Zendesk vs Intercom: In-Depth Feature & Price Comparison

In the duel between Zendesk vs Intercom, it seems that Zendesk chat rises slightly above Intercom. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Zendesk chat is right for your business. HelpCrunch is another alternative to consider, especially because it offers free migration from Intercom, making onboarding a breeze. Sure, Intercom allows you to create articles and deliver a bot that answers customer questions with specific articles and resolves issues faster. Analytics features Intercom has is done through add-ons such as Google Analytics, Statbot, Microsoft Teams, and more.

Customer service systems like Zendesk and Intercom should provide a simple workflow builder as well as many pre-built automations which can be used right out of the box. You get call recording, muting and holding, conference calling, and call blocking. Zendesk also offers callback requests, call monitoring and call quality notifications, among other telephone tools.

Intercom vs Zendesk Pricing in a Table

Zendesk has more pricing options, and its most affordable plan is likely cheaper than Intercom’s, although without exact Intercom numbers, it is not easy to truly know the cost. When the company started in 2015, it used Intercom for live chat. 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.

• It also offers a number of support features like multi-channel communication, lead generation and nurturing, chatbot AI, and more.
• If you want to meet these requirements, you must have a niche and your product must solve a very critical problem for investors to believe in your product enough to invest more than $1 million.
• If you’re looking for a dedicated support tool, Crisp may not be your best option.
• It tracks changes in the synchronized data sources and performs only necessary data changes.
• Though Intercom chat window says that their team typically replies in a few hours, I received the answer in a couple of minutes.
• Installing it might take some technical skill and even when installed, could malfunction a bit.

Let’s look at ratings of Zendesk vs. Freshdesk on popular review sites and see some positive and negative opinions. Both Freshdesk and Zendesk offer hundreds of integrations to add the flexibility and convenience businesses need to succeed. In the past, people considered Zendesk to have more robust features, but Freshdesk managed to make up through the years, so the differences between the two platforms are insignificant. Skyvia offers a number of benefits for import Intercom data to Zendesk or vice versa. With Skyvia import you can use data filtering, perform data transformations, and many more.

Low Pricing (weighted 11%)

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. Zendesk has great intelligent routing and escalation protocols as well.

• It can still be used in the same way, but from our perspective, it seems to be much more geared towards customer support, less so for sales and marketing.
• Use the drag and drop builder to create self service flows for your most frequent customer service questions.
• So we see a lot of things on the maybe more enterprise use case, maybe more premium use case.
• Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy researched and discovered how businesses engage and realize value from software throughout their journeys.
• However, if you wish to get all professional B2B essentials then it will wound up costing around $64/agent/mo which is quite a sum.
• Easily buy a new number, manage your call center team, and access features that can help your team support its customers.

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. 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.

Inability to provide an omnichannel experience

One of the most significant downsides of Intercom is its customer support. Existing customers have complained consistently about how they aren’t available at the right time to offer support to customers. There are even instances where customers don’t receive the first response in more than seven days. Zendesk also offers a straightforward interface to operators that helps them identify the entire interaction pathway with the customers. Compared to being detailed, Zendesk gives a tough competition to Intercom. Operators can easily switch from one conversation to another, therefore helping operators manage more interactions simultaneously.

They have been around for years, are reliable and many large enterprises use them. Not a great internal ticketing suite but amazing for external customer experience. With its intuitive metadialog.com design and comprehensive set of features, Help Scout makes it easy for your team to manage tickets, automate workflows, and provide better customer service in one place.

Other alternatives to Zendesk

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 their messenger. Is it as simple as knowing whether you want software strictly for customer support (like Zendesk) or for some blend of customer relationship management and sales support (like Intercom)? Intercom, on the other hand, was built for business messaging, so communication is one of their strong suits.

• Get to a resolution faster by switching to voice calls and share your screen – without switching to another platform.
• But it’s also a given that many people will approach their reviews to Zendesk and Intercom with some specific missions in mind, and that’s bound to change how they feel about the platforms.
• Zendesk Support has voicemail, text messages, and embedded voice, and it displays the phone number on the widget.
• Groove is another Zendesk alternative that is great for streamlining customer inquiry and support processes.
• It feels very modern, and Intercom offers some advanced messenger features that Zendesk does not.
• Intercom, I’ll say, has probably one of the most extensive documentations I’ve seen.

Zendesk’s interface is not the most modern interface out there and appears quite outdated. While using Zendesk for more than a couple of hours, you can easily get tired and feel there is a lot of room for improvement. Here is a short overview of how these tools started, where they stand today, and what they can bring to your business. While there is an abundance of help desk tools available out there, only a few get the fervour when it comes to value for money. Front is built for collaboration at scale, so customers always get an authentic, thorough reply. It allows you to chat with visitors on your website and convert them into customers.

Autopilot is marketing automation software.

Though each platform is unique, basic features are similar, and the main difference is pricing and the seamless user experience Customerly offers. If you need help desk software that can provide you with a first-class personalized service without costing an arm and a leg, Customerly is the answer. It gives support and sales-focused teams valuable insights into how customers use the system, providing them with helpful customer satisfaction metrics and identifying areas for improvement.

Depending on the complexity of the script and the amount of your data, the transfer process can take anywhere from a few hours to several weeks. You should be prepared for this process to take an extended period of time. We recommend running a small batch of records (say 5%), and using that to project time to completion. The time this ultimately takes is heavily dependent on the rate limits of the platforms, and cannot be overridden by developers. The amount of data you have for each object in Zendesk will affect the duration of the transfer process. The more data you have, the longer it will take to transfer it from Zendesk to Intercom.

Zendesk vs Intercom: Reporting and Analytics

Intercom has positioned itself as a messaging platform rather than a comprehensive CRM solution. This differentiates it from Zendesk, which offers a more traditional CRM experience. Intercom’s primary focus is engaging and communicating with customers through live chat, in-app messaging, and email. This makes it a great choice for businesses that want to provide their customers with a more personal experience. Whatever people are using to communicate with each other, whether it be online or over the phone, they expect to also be able to talk to the businesses they use with those same tools and platforms.

If you can afford it, Intercom is the first thing you should try out. It’s very unlikely that this sophisticated tool will disappoint you. Our team of CX consultants would be happy to show you a demo or answer questions. Powerful analytics to help you understand the reason for contact and generate ideas for automation. On practice, I can’t promise you anything when it comes to Intercom.

New Intercom User to Send Delighted NPS Survey to Submit New Zendesk Ticket

Behavior-based messaging allows you to customize every last detail of triggers and rules including–which channel sends the message, when it sends, where it sends, and who gets targeted. Sequence all channels–chat, web post, email, chatbot outreach, tour message, banner, push notification, or carousel–mixing and matching modes of outreach to fit campaign goals. If a customer isn’t satisfied with Answer Bot’s response, Answer Bot quickly routes them to an agent best suited to help. The entire thread is saved within the ticket for future agents to reference. Agents can add each other to internal notes within a ticket, looping in team members to collaborate when necessary.