Zendesk VS Intercom: In-Depth Analysis & Review

Intercom’s clean and minimalistic design focuses on white space and easy-to-read fonts. The user interface is also highly responsive, making it easy to use on mobile devices. HubSpot helps seamlessly integrate customer service tools that you and your team already leverage. Picking customer service software to run your business is not a decision you make lightly. Zendesk pricing is divided between a customer support product called “Zendesk for support”, and a fully-fledged CRM called “Zendesk for sales”. Zendesk is a customer service platform that allows you to communicate with customers via any channel.

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. 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. 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.

Different Criteria Used to Differentiate Zendesk & Intercom

With Intercom, you can keep track of your customers and what they do on your website in real time. Like Zendesk, Intercom allows you to chat with online visitors and assist with their issues. If you want both customer support and CRM, you can choose between paying $79 or $125 per month per user, depending on how many advanced features you require. Its $99 bracket includes advanced options, such as customer satisfaction prediction and multi-brand support, and in the $199 bracket, you also get advanced security and other very advanced features.

Zendesk and Intercom also both offer analytics and reporting capabilities that allow businesses to analyze and monitor customer agents’ productivity. As a result, companies can identify trends and areas for improvement, allowing them to continuously improve their support processes and provide better service to their customers. They have a dedicated help section that provides instructions on how to set up and effectively use Intercom. Intercom’s ticketing system and help desk SaaS is also pretty great, just not as amazing as Zendesk’s.

• Every single bit of business SaaS in the world needs to leverage the efficiency power of workflows and automation.
• Customerly’s reporting tools are built on the principle that you can’t improve what you can’t measure.
• If you require a robust helpdesk with powerful ticketing and reporting features, Zendesk is the better choice, particularly for complex support queries.
• In comparison, Zendesk customers pay a fixed price of $50 per agent—and only Zendesk AI is modeled on the world’s largest CX-specific dataset.
• Intercom has received generally positive customer reviews, with an overall rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars on Gartner Peer Insights.

You can manage and unify these conversations through our unified Agent Workspace, which also has a context panel to provide reps with valuable insights to resolve inquiries faster. Spiceworks, on the other hand, has limited AI and automation capabilities. As of now, the solution doesn’t offer a conversational chatbot, but it has basic capabilities for automating replies and ticket transfers. Spiceworks has reporting and analytics capabilities, but it lacks features like customized and advanced reports. They’ve been rated as one of the easy live chat solutions with more integrated options. Welcome to another blog post that helps you gauge which live chat solution is compatible with your customer support needs.

But with perks like more advanced chatbots, automation, and lead management capabilities, Intercom could have an edge for many users. Today, amid the rise of omnichannel customer service, it offers a centralized location to manage interactions via email, live chat, intercom vs zendesk social media, or voice calls. Intercom also uses AI and features a chatbot called Fin, but negative reviews note basic reporting and a lack of customization. Fin is priced at $0.99 per resolution, so companies handling large volumes of queries might find it costly.

Discover customer and product issues with instant replays, in-app cobrowsing, and console logs. Now that we’ve covered a bit of background on both Zendesk and Intercom, let’s dive into the features each platform offers. In this paragraph, let’s explain some common issues users usually ask about when choosing between Zendesk and Intercom platforms. Though the Intercom chat window says that their customer success team typically replies in a few hours, don’t expect to receive any real answer in chat for at least a couple of days.

Although it provides businesses with valuable messaging and automation tools, they may require more than this to achieve a higher level of functionality. Companies might assume that using Intercom increases costs, potentially impacting businesses’ ROI. Tracking the ticket progress enables businesses to track what part of the resolution customer complaint has reached. On the other hand, Intercom catches up with Zendesk on ticket handling capabilities but stands out due to its automation features. Some aspects give an edge or create differentiation in the operations of both software, which users may oversee while making a choice.

If you’re exploring popular chat support tools Zendesk and Intercom, you may be trying to understand which solution is right for you. You can use the dashboards to understand customer journeys in-depth and identify areas of improvement. While it helps track some basic support metrics, Intercom’s strength lies in helping companies understand user behavior, product usage, and friction points along the journey. Both the platforms offer valuable automation features, and the optimal choice depends on your business’s specific needs. The platform converts all customer queries into “tickets” that agents can handle with ease and track till the point of resolution.

However, if you’re looking to improve your customer’s user journey with personalized conversations, Intercom’s automation features and AI assistant are likely to be beneficial. Choosing the right customer service platform is critical for any business. It enables you to streamline all incoming customer queries, and ensure your support team is equipped to provide prompt, efficient solutions.

