Zendesk vs Intercom: An Honest Comparison in 2024

On the other hand, Intercom’s chatbots have more advanced features but do not sacrifice simplicity and ease of use. It helps businesses create highly personalized chatbots for interactive customer communication. Its messaging also has real-time notifications and automated responses, enhancing customer communication. Intercom focuses on real-time customer messaging, while Zendesk provides a comprehensive suite for ticketing, knowledge base, and self-service support. Overall, Zendesk has a slight edge over Intercom when it comes to ticketing capabilities.

What’s more, we support live video support for moments when your customers need in-depth guidance. However, for more advanced CRM needs like lead management and sales forecasting, Intercom may not make the cut, unfortunately. What’s even cooler is its ability to use AI to forecast customer behavior. Agents can use this to anticipate and proactively address issues before the escalate, or even arise in the first place. 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.

Zendesk which is less user-friendly and charges more for quality support, might not work for smaller businesses. What differentiates them is the kind of reports they equip your teams with. Guru GPT integrates your company’s internal knowledge with ChatGPT, making it easy to access and use information from Guru and connected apps. Honestly, when it comes to Zendesk, it is not the most modern tool out there. 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.

At the same time, Fin AI Copilot background support to agents, acting as a personal, real-time AI assistant for dealing with inquiries. Intercom has more customization features for features like bots, themes, triggers, and funnels. You can create articles, share them internally, group them for users, and assign them as responses for bots—all pretty standard fare. Intercom can even integrate with Zendesk and other sources to import past help center content.

Its AI chatbots leverage machine learning to gain a deeper understanding of customer interactions. Handle conversations, manage tickets, and resolve issues quickly to improve your CSAT. That being said, while both platforms offer extensive features, they can be costly, especially for smaller enterprises. Ultimately, your choice should reflect whether your priority is comprehensive customer support (Zendesk) or a blend of CRM and sales support (Intercom). While not included with its customer service suite, it offers a full-fledged standalone CRM called Zendesk Sell. While it’s a separate product with separate costs, it does integrate seamlessly with Zendesk’s customer service platform.

This data can help eliminate unwanted surprises and give your sales team valuable insights to improve their strategy. Pipedrive uses historical data to help predict cash flow and provide performance metrics for your sales team. Zendesk supports sales team productivity by syncing with your email to provide valuable data, like when your prospect opens, clicks, or replies to your email. You can also use Zendesk to automatically track and record sales calls, allowing you to focus your full attention on your customer rather than taking notes.

Customer Support and Services

Pipedrive has workflow automation features, like setting triggers and desired actions, scheduling customer interactions, and automating lead assignment. However, one user noted that important features like automation are often down for an extensive amount of time. Whether you’re looking for a CRM for small businesses or an enterprise, the Zendesk sales CRM has the flexibility to grow with you, supporting up to 2 million deals across all of our plans. On the other hand, entry-level Pipedrive users are limited to only 3,000 open deals per company, making it an insufficient CRM for enterprises and growing companies.

While both Zendesk and Intercom offer strong ticketing systems, they differ in the depth of automation capabilities. According to G2, Intercom has a slight edge over Zendesk with a 4.5-star rating, but from just half the number of users. Similar to Zendesk, though, users praise its ease of use and feature set. While no area of concern really stands out, there are some complaints about the company’s billing practices. You can test any of HelpCrunch’s pricing plans for free for 14 days and see our tools in action immediately. To sum up this Intercom vs Zendesk battle, the latter is a great support-oriented tool that will be a good choice for big teams with various departments.

Team-oriented

The platform is known for its ease of use, customizable workflows, and extensive integrations with other business tools. 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. When you see pricing plans starting for $79/month, you should get a clear understanding of how expensive other plans can become for your business.

Zendesk offers more advanced automation capabilities than Intercom, which may be a deciding factor for businesses that require complex workflows. Like Intercom, Zendesk has received generally positive customer reviews, with an overall rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars on Gartner Peer Insights. Customers appreciate the platform’s ease of use, customization options, and robust reporting capabilities.

Automatically answer common questions and perform recurring tasks with AI. You can try Customerly without any risk to you as we offer a 14-day free trial. 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. To sum up, one can get really confused trying to understand the Zendesk pricing, let alone calculate costs.

