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

Zendesk vs Intercom: A comprehensive comparison guide

It will allow you to leverage some Intercom capabilities while keeping your account at the time-tested platform. In this paragraph, let’s explain some common issues that users usually ask about when choosing between Zendesk and Intercom platforms. 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. They’ve been marketing themselves as a messaging platform right from the beginning.

Use ticketing systems to manage the influx and provide your customers with timely responses. This Intercom competitor can respond to customers across various social platforms and connect them to the appropriate agent for the job. Salesforce is a customer relationship management platform that provides businesses with a channel to communicate with their customers, forecast revenues, and monitor their leads.

Can I use Intercom on the front end and Zendesk on the back?

HubSpot CRM has a reputation for being a reliable, comprehensive suite of features that also integrate smoothly with users’ third-party apps, making it easier to manage customers. Also, its scalability is a big plus, allowing you to use essential features or scale it to handle complex processes. However, we saw complaints about how limited customization with HubSpot.

Businesses engaging in direct sales through multiple channels will benefit from Zendesk Sell’s offerings, too. Most Zendesk users say the CRM software is a solid tool for customer relationship management. However, some are unhappy about the occasional platform crash and slowdown, which reduces their productivity. A few users also complained of integration issues that caused errors and delayed response times with their clients. Pop-up chat, in-app messaging, and notifications are some of the highly-rated features of this live chat software. While in Intercom, advanced chatbots, a modern and well-developed chat widget, email marketing services, product demonstrations, and in-app messaging all contribute to a better customer experience.

Indigo Capitalizes on Data-Driven Customer Delivery Experiences

They bought out the Zopim live chat solution and integrated it with their toolset. Users can benefit from using Intercom’s CX platform and AI software as a standalone tool for business messaging. But to provide a more robust customer experience, businesses may need to consider integrating Intercom’s AI tool with a third-party customer service platform, as it falls short of a full-stack offering. AI and ML make customer service functionalities like chatbots, sentiment analysis, ticket creation, and workflow automation possible.

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. Intercom’s user interface is also quite straightforward and easy to understand; it includes a range of features such as live chat, messaging campaigns, and automation workflows.

Features: Zendesk vs Intercom

These plans include all the features available for email, live chat, voice, and social media support. They accomplished this by adding different tools to their software bundle, now known as the Zendesk Support Suite. Their most major development was acquiring the live chat platform Zopim, which was rebranded as Zendesk Chat. Since then, they have expanded their line to include products such as Zendesk Sell, Talk, and Sunshine Conversations. 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.

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. Zendesk provides limited customer support for its basic plan users, along with costly premium assistance options. On the other hand, Intercom is generally praised for its support features, despite facing challenges with its AI chatbot and the complexity of its help articles. 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.

Intercom or Zendesk: Voice and phone tools

The Intercom versus Zendesk conundrum is probably the greatest problem in the customer service software world. They both offer some state-of-the-art core functionality and numerous unusual features. Basically, if you have a complicated support process, go with Zendesk, an excellent Intercom alternative, for its help desk functionality. If you’re a sales-oriented corporation, use Intercom for its automation options. Both tools can be quite heavy on your budget since they mainly target big enterprises and don’t offer their full toolset at an affordable price.

Easily reply to customer conversations and manage workload in a smart & automated way. So, by now, you can see that according to this article, Zendesk inches past Intercom as the better customer support platform. Integrations are the best way to enhance the toolkit of your apps by connecting them for interoperable actions and features.

• It has a very intuitive design that goes far beyond its platform and into its articles, product guides, and even its illustrations.
• That’s why it would be better to review where both the options would be ideal to use.
• When comparing the user interfaces (UI) of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms exhibit distinct characteristics and strengths catering to different user preferences and needs.
• Discover customer and product issues with instant replays, in-app cobrowsing, and console logs.

Lastly, Intercom offers an academy that offers concise courses to help users make the most out of their Intercom experience. Customers of Zendesk can purchase priority assistance at the enterprise tier, which includes a 99.9% uptime service level agreement and a 1-hour service level goal. At all tiers, there is an additional fee to work with a member of the Zendesk success team on unique engagements. Intercom’s native mobile apps are good for iOS, Android, React Native, and Cordova, while Zendesk only has mobile apps for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. 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 vs Zendesk for knowledgebase & learning

However, you must take into account that Zendesk’s plans charge per agent per month, while Intercom’s plans are limited to a certain number of seats. In order to determine which solution is more affordable, you will have to determine what features your team needs and how many agents will be providing support. Unlike either Zendesk or Intercom, our team at Ada offers an AI-first approach to improving your customer experience. Ada integrates with Intercom as well as Zendesk and spans a wide range of channels, making it easy for companies of any size to implement. Their basic plan offers support for one user, while the team plan works for up to 5 users. If you’re looking for automation, plans can become quite expensive depending on the level of automation you require.

You can then add automations and triggers, such as automatically closing a ticket or sending a message to a user. Although it can be pricey, Zendesk’s platform is a very robust one, with powerful reporting and insight tools, a large number of integrations, and excellent scalability features. 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.

Intercom, on the other hand, has several modules, including help desk and AI chatbots. Both platforms have many overlapping features, but also a fair share of differences. It enables them to engage with visitors who are genuinely interested in their services. You get to engage with them further and get to know more about their expectations. This becomes the perfect opportunity to personalize the experience, offer assistance to prospects as per their needs, and convert them into customers.

Additionally, the platform allows for customizations such as customized user flows and onboarding experiences. 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 has a mobile app available for both Android and iOS, which makes it easy to stay connected with customers even when away from the computer.

In this context, Zendesk and Intercom emerge as key contenders, each offering distinct features tailored to dynamic customer service environments. To automate operations and reduce your employees’ workload, it is critical that customer support systems allow intercom versus zendesk integration with other products. This enables organizations to work more efficiently and easily integrate their software without having to alter their present business processes. It’s clear that both of these tools are designed for different use cases.

FreshDesk is a SaaS customer messaging software that allows small and large businesses to provide stellar customer support services. Depending on the plan, it can even be free for a lifetime for any number of agents. Intercom is better for smaller companies that are looking for a simple and capable customer service platform. Instead, using it and setting it up is very easy, and very advanced chatbots and predictive tools are included to boost your customer service.

• While both have similar and different ticketing channel tools, Intercom edges past Freshdesk in this category for being slightly more versatile.
• Just like Intercom, Zendesk can also integrate with multiple messaging platforms and ensure that your business never misses out on a support opportunity.
• Choosing the right customer service platform is pivotal for enhancing business-client interactions.
• Zendesk is among the industry’s best ticketing and customer support software, and most of its additional functionality is icing on the proverbial cake.

With a mix of productivity, collaboration, eCommerce, CRM, analytics, email marketing, social media, and other tools, you get the option to create an omnichannel suite. Both Zendesk and Intercom are customer support management solutions that offer features like ticket management, live chat and messaging, automation workflows, knowledge centers, and analytics. Zendesk has traditionally been more focused on customer support management, while Intercom has been more focused on live support solutions like its chat solution.