You can test any of HelpCrunch’s pricing plans for free for 14 days and see our tools in action immediately. To sum up this Intercom vs Zendesk battle, the latter is a great support-oriented tool that will be a good choice for big teams with various departments. Intercom feels modern and is more client-success-oriented, but it can be too costly for smaller companies.

This can be a valuable resource for users looking for solutions to specific problems or wanting to learn more about the platform. Intercom also offers a community forum where users can ask questions and get help from other users. Overall, Intercom and Zendesk offer intuitive and user-friendly user interfaces, prioritizing ease of use and customization. The choice between the two may be personal preference or specific feature requirements. Intercom’s user interface is known for being modern, intuitive, and user-friendly. The dashboard is customizable, allowing users to efficiently access the features they use most frequently.

This data can help eliminate unwanted surprises and give your sales team valuable insights to improve their strategy. Pipedrive uses historical data to help predict cash flow and provide performance metrics for your sales team. A sales CRM should also provide you with the benefits of pipeline management software. Pipedrive has workflow automation features, like setting triggers and desired actions, scheduling customer interactions, and automating lead assignment. However, one user noted that important features like automation are often down for an extensive amount of time.

Ticketing & Automation

By integrating seamlessly into your app, it offers an intuitive in-app chat experience that fosters direct customer engagement. Zendesk has many amazing team collaboration and communication features, like whisper mode, which lets multiple agents chime in to help each other without the customer knowing. There is also something called warm transfers, which let one rep add contextual notes to a ticket before transferring it to another rep. You also get a side conversation tool. In the category of customer support, Zendesk appears to be just slightly better than Intercom based on the availability of regular service and response times.

With only the Enterprise tier offering round-the-clock email, phone, and chat help, Zendesk support is sharply separated by tiers. 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. The learning and knowledgebase category is another one where it is a close call between Zendesk and Intercom. However, we will say that Intercom just edges past Zendesk when it comes to self-service resources. For large-scale businesses, the budget for such investments is usually higher than for startups, but they need to analyze if the investment is worth it.

Intercom’s Pricing

While we wouldn’t call it a full-fledged CRM, it should be capable enough for smaller businesses that want a simple and streamlined CRM without the additional expenses or complexity. The dashboard follows a streamlined approach with a single inbox for customer inquiries. Here, agents can deal with customers directly, leave notes for each other to enable seamless handovers, or convert tickets into self-help resources. While most of Intercom’s ticketing features come with all plans, it’s most important AI features come at a higher cost, including its automated workflows. While its integrations are not as far-reaching as Zendesk’s, it seamlessly works with modern communication and business tools, like WhatsApp and the most prominent CRMS. Not to mention marketing and sales tools, like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Google Analytics.

Pipedrive also includes lead management features like automatic lead nurturing, labeling, and bulk imports. However, Pipedrive does not include native desktop text messaging features. One user noted that, in some cases, it can take https://chat.openai.com/ Pipedrive at least eight hours to populate saved leads, making it difficult to quickly communicate with hot leads. While they like the ease of use this product offers its users, they’ve indeed rated them low in terms of services.

The best thing about this plan is that it is eligible for an advanced AI add-on, has integrated community forums, side conversations, skill-based routing, and is HIPAA-enabled. In comparison, Intercom’s reporting and analytics are limited in scope when it comes to consumer behavior metrics, custom reporting, and custom metrics. Zendesk has excellent reporting and analytics tools that allow you to decipher the underlying issues behind your help desk metrics. Discover how to awe shoppers with stellar customer service during peak season.

Never Leave Your Customer Without an Answer

According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2023, 78 percent of business leaders want to combine their customer service and sales data. The Zendesk sales CRM integrates seamlessly with the Zendesk Suite, our top-of-the-line customer service software. Unlike Zendesk, Pipedrive is limited to third-party integrations and doesn’t connect with native customer support software. Zendesk was founded in 2007 by Mikkel Svane, Morten Primdahl, and Alexander Aghassipour.

Automatically answer common questions and perform recurring tasks with AI. 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. 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.

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. Zendesk supports teams that can then field these issues from a nice unified dashboard. It also provides mid-sized businesses with comprehensive customer relationship management software, as they require more advanced features to handle customer support. Similarly, the ability of Zendesk to scale also makes it the best fit for enterprise-level organizations.

Whether you’re into traditional bar charts, pie charts, treemaps, word clouds, or any other type of visualization, Zendesk is a data “nerd’s” dream. It makes sure that you don’t miss a single inquiry by queuing tickets for agent handling. You can configure it to assign tickets using various methods, such as skills, load balancing, and round-robin to ensure efficient handling. If you’re already using Intercom and want to continue using it as the front-end CRM experience, integrating with Zendesk can improve it.

