Zendesk vs Intercom in 2023: Detailed Analysis of Features, Pricing, and More

The sophisticated nature of its chatbot makes it more than a task automation tool — it takes customer interactions to the next level. What makes Desku unique is that it has competitively priced services with similar features as those provided by other companies but at a lower cost. In terms of pricing, both Intercom and Zendesk offer a range of plans to fit different business needs and budgets.

To sum up this Intercom vs Zendesk battle, 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. Just like Zendesk, Intercom also offers its own Operator bot, which will automatically suggest relevant articles to customers right in a chat widget. Freshdesk is a more unique Intercom alternative, as it offers the functionality to support businesses that use call centers for customer support. They have a nice implementation of live chat in their product as well, it’s actually thoughtful (and further customer-focused).

Intercom Agent Dashboard

Remember to get a free trial first prior to subscribing to get a firsthand experience how the solution can benefit you in real scenarios. Zendesk also has a clear and customizable interface, but it has more features, so it might take a bit longer to learn. And you would be surprised to know that the Intercom does not have a VOIP call service.

• Talking about the Intercom, it has flexible pricing plans that its experts can help adjust as per your requirements to match contacts and number of seats.
• From the inbox, live agents and chatbots can refer to and link knowledge base articles, to elaborate on replies and help customers locate answers.
• When an agent clicks on a conversation, the full conversation history populates the middle screen.
• When visitors click on it, they’ll be directed to one of your customer service teammates.
• When it comes to customer support and services, both Intercom and Zendesk offer robust solutions.

When it comes to creating an optimum knowledge base experience, both Intercom and Zendesk are excellent choices with similar capabilities for your needs. Intercom is a customer support platform known for its effective messaging and automation, enhancing in-context support within products, apps, or websites. It features the Intercom Messenger, which works with existing support tools for self-serve or live support.

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. In addition to third-party integrations, Zendesk offers a range of native integrations with its products, including Zendesk Support, Zendesk Chat, and Zendesk Talk. These integrations allow businesses to streamline workflow and provide a seamless customer experience across multiple channels. By leveraging the out-of-the-box Netomi virtual agent integration, companies enhance both the agent and customer experience, while also reducing costs.

Zendesk vs Intercom for pricing

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. Overall, I actually liked Zendesk’s user experience better than Intercom’s in terms of its messaging dashboard. Intercom has a dark mode that I think many people will appreciate, and I wouldn’t say it’s lacking in any way. 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. The highlight of Zendesk’s ticketing software is its omnichannel-ality (omnichannality?).

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. Integrations are the best way to enhance the toolkit of your apps by connecting them for interoperable actions and features. Both Zendesk and Intercom have integration libraries, and you can also use a connecting tool like Zapier for added integrations and add-ons. Zendesk’s mobile app is also good for ticketing, helping you create new support tickets with macros and updates. 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.

Intercom self-service chatbot widgets, highly customizable and capable of conversing in 32 different languages, embed into your website or application. Zendesk wins the ticketing system category due to its easy-to-use interface and side conversations tool. 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.

Apps and integrations are critical to creating a 360 view of the customer across the company and ensuring agents have easy access to key customer context. When agents don’t have to waste time toggling between different systems and tools to access the customer details they need, they can deliver faster, more personalized customer service. Messagely’s pricing starts at just $29 per month, which includes live chat, targeted messages, shared inbox, mobile apps, and over 750 powerful integrations.

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. You can create articles, share them internally, group them for users, and assign them as responses for intercom vs. zendesk bots—all pretty standard fare. Intercom can even integrate with Zendesk and other sources to import past help center content. I just found Zendesk’s help center to be slightly better integrated into their workflows and more customizable.

