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

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. Intercom offers just over 450 integrations, which can make it less cost-effective and more complex to customize the software and adapt to new use cases as you scale. The platform also lacks transparency in displaying reviews, install counts, and purpose-built customer service integrations. 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.

With Intercom, you can keep track of your customers and what they do on your website in real time. Like Zendesk, Intercom allows you to chat with online visitors and assist with their issues. If you want both customer support and CRM, you can choose between paying $79 or $125 per month per user, depending on how many advanced features you require. It provides a real-time feed and historical data, so agents can respond instantly to consumer queries, as well as learn from past CX trends. By using its workforce management functionality, businesses can analyze employee performance, and implement strategies to improve them. Keep up with emerging trends in customer service and learn from top industry experts.

Since Intercom doesn’t offer a CRM, its pricing is divided into basic messaging and messaging with automations. You can also contact Zendesk support 24/7, whereas Intercom support only has live agents during business hours. Both Zendesk and Intercom have their own “app stores” where users can find all of the integrations for each platform. Since Intercom is so intuitive, the time you’ll need to spend training new users on how to interact with the platform is greatly reduced.

That being said, it sometimes lacks the advanced customization and automation offered by other AI-powered chatbots, like Intercom’s. While most of Intercom’s ticketing features come with all plans, it’s most important AI features come at a higher cost, including its automated workflows. Having only appeared in 2011, Intercom lacks a few years of experience on Zendesk. It also made its name as a messaging-first platform for fostering personalized conversational experiences for customers. One of Zendesk’s other key strengths has also been its massive library of integrations.

From triggers to triggering Workflows

Chat features are integral to modern business communication, enabling real-time customer interaction and team collaboration. Intercom is more for improving sales cycles and customer relationships, while Zendesk, an excellent Intercom alternative, has everything a customer support representative can dream about. If delivering an outstanding customer experience and employee experience is your top priority, Zendesk should be your top pick over Intercom. Zendesk has the CX expertise to help businesses of all sizes scale their service experience without compromise. The Zendesk Marketplace offers over 1,500 no-code apps and integrations.

As we explore the latest CX trends for 2024, there’s a need to bridge the gap between what businesses perceive and what customers actually experience. Our ebook delves into these discrepancies and walks you through the precise way you can use AI and automation to bring your experiences at par with what your customers expect. CX platforms are catching up fast, optimizing everything for mobile.

With so many features to consider, not to mention pricing, user experience, and scalability, we don’t blame you if you feel your head spinning. Intercom has more customization features for features like bots, themes, triggers, and funnels. Powered by Explore, Zendesk’s reporting capabilities are pretty impressive. Right out of the gate, you’ve got dozens of pre-set report options on everything from satisfaction ratings and time in status to abandoned calls and Answer Bot resolutions.

Intercom’s chatbot feels a little more robust than Zendesk’s (though it’s worth noting that some features are only available at the Engage and Convert tiers). You can set office hours, live chat with logged-in users via their user profiles, and set up a chatbot. Customization is more nuanced than Zendesk’s, but it’s still really straightforward to implement.

This helps the service teams connect to applications like Shopify, Jira, Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Slack, etc., all through Zendesk’s service platform. Zendesk has a broad range of security and compliance features to protect customer data privacy, such as SSO (single sign-on) and native content redaction for sensitive data. If you require a robust helpdesk with powerful ticketing and reporting features, Zendesk is the better choice, particularly for complex support queries. Simply put, we believe that our Aura AI chatbot is a game-changer when it comes to automating your customer service. 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.

Find the Intercom App

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. A helpdesk solution’s user experience and interface are crucial in ensuring efficient and intuitive customer support. Let’s evaluate the user experience and interface of both Zendesk and Intercom, considering factors such as ease of navigation, customization options, and overall intuitiveness. We will also consider customer feedback and reviews to provide insights into the usability of each platform.

One more thing to add, there are ways to integrate Intercom to Zendesk. Visit either of their app marketplaces and look up the Intercom Zendesk integration. Like with many other apps, Zapier seems to be the best and most simple way to connect Intercom to Zendesk. The Zendesk marketplace is also where you can get a lot of great add-ons.

Your customer service agents can leave private notes for each other and enjoy automatic ticket assignments to the right specialists. It’s designed so well that you really enjoy staying in their inbox and communicating with clients. 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. Use ticketing systems to efficiently manage high ticket volume, deliver timely customer support, and boost agent productivity. It’s also a good idea to take advantage of free trials and demos to see how each tool works in practice before making a decision.

