Intercom vs Zendesk: Which One is Right for Your Business?

Are you looking to provide your customers with the best experience? 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.

This customer messaging software converts all email, mobile SMS, chat, and social channel requests into tickets on one platform. It also unites various ticket resolutions across different channels. LiveChat is a straightforward chatbot that integrates into a website, similar to Intercom. Next to Ada, LiveChat is also a powerful customer messaging software that satisfies modern companies’ communication needs.

I successfully completed the integration setup, but it still shows “Set Up Now” in the add-in window.

Intercom’s dashboards may not be as aesthetically pleasing as Zendesk’s, but they still allow users to navigate their tools with few distractions. 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. For those of you who have been waiting for the big showdown between these two customer support heavyweights, we are glad to present the ultimate Zendesk vs Intercom comparison article.

• It divides all articles into a few main topics so you can quickly find the one you’re looking for.
• Collaborate with your teammates by easily assigning the right rep to best handle a customer query.
• With over 21 million Ada-powered ecommerce interactions between October and December 2021, we’ve identified some key patterns that will help brands understand what customers need most.

It’s known for its unified agent workspace which combines different communication methods like email, social media messaging, live chat, and SMS, all in one place. This makes it easier for support teams to handle customer interactions without switching between different systems. Plus, Zendesk’s integration with various channels ensures customers can always find a convenient way to reach out.

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In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the hardest on your pocket. Zendesk can be more flexible and predictable in this area as you can buy different tools separately (or even use their limited versions for free). Though Intercom chat window says that their team typically replies in a few hours, I received the answer in a couple of minutes. Their agent was zendesk or intercom always trying to convert me into a lead along the way, but heck, that’s a side effect of our job. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk, though is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. As I’ve already mentioned, they started as a help desk/ticketing tool, and honestly, they perfected every bit of it over the years.

Zendesk, with its extensive toolkit, is often preferred by businesses seeking an all-encompassing customer support solution. Understanding the unique attributes of Zendesk and Intercom is crucial in this comparison. Zendesk is renowned for its comprehensive range of functionalities, including advanced email ticketing, live chat, phone support, and a vast knowledge base. Its ability to seamlessly integrate with various applications further amplifies its versatility. Zendesk for Service, a customer service solution, provides unified customer-facing communication channels, self-service, collaboration, customer routing, and analytics–all organized in one dashboard.

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This allows customers to resolve their own issues quickly, reducing inbound conversation volume and scaling your team’s support capacity. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer automation features that improve efficiency and reduce your labor costs. While Zendesk offers 24/7 support, Intercom only provides support with live agents during business hours.

Altogether, this can significantly impact affordability in the long term. Track customer service metrics to gain valuable insights and improve customer service processes and agent performance. Sales teams can also view outbound communications, and any support agent can access resources from the Intercom workspace. Prioritize the agent experience to maximize productivity and customer satisfaction while reducing employee turnover.

Zendesk VS Intercom: In-Depth Analysis & Review

As customers’ needs are constantly evolving, businesses must adapt and keep up to guarantee the best customer experience and satisfaction. Easily reply to customer conversations and manage workload in a smart & automated way. It is none other than the modern customer support software of Helpwise. Here, we’ve outlined the support options that Intercom and Zendesk provide to companies using their platforms. Intercom has a unique pricing structure, offering three separate solutions, each intended for a distinct use case.

You can create a help platform to assist users in guiding themselves, or you can use AI-enabled responses to create a more “human” like effect. Given that both of these platforms seem aimed at one sort of market or another, it shouldn’t surprise you that we might find a few gaps in the sorts of services they provide. 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. Respond to all conversations across different messaging platforms in one place and avoid juggling between dozens of tabs.

As any free tool, the functionalities there are quite limited, but nevertheless. If you’re a really small business or a startup, you can benefit big time from such free tools. Zendesk is another popular customer service, support, and sales platform that enables clients to connect and engage with their customers in seconds. Just like Intercom, Zendesk can also integrate with multiple messaging platforms and ensure that your business never misses out on a support opportunity. This conversational marketing and sales automation tool helps businesses connect quickly with customers who are ready to purchase their products.

Intercom is a customer messaging platform that enables businesses to engage with customers through personalized and real-time communication. While the company is smaller than Zendesk, Intercom has earned a reputation for building high-quality customer service software. The company’s products include a messaging platform, knowledge base tools, and an analytics dashboard. Many businesses choose to work with Intercom because of its focus on personalization and flexibility, allowing companies to completely customize their customer service experience. On the contrary, Intercom is far less predictable when it comes to pricing and can cost hundreds/thousands of dollars per month. But this solution is great because it’s an all-in-one tool with a modern live chat widget, allowing you to easily improve your customer experiences.

Intercom vs Zendesk: Which One is Right for Your Business?

It’s virtually impossible to predict what you’ll pay for Intercom at the end of the day. 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. 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)? You can even improve efficiency and transparency by setting up task sequences, defining sales triggers, and strategizing with advanced forecasting and reporting tools. Starting at $19 per user per month, it’s also on the cheaper end of the spectrum compared to high-end CRMs like ActiveCampaign and HubSpot. When it comes to which company is the better fit for your business, there’s no clear answer.

Zendesk’s mission is to build software designed to improve customer relationships. However, HubSpot’s customer portal is open only on HubSpot’s Professional and Enterprise plans. One of HubSpot’s advantages is its scalability, and with the option to begin at $0, you can test its features without committing. HubSpot CRM’s free version is also generous, serving marketing, customer service and operation teams, so it’s no surprise that it’s one of the best free CRM systems. Zendesk Sell is a cloud-based CRM platform built to improve customer relationships and influence sales through features such as a self-service portal, knowledge base and community forums. This CRM tool combines marketing, sales and service functionality to help you track and manage leads, interact with customers and close deals more efficiently, whether over a call, chat or email.

At the same time, the vendor offers powerful reporting capabilities to help you grow and improve your business. Zendesk would be a perfect option for businesses that are searching for a well-integrated support system. It offers a suite that compiles help desk, live chat, and knowledge base to their user base. This enables them to speed up the support process and build experiences that customers like. Intercom offers an integrated knowledge base functionality to its user base.

However, customers should keep in mind that Intercom does not offer voice. From the inbox, live agents and chatbots can refer to and link knowledge base articles, to elaborate on replies and help customers locate answers. Intercom’s app store has popular integrations for things like WhatsApp, Stripe, Instagram, and Slack. There is a really useful one for Shopify to provide customer support for e-commerce operations. HubSpot and Salesforce are also available when support needs to work with marketing and sales teams.

The setup is designed to seamlessly connect your customer support team with customers across all platforms. But they also add features like automatic meeting booking (in the Convert package), and their custom inbox rules and workflows just feel a little more, well, custom. I’ll dive into their chatbots more later, but their bot automation features are also stronger. Zendesk and HubSpot use artificial intelligence (AI)-powered automation and unified dashboards to improve customer relationships and team productivity, regardless of your business size. However, HubSpot‘s interface is not as user friendly as Zendesk’s, and its combined pricing for marketing, sales and service functions is quite expensive and complex. However, it offers a generous free version, allowing you to try its features—something missing in Zendesk.

By exploring their distinct offerings, we aim to assist businesses in making informed decisions when selecting a customer service platform. Create a help center combining knowledge base articles and a customer contact request form, embeddable into any webpage or mobile app. Customers can search the help center by query keywords and sort through articles in 40 languages. Intercom, of course, allows its customer support team to collaborate and communicate too, but overall, Zendesk wins this group. 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. However, it is possible Intercom’s support is superior at the premium level.