Zendesk also offers a sales pipeline feature through its Zendesk Sell product. You can set up email sequences that specify how and when leads and contacts are engaged. With Zendesk Sell, you can also customize how deals move through your pipeline by setting pipeline stages that reflect your sales cycle. You can also add apps to your Intercom Messenger home to help users and visitors get what they need, without having to start a conversation.

A collection of these reports can enable your business to identify the right resources responsible for bringing engagement to your business. Intercom offers an integrated knowledge base functionality to its user base. Using the existing knowledge base functionality, they can display self-help articles in the chat window before the customer approaches your team for support. You can create these knowledge base articles in your target audience’s native language as their software is multilingual. Both Zendesk Messaging and Intercom Messenger offer live chat features and AI-enabled chatbots for 24/7 support to customers.

Zendesk Sunshine is a separate feature set that focuses on unified customer views. Zendesk is quite famous for designing its platform to be intuitive and its tools to be quite simple to learn. This is aided by the fact that the look and feel of Zendesk’s user interface are neat and minimal, with few cluttering features.

Intercom vs Zendesk: Which Is Better?

Zendesk and Intercom both have an editor preview feature that makes it easier to add images, videos, call-to-action buttons, and interactive guides to your help articles. If your company deals with a lot of external vendors or contract workers, managing them manually or on spreadsheets can be a real headache. Tracking your finances when you’re running a small business can be a task. What better way to start a Zendesk vs. Intercom than to compare their features?

Like Zendesk, Intercom offers its Operator bot, which automatically suggests relevant articles to clients right in a chat widget. Well, I must admit, the tool is gradually transforming from a platform for communicating with users to a tool that helps you automate every aspect of your routine. This was the first match between two teams from last season’s Serie A top four. Ten trends every CX leader needs to know in the era of intelligent CX, a seismic shift that will be powered by AI, automation, and data analytics.

However, Intercom’s real strength lies in generating insights into areas like customer journey mapping, product performance, and retention. Far from impersonalizing customer service, chatbots offer an immediate and efficient way to address common queries that end in satisfaction. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Nowadays, it’s a crucial component in helping businesses focus on high-priority interactions and scale their customer service. Zendesk has an app available for both Android and iOS, which makes it easy to stay connected with customers while on the go. The app includes features like push notifications and real-time customer engagement — so businesses can respond quickly to customer inquiries.

Its automation tools help companies see automated responses and triggers based on the customer journey and response time. Intercom’s automation features enable businesses to deliver a personalized experience to customers and scale their customer support function effectively. Both Zendesk and Intercom are customer support management solutions that offer features like ticket management, live chat and messaging, automation workflows, knowledge centers, and analytics. Zendesk has traditionally been more focused on customer support management, while Intercom has been more focused on live support solutions like its chat solution. On the contrary, Intercom’s pricing is far less predictable and can cost hundreds/thousands of dollars per month. But this solution wins because it’s an all-in-one tool with a modern live chat widget, allowing you to improve your customer experiences easily.

• Provide a clear path for customer questions to improve the shopping experience you offer.
• There is a simple email integration tool for whatever email provider you regularly use.
• When deciding on choosing between Zendesk or Pipedrive for your business, there is a lot to keep in mind.

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. You could technically consider Intercom a CRM, but it’s really more of a customer-focused communication product.

While not included with its customer service suite, it offers a full-fledged standalone CRM called Zendesk Sell. While it’s a separate product with separate costs, it does integrate seamlessly with Zendesk’s customer service platform. When it’s intelligent and accessible, reporting can provide deep insights into your customer interactions, agent efficiency, and service quality at a glance. Zendesk’s reporting tools are arguably more advanced while Intercom is designed for simplicity and ease of use. Zendesk also prioritizes operational metrics, while Intercom focuses on behavior and engagement. Zendesk provides comprehensive security and compliance features, ensuring customer data privacy.

This may be problematic for businesses that must build on or supplement Spiceworks’ capabilities. It includes the most important service desk software features—a few of which we’ll cover in more detail later—needed to deliver the best employee experience. At Zendesk, we know how important it is for you to get up and running quickly—that’s why our software is ready to go in days, not months. Our software is also flexible, reliable, and easy to use, so you can adapt to changing business needs as you go, without hiring an army of developers or worrying about dependability. In contrast, it’s been noted that Spiceworks can be clunky and potentially unreliable when trying to execute routine tasks like updating a ticket. Utilizing modern CRM software can help your sales team boost their productivity and sales performance.