Plus, Aura AI’s global, multilingual support breaks down language barriers, making it an ideal solution for businesses with an international customer base. Aura AI transcends the limits of traditional chatbots that typically struggle with anything but the simplest user queries. Instead, Aura AI continuously learns from your knowledge base and canned responses, growing and learning — just like a real-life agent. 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. Zendesk offers a slightly broader selection of plans, with an enterprise solution for customers with bespoke needs.

You need to select the right software, onboard users, create workflows, define SLAs, and customize… The platform also supports multiple languages, making it easier for clients to interact in the language they’re most comfortable with. This feature is particularly valuable if you serve a diverse customer base. The portal also makes it easy for customers to find the best answers by integrating third-party knowledge resources with Salesforce’s Unified Knowledge feature. This feature uses AI to pull up relevant content, helping customers get the information they need faster. To cut down on repetitive questions, Hiver has a knowledge base that customers can access to find answers on their own.

Customerly is a forward-thinking, all-in-one customer service platform. Similar to Zendesk, Intercom’s pricing reserves its most powerful automations for higher-paying customers, the good news is that Fin AI comes with all plans. With this data, businesses identify friction points where the customer journey breaks down as well as areas where it’s performing smoothly. For standard reporting like response times, leads generated by source, bot performance, messages sent, and email deliverability, you’ll easily find all the metrics you need. Beyond that, you can create custom reports that combine all of the stats listed above (and many more) and present them as counts, columns, lines, or tables.

If you want to get to the nitty-gritty of your customer service team’s performance, Zendesk is the way to go. It’s built for function over form — the layout is highly organized and clearly designed around ticket management. You get an immediate overview of key metrics, such as ticket volume and agent performance as well as a summary of key customer data points. Plus, Intercom’s modern, smooth interface provides a comfortable environment for agents to work in. It even has some unique features, like office hours, real-time user profiles, and a high-degree of customization. Zendesk’s automation is centered around streamlining ticket management by bringing together customer inquiries from various sources—email, phone, web, chat, and social media—into a single platform.

You can then create linked tickets for any bug reports or issues that require further troubleshooting by technical teams. As a Zendesk user, you’re familiar with tickets – you’ll be able to continue using these in Intercom. To sum things up, Zendesk is a great customer support oriented tool which will be a great choice for big teams with various departments.

It also provides seamless navigation between a unified inbox, teams, and customer interactions, while putting all the most important information right at your fingertips. This makes it easy for teams to prioritize https://chat.openai.com/ tasks, stay aligned, and deliver superior service. As the place where your agents will be spending most of their time, a functional and robust Helpdesk will be critical to their overall performance and experience.

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. Understanding these fundamental differences should go a long way in helping you pick between the two, but does that mean you can’t use one platform to do what the other does better? These are both still very versatile products, so don’t think you have to get too siloed into a single use case.

As you dive deeper into the world of customer support and engagement, you’ll discover that Zendesk and Intercom offer some distinctive features that set them apart. Let’s explore these unique offerings and see how they can benefit your business. Streamline support processes with Intercom’s ticketing system and knowledge base. Efficiently manage customer inquiries and empower customers to find answers independently. Intercom’s messaging system enables real-time interactions through various channels, including chat, email, and in-app messages. Connect with customers wherever they are for timely assistance and personalized experiences.

Any custom states created in Zendesk will be mapped to their nearest appropriate state above. You can create custom states in Intercom, but mapping custom states to custom states is currently not supported. You’ll need to have a ticket type setup for both Customer and Back-office tickets before you import. Enter the URL of your Zendesk account in the field provided, then click to migrate or import.

But I’ve got to say, Zendesk is pretty pricey—almost double the cost of Hiver. On top of that, I’ve found that the customization options in their customer portal aren’t as flexible as you might expect. Customer portal software is a digital platform that helps customers access personalized information and services related to their accounts with a business. The below tools are in no particular order of ranking or popularity. Still, they are independent picks by Sprinklr’s editorial team based on our research and publicly available information on the review sites.

Experience targeted communication with Intercom’s automation and segmentation features. Create personalized messages for specific customer segments, driving engagement and satisfaction. You can use both Zendesk and Intercom simultaneously to leverage their respective strengths and provide comprehensive customer support across different channels and touchpoints. 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.

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 you’d want to test Zendesk and Intercom before deciding on a tool for good, they both provide free trials. Intercom has a standard trial period for a SaaS product which is 14 days, while Zendesk offers a 30-day trial.

It’s like having a toolkit for lead generation, customer segmentation, and crafting highly personalized messages. This makes it an excellent choice if you want to engage with support and potential and existing customers in real time. Ultimately, it’s important to consider what features each platform offers before making a decision, as well as their pricing options and customer support policies. Since both are such well-established market leader companies, you can rest assured that whichever one you choose will offer a quality customer service solution.