Customers will stay with you long if they are not getting any support from your company, especially when you are new to them. While they like the ease of use this product offers its users, they’ve indeed rated them low in terms of services. Zendesk also offers a straightforward interface to operators that helps them identify the entire interaction pathway with the customers. Compared to being detailed, Zendesk gives a tough competition to Intercom. Operators can easily switch from one conversation to another, therefore helping operators manage more interactions simultaneously. Zendesk’s per-agent pricing structure makes it a budget-friendly option for smaller teams, allowing costs to scale with team growth.

Reactive ticketing

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 go puff. All customer questions, be it via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel, are landing in one dashboard, where your agents can solve them quickly and efficiently. It guarantees continuous omnichannel support that meets customer expectations.

Intercom is used by over 30,000 businesses worldwide, including Shopify, Atlassian, and New Relic. The platform is known for its user-friendly interface, powerful automation capabilities, and robust analytics tools. In 2023, businesses will have an abundance of options when it comes to choosing a customer support and relationship management tool.

Users can submit support tickets through the platform, and customer support teams can manage and track those tickets to ensure they are resolved promptly. This feature ensures that users receive the support they need when needed. Intercom and Zendesk offer a range of features to help businesses manage their customer interactions. While Intercom focuses more on customer messaging and personalization, Zendesk focuses more on traditional customer support ticket management.

Zendesk for Sales offers three plans, ranging from $19 to $99 monthly per user, with free trials available for each plan. Zendesk for Service and Zendesk for Sales are sold as two separate solutions, each with three pricing plans, or tiers. Intercom plan prices are determined based on your specific business needs, so interested users must contact them for specific price details. The top of the agent workspace shows an agent’s open tickets, ticket statistics, and satisfaction statistics, as well as tabs depicting all current tickets.

Netomi’s virtual agents sit alongside human agents to supplement and enhance the capacity of support teams, ensuring the seamless resolution of customer queries. Zendesk is renowned for its comprehensive toolset that aids in automating customer service workflows and fine-tuning chatbot interactions. Its strengths are prominently seen in multi-channel support, with effective email, social media, and live chat integrations, coupled with a robust internal knowledge base for agent support. Zendesk was founded in 2007 by Mikkel Svane, Morten Primdahl, and Alexander Aghassipour. The platform was created to provide a simple and effective way for businesses to manage customer support tickets. Over the years, Zendesk has expanded its offerings to include features such as live chat, knowledge base, and customer feedback.

This enables organizations to work more efficiently and easily integrate their software without having to alter their present business processes. Simplicity is an important consideration when selecting the best customer service software. Having easy-to-use software is far more controllable and saves time whether you’re a tiny and growing business or a massive multinational. The offers that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site (including, for example, the order in which they appear).

Triggers should prove especially useful for agents, allowing them to do things like automate notifications for actions like ticket assignments, ticket closing/reopening, or new ticket creation. Their template triggers are fairly limited with only seven options, but they do enable users to create new custom triggers, which can be a game-changer for agents with more complex workflows. Use ticketing systems to manage the influx and provide your customers with timely responses. Provide self-service alternatives so customers can resolve their own issues. This serves the dual benefit of adding convenience to the customer experience and lightening agents’ workloads.

They have a dedicated help section that provides instructions on how to set up and effectively use Intercom. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Intercom’s ticketing system and help desk SaaS is also pretty great, just not as amazing as Zendesk’s. Their customer service management tools have a shared inbox for support teams. When you combine the help desk with Intercom Messenger, you get added channels for customer engagement. Zendesk is a great option for large companies or companies that are looking for a very strong sales and customer service platform.

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 primary function of Intercom’s mobile app is the business messenger suite, including personalized messaging, real-time support tools, push notifications, in-app messaging and emailing.

