Intercom vs Zendesk: Which Is Right for You in 2024?

Using Zendesk, you can create community forums where customers can connect, comment, and collaborate, creating a way to harness customers’ expertise and promote feedback. Community managers can also escalate posts to support agents when one-on-one help is needed. With both tools, you can also use support bots to automatically suggest specific articles, track customers’ ratings, and localize help center content to serve your customers in their native language. If you prioritize detailed support performance metrics and the ability to create custom reports, Zendesk’s reporting capabilities are likely to be more appealing. Here is a Zendesk vs. Intercom based on the customer support offered by these brands. The offers that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation.

The former is one of the oldest and most reliable solutions on the market, while the latter sets the bar high regarding innovative and out-of-the-box features. You need help desk software that enables you to deliver employee experiences that are intuitive, efficient, personalized, and secure. When deciding between Zendesk vs. Spiceworks, Zendesk is the right choice. Our AI-powered employee service solution is built to move at the speed of your business, grow with you, and offer security measures that keep your data safe.

Currently based in Albuquerque, NM, Bryce Emley holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NC State and nearly a decade of writing and editing experience. When he isn’t writing content, poetry, or creative nonfiction, he enjoys traveling, baking, playing music, reliving his barista days in his own kitchen, camping, and being bad at carpentry. Luca Micheli is a serial tech entrepreneur with one exited company and a passion for bootstrap digital projects. He’s passionate about helping companies to succeed with marketing and business development tips.

Zendesk is built to grow alongside your business, resulting in less downtime, better cost savings, and the stability needed to provide exceptional customer support. Many customers start using Zendesk as small or mid-sized businesses (SMBs) and continue to use our software as they scale their operations, hire more staff, and serve more customers. Our robust, no-code integrations enable you to adapt our software to new and growing use cases.

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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. For instance, Zendesk’s automation rules can help support teams automatically intercom vs zendesk assign tickets based on specific criteria – like subject line or specific keywords. It offers robust features for automating routine tasks such as ticket routing, creating queues, creating ticket statuses and more. Features like macros, triggers, and automations allow businesses to create custom workflows tailored to their specific needs. Intercom generally has the edge when it comes to user interface and design.

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. 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. It also offers a Proactive Support Plus as an Add-on with push notifications, a series campaign builder, news items, and more. Now that we know the differences between Intercom vs. Zendesk, let’s analyze which one is the better service option. Grow faster with done-for-you automation, tailored optimization strategies, and custom limits.

Pricing & Scalability

Intercom is geared toward sales, whereas Zendesk includes everything a customer service rep desires. 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. Intercom recently ramped up its features to include helpdesk and ticketing functionality. Zendesk, on the other hand, started as a ticketing tool, and therefore has one of the market’s best help desk and ticket management features.

You’d probably want to know how much it costs to get each platform 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. If I had to describe Intercom’s helpdesk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools. Understanding customer needs is essential for building loyalty and driving business growth. Explore the most common types of customer needs and discover strategies to meet them in this comprehensive guide.

One of the standout features of Intercom’s user interface is the ability to view customer conversations in a single thread, regardless of the channel they were initiated on. This makes it easy to see the full context of a customer’s interactions with a business, which can lead to more personalized and practical support. In 2023, businesses will have an abundance of options when it comes to choosing a customer support and relationship management tool. Both of these tools have unique strengths and weaknesses, and choosing between them can be difficult for businesses of all sizes. Ultimately, the choice between Zendesk and Intercom depends on your business needs.

It feels very modern, and Intercom offers some advanced messenger features that Zendesk does not. Hivers offers round-the-clock proactive support across all its plans, ensuring that no matter the time or issue, expert assistance is always available. This 24/7 support model is designed to provide continuous, real-time solutions to clients, enhancing the overall reliability and responsiveness of Hivers’ services. It offers a feature called “Mobile Push”  which are essentially push notifications that allow businesses to reach customers on their mobile apps. This feature enables timely alerts and updates to customers, even when they are on the go.

Zendesk has more all-in-one potential with additional CRM, but Intercom comes closer to being a standalone CRM out of the box

With this data, businesses identify friction points where the customer journey breaks down as well as areas where it’s performing smoothly. Powered by AI, Intercom’s Fin chatbot is purportedly capable of solving 50% of all queries autonomously — in multiple languages. At the same time, Fin AI Copilot background support to agents, acting as a personal, real-time AI assistant for dealing with inquiries.