• The portal also makes it easy for customers to find the best answers by integrating third-party knowledge resources with Salesforce’s Unified Knowledge feature.
• It’s like having a toolkit for lead generation, customer segmentation, and crafting highly personalized messages.
• The only other downside is that the chat widget can feel a bit static and outdated.
• Upon subsequent imports, old imported data will be overwritten, duplicates will not be created.
• Intercom, of course, allows its customer support team to collaborate and communicate too, but overall, Zendesk wins this group.

If you’re here, it’s safe to assume that you’re looking for a new customer service solution to support your teams and delight your audience. As two of the giants of the industry, it’s only natural that you’d reach a point where you’re comparing Zendesk vs 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. Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates.

The more expensive Intercom plans offer AI-powered content cues, triage, and conversation insights. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. 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.

Both Zendesk and Intercom have AI capabilities that deserve special mention. Zendesk’s AI (Fin) helps with automated responses, ensuring your customers get quick answers. Chat GPT On the other hand, Intercom’s AI-powered chatbots and messaging are designed to enhance your marketing and sales efforts, giving you an edge in the competitive market.

Well, I must admit, the tool is gradually transforming from a platform for communicating with users to a tool that helps you automate every aspect of your routine. 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. But don’t just take our word for it—listen to what customers say about why they picked Zendesk.

You can contact our Support team if you have any questions or need us to import older data. View your users’ Zendesk tickets in Intercom and create new ones directly from conversations. You can collect ticket data from customers when they fill out the ticket, update them manually as you handle the conversation. Test any of HelpCrunch pricing plans for free for 14 days and see our tools in action right away.

With smart automation and AI, it streamlines case handling, prioritization and agent support. What makes Intercom stand out from the crowd are their chatbots and lots of chat automation features that can be very helpful for your team. You can integrate different apps (like Google Meet or Stripe among others) with your messenger and make it a high end point for your customers. When making your decision, consider factors such as your budget, the scale of your business, and your specific growth plans. Explore alternative options like ThriveDesk if you’re looking for a more budget-conscious solution that aligns with your customer support needs. ThriveDesk is a help desk software tailor-made for businesses seeking extensive features and a powerful yet simple live chat assistant.

It allows companies to track, oversee and organize every interaction between a customer and the organization through analytics and real-time data insights. 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.

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. If you’re still on the fence about which platform to choose, consider exploring Tidio as a strong alternative. Tidio stands out with its advanced AI-powered chatbots and seamless automated workflows, making customer interactions efficient and personalized. It also features an AI-driven ticketing system, an omnichannel dashboard to manage all customer communications in one place, and customizable chat widgets to enhance user engagement.

This list will help you check out everything that these tools offer, and then decide which tool is the best fit for you. With Sprinklr Reporting and Analytics, you can map your end-to-end customer journey and monitor, respond to, or mitigate critical events in real time. You can even monitor conversations happening in real-time across 30+ channels, analyze your team’s performance, identify skill issues and coach your teams with targeted insights. The goal of CX software is to optimize these interactions to increase customer loyalty and retention by making the experience smoother and more responsive. Features typically include customer self-service, feedback collection and omnichannel customer service.

Intercom’s CRM features include customer journey tracking, custom data parameters, and list segmentation, which are useful for targeted marketing and engagement. You can use these features to create custom funnels, segment users based on specific behaviors, and automate personalized communications. When it’s intelligent and accessible, reporting can provide deep insights into your customer interactions, agent efficiency, and service quality at a glance. Zendesk’s reporting tools are arguably more advanced while Intercom is designed for simplicity and ease of use. Zendesk also prioritizes operational metrics, while Intercom focuses on behavior and engagement.

This disconnect in CX leaves users feeling a bit left out in the cold. So, bringing CX into the fold with your brand’s core promise is downright essential, not just nice-to-have. The three tiers—Suite Team, Suite Growth, and Suite Professional—also give you more options outside of Intercom’s static structure.

At first glance, they seem like simple three packages for small, medium, and big businesses. But it’s virtually impossible to predict what you’ll pay for Intercom at the end of the day. They charge not only for customer service representative seats but also for feature usage and offer tons of features as custom add-ons at additional cost.

Its tiered plans offer everything from basic contact management to advanced features and automation, making it a solid choice for diverse business needs. Intercom is a customer messaging platform that enables businesses to engage with customers through personalized and real-time communication. On the contrary, Intercom’s pricing is far less predictable and can cost hundreds/thousands of dollars per month.

