Zendesk vs Intercom: Which Is Right For Your Business in 2023?

Intercom has a standard trial period for a SaaS product which is 14 days, while Zendesk offers a 30-day trial. If I had to describe Intercom’s help desk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools. It’s great, it’s convenient, it’s not nearly as advanced as the one by Zendesk.

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. Zendesk’s Help Center and Intercom’s Articles both offer features to easily embed help centers into your website or product using their web widgets, SDKs, and APIs.

Both Chat GPT 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 is a customer service software company that provides businesses with a suite of tools to manage customer interactions. The company was founded in 2007 and today serves over 170,000 customers worldwide.

It may have limited abilities regarding the scalability or support of an enterprise-level company. Thus, due to its limited agility, businesses with complex business models may not find it appropriate. Intercom’s messaging platform is very similar to Zendesk’s dashboard, offering seamless integration of multiple channels in one place for managing customer interactions. Although Intercom offers an omnichannel messaging dashboard, it has slightly less functionality than Zendesk. Zendesk is an all-in-one omnichannel platform offering various channel integrations in one place.

Messagely’s pricing starts at just $29 per month, which includes live chat, targeted messages, shared inbox, mobile apps, and over 750 powerful integrations. Both Zendesk and Intercom have knowledge bases to help customers get the most out of their platforms. Intercom works with any website or web-based product and aims to be your one-way stop for all of your customer communication needs.

It gives detailed contact profiles enriched by company data, behavioral data, conversation data, and other custom fields. It is great to have CRM functionality inside your customer service platform because it helps maintain great customer experiences by storing all past customer engagements and conversation histories. This method helps offer more personalized support as well as get faster response and resolution times. The customer support platform starts at just $5 per agent per month, which is a very basic customer support tool. If you want dashboard reporting and integrations, you’ll need to pay $19 per agent per month. Multilingual content and other advanced features come with a $49 price per agent per month.

Features: Zendesk vs Intercom

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. In this article, we comprehensively do a comparison of Zendesk vs Intercom, examining their key features, benefits, and industry use cases. By exploring their distinct offerings, we aim to assist businesses in making informed decisions when selecting a customer service platform. Messagely’s chatbots are powerful tools for qualifying and converting leads while your team is otherwise occupied or away.

Instead of spending time on conversations with limited learning opportunities, reviewers can jump directly to the most impactful conversations using Spotlight and advanced filters. This feature ensures that each customer request is handled by the best-suited agent, improving the overall efficiency of the support team. On the other hand, Intercom brings a dynamic approach to customer support. Its suite of tools goes beyond traditional ticketing and focuses on customer engagement and messaging automation. From in-app chat to personalized autoresponders, Intercom provides a unified experience across multiple channels, creating a support ecosystem that nurtures and converts leads. Zendesk is an AI-powered service solution that’s easy to set up, use, and scale.

What are customers saying?

Today, amid the rise of omnichannel customer service, it offers a centralized location to manage interactions via email, live chat, social media, or voice calls. With industry-leading AI that infuses intelligence into every interaction, robust integrations, and exceptional data security and compliance, it’s no wonder why Zendesk is a trusted leader in CX. Intercom offers reporting and analytics tools with limited capabilities for custom reporting, user behavior metrics, and advanced visualization. It also lacks advanced features like collaboration reporting, custom metrics, metric correlation, and drill-in attribution. Intercom does not have a dedicated workforce management solution, either. Zendesk boasts robust reporting and analytics tools, plus a dedicated workforce management system.

Furthermore, Intercom offers advanced automation features such as custom inbox rules, targeted messaging, and dynamic triggers based on customer segments. In a nutshell, none of the customer support software companies provide decent user assistance. Intercom live chat is modern, smooth, and has many advanced features that other chat tools lack. It’s also highly customizable, so you can adjust it according to the style of your website or product.

This eventually adds to overall business costs, so they carefully need to consider all plans and budgets before making a decision. The pricing structure of Intercom is complex, making it difficult for Intercom users to understand their final costs. Intercom charges the price based on representative seats and people reached, with additional expenses for add-ons.

The dashboard of Zendesk is sleek, simple, and highly responsive, offering a seamless experience for managing customer interactions. Intercom has a very robust advanced chatbot set of tools for your business needs. There is a conversation routing bot, an operator bot, a lead qualification bot, and an article-suggesting bot, among others. It is also not too difficult to program your own bot rules using Intercon’s system. 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.

