Their help desk is a single inbox to handle customer requests, where your customer support agents can leave private notes for each other and automatically assign requests to the right people. But it’s designed so well that you really enjoy staying in their inbox and communicating with customers. Basically, if you have a complicated customer support process, go with Zendesk for its help desk functionality. If you’re a sales-oriented corporation, go with Intercom for its automation options. Both tools can be quite heavy on your budget, since they’re mainly targeting big enterprises and don’t offer their full toolset at an affordable price.

Pop-up chat, in-app messaging, and notifications are some of the highly-rated features of this live chat software. 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 leads for your business and improve your chances of closing a sale faster. Intercom’s live chat reports aren’t just offering what your customers are doing or whether they are satisfied with your services.

Intercom Pricing

In this section, we will be doing an in-depth analysis of the various help desk, live chat, and knowledge base features of these tools. Intercom gives you the ability to see metadialog.com who your customers are and what they do in your web and mobile apps in real time. Zendesk Message and chat enable users to connect to their customers on a scalable app.

• Whether agents are facing customers via chat, email, social media, or good old-fashioned phone, they can keep it all confined to a single, easy-to-navigate dashboard.
• Both Zendesk Messaging and Intercom Messenger offer live chat features and AI-enabled chatbots for 24/7 support to customers.
• This allows agents to work on their own device anytime and anywhere.
• Like with many other apps, Zapier seems to be the best and most simple way to connect Intercom to Zendesk.
• 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.
• Check out the research-backed comparison below to better understand how each solution can add value to your organization.

Additionally, its omnichannel takes social media integration to the next level, thanks to communication channels, such as Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, and WhatsApp. “I like how HubSpot Service Hub helps a company from every perspective. If you are from the Sales team, you have the right tool to accomplish your goals. 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. In the current economic environment, it’s never been more important to know exactly what you’re going to be paying for, before you start paying for it.

Zendesk vs Intercom for ease of use

It also offers a number of support features like multi-channel communication, lead generation and nurturing, chatbot AI, and more. Plus, LiveChat’s support tool is slightly more robust, coming with reporting, ticketing solutions, routing rules, and more. Its live chat tool has a lot to offer as well, from automation and canned responses to chat transfers and personalization. The bot feeds customers and employees the relevant articles upon making a query. The main difference is its connectivity with the Intercom Team Inbox. This makes things faster for support teams to access information without bothering other users.

Skyvia offers powerful visual editors which allow precise mapping configuration to quickly configure your data migration or synchronization between Intercom and Zendesk. This is a bit of a letdown as you’ll have to use third party apps to create a self help section. The self-hosted option is available for a one-time perpetual license fee that covers free upgrades for up to one year.

Freshdesk

Whether agents are facing customers via chat, email, social media, or good old-fashioned phone, they can keep it all confined to a single, easy-to-navigate dashboard. That not only saves them the headache of having to constantly switch between dashboards while streamlining resolution processes—it also leads to better customer and agent experience overall. It has essential features like help desk automation, chat tools, customer feedback surveys, and a knowledge base. Its easy-to-use interface is what makes it attractive to customer support and marketing teams. The tool, which can be easily installed with Javascript code, can also be used as a plugin for platforms such as WordPress, Shopify, and Wix.

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. As you can imagine, banking from anywhere requires a flexible, robust customer service experience. The support team faced spiking ticket volumes, numerous new customer accounts, and the need to shift to remote work. 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. Track customer service metrics to gain valuable insights and improve customer service processes and agent performance. Prioritize the agent experience to maximize productivity and customer satisfaction while reducing employee turnover.

Understand why customers contact you

Both Zendesk and Intercom have integration libraries, and you can also use a connecting tool like Zapier for added integrations and add-ons. Intercom’s large series of bots obviously run on automations as well. As mentioned before, the bot builder is a visual drag-and-drop system that requires no coding knowledge; this is also how other basic workflows are designed. The more expensive Intercom plans offer AI-powered content cues, triage, and conversation insights. Intercom has a full suite of email marketing tools, although they are part of a pricier package. With Intercom, you get email features like targeted and personalized outbound emailing, dynamic content fields, and an email-to-inbox forwarding feature.