Zendesk has the CX expertise to help businesses of all sizes scale their service experience without compromise. Learn how top CX leaders are scaling personalized customer service at their companies. 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 puff. All customer questions, whether via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel, are landed in one dashboard, where your agents can solve them quickly and efficiently. This guarantees continuous omnichannel support that meets customer expectations. Spiceworks has a limited selection of integrations, most of which focus on IT management.

This comparison is going to help you understand the features of both tools. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. Boost your lead gen and sales funnels with Flows – no-code automation paths that trigger at crucial moments in the customer journey. Their reports are attractive, dynamic, and integrated right out of the box.

Collaborate with your teammates by easily assigning the right rep to best handle a customer query. When it comes to the design and simplicity of the software for customer use, Zendesk’s interface is somewhat antiquated and cluttered, especially when it comes to customizing the chat widget. The platform is evolving from a platform for engaging with consumers to a tool that assists you in automating every element of your daily routine. Zendesk is primarily a ticketing system, and its ticketing capability is overwhelming in the best conceivable manner.

Even reviewers who hadn’t used the platform highlight how beautifully designed it is and how simple it is to interact with for both users and clients alike. With a very streamlined design, Intercom’s interface is far better than many alternatives, including Zendesk. It has a very intuitive design that goes far beyond its platform and into its articles, product guides, and even its illustrations.

• 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.
• Intercom and Zendesk offer robust integration capabilities that allow businesses to streamline their workflow and improve customer support.
• However, the right fit for your business will depend on your particular needs and budget.
• You’d probably want to know how much it costs to get each platform for your business, so let’s talk money now.

The ticket view often includes detailed information about the customer, history of interactions, and other details. Intercom also offers extensive integrations with over 350 tools that include Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Analytics, Amplitude, Zoho, JIRA, and more. The platform is recognized for its ability to resolve a significant portion of customer questions automatically, ensuring faster response times. 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. Zendesk has a help center that is open to all to find out answers to common questions.

The Zendesk marketplace hosts over 1,500 third-party apps and integrations. The software is known for its agile APIs and proven custom integration references. This helps the service teams connect to applications like Shopify, Jira, Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Slack, etc., all through Zendesk’s service platform.

Intercom live chat is modern, smooth, and has many advanced features that other chat tools lack. It’s also highly customizable, so you can adjust it according to the style of your website or product. Your customer service agents can leave private notes for each other and enjoy automatic ticket assignments to the right specialists.

Intercom does have a ticketing dashboard that has omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk. Keeping this general theme in mind, I’ll dive deeper into how each software’s features compare, so you can decide which use case might best fit your needs. Customerly allows you to rate prospects, either manually or automatically, so you can prioritize the most valuable leads. Our platform also supports dynamic list building, enabling you to run targeted surveys, send newsletters, and automate marketing actions, all from one place. However, for more advanced CRM needs like lead management and sales forecasting, Intercom may not make the cut, unfortunately. It goes without saying that you can generate custom reports to hone in on particular areas of interest.

Many businesses turn to customer relationship management (CRM) software to help improve customer relations and assist in sales. 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. Instead, they offer a product demo when prospects reach out to learn more about their pricing structure.

Leveraging the sequencing and bulk email features of the Zendesk sales CRM, CoinJar increased its visibility and productivity at scale. Zendesk supports sales team productivity by syncing with your email to provide valuable data, like when your prospect opens, clicks, or replies to your email. You can also use Zendesk to automatically track and record sales calls, allowing you to focus your full attention on your customer rather than taking notes. When selecting a sales CRM, you’ll want to consider its total cost of ownership (TCO). Zendesk has a low TCO because it has no hidden costs and can be easily set up without needing developers or third-party help, saving you time and money. Alternatively, Pipedrive users should prepare to pay more for even simple CRM features like email tracking, whereas email tracking is available for all Zendesk Sell plans.

Intercom Pricing: No-BS Breakdown for Every Company Size

It’s designed so well that you really enjoy staying in their inbox and communicating with clients. Often, it’s a centralized platform for managing inquiries and issues from different channels. Let’s look at how help desk features are represented in our examinees’ solutions. The Intercom versus Zendesk conundrum is probably the greatest problem in customer service software. They both offer some state-of-the-art core functionality and numerous unusual features.