Essentially, Desku is not an option but a reliable replacement for Zendesk and Intercom that companies can rely on at lower costs and improved performance. There is no harm in testing the waters before committing to one or the other, as both Zendesk and Intercom offer free trials. 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. If you’re part of a team or manage a team, then it’s quite common that you’d want to broadcast certain messages…

The strength of Zendesk’s UI lies in its structured and comprehensive environment, adept at managing numerous customer interactions and integrating various channels seamlessly. However, compared to the more contemporary designs like Intercom’s, Zendesk’s UI may appear outdated, particularly in aspects such as chat widget and customization options. This could impact user experience and efficiency for new users grappling with its complexity​​​​​​. What sets Zendesk apart is its user-friendly interface, customizable workflows, and scalability. It caters to a wide range of industries, particularly excelling in e-commerce, SaaS, technology, and telecommunications.

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. But keep in mind that Zendesk is viewed more as a support and ticketing solution, while Intercom is CRM functionality-oriented. Which means it’s rather a customer relationship management platform than anything else. The cheapest plan for small businesses – Starter – costs $89 monthly, including 2 seats and 1,000 people reached/mo.

Intercom Differentiation

Nevertheless, the platform’s support consistency can be a concern, and the unpredictable pricing structure might lead to increased costs for larger organizations. Zendesk wins the major category of help desk and ticketing system software. It lets customers reach out via messaging, a live chat tool, voice, and social media.

Admins will also like the fact that they can see the progress of all their teams and who all are actively answering a customer’s query in real-time. Key offerings include automated support with help center articles, a messenger-first ticketing system, and a powerful inbox to centralize customer queries. This exploration aims to provide a detailed comparison, aiding businesses in making an informed decision that aligns with their customer service goals. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer robust solutions, but the choice ultimately depends on specific business needs. Intercom is ideal for personalized messaging, while Zendesk offers robust ticket management and self-service options. In-app messages and email marketing tools are two crucial features that Zendesk lacks when compared to Intercom.

Altogether, this can significantly impact affordability in the long term. Intercom is the new guy on the block when it comes to help desk ticketing systems. This means the company is still working out some kinks and operating with limited capabilities. Track customer service metrics to gain valuable insights and improve customer service processes and agent performance.

In short, Zendesk is perfect for large companies looking to streamline their customer support process; Intercom is great for smaller companies looking for advanced customer service features. Its sales CRM software starts at $19 per month per user, but you’ll have to pay $49 to get Zapier integrations and $99 for Hubspot integrations. Finally, you can pay $199 per month per user for unlimited sales pipelines and advanced reporting along with other features. Intercom is more for improving sales cycle and customer relationships, while Zendesk has everything a customer support representative can dream about, but it does lack wide email functionality.

If you thought Zendesk prices were confusing, let me introduce you to the Intercom charges. 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. Just like Zendesk, Intercom also offers its Operator bot, which will automatically suggest relevant articles to clients right in a chat widget. You can create dozens of articles in a simple, intuitive WYSIWYG text editor, divide them by categories and sections, and customize with your custom themes.

These plans make Hiver a versatile tool, catering to a range of business sizes and needs, from startups to large enterprises looking for a comprehensive customer support solution within Gmail. 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.

• Nevertheless, the platform’s support consistency can be a concern, and the unpredictable pricing structure might lead to increased costs for larger organizations.
• With this kind of organization, you will not only find your favorite apps but also discover new ones to meet your needs.
• Intercom regularly hosts webinars that are recorded and stored for future reference.
• Intercom is geared toward sales, whereas Zendesk includes everything a customer service rep desires.
• 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.

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. 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. 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. Zendesk is quite famous for designing its platform to be intuitive and its tools to be quite simple to learn.

When a customer asks a question in the Messenger widget, the Operator automatically suggests a handful of relevant articles based on keywords to help customers resolve their own issues. Users with light access–such as knowledgeable agents and supervisors–can be added to tickets for browsing and feedback. While light agents cannot interact with the customer on the ticket, they can make notes and interact privately with other team members and agents involved with the ticket. In an omnichannel contact center, agents can manage customer interactions across channels, no matter which channel a customer uses to contact the company. One place Intercom really shines as a standalone CRM is its data utility. You can even improve efficiency and transparency by setting up task sequences, defining sales triggers, and strategizing with advanced forecasting and reporting tools.