However, we will say that Intercom just edges past Zendesk when it comes to self-service resources. Whether it’s getting set up or figuring out the best way to customize meetings for your needs, there are over 85,000 community members willing to  help. Please reload the page and try again, or you can contact Zendesk for support. We have numerous customers that do this and benefit greatly from our out-of-the-box integration with Intercom. Yes, you can find the Intercom integration in the Zendesk Marketplace—and it’s free to install.

Tools for the world’s most customer-centric businesses

On top of that, AzureDesk integrates with popular third-party applications like Slack and Salesforce so you can provide even better service to your customers. If you’re looking for a powerful but affordable customer support solution, AzureDesk is worth considering. Additionally, it allows customers to self-serve with its knowledge base feature where customers can find answers to their questions quickly without needing to contact your team. Groove also provides helpful analytics so you can track customer inquiries, measure your team’s performance, and identify areas of improvement.

Here are some of the things that our marketing department at Live Typing is especially fond of. For instance, in this blog you can read why the Outreach (a tool for active sales) IT juggernaut preferred Zendesk to Intercom and almost picked Desk.com. There’s no need for you to train your agents on a new Help Desk tool. 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 always trying to convert me into a lead along the way, but heck, that’s a side effect of our job.

It’s impossible to effectively engage with customers at scale

With Intercom, it is self-explanatory where customers need to address their queries. There is a blue chat box in the right-hand corner of our software where customers pop in their queries. Once customers send their questions, the team members linked to customer support at Hire-Hive are notified via email. Intercom software is simple, personal, Intuitive, and Informative.

• For instance, in this blog you can read why the Outreach (a tool for active sales) IT juggernaut preferred Zendesk to Intercom and almost picked Desk.com.
• But because of its live chat and custom chatbot tools, we wanted to include them on this list as an alternative your business may want to consider.
• Here, we’ll dig into three different companies that chose Zendesk in the Intercom vs. Zendesk debate.
• While they like the ease of use this product offers its users, they’ve indeed rated them low in terms of services.
• In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the most expensive tools on the market.
• Zendesk also has solutions for small to mid-sized companies as well.

They also offer features that enhance collaboration amongst employees if you have a bigger team. For small companies and startups, Intercom offers a Starter plan — with a balanced suite of features from each of the solutions below — at $74 per month per user, billed annually. Intercom stands out here due to its ability  to tailor sales workflows. You can also set up interactive product tours to highlight new features in-product and explain how they work.

Intercom Features & Benefits

Gist offers a range of features, such as live chat, email marketing, and a knowledge base, allowing your team to effectively support and engage with your customers. Finally, for startups or small businesses looking for a cost-effective live chat solution, Crisp.Chat is the best option. As your business grows, you can upgrade to their paid plans to unlock advanced features like chatbots and integrations. A frictionless, simple, and easy-to-use sales and marketing support IT solution. Freshdesk operates in a seamless and rapid approach that delights customers and employees. The ticketing system company initiates a speed execution with an intense customer focus strategy to equip modern SaaS solutions that solve multiple and complex business problems.

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)? 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. Zendesk’s help center tools should also come in handy for helping customers help themselves—something Zendesk claims eight out of 10 customers would rather do than contact support. To that end, you can import themes or apply your own custom themes to brand your help center the way you want it. From there, you can include FAQs, announcements, and article guides and then save them into pre-set lists for your customers to explore.

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. Zendesk for Sales, or Zendesk Sell, is Zendesk’s sales pipeline and CRM tool with its own dashboard for lead generation and conversion. Sure, you can have a front desk—but you don’t necessarily have to plunk down the cost it would take to buy that desk, train an employee, and add them to your payroll.

• Zendesk will best suit you if you are planning to expand or you already own a large company that will require advanced features like advanced analytics and reporting, segmentation or retargeting.
• 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.
• Although many standard features are included within Zendesk’s plans, some hidden fees might arise anytime due to its lack of out-of-box features that should’ve been included in the first place.
• IOS and Android apps will help you view, manage, and respond to customer conversations from your mobile device.
• For freelancers and enterprises, Zendesk is likely to be a better fit.
• Using this, agents can chat across teams within a ticket via email, Slack, or Zendesk’s ticketing system.