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

From in-app chat to personalized autoresponders, Intercom provides a unified experience across multiple channels, creating a support ecosystem that nurtures and converts leads. They have a dedicated help section that provides instructions on how to set up and effectively use Intercom. 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. 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.

Intercom is ideal for personalized messaging, while Zendesk offers robust ticket management and self-service options. 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. If your goal is to deliver outstanding customer support to your audience, then Zendesk is a good option. It comes with a unified omnichannel dashboard, custom reports, and an advanced ticketing system. However, if you aim to nurture leads and grow sales, then Intercom is the better option.

When deciding between Intercom and Zendesk, businesses should consider their specific needs and goals. For those with a complicated customer support process, Zendesk may be the better option. However, Chat GPT Intercom may be the better choice if a business is more sales-oriented. Ultimately, the decision between these two tools will depend on company size, budget, and specific business needs.

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. You could say something similar for Zendesk’s standard service offering, so it’s at least good to know they have Zendesk Sell, a capable CRM option to supplement it.

Reporting

Intercom also offers an API enabling businesses to build custom integrations with their tools. The API is well-documented and easy to use, making it a popular choice for companies that want to create their integrations. 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. Both of these tools have unique strengths and weaknesses, and choosing between them can be difficult for businesses of all sizes.

Intercom has a standard trial period for a SaaS product which is 14 days, while Zendesk offers a 30-day trial. It’s modern, it’s smooth, it looks great and it has so many advanced features. But I don’t want to sell their chat tool short as it still has most of necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers and live chat analytics.

Consider which features align best with your business needs to make the right choice. Zendesk excels with its powerful ticketing and customer support capabilities, making it ideal for streamlining service operations. Unlike Intercom, Zendesk is scalable, intuitively designed for CX, and offers a low total cost of ownership. 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.

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. From there, you can include FAQs, announcements, and article guides and then save them into pre-set lists for your customers to explore. You can even moderate user content to leverage your customer community.

Zendesk vs Intercom: What are the real differences?

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. Zendesk also offers digital support during business hours, and their website has a chatbot. Premiere Zendesk plans have 24/7 proactive support with faster response times. Other customer service add-ons with Zendesk include custom training and professional services. Zendesk offers your agents a unified workspace to collaborate on support tickets.

Whether you’re into traditional bar charts, pie charts, treemaps, word clouds, or any other type of visualization, Zendesk is a data “nerd’s” dream. It makes sure that you don’t miss a single inquiry by queuing tickets for agent handling. You can configure it to assign tickets using various methods, such as skills, load balancing, and round-robin to ensure efficient handling. In the process, it streamlines collaboration between team members as well as a unified interface to manage all help resources.

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. 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. Intercom primarily focuses on messaging but offers limited channel breadth compared to Zendesk, requiring paid add-ons for critical channels like WhatsApp.

Introduction to Intercom & Zendesk

Like with many other apps, Zapier seems to be the best and most simple way to connect Intercom to Zendesk. No matter what Zendesk Suite plan you are on, you get workflow triggers, which are simple business rules-based actions to streamline many tasks. Now that we know the differences between Intercom vs. Zendesk, let’s analyze which one is the better service option. Discover how this Shopify store used Tidio to offer better service, recover carts, and boost sales.

As an avid learner interested in all things tech, Jelisaveta always strives to share her knowledge with others and help people and businesses reach their goals. Grow faster with done-for-you automation, tailored optimization strategies, and custom limits. Automatically answer common intercom or zendesk questions and perform recurring tasks with AI. Check out our chart that compares the capabilities of Zendesk vs. Intercom. 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.

Zendesk AI is the intelligence layer that infuses CX intelligence into every step of the customer journey. Customers have also noted that they can implement Zendesk AI five times faster than other solutions. Zendesk provides comprehensive security and compliance features, ensuring customer data privacy. 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. As a result, customers can implement the help desk software quickly—without the need for developers—and see a faster return on investment.