Best Customer Portal Software Solutions in 2024

Intercom is the go-to solution for businesses seeking to elevate customer support and sales processes. With its user-friendly interface and advanced functionalities, Intercom offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed to effectively communicate and engage with customers. The company’s products include a ticketing system, live chat software, knowledge base software, and a customer satisfaction survey tool.

These products range from customer communication tools to a fully-fledged CRM. Zendesk boasts incredibly robust sales capabilities and security features. The highlight of Zendesk is its help desk ticketing system, which brings several customer communication channels to one location.

Intercom’s reporting is less focused on getting a fine-grained understanding of your team’s performance, and more on a nuanced understanding of customer behavior and engagement. While clutter-free and straightforward, it does lack some of the more advanced features and capabilities that Zendesk has. Check these 7 Zendesk alternatives to improve your customer support. Though the Intercom chat window says that their customer success team typically replies in a few hours, don’t expect to receive any real answer in chat for at least a couple of days. Say what you will, but Intercom’s design and overall user experience leave all its competitors far behind. If you want to test Intercom vs Zendesk before deciding on a tool for good, they both provide free 14-day trials.

Discover customer and product issues with instant replays, in-app cobrowsing, and console logs. Every single bit of business SaaS in the world needs to leverage the efficiency power of workflows and automation. 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 is a customer-focused communication platform with basic CRM capabilities. While we wouldn’t call it a full-fledged CRM, it should be capable enough for smaller businesses that want a simple and streamlined CRM without the additional expenses or complexity. The dashboard follows a streamlined approach with a single inbox for customer inquiries. Here, agents can deal with customers directly, leave notes for each other to enable seamless handovers, or convert tickets into self-help resources. 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.

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. 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. Your typical Zendesk review will often praise the platform’s simplicity and affordability, as well as its constant updates and rolling out of new features, like Zendesk Sunshine.

The help center is pretty versatile, supporting 45 languages and integrating with a ton of third-party apps from the Intercom App Store. A standout feature is the “Community” section, which gives users a place to connect with each other and company support experts. This forum-style area lets customers exchange ideas, raise questions, and offer feedback. It also serves as a space for users to help one another solve issues, which eases the burden on your support team. You can adjust the appearance, set different service channels, and create brand-specific SLAs and notifications.

Zendesk’s user face is quite intuitive and easy to use, allowing customers to quickly find what they are looking for. Additionally, the platform allows users to customize their experience by setting up automation workflows, creating ticket rules, and utilizing analytics. Intercom also offers a 14-day free trial, after which customers can upgrade to a paid plan or use the basic free plan.

You’d probably want to know how much it costs to get each platform for your business, so let’s talk money now. 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. So, you see, it’s okay to feel dizzy when comparing Intercom vs Zendesk.

What’s more, we support live video support for moments when your customers need in-depth guidance. They fall within roughly the same price range, that most SMEs and larger enterprises should find within their budget. Both also use a two-pronged pricing system, based on the number of agents/seats and the level of features needed.

It’s also good for sending and receiving notifications, as well as for quick filtering through the queue of open tickets. There are pre-built workflows to help with things like ticket sharing, as well as conversation routing based on metrics like agent skill set or availability. There are even automations to help with things like SLAs, or service level agreements, to do things like send out notifications when headlights are due. The main idea here is to rid the average support agent of a slew of mundane and repetitive tasks, giving them more time and mental energy to help customers with tougher issues.

Zendesk can also save key customer information in their platform, which helps reps get a faster idea of who they are dealing with as well as any historical data that might assist in the support. Zendesk Sunshine is a separate feature set that focuses on unified customer views. The best help desks are also ticketing systems, which lets support reps create a support ticket out of issues that can then be tracked. Ticket routing helps to send the ticket to the best support team agent. Help desk SaaS is how you manage general customer communication and for handling customer questions. When it comes to self-service portals for things like knowledgebases, Intercom has a useful set of resources.

This scalability allows organizations to adapt their support operations to their expanding customer base. Higher-tier plans in Zendesk come packed with advanced functionalities such as chatbots, zendesk intercom customizable knowledge bases, and performance dashboards. These features can add significant value for businesses aiming to implement more sophisticated support capabilities as they scale.

It is crucial to note that software or platforms may evolve over time and the company may address some of these concerns in newer updates or versions. You can use this support desk to help customers or you can forward potential new users to your sales department. 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. Help desk software creates a sort of “virtual front desk” for your business.

Both Zendesk and Intercom have knowledge bases to help customers get the most out of their platforms. 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. 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. Depending on your needs, you can set up Intercom on your website or mobile app and add your automations.