Zendesk vs Intercom: Which Solution to Choose in 2024?

Zendesk’s pricing structure provides increasing levels of features and capabilities as businesses move up the tiers. This scalability allows organizations to adapt their support operations to their expanding customer base. Higher-tier plans in Zendesk come packed with advanced functionalities https://chat.openai.com/ such as chatbots, customizable knowledge bases, and performance dashboards. These features can add significant value for businesses aiming to implement more sophisticated support capabilities as they scale. On the other hand, Intercom brings a dynamic approach to customer support.

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. Messagely’s live chat platform is smooth, effective, and easy to set up. With Messagely, you can increase your Chat PG customer satisfaction and solve customers’ issues while they’re still visiting your site. 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.

Zendesk vs. Intercom: Sales Pipeline and Lead Nurturing Tools

When it comes to real-time analytics, Zendesk is winning our hearts. With its live analytics feature on the dashboard, it makes it easy for you to make instant decisions in no time. Such live insights are very useful in evaluating your customer support process. But, you would not be able to enjoy such a live tracking experience on Intercom.

Honestly, when it comes to Zendesk, it is not the most modern tool out there. 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. If I had to describe Intercom’s help desk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools. It’s great, it’s convenient, it’s not nearly as advanced as the one by Zendesk. 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.

While doing my research for this article, I’ve not only tested both Intercom and Zendesk myself, but also read a pile of different articles, comparisons, guides, showdowns and all this kind of stuff. What really struck me though is that people seemed to like Zendesk more. Struck not in a bad way, more like in a very neutral ‘huh, this may be interesting’ way. Before you make your choice, check out Messagely’s features and compare them to discover which platform is best for you.

Features:

Let’s explore these unique offerings and see how they can benefit your business. Intercom is great for talking to customers in real-time, like through live chats or in-app messages. Zendesk is more about organizing customer requests with a ticketing system and talking to customers through many channels like email, phone, or chat. Because of its easy navigation and interface, Intercom has always received positive words from its users. We can say that Zendesk’s user interface is very clean and clear to understand.

With so many solutions to choose from, finding the right option for your business can feel like an uphill battle. While Zendesk features are plenty, someone using it for the first time can find it overwhelming. Intercom has a community forum where users can engage with each other and gain insights from their experiences. With only the Enterprise tier offering round-the-clock email, phone, and chat help, Zendesk support is sharply separated by tiers. In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the most expensive tools on the market. And there’s still no way to know how much you’ll pay for them since the prices are only revealed after you go through a few sale demos with the Intercom team.

Whether it’s the ticketing system, knowledge base corner, or branding elements, you get the full right to use them as per your brand’s need. Suppose you are thinking that Intercom isn’t offering any attractive features, but it’s actually not true. There is one mind-boggling feature in Intercom, and that is its in-app messaging serving. It’s a very good way of communicating with customers through multi-platform apps. Moreover, the best part is it also lets you send customized messages to various customers on the basis of their actions. That their customers are fully satisfied with their products and services, and so is the motto of our Desku chatbots.

But this also means the customer experience ROI tends to be lower than what it would be if you went with a best-in-class solution like Zendesk. If a customer starts an interaction by talking to a chatbot and can’t find a solution, our chatbot can open a ticket and intelligently route it to the most qualified agent. In 2023, conversational messaging will play an essential role in customer service. Customers increasingly expect to receive fast, convenient, and personalized support.

This could impact user experience and efficiency for new users grappling with its complexity​​​​​​. While both platforms have a significant presence in the industry, they cater to varying business requirements. Zendesk, with its extensive toolkit, is often preferred by businesses seeking an all-encompassing customer support solution. The primary function of Intercom’s mobile app is the business messenger suite, including personalized messaging, real-time support tools, push notifications, in-app messaging and emailing. Intercom also does mobile carousels to help please the eye with fresh designs. Chatbots are automated customer support tools that can assist with low-level ticket triage and ticket routing in real-time.

The Zendesk Admin Center panels allow administrators to control settings, accessibility, automations, and workflows for everything from chatbots to integrations and custom APIs. Intercom wins the sales pipeline tools category because its campaigning and sequencing tools integrate all channels and unique services, like carousels and product tours. Zendesk wins the self-service tools category because it provides extensive help center customization options. Users with light access–such as knowledgeable agents and supervisors–can be added to tickets for browsing and feedback. While light agents cannot interact with the customer on the ticket, they can make notes and interact privately with other team members and agents involved with the ticket. Collaboration tools enable agents to work together in resolving customer tickets and making sales.

