Zendesk vs Intercom: In-Depth Features & Price Comparison

Those same tools also increase customer retention by 27% while saving 23% on sales and marketing costs. A complete set of customer service management offerings to help you create human relationships with your customers. 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. 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. For example, you can read in many Zendesk Sell reviews how adding sales tools benefits Zendesk Support users.

It’s beautifully crafted and thought through, and their custom-made illustrations are just next level stuff. You can see their attention to detail in everything — from their tools to their website. Honestly, when it comes to Zendesk, it is not the most modern tool out there. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk, though is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. The cheapest (aka Essential) ‘All of Intercom’ package will cost you $136 per month, but if you only need their essential chat tools only, you can get them for $49 per month. Intercom doesn’t really provide free stuff, but they have a tool called Platform, which is free.

World’s 1st multi-channel help deskfor teams on Google Workspace

Set triggers to target particular audiences at the right time, utilize carousels as part of a communication campaign, and compare carousels with A/B testing. The debate rages between WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce for best ecomm platform — we’ll help you find the best one for you. 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. Our mission is to break apart what CRM is and means.Here we discuss anything that helps create more meaningful lasting work relationships. 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.

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. Now that we’ve discussed the customer service-focused features of Zendesk and Intercom, let’s turn our attention to how these platforms can support sales and marketing efforts. Because Intercom started as a live chat service, its messenger functionality is very robust. It feels very modern, and Intercom offers some advanced messenger features that Zendesk does not.

Knowledge base.

The platform is relatively easy to use in comparison to Zendesk, making it more accessible for small and medium-sized businesses. The irony with Zendesk is that you’re paying for features that you’ll never use, while the ones you actually need are offered as add-ons at an extra cost. Jitbit is quite special in itself, as it allows you to host both self-hosted and cloud-based versions of your help desk software. By means of this perk, you can leave a comment, which is called a private note, on an email for your colleague to review before sending it. This beneficial feature can be achieved via even a basic plan and is a big advantage for larger teams that need to keep in touch regularly for email ticketing. 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.

• Experience firsthand how our software can transform your customer support strategy and drive overall business success.
• With Zendesk, businesses can build a dedicated help center and a community forum to encourage customers to resolve issues at their own pace- while reducing the ticket volume.
• You can use this with the push notification of the app to keep your customers in the loop of possible promos, rewards, and more.
• It stands out with its powerful automation and collaboration features.
• Send surveys at key points throughout the customer buying cycle, utilizing multiple types of question formats.
• The platform is a customer service tool that allows you to maximize customer service in e-commerce with quick responses, ready-made templates, automatic redirects, and many more features.

Customers increasingly expect to receive fast, convenient, and personalized support. What’s really nice about this is that even within a ticket, you can switch between communication modes without changing views. So if an agent needs to switch from chat to phone to email (or vice versa) with a customer, it’s all on the same ticketing page. There’s even on-the-spot translation built right in, which is extremely helpful. However, you should know that just like Zendesk, the free alternatives limit your features and functionality until you pay for a premium account. AIMultiple informs hundreds of thousands of businesses (as per similarWeb) including 55% of Fortune 500 every month.

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Sales teams can also view outbound communications, and any support agent can access resources from the Intercom workspace. Test any of HelpCrunch pricing plans for free for 14 days and see our tools in action right away. Lots of users complain that Intercom support is not available most of the time, so you’re forced to repeat your question over and over again to a bot.

Some of the links that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation. This site does not include all companies or all available Vendors. The Zendesk marketplace is also where you can get a lot of great add-ons. There are also several different Shopify integrations to choose from, as well as CRM integrations like HubSpot and Salesforce.

LivechatInc vs HubSpot Service Hub

Zendesk has more pricing options, and its most affordable plan is likely cheaper than Intercom’s, although without exact Intercom numbers, it is not easy to truly know the cost. 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. Yes—as your business’s needs grow, you will require a more sophisticated case management system. But that doesn’t mean you have to completely switch from your current provider if you’re not quite ready. Our integration with Intercom enables bi-directional contact and case synchronization, so you can continue using Intercom as your front-end digital experience and use Zendesk for case management.

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. This software provides a very personalized experience and is one of the best Zendesk alternatives due to its simple interface and adaptability. Organizations can also use Groove to create customer portals and a knowledge base. The knowledge base and customer portals can be used to depict information via multimedia or text to help customers find the information they need quickly.