When it comes to choosing a help desk software, security is a top priority. Intercom and Zendesk have implemented various security measures to protect their clients’ data. This way, your clients will never have to repeat themselves or get frustrated because their new representative doesn’t know their background. Zendesk, on the other hand, has revamped its security since its security breach in 2016. 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.

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 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.

This becomes the perfect opportunity to personalize the experience, offer assistance to prospects as per their needs, and convert them into customers. They offer an omnichannel 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. Zendesk chat allows you to talk with your visitors in real time through a small chat bar at the bottom of your site. When visitors click on it, they’ll be directed to one of your customer service teammates. 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.

Consider which features align best with your business needs to make the right choice. This live chat service provider offers 200+ integrations to its user base. With a mix of productivity, collaboration, eCommerce, CRM, analytics, email marketing, social media, and other tools, you get the option to create an omnichannel suite. 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.

Intercom’s user-friendly interface and easy integration with other tools make it a popular choice for many businesses. One of the standout features of Zendesk’s customer support is its ticketing system. Users can submit support tickets through the platform, and customer support teams can manage and track those tickets to ensure they are resolved promptly. This feature ensures that users receive the support they need when needed.

Built on billions of customer experience interactions, the AI capabilities can be integrated across the entire service experience, from self-service to agent support, optimizing operations at scale. Zendesk is a great option for large companies or companies that are looking for a very strong sales and customer service platform. It offers more support features and includes more advanced analytics and reports. 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.

Finally, you can pay $199 per month per user for unlimited sales pipelines and advanced reporting along with other features. NovoChat, on the other hand, is great for businesses that primarily engage with their clients through messaging apps. The program is simple to use and includes all of the necessary capabilities for providing good customer service.

You can use our AI-powered employee experience solutions to deliver 24/7 service, solve employee issues faster, optimize your internal knowledge base and self-service capabilities, and more. For example, leverage our advanced chatbots to immediately understand and solve common employee issues. Or, use our AI-powered intelligent triage and routing to automatically send tickets to the right team and improve service efficiency.

Pipedrive offers access to app integrations built by Pipedrive and third-party vendors, including Zendesk. But unlike the Zendesk sales CRM, Pipedrive does not seamlessly integrate with native customer service software and relies on third-party alternatives. 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.

Customers can feel confident that their data is secure when using either platform. Guru GPT integrates your company’s internal knowledge with ChatGPT, making it easy to access and use information from Guru and connected apps. Before you make your choice, check out Messagely’s features and compare them to discover which platform is best for you. While both Zendesk and Intercom are great and robust platforms, none of them are able to provide you with the same value Messagely gives you at such an  affordable price. 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. And while many other chatbots take forever to set up, you can set up your first chatbot in under five minutes.

Furthermore, Intercom offers advanced automation features such as custom inbox rules, targeted messaging, and dynamic triggers based on customer segments. If you’re here, it’s safe to assume that you’re looking for a new customer service solution to support your teams and delight your audience. As two of the giants of the industry, it’s only natural that you’d Chat GPT reach a point where you’re comparing Zendesk vs Intercom. Zendesk AI is the intelligence layer that infuses CX intelligence into every step of the customer journey. In addition to being pre-trained on billions of real support interactions, our AI powers bots, agent and admin assist, and intelligent workflows that lead to 83 percent lower administrative costs.

This includes secure login options like SAML or JWT SSO (single sign-on) and native content redaction for sensitive information. We also adhere to numerous industry standards and regulations, such as HIPAA, SOC2, ISO 27001, HDS, FedRAMP LI-SaaS, ISO 27018, and ISO 27701. As a result, customers can implement the help desk software quickly—without the need for developers—and see a faster return on investment. Plus, our transparent pricing doesn’t have hidden fees or endless add-ons, so customers know exactly what they’re paying for and can calculate the total cost of ownership ahead of time.

Zendesk is designed to fit your business needs whether you’re a fast-growing startup or a well-established company. Starting at just $19/user/month, Hiver is a more affordable solution that doesn’t compromise on essential helpdesk functionalities. But you also need to consider the fact that Intercom has many add-ons that cost extra, especially their AI features. Both Zendesk and Intercom have very different and distinct user interfaces. In this guide, I compare Zendesk and Intercom – on pricing and features – to help you make an informed decision.

Plus, Aura AI’s global, multilingual support breaks down language barriers, making it an ideal solution for businesses with an international customer base. Zendesk offers a slightly broader selection of plans, with an enterprise solution for customers with bespoke needs. Intercom is a customer-focused communication platform with basic CRM capabilities.