You don’t have to pay per contact on your database, and you there are many free features you can use. With this kind of organization, you will not only find your favorite apps but also discover new ones to meet your needs. However, the Intercom app store is far more intuitive and is much easier to navigate. It not only shows you all of the apps you can use, but it also divides these into topics and categories. Finally, you’ll have to choose your reporting preferences including details about what you’ll be tracking and how often you want to be reported of changes.

Zendesk

With 2.78 billion users (a number that’s still growing rapidly),it’s just not another app… If you’re running a business, you’d know that occasional disruptions to your products or services are inevitable…. They have a 2-day SLA, no phone support, and the times I have had to work with them they have been incredibly difficult to work with. Very rarely do they understand the issue (mostly with Explore) that I am trying to communicate to them.

Additionally, the platform allows users to customize their experience by setting up automation workflows, creating ticket rules, and utilizing analytics. However, the right fit for your business will depend on your particular needs and budget. If you’re looking for a comprehensive solution with lots of features and integrations, then Zendesk would be a good choice.

Zendesk is a much larger company than Intercom; it has over 170,000 customers, while Intercom has over 25,000. While this may seem like a positive for Zendesk, it’s important to consider that a larger company may not be as agile or responsive to customer needs as a smaller company. Intercom’s role-based permissions allow administrators full control over each department’s and agent’s capabilities, and access to channels and information.

Both Zendesk and Intercom have integration libraries, and you can also use a connecting tool like Zapier for added integrations and add-ons. Use HubSpot Service Hub to provide seamless, fast, and delightful customer service. Zendesk for Sales offers three plans, ranging from $19 to $99 monthly per user, with free trials available for each plan. Zendesk for Service and Zendesk for Sales are sold as two separate solutions, each with three pricing plans, or tiers. Inside a ticket, the workspace center console displays the ticket’s conversation. The right side of the screen displays all customer contact information and company interaction history, and the agent can contact the customer via any channel with just a few clicks.

• 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.
• However, Intercom has fewer integration options than Zendesk, which may limit its capabilities for businesses seeking extensive integrations.
• 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.
• The best help desks are also ticketing systems, which lets support reps create a support ticket out of issues that can then be tracked.
• It is a totally cloud-based service; you can operate this VOIP technology by sitting in any corner of the world.

Intercom’s solution aims to streamline high-volume ticket influx and provide personalized, conversational support. It also includes extensive integrations with over 350 CRM, email, ticketing, and reporting tools. The platform is recognized for its ability to resolve a significant portion of common questions automatically, ensuring faster response times.

Best Customer Service Apps Your Customer Service Team Will Love

Zendesk, less user-friendly and with higher costs for quality vendor support, might not suit budget-conscious or smaller businesses. When comparing the omnichannel support functionalities of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms show distinct strengths and weaknesses. Intercom’s native mobile apps are good for iOS, Android, React Native, and Cordova, while Zendesk only has mobile apps for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. No matter what Zendesk Suite plan you are on, you get workflow triggers, which are simple business rules-based actions to streamline many tasks.

Apart from this feature, the customer support options at Zendesk are quite limited. First, you can only talk to the support team if you are a registered user. In this article, we comprehensively do a comparison of Zendesk vs Intercom, examining their key features, benefits, and industry use cases. By exploring their distinct offerings, we aim to assist businesses in making informed decisions when selecting a customer service platform. But it’s designed so well that you really enjoy staying in their inbox and communicating with clients.

Its suite of tools goes beyond traditional ticketing and focuses on customer engagement and messaging automation. From in-app chat to personalized autoresponders, Intercom provides a unified experience across multiple channels, creating a support ecosystem that nurtures and converts leads. Zendesk and Intercom offer help desk management solutions to their users. Zendesk, unlike Intercom, is a more affordable and predictable customer service platform. Also, it’s the pioneer in the support and communication tools market. You can always count on it if you need a reliable customer support platform to process tickets, support users, and get advanced reporting.

At all tiers, there is an additional fee to work with a member of the Zendesk success team on unique engagements. Test any of HelpCrunch pricing plans for free for 14 days and see our tools in action right away. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. 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. You can publish your self-service resources, divide them by categories, and integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience.