On the other hand, if you need something that is more tailored to your customer base and is less expensive, then Intercom might be a better fit. Learn how your HR teams can leverage onboarding automation to streamline onboarding workflows and processes. Empathy in customer support goes beyond just resolving issues—it’s about understanding and showing genuine concern for customers’ feelings and problems. In customer support, providing a satisfactory solution is the ultimate goal—a definitive answer to the customer’s query or concern. Conversations where customers show negative sentiment, or churn risk, or on the other side of the coin have expressed experiencing exceptional service, are all valuable for quality assurance’s sake.

Never Leave Your Customer Without an Answer

A purely manual QA process lacks the scalability essential for large or expanding teams to keep pace with customer expectations. Our Greeting category is designed to assess whether the agent successfully initiated the conversation with a friendly and professional opening. The initial moments of a customer interaction often set the stage for the entire experience. A warm and welcoming greeting can make customers feel valued and understood right from the start. The final score is calculated on a scale of 1-5 for both the conversation and individual agents.

To sum it all up, you need to consider various aspects of your business before choosing CRM software. While deciding between Zendesk and Intercom, you should ensure the customization, AI automation, and functionalities align with your business goals. Let us dive deeper into the offerings of Zendesk and Intercom to make a comparison at a glance. This comparison is going to help you understand the features of both tools. Integrations are the best way to enhance the toolkit of your apps by connecting them for interoperable actions and features.

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. The app includes features like automated messages and conversation routing — so businesses can manage customer conversations more efficiently. Zendesk has an app available for both Android and iOS, which makes it easy to stay connected with customers while on the go.

Zendesk vs Intercom

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.

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. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer compelling features and capabilities aimed at improving customer service through efficient ticketing systems. Zendesk is a robust choice for businesses seeking quick setup, scalability, and powerful AI-driven support. Its strength in creating a comprehensive self-service knowledge base and its extensive integration ecosystem make it a versatile option. On the other hand, Intercom prides itself on being the only complete customer service solution that provides a seamless experience across automation and human support.

Zendesk Sunshine is a separate feature set that focuses on unified customer views. It is none other than the modern customer support software of Helpwise. Here is a Zendesk vs. Intercom based on the customer support offered by these brands. 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.

Not to mention marketing and sales tools, like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Google Analytics. You can test any of HelpCrunch’s pricing plans for free for 14 days and see our tools in action immediately. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how its tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously.

These include chatbot automation features, customer segmentation, and targeted SMS messaging to reach the right audience efficiently. Customerly’s CRM is designed to help businesses build stronger relationships by keeping customer data organized and actionable. Aura AI transcends the limits of traditional chatbots that typically struggle with anything but the simplest user queries. Instead, Aura AI continuously learns from your knowledge base and canned responses, growing and learning — just like a real-life agent. To make your ticket handling a breeze, Customerly offers an intuitive, all-in-one platform that consolidates customer inquiries from various channels into a unified inbox. Customerly is a forward-thinking, all-in-one customer service platform.

The app includes features like push notifications and real-time customer engagement — so businesses can respond quickly to customer inquiries. Intercom also offers a 14-day free trial, after which customers can upgrade to a paid plan or use the basic free plan. Unlike Zendesk, the prices for Intercom are based on the number of seats and contacts, with each plan tailored to each customer, meaning that the pricing can be quite flexible. This is especially helpful for smaller businesses that may not need a lot of features. Zendesk offers a free 30-day trial, after which customers will need to upgrade to one of their paid plans. One of the things that sets Zendesk apart from other customer service software providers is its focus on design.

The best thing about this plan is that it is eligible for an advanced AI add-on, has integrated community forums, side conversations, skill-based routing, and is HIPAA-enabled. Zendesk offers various features, which may differ according to the plan. 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.

When you combine the help desk with Intercom Messenger, you get added channels for customer engagement. If you’re still on the fence about which platform to choose, consider exploring Tidio as a strong alternative. Tidio stands out with its advanced AI-powered chatbots and seamless automated workflows, making customer interactions efficient and personalized.

It’s definitely something that both your agents and customers will feel equally comfortable using. 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. 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.