You can also contact Zendesk support 24/7, whereas Intercom support only has live agents during business hours. It’s divided into about 20 topics with dozens of articles each, so navigating through it can be complicated. 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.

Similarly, the ability of Zendesk to scale also makes it the best fit for enterprise-level organizations. It can also handle complex interactions and provide real-time insight to customer support agents. Overall, Intercom is a better option if personalized and robust chatbots are something you are looking for when managing customer support strategy.

This includes secure login options like SAML or JWT SSO (single sign-on) and native content redaction for sensitive information. We also adhere to numerous industry standards and regulations, such as HIPAA, SOC2, ISO 27001, HDS, FedRAMP LI-SaaS, ISO 27018, and ISO 27701. 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.

While both Zendesk and Intercom tick both those boxes, they each have their own distinct style. 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. While its integrations are not as far-reaching as Zendesk’s, it seamlessly works with modern communication and business tools, like WhatsApp and the most prominent CRMS.

This is especially helpful for smaller businesses that may not need a lot of features. The last thing you want is your sales data or the contact information of potential customers to end up in the wrong hands. Because of this, you’ll want to make sure you’re selecting a cloud-based CRM, like Zendesk, with strong security features.

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. Learn how top CX leaders are scaling personalized customer service at their companies.

• The dashboard also provides insights into user behavior and engagement metrics.
• While deciding between Zendesk and Intercom, you should ensure the customization, AI automation, and functionalities align with your business goals.
• For example, you can read in many Zendesk Sell reviews how adding sales tools benefits Zendesk Support users.
• It also made its name as a messaging-first platform for fostering personalized conversational experiences for customers.

A customer service department is only as good as its support team members, and these highly-prized employees need to rely on one another. Tools that allow support agents to communicate and collaborate are important aspect of customer service software. Intercom’s AI has the transformative power to enhance customer service by offering multilingual support and contextual responses. Fin uses seamless communication across customer bases, breaking language barriers and catering to global audiences. Integrating AI in the help center helps agents find answers to customer inquiries, providing a seamless customer experience. Zendesk’s AI offers automated responses to customer inquiries, increasing the team’s productivity, as they can spend time on the most crucial things.

You’ll still be able to get your eyes on basic support metrics, like response times and bot performance, that will help you improve your service quality. However, Intercom’s real strength lies in generating insights into areas like customer journey mapping, product performance, and retention. 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. Furthermore, Intercom offers advanced automation features such as custom inbox rules, targeted messaging, and dynamic triggers based on customer segments.

You can access detailed customer data at a glance while chatting, enabling you to make informed decisions in real time. The customer journey timeline provides a clear view of customer activities, helping you understand behaviors and tailor your responses accordingly. Your agents will love the seamless assistance Aura AI provides throughout the entire customer interaction. From handling multiple questions to avoiding dreaded customer-stuck loops, Aura AI is the Swiss Army Knife of customer service chatbots.

However, customers do have the option to go to Zendesk Sell for a more robust experience. Considering all the features of Zendesk, including robust ticketing, messaging, a help center, and chatbots, we can say that Zendesk excels in being the top customer support platform. Zendesk excels with its AI-enhanced user experience and robust omnichannel support, making it ideal for businesses focused on customer service. On the other hand, Intercom shines with its advanced AI-driven automation and insightful analytics, perfect for those who value seamless communication and in-app messaging. Consider which features align best with your business needs to make the right choice.

Zendesk also offers callback requests, call monitoring and call quality notifications, among other telephone tools. Intercom’s dashboards may not be as aesthetically pleasing as Zendesk’s, but they still allow users to navigate their tools with few distractions. 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.

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. Zendesk has excellent reporting and analytics tools that allow you to decipher the underlying issues behind your help desk metrics. Discover how to awe shoppers with stellar customer service during peak season.

Zendesk excels with its powerful ticketing and customer support capabilities, making it ideal for streamlining service operations. Zendesk offers your agents a unified workspace to collaborate on support tickets. This single window allows your team members to combine several channels for better efficiency and improved customer experience.

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. Customerly’s reporting tools are built on the principle that you can’t improve what you can’t measure.