Intercom vs Zendesk: User Assistance and Support

Customization is more nuanced than Zendesk’s, but it’s still really straightforward to implement. You can opt for code via JavaScript or Rails or even integrate directly with the likes of Google Tag Manager, WordPress, or Shopify. 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. There are those that are ticket-oriented still, and there are alternatives that are all-in-one solutions.

You can even moderate user content to leverage your customer community. Intercom, on the other hand, was built for business messaging, so communication is one of their strong suits. Combine that with their prowess in automation and sales solutions, and you’ve got a really strong product that can handle myriad customer relationship needs. Using this, agents can chat across teams within a ticket via email, Slack, or Zendesk’s ticketing system. This packs all resolution information into a single ticket, so there’s no extra searching or backtracking needed to bring a ticket through to resolution, even if it involves multiple agents. I tested both options (using Zendesk’s Suite Professional trial and Intercom’s Support trial) and found clearly defined differences between the two.

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You can even create an internal knowledge base to keep your agents well-trained and ready to delight customers. In addition to this, Intercom provides your business the right platform to offer proactive support. You can use targeted messages to suggest quick tips to new customers or to simply update them about scheduled outages or changes in business hours. Having the two presented side by side, which is the best CRM solution? The answer, as with most things in life, is that it depends on your specific needs and ultimate goals. While Intercom offers a “Starter Plan” for very small businesses, the price for larger companies is scaled upward, too.

On the other hand, you need to be careful about the various needs and requirements of your support team. Zendesk has over 160,000 customers, including some well-known brands like Siemens, Uber and Instacart. Zendesk identifies itself as a growth-enabling, all-in-one solution. Sure, Intercom allows you to create articles and deliver a bot that answers customer questions with specific articles and resolves issues faster. It’s Intercom VS Zendesk, the battle of two well-known software in the help desk category.

Access to 24×7 Support for Free

Zendesk stimulates business growth and helps companies to support customers across all channels. The customer service platform helps businesses to personalize users’ experiences to deliver excellent customer service. Founded by Mikkel Svane, Alexander Aghassipour, and Morten Primdahl in 2007, the company has now customers around the world and defines itself as the world leader in the ticketing system industry.

After your free trial ends, Intercom’s products start at $49/mo, but if you cancel in the first 14 days you won’t be charged. If no payment method is added at the end of the trial period, the account is deleted 90 days after the trial expiration date. Reduce waiting times with interactive guidance when users need it most. Gorgias is a good choice for businesses looking to increase sales and conversion rates in e-commerce.

E.g., when a customer asks where their order is then send a link to shipping tracking information. Gorgias users felt that the tool had better out-of-the-box automation features than competitors like Zendesk especially for eCommerce businesses. More than channels, Crisp lets you gather your teams around the inbox to improve collaboration and reduce the time to resolution of each conversation. Combined with data accessible to your fingertips, Crisp helps you to personalize each interaction on every channel to build the best customer experience possible.

• It is important to note that the only communication channel included in cheaper packages is email.
• Also, it comes with tools that can meet the customer support needs of businesses of all sizes.
• It includes a shared inbox, knowledge base, CRM capabilities, email automation, and an entire email marketing platform.
• Report and Analytics of businesses can gain valuable insights and improve their support strategy.
• To guide your decision-making, we explain the key features and qualities of each, and the role that a omnichannel conversational AI platform (Netomi!) can play, for the ultimate CX strategy.
• He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO.

If you happen to be doing business for the government and restricted by FedRAMP approved SaaS, then Zendesk is your only solution right now. In a nutshell, both these metadialog.com companies provide great customer support. I tested both of their live chats and their support agents were answering in very quickly and right to the point.

Zendesk, like Intercom, offers multilingual language functionality. It also provides detailed reports on how each self-help article performs in your knowledge base and helps you identify how each piece can be improved further. Intercom offers an integrated knowledge base functionality to its user base. Using the existing knowledge base functionality, they can display self-help articles in the chat window before the customer approaches your team for support. You can create these knowledge base articles in your target audience’s native language as their software is multilingual.

• For example, Customerly, the product we build, is an advanced behavioral messaging platform and an exciting option to consider.
• They both have this program to help companies in their early stage acquire customers and serve these customers effectively.
• 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.
• Using this, agents can chat across teams within a ticket via email, Slack, or Zendesk’s ticketing system.
• Pricing stands at $35/mo/user and they only have one pro plan which includes all of their features.
• HubSpot Service Hub is a comprehensive customer service platform designed to help you provide exceptional customer experiences.