In fact, agents can even add customers to private messaging chats when necessary, and the customer will receive the whole conversation history by email to ensure they’re up to date. An inbound customer message through any of these channels becomes a ticket for your support agents, whose reply reaches the customer through the same channel they originally used. If you thought Zendesk prices were confusing, let me introduce you to the Intercom charges.

Monese is another fintech company that provides a banking app, account, and debit card to make settling in a new country easier. By providing banking without boundaries, the company aims to provide users with quick access to their finances, wherever they happen to be. The support team faced spiking ticket volumes, numerous new customer accounts, and the need to shift to remote work. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Track customer service metrics to gain valuable insights and improve customer service processes and agent performance.

While administrators can automatically assign tickets to certain agents or teams, they can also manually assign tickets to members of sales or customer service teams. Team inboxes aggregate tickets applicable to the whole team–or a specific department–that any agent can address. What sets Zendesk apart is its user-friendly interface, customizable workflows, and scalability.

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. For Intercom’s pricing plan, on the other hand, there is much less information on their website.

Operator, Intercom’s automation engine, empowers Intercom chatbots to gather key information from each website visitor to qualify leads and route customers to the right destination. This article will compare Intercom vs Zendesk, outlining each tool’s features, ease-of-use, pricing and plans, pros and cons, and user-support options. Intercom and Zendesk are two of the most popular customer service platforms, each with its own set of distinct advantages and drawbacks. Personalized messaging, in-app messaging, product tours, and chatbot capabilities set Intercom apart from Zendesk. You can contact the sales team if you’re just looking around, but you will not receive decent customer support unless you buy their service.

On the other hand, it provides call center functionalities, unlike Intercom. Overall, I actually liked Zendesk’s user experience better than Intercom’s in terms of its messaging dashboard. Intercom has a dark mode that I think many people will appreciate, and I wouldn’t say it’s lacking in any way. But I like that Zendesk just feels slightly cleaner, has easy online/away toggling, more visual customer journey notes, and a handy widget for exploring the knowledge base on the fly. 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.

Intercom, of course, allows its customer support team to collaborate and communicate too, but overall, Zendesk wins this group. Intercom is ideal for personalized messaging, while Zendesk offers robust ticket management and self-service options. Compared to Zendesk and Intercom, Helpwise offers competitive and transparent pricing plans. Its straightforward pricing structure ensures businesses get access to the required features without complex tiers or hidden costs, making it an attractive option for cost-conscious organizations. The two essential things that Zendesk lacks in comparison to Intercom are in-app messages and email marketing tools. On the other hand, Intercom lacks many ticketing functionality that can be essential for big companies with a huge client support load.

However, the approach is far much wider than merely focusing on what would be more cost-effective but instead exploring ways through which a solution that would suit you best could be realized. If not, then you should because it will ease much of your workload as you would not have to waste your precious time in finding the helpdesk operator, plus zero management issues. All plans come with a 7-day free trial, and no credit card is required to sign up for the trial.

So you see, it’s okay to feel dizzy when comparing Zendesk vs Intercom platforms. You could say something similar for Zendesk’s standard service offering, so it’s at least good to know they have Zendesk Sell, a capable CRM option to supplement it. You can use Zendesk Sell to track tasks, streamline workflows, improve engagement, nurture leads, and much more. As customers come closer to purchasing, they often find themselves weighing the same pros and cons. In our experience, when future clients start thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of Intercom vs. Zendesk, these are the questions they want answers to. Sendcloud is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that allows users to generate packing slips and labels to help online retailers streamline their shipping process.

Zendesk has a rating of 4.3 out of 5 stars, based on over 5,600 reviews. Intercom has a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars, based on over 2700 reviews. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. zendesk or intercom There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. But, you would not be able to experience such a good in-app messaging service on Zendesk.

There are also several different Shopify integrations to choose from, as well as CRM integrations like HubSpot and Salesforce. As for the category of voice and phone features, Zendesk is a clear winner. Zendesk Support has voicemail, text messages, and embedded voice, and it displays the phone number on the widget. 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.

It is a totally cloud-based service; you can operate this VOIP technology by sitting in any corner of the world. Automating onboarding messages, product guides, newsletters, and the list goes on. Intercom understands very well that email marketing is no more than a magic wand for building strong customer relations. For leading a successful business, communication is one of the keys. Customers will stay with you long if they are not getting any support from your company, especially when you are new to them. Zendesk is yet another powerful way to help businesses interact with their customers.