So yeah, all the features talk actually brings us to the most sacred question — the question of pricing. You’d probably want to know how much it costs to get each platform for your business, so let’s talk money now. You can publish your self-service resources, divide them by categories, and integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience. 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. If I had to describe Intercom’s helpdesk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools.

By aiming to resolve most customer conversations without human intervention, Intercom allows teams to focus on higher-value interactions. This not only increases customer satisfaction but also reduces operational costs. Zendesk’s customer support is also very fast, though their live chat is only available for registered users. Chatbots are automated customer support tools that can assist with low-level ticket triage and ticket routing in real-time.

Let us look at the type and size of business for which Zednesk and Intercom are suitable. These pricing structures are flexible enough to cater to all business sizes and types. Moreover, the pricing model ensures customer transparency and reveals the costs that businesses will incur. The help center in Intercom is also user-friendly, enabling agents to access content creation easily. It does help you organize and create content using efficient tools, but Zendesk is more suitable if you want a fully branded customer-centric experience.

Zendesk excels in traditional ticket management and offers a robust set of feature. On the other hand, Intercom’s cutting-edge AI capabilities and in-app messaging features help companies provide a more intuitive and on-the-go customer support. Intercom is a customer messaging platform that enables businesses to engage with customers through personalized and real-time communication. According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2023, 78 percent of business leaders want to combine their customer service and sales data. The Zendesk sales CRM integrates seamlessly with the Zendesk Suite, our top-of-the-line customer service software. Unlike Zendesk, Pipedrive is limited to third-party integrations and doesn’t connect with native customer support software.

With Intercom, you get email features like targeted and personalized outbound emailing, dynamic content fields, and an email-to-inbox forwarding feature. 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 has a help center that is open to all to find out answers to common questions. Apart from this feature, the customer support options at Zendesk are quite limited. First, you can only talk to the support team if you are a registered user. This structure may appeal to businesses with specific needs but could be less predictable for budget-conscious organizations.

It also offers a confusing pricing structure and fewer integrations, making it less scalable and cost-effective. Pipedrive also includes lead management features like automatic lead nurturing, labeling, and bulk imports. However, Pipedrive does not include native desktop text messaging features. One user noted that, in some https://chat.openai.com/ cases, it can take Pipedrive at least eight hours to populate saved leads, making it difficult to quickly communicate with hot leads. Zendesk provides its partners with quality support and educational resources, including online training and certification programs, helping turn any salesperson into a Zendesk expert.

You can contact the sales team if you’re just looking around, but you will not receive decent customer support unless you buy their service. Overall, Zendesk empowers businesses to deliver exceptional customer support experiences across channels, making it a popular choice for enhancing support operations. Yes, you can continue using Intercom as the consumer-facing CRM experience, but integrate with Zendesk for customer service in the back end for more customer support functionality.

We will discuss these differentiating factors to help you make the right choice for your business and help it excel in offering extraordinary customer service. Compared to Zendesk and Intercom, Helpwise offers competitive and transparent pricing plans. Its straightforward pricing structure ensures businesses get access to the required features without complex tiers or hidden costs, making it an attractive option for cost-conscious organizations.

It’s designed so well that you really enjoy staying in their inbox and communicating with clients. Founded in 2007, Zendesk started as a ticketing tool for customer success teams. Later, they started adding all kinds of other features, like live chat for customer conversations. As a result, customers can implement the help desk software quickly—without the need for developers—and see a faster return on investment. Plus, our transparent pricing doesn’t have hidden fees or endless add-ons, so customers know exactly what they’re paying for and can calculate the total cost of ownership ahead of time. In comparison, Intercom’s confusing pricing structure that features multiple add-ons may be unsuitable for small businesses.

With its CRM, you have the ability to place your clients in your sales funnels and follow through with them until conversion. There are many powerful integrations included, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Slack, and Zapier. Finally, you’ll have to choose your reporting preferences including details about what you’ll be tracking and how often you want to be reported of changes.

And in this post, we will analyze two popular names in the SaaS industry – Intercom & Zendesk. It starts with as low as $19/user/month and can go up to $49/user/ month. This means, even when you choose a higher plan, you’ll be paying considerably less than what you would have to pay for Zendesk or intercom.