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. However, you won’t miss out on any of the essentials when it comes to live chat. Automated triggers, saved responses, and live chat analytics are all baked in. The only other downside is that the chat widget can feel a bit static and outdated. According to G2, Intercom has a slight edge over Zendesk with a 4.5-star rating, but from just half the number of users.

Supercharge customer support

Intercom offers live chat, email, and phone support to its customers, ensuring that any issues or questions are addressed promptly. Zendesk provides similar support options and also has a vast knowledge base with helpful articles and tutorials. Check customer reviews and ratings to gauge the quality of support offered by each platform. 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.

Along with Omni channel integrations with chat (their own or other chat solutions), email, phone and so on. We sell a high-touch, high ASP product (caskets) and have scaled to where we’re adding several more customer service agents to our company. Customers often call or chat with us multiple times prior to the purchase and post-purchase, as these are emotional, time-sensitive purchases. Pop-up chat, in-app messaging, and notifications are some of the highly-rated features of this live chat software.

This has helped to make Zendesk one of the most popular customer service software platforms on the market. However, the latter is more of a support and ticketing solution, while Intercom is CRM functionality-oriented. This means it’s a customer relationship management platform rather than anything else. 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.

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.

Zendesk for sales makes integrating with the tools you already use easy. Additionally, the Zendesk sales CRM seamlessly integrates with the Zendesk Support Suite, allowing your customer service and sales teams to share information in a centralized place. In this article, we will explore the key differences between Intercom and Zendesk, two popular customer support platforms. Both Intercom and Zendesk offer a range of features to help businesses manage customer interactions, but there are some distinct differences between the two. Zendesk directly competes with Intercom when it comes to integrations.

In terms of customer service, Zendesk fails to deliver an exceptional experience. This can be a bummer for many as they can always stumble upon an issue. One of the most significant downsides of Intercom is its customer support. Existing customers have complained consistently about how they aren’t available at the right time to offer support to customers. There are even instances where customers don’t receive the first response in more than seven days. Compared to Intercom, Zendesk’s pricing starts at $49/month, which is still understandable but not meant for startups looking for affordable pricing plans.

Messagely’s live chat platform is smooth, effective, and easy to set up. With Messagely, you can increase your customer satisfaction and solve customers’ issues while they’re still visiting your site. 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. For basic chat and messaging, Intercom charges a flat fee of $39 per month for its basic plan with one user and $99 per month for its team plan with up to 5 users.

First of all, Intercom positions itself as a business messenger, the primary aim of which is to deliver modern and reliable customer communication tool. When choosing the right customer support tool, pricing is an essential factor to consider. In this section, we will compare the pricing structures of Intercom and Zendesk. Their help desk is a single inbox to handle customer requests, where your customer support agents can leave private notes for each other and automatically assign requests to the right people. Intercom is 4 years younger than Zendesk and has fancied itself as a messaging platform right from the beginning.

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. It’s definitely something that both your agents and customers will feel equally comfortable using. When comparing chatbots, it’s important to consider their level of intelligence, “trainability,” and customization.

Intercom also does mobile carousels to help please the eye with fresh designs. Zendesk fully utilizes AI tools to enhance user experiences at every stage of the customer journey. Its AI chatbots leverage machine learning to gain a deeper understanding of customer interactions.

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. Use ticketing systems to efficiently manage high ticket volume, deliver timely customer support, and boost agent productivity. 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.

One of the standout features of Intercom’s customer support is its chatbot functionality. The chatbot can help users with common support issues and answer frequently asked questions. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. This feature can reduce the workload of customer support teams and provide faster response times to users. Intercom and Zendesk are two of the most popular customer support tools available. Both platforms offer a range of features that enable businesses to communicate with their customers seamlessly.

