conundrum is probably the greatest problem in the customer service software world. They both offer some state-of-the-art core functionality and numerous unusual features. Overall, I actually liked Zendesk’s user experience better than Intercom’s in terms of its messaging dashboard.

Intercom is 4 years younger than Zendesk and has fancied itself as a messaging platform right from the beginning. Intercom lets businesses send their customers targeted in-app messages. So yeah, all the features talk actually brings us to the most sacred question — the question of pricing. You’d probably want to know how much it costs to get each of the platforms for your business, so let’s talk money now. Powered by Explore, Zendesk’s reporting capabilities are pretty impressive.

Zendesk offers robust reporting capabilities, providing businesses with detailed insights into consumer interactions, ticketing systems, agent performance, and more. Businesses can also track their performance, identify trends, and make informed decisions using its advanced analytics tool and creative dashboards that can customized according to the business needs. On the other hand, Intercom’s chatbots have more advanced features but do not sacrifice simplicity and ease of use. It helps businesses create highly personalized chatbots for interactive customer communication.

Talking about the Intercom, it has flexible pricing plans that its experts can help adjust as per your requirements to match contacts and number of seats. The good news is that you enjoy a generous free 14-day trial by opting to get an idea if the particular service is suitable for your business or not. That their customers are fully satisfied with their products and services, and so is the motto of our Desku chatbots. So, by holding Desku’s hand, you can open doors for a long list of happy and fully satisfied customers. Zendesk is suitable for startups, mainly due to its transparent pricing.

• Intercom and Zendesk are both powerful support solutions with unique features.
• However, users often find Intercom’s live chat more user-friendly and feature rich.
• Crisp also has CRM software that helps agents manage and store customer data in one place.
• The trigger feature reduces cart abandonment and increases conversions.

If your business is established and you need to cut down on those ticket resolution times, Zendesk may be worth it. But, if you just need a secure and quick data transfer, opt for Help Desk Migration. Pricing starts at $39 and varies based on the number of records you want to migrate.

The pricing strategies are covered below so you can analyze the pricing structure and select your customer service software. Zendesk TCO is lower than Intercom due to its ability to scale, which does not require additional cost to update the software for a growing business. It also has a transparent pricing model so businesses know the price they will incur.

While Zendesk features are plenty, someone using it for the first time can find it overwhelming. As a freelancer, I don’t need all the integrations and support that Intercom provides. Intercom assists with the onboarding and retention of customers through targeted email and in-app messages triggered by time or behavior. Zendesk Chat shows up as a chat bar docked at the bottom of your site. Zendesk, on the other hand, only has online support and a knowledge base.

Its tight focus on customer support keeps things simple, especially when people are learning the software. Leave your email below and a member of our team will personally get in touch to show you how Fullview can help you solve support tickets in half the time. Now that we’ve covered a bit of background on both Zendesk and Intercom, let’s dive into the features each platform offers.

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. Help Scout has limitations with its integrations, not including some standard or popular apps. Compared to industry leaders, Help Scout’s offers fewer integrations in its app marketplace, with around 90 integration options. It also has limited reporting capabilities that can deliver inaccurate data. 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.

Considering all the features of Zendesk, including robust ticketing, messaging, a help center, and chatbots, we can say that Zendesk excels in being the top customer support platform. In today’s business world, customer service is fast-paced, and customers have higher expectations. To enhance customer satisfaction, businesses must equip their teams with customer support solutions and customer service software. Zendesk is a customer service software company that provides businesses with a suite of tools to manage customer interactions.

Intercom vs Zendesk: pricing

Having the two presented side by side, which is the best CRM solution? The answer, as with most things in life, is that it depends on your specific needs and ultimate goals. Furthermore, integration capabilities with existing systems, scalability for future growth, and the potential for automation are significant considerations. Evaluating these factors will enable you to select a customer support solution that seamlessly integrates with your business operations while enhancing overall efficiency and customer satisfaction.

That means automating customer service and sales processes so the people visiting your website don’t actually have to interact with anyone before they take action. They have similar features, but Intercom has lots of features and tools that better integrate each other. Therefore, to gauge if your chosen help desk is effective or not, you use analytics.

By evaluating their key features, pricing, specifications, and ratings, you’ll gather valuable information to make a well-informed decision. Zendesk chat allows businesses to reach out and connect to customers before they ask a question. The clothing rental company, Le Tote, uses an automated trigger feature to offer help when its customers are lingering at the checkout. Intercom has a very robust advanced chatbot set of tools for your business needs. There is a conversation routing bot, an operator bot, a lead qualification bot, and an article-suggesting bot, among others.

Zendesk Message and chat enable users to connect to their customers on a scalable app. Intercom has a full suite of email marketing tools, although they are part of a pricier package. With Intercom, you get email features like targeted and personalized outbound emailing, dynamic content fields, and an email-to-inbox forwarding feature.

However, customers do have the option to go to Zendesk Sell for a more robust experience. However, businesses must choose between Zendesk vs Intercom based on their needs and requirements. For businesses looking for a comprehensive customer service and support tool, Zendesk reigns supreme. Its feature offering is second to none and for growing companies, Zendesk scales as well or better than any other customer support platform on the market. The company’s products include a ticketing system, live chat software, knowledge base software, and a customer satisfaction survey tool. Zendesk also offers a number of integrations with third-party applications.

Some users also report difficulty keeping track of cases, with conversation threads becoming mixed in the system. Remember that while both Zendesk and Intercom offer robust solutions, understanding your business’s specific needs is key to selecting the ideal customer support platform. Zendesk’s emphasis on versatility and adaptability makes it suitable for businesses seeking comprehensive support across various industries. In contrast, Intercom’s messaging and engagement tools are instrumental in fostering meaningful customer relationships through personalized conversations. Intercom focuses on real-time customer messaging, while Zendesk provides a comprehensive suite for ticketing, knowledge base, and self-service support. Compared to Zendesk and Intercom, Helpwise offers competitive and transparent pricing plans.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. The feedback and recommendations from existing users serve as valuable guidance for businesses considering either platform. Real-world case studies illustrate how businesses leverage Zendesk and Intercom to enhance their customer support operations and drive business growth. Analyzing these case studies provides practical insights into the tangible benefits and outcomes achieved by implementing either platform. It’s an opportunity for Zendesk to differentiate itself, but unfortunately it didn’t get very high marks from users, either.

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. Let’s explore these unique offerings and see how they can benefit your business. 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. Efficiently manage customer inquiries and empower customers to find answers independently.

Key factors to consider include the scale of your customer service operations, the level of customization required, and the complexity of your support processes. Additionally, assessing the volume and nature of customer inquiries can help determine which platform offers features best suited to address those needs effectively. In this article, we comprehensively do a comparison of Zendesk vs Intercom, examining their key features, benefits, and industry use cases.

Thus, due to its limited agility, businesses with complex business models may not find it appropriate. Intercom provides a perfect platform for sales and support teams to collaborate. Agents can assign sales inquiries and support requests to the respective team or team members. Zendesk will meet all your needs, Chat GPT whether you are a budding startup or an enterprise player. It simplifies the ticketing flow through features like automation, a shared inbox, private notes, a consolidated dashboard, analytics, etc. Intercom focuses more on streamlining customer communication to help brands serve proactive support.