Zendesk’s automation features are limited to offering basic automation to streamline repetitive tasks. While Zeendesk provides automation services for ticket support systems, notifications, chatbots, etc., it may not be an extensive feature compared to Intercom. Intercom is ideal for personalized messaging, while Zendesk offers robust ticket management and self-service options. Zendesk fully utilizes AI tools to enhance user experiences at every stage of the customer journey.

And according to research, brands adopting omnichannel customer service software experience a decline in cost per contact by 7.5% every year, so having this feature is definitely a plus. When comparing Zendesk and Intercom, it’s essential to understand their core features and their differences to choose the right solution for your customer support needs. These include ticketing, chatbots, and automation capabilities, to name just a few.Here’s a side-by-side comparison to help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of each platform.

Intercom is geared toward sales, whereas Zendesk includes everything a customer service rep desires. Zendesk has many amazing team collaboration and communication features, like whisper mode, which lets multiple agents chime in to help each other without the customer knowing. There is also something called warm transfers, which let one rep add contextual notes to a ticket before transferring it to another rep. You also zendesk vs. intercom get a side conversation tool. There are 3 Basic support plans at $19, $49 and $99 per user per month billed annually, and 5 Suite plans at $49, $79, $99, $150, and $215 per user per month billed annually. Intercom is a complete customer communication platform for small businesses. Still, considering that such companies do not have a large budget for investing in CRM software, they should carefully consider all plans.

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. 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. Intercom also has a community forum where users can help one another with questions and solutions. Every CRM software comes with some limitations along with the features it offers. You can analyze if that weakness is something that concerns your business model.

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. Intercom also uses AI and features a chatbot called Fin, but negative reviews note basic reporting and a lack of customization. Fin is priced at $0.99 per resolution, so companies handling large volumes of queries might find it costly. In comparison, Zendesk customers pay a fixed price of $50 per agent—and only Zendesk AI is modeled on the world’s largest CX-specific dataset. Zendesk provides comprehensive security and compliance features, ensuring customer data privacy.

In terms of pricing, both Intercom and Zendesk offer a range of plans to fit different business needs and budgets. However, Zendesk’s pricing is generally more affordable for smaller businesses, while Intercom’s pricing tends to be higher but offers more advanced features and capabilities. Intercom and Zendesk are excellent customer support tools offering unique features and benefits.

They offer an omnichannel chat solution that integrates with multiple messaging platforms and marketing channels and even automates incoming support processes with bots. It is quite the all-rounder as it even has a help center and ticketing system that completes its omnichannel support cycle. 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. You can use the dashboards to understand customer journeys in-depth and identify areas of improvement.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Intercom was founded in 2011 by Eoghan McCabe, Ciaran Lee, Des Traynor, and David Barrett. Initially, the platform was designed to help businesses communicate with their customers through targeted messaging. However, over the years, Intercom has evolved into a complete customer communication platform with features like live chat, email marketing, and customer support. Intercom is better for smaller companies that are looking for a simple and capable customer service platform.

Zendesk also offers various integrations with third-party tools, including CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and analytics tools. Some of the popular integrations include Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and Google Analytics. Zendesk’s integration with these tools allows businesses to track customer interactions, personalize messaging, and automate workflows. Intercom offers a wide range of integrations with various third-party tools, including CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and analytics tools.

Like Zendesk, Intercom allows you to chat with online visitors and assist with their issues. Zendesk chat allows you to talk with your visitors in real time through a small chat bar at the bottom of your site. When visitors click on it, they’ll be directed to one of your customer service teammates. 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.

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. As the place where your agents will be Chat GPT spending most of their time, a functional and robust Helpdesk will be critical to their overall performance and experience. While there are some universal things to look out for, like the range of features, ease of use, and a seamless omnichannel experience, it’s also about your subjective experience.

Connecting Zendesk Support and Zendesk Sell allows its customer service and sales-oriented wholesale team to work together effortlessly. CoinJar is one of the longest-running cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. To help keep up with its growing customer base, CoinJar turned to Zendesk for a user-friendly and easily scalable solution after testing other CRMs, including Pipedrive and HubSpot. Leveraging the sequencing and bulk email features of the Zendesk sales CRM, CoinJar increased its visibility and productivity at scale. Today, Zendesk is used by over 200,000 businesses worldwide, including Airbnb, Uber, and Slack.