• Existing customers have complained consistently about how they aren’t available at the right time to offer support to customers.
• If you’re already using Intercom and want to continue using it as the front-end CRM experience, integrating with Zendesk can improve it.
• However, it offers a limited channel scope compared to Zendesk, and users will have to get paid add-ons for channels like WhatsApp.
• However, you can browse their respective sites to find which tools each platform supports.
• Zendesk’s user interface is also modern and user-friendly but with a slightly different design aesthetic than Intercom.

Customer expectations are already high, but with the rise of AI, customers are expecting even more. Customers want speed, anticipation, and a hyper-personalized experience conveniently on their channel of choice. Intelligence has become key to delivering the kinds of experiences customers expect at a lower operational cost. As more organizations adopt AI, it will be critical to choose a data model that aligns with how your business operates.

Managing Customer Relationships Using Advanced AI

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. The Zendesk chat tool has most of the necessary features, like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers, and live chat analytics. Founded in 2007, Zendesk started as a ticketing tool for customer success teams. Later, they started adding all kinds of other features, like live chat for customer conversations. Spiceworks provides limited options for support and primarily focuses on ticket creation through email, mobile apps, and web browsers.

After signing up and creating your account, you can start filling in your information, such as your company name and branding and your agents’ profiles and information. Then, you can begin filling in details such as your account’s name and icon and your agents’ profiles and security features. The setup can be so complex that there are tutorials by third parties to teach new https://chat.openai.com/ users how to do it right. Zendesk has over 150,000 customer accounts from 160 countries and territories. They have offices all around the world including countries such as Mexico City, Tokyo, New York, Paris, Singapore, São Paulo, London, and Dublin. Respond to all conversations across different messaging platforms in one place and avoid juggling between dozens of tabs.

Unlike Zendesk, which requires more initial setup for advanced automation, Customerly’s out-of-the-box automation features are designed to be user-friendly and easily customizable. To make your ticket handling a breeze, Customerly offers an intuitive, all-in-one platform that consolidates customer inquiries from various channels into a unified inbox. You can then add features like advanced AI agents, workforce management, and QA.

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 also offers a 14-day free trial, after which customers can upgrade to a paid plan or use the basic free plan. Unlike Zendesk, the prices for Intercom are based on the number of seats and contacts, with each plan tailored to each customer, meaning that the pricing can be quite flexible. This is especially helpful for smaller businesses that may not need a lot of features.

Basically, if you have a complicated support process, go with Zendesk for its help desk functionality. If you’re a sales-oriented corporation, use Intercom for its automation options. Both tools can be quite heavy on your budget since they mainly target big enterprises and don’t offer their full toolset at an affordable price. CoinJar is one of the longest-running cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. To help keep up with its growing customer base, CoinJar turned to Zendesk for a user-friendly and easily scalable solution after testing other CRMs, including Pipedrive and HubSpot.

Let’s dive deeper into five key features and see how Spiceworks and Zendesk compare. The right sales CRM can help your team close more deals and boost your business. If that’s not detailed enough, then surely their visitor browsing details will leave you surprised. This enables your operators to understand visitor intent faster and provide them with a personalized experience.

What’s more, we support live video support for moments when your customers need in-depth guidance. What’s even cooler is its ability to use AI to forecast customer behavior. Agents can use this to anticipate and proactively address issues before the escalate, or even arise in the first place. With over 160,000 customers across all industries and regions, Zendesk has the CX expertise to provide you with best practices and thought leadership to increase your overall value.

Zendesk meets global security and privacy compliance standards and includes features like single sign-on (SSO) to help provide protection against cyberattacks and keep your data safe. This live chat software provider also enables your business to send proactive chat messages to customers and engage effectively in real-time. This is one of the best ways to qualify high-quality Chat GPT leads for your business and improve your chances of closing a sale faster. Overall, both Intercom and Zendesk are reliable and effective customer support tools, and the choice between the two ultimately depends on the specific needs and priorities of the user. In terms of pricing, both Intercom and Zendesk offer a range of plans to fit different business needs and budgets.

When you onboard a customer support platform, it’s important to consider the level of support the vendor offers. That’s because if there’s a glitch or a system outage, you want an immediate fix or clarity on the resolution. It’s characterized by a clear, organized layout with a strong focus on ticket management. The dashboard provides an overview of ticket volume, agent performance, and other key metrics.