If you want both customer support and CRM, you can choose between paying $79 or $125 per month per user, depending on how many advanced features you require. Its $99 bracket includes advanced options, such as customer satisfaction prediction and multi-brand support, and in the $199 bracket, you also get advanced security and other very advanced features. On the other hand, Zendesk’s customer support includes a knowledge base that’s very intuitive and easy to navigate. It divides all articles into a few main topics so you can quickly find the one you’re looking for. It also includes a list of common questions you can browse through at the bottom of the knowledge base home page so you can find answers to common issues.

Intercom does have a ticketing dashboard that has omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk. 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.

• With Zendesk, you get next-level AI-powered support software that’s intuitively designed, scalable, and cost-effective.
• 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.
• The setup can be so complex that there are tutorials by third parties to teach new users how to do it right.
• This makes it challenging to customize the software as your business grows.

For example, you can read in many Zendesk Sell reviews how adding sales tools benefits Zendesk Support users. Easily reply to customer conversations and manage workload in a smart & automated way. Intercom is ideal for personalized messaging, while Zendesk offers robust ticket management and self-service options.

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. 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 can also save key customer information in their platform, which helps reps get a faster idea of who they are dealing with as well as any historical data that might assist in the support.

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. In the category of customer support, Zendesk appears to be just slightly better than Intercom based on the availability of regular service and response times. However, it is possible Intercom’s support is superior at the premium level. 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. 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.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Leave your email below and a member of our team will personally get in touch to show you how Fullview can help you solve support tickets in half the time. You can use both zendesk and intercom simultaneously to leverage their respective strengths and provide comprehensive customer support across different channels and touchpoints. Learn how top CX leaders are scaling personalized customer service at their companies. Discover what large language models are, their use cases, and the future of LLMs and customer service.

• Intercom bills itself first and foremost as a platform to make the business of customer service more personalized, among other things.
• Overall, I actually liked Zendesk’s user experience better than Intercom’s in terms of its messaging dashboard.
• However, manual reviews are still vital in the customer service QA process.
• The company’s products are built with an emphasis on simplicity and usability.
• Today, amid the rise of omnichannel customer service, it offers a centralized location to manage interactions via email, live chat, social media, or voice calls.

It has very limited customization options in comparison to its competitors. For small companies and startups, Zendesk offers a six-month free trial of up to 50 agents redeemable for any combination of Zendesk Support and Sell products. Zendesk also offers a sales pipeline feature through its Zendesk Sell product. You can set up email sequences that specify how and when leads and contacts are engaged. With Zendesk Sell, you can also customize how deals move through your pipeline by setting pipeline stages that reflect your sales cycle. Intercom does not offer a native call center tool, so it cannot handle calls through a cloud-based phone system or calling app on its own.

In addition, some of the services Zendesk offers have a free plan (find them below in the tables). The difference in prices between plans is so significant because of the features each of them provides. If you’d want to test https://chat.openai.com/ before deciding on a tool for good, they both provide free trials.

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, 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. 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. Zendesk also has the Answer Bot, which can take your knowledge base game to the next level instantly.

Our ‘Closing’ category is your tool to ensure that your agents conclude customer interactions on a high note. So yeah, two essential things that Zendesk lacks in comparison to Intercom are in-app messages and email marketing tools. Intercom on the other hand lacks many ticketing functionality that can be essential for big companies with a huge customer support load.

This site does not include all software companies or all available software companies offers. However, this is somewhat subjective, and depending on your business needs and favorite tools, you may argue we got it all mixed up, and Intercom is truly superior. Some startups and small businesses may prefer one app, while large companies and enterprise operations will have their own requirements.

Auto QA taps into each and every one of these principles when used by a QA specialist with the eye to pluck out critical conversations and knowledge to put the ensuing analytical data into action. For each conversation, we aggregate scores for the entire conversation and the agents involved. A weighted score for mistakes is calculated, considering various types of grammar mistakes.

As the place where your agents will be 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. While both Zendesk and Intercom tick both those boxes, they each have their own distinct style. That being said, it sometimes lacks the advanced customization and automation offered by other AI-powered chatbots, like Intercom’s.

You can use Zendesk Sell to track tasks, streamline workflows, improve engagement, nurture leads, and much more. 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. Communication is not just about words; it’s also about how those words are delivered. Tone plays a pivotal role in shaping the emotional texture of a conversation. Let’s get into what an automated scorecard looks like in Zendesk QA, and how the score is reached.