Basically, you can create new articles, divide them by categories and sections — make it a high end destination for customers when they have questions or issues. If you’re a huge corporation with a complicated customer support process, go Zendesk for its help desk functionality. If you’re smaller more sales oriented startup with enough money, go Intercom. Experience targeted communication with Intercom’s automation and segmentation features.

Their agent was always trying to convert me into a lead along the way, but heck, that’s a side effect of our job. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk, though is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. As I’ve already mentioned, they started as a help desk/ticketing tool, and honestly, they perfected every bit of it over the years.

Again, Zendesk has surpassed the number of reviewers when compared to Intercom. Some of the highly-rated features include ticket creation user experience, email to case, and live chat reporting. 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. What’s worse, Intercom doesn’t offer a free trial to its prospect to help them test the product before onboarding with their services. Instead, they offer a product demo when prospects reach out to learn more about their pricing structure. Help desk software creates a sort of “virtual front desk” for your business.

• Zendesk has also introduced its chatbot to help its clients send automated answers to some frequently asked questions to stay ahead in the competitive marketplace.
• 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.
• The choice between the two may be personal preference or specific feature requirements.

Although many people tout it as the solution for large businesses, its bottom pricing tier is a nice entry for any small business looking to add customer service to its front page. Basically, provides you with a knowledge base to create, organize, and store the articles that answer your customers’ questions. Has a bot that suggests relevant articles to customers who have questions. One of the standout features of Intercom’s user interface is the ability to view customer conversations in a single thread, regardless of the channel they were initiated on.

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. 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.

Intercom is praised as an affordable option with high customization capabilities, allowing businesses to create a personalized support experience. Although the interface may require a learning curve, users find the platform effective and functional. However, Intercom has fewer integration options than Zendesk, which may limit its capabilities for businesses seeking extensive integrations.

Create personalized messages for specific customer segments, driving engagement and satisfaction. You get a dashboard that makes creating, tracking, and organizing tickets easy. Personalized messaging, in-app messaging, product tours, and chatbot capabilities set Intercom apart from Zendesk.

But sooner or later, you’ll have to decide on the subscription plan, and here’s what you’ll have to pay. 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. If I had to describe Intercom’s helpdesk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools. At the end of the day, the best sales CRM delivers on the features that matter most to you and your business. To determine which one takes the cake, let’s dive into a feature comparison of Pipedrive vs. Zendesk.

With our commitment to quality and integrity, you can be confident you’re getting the most reliable resources to enhance your customer support initiatives. Intercom’s live chat reports aren’t just offering what your customers are doing or whether they are satisfied with your services. They offer more detailed insights like lead generation sources, a complete message report to track customer engagement, and detailed information on the support team’s performance. A collection of these reports can enable your business to identify the right resources responsible for bringing engagement to your business. Intercom is a customer support messenger, bot, and live chat service provider that empowers its clients to provide instant support in real-time.

Aura AI also excels in simplifying complex tasks by collecting data conversationally and automating intricate processes. When things get tricky, Aura AI smartly escalates the conversation to a human agent, ensuring that no customer is left frustrated. Plus, Aura AI’s global, multilingual support breaks down language barriers, making it an ideal solution for businesses https://chat.openai.com/ with an international customer base. Simply put, we believe that our Aura AI chatbot is a game-changer when it comes to automating your customer service. Zendesk offers a slightly broader selection of plans, with an enterprise solution for customers with bespoke needs. Intercom is a customer-focused communication platform with basic CRM capabilities.

Discover customer and product issues with instant replays, in-app cobrowsing, and console logs. Now that we’ve covered a bit of background on both Zendesk and Intercom, let’s dive into the features each platform offers. 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.

KindGeek was founded in Ukraine; our co-founders are from Ukraine, and all of our team members call Ukraine home. Intercom does not have a built-in call center solution, but you can integrate Intercom with other call center software. We are going to overview only their helpdesk/communication features to make the two systems comparable. As expected, the right choice between Zendesk and Intercom will depend on your budget, your company, and your needs.