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

Agents can use the app to support customers who need help, even while they are away from their desk or working remotely. Moreover, internal collaboration feels a bit more engaging and metadialog.com effortless with notes and mentions. As a leading cloud-based help desk software, Zendesk is home to many popular businesses such as Siemens, Mailchimp, Tesco, GrubHub, and more.

Also, a customer experience form can be found at the end of each article. The answers are analyzed to help streamline the AI and can also be collated into a report for your perusal. However, the customer service (and the ways how a company delivers it) creates a centerpiece of a brand. But if you’re not familiar with them, think of the software as online human resource departments. For instance, customers and staff alike can channel messages through it.

Do you need Intercom or Zendesk?

The overall system of Zendesk might run without difficulty, but having beginner-friendly mechanics is definitely not a characteristic of it due to its overloaded user interface. While it’s no secret that Zendesk contains several relevant help articles that might be of help when you encounter a problem, some cases might require more than articles. If everything is handled seamlessly, customer engagement will boost without a doubt.

• And considering that its tools (including live chat options) are so easy to use, it’s probably going to be easier for a small business to get integrated and set up.
• You can choose from a selection of templates that will match your brand, or you can start creating your design from scratch.
• The top alternatives to Zendesk are HubSpot, Freshdesk, Help Scout, Zoho Desk, Salesforce Service Cloud, and Intercom.
• They’ve been rated as one of the easy live chat solutions with more integrated options.
• There is no harm in testing the waters before committing to one or the other, as both Zendesk and Intercom offer free trials.
• Also, this software offers a feature called ‘Business Messenger’ that comes with its own AI chatbot.

There are several great options available that provide excellent customer service. Are you looking for an alternative to Zendesk to provide excellent customer service? From Intercom to HubSpot Service Hub, there are several high-quality options that can make a huge difference in your customer service experience. In this article, we will explore the best-rated alternatives to Zendesk and discuss what makes each of them unique. Also, their in-app messenger is worth a separate mention as it’s one of their distinctive tools (especially since Zendesk doesn’t really have one).

Zendesk Chat Pricing

If you need to have access to integrations right out the box, Zendesk is the big winner here. If you’re code savvy and you’re really tied to a particular web service there is an API available for creating integrations. The last button in the bottom left of the screen is a link to the Admin home page, here you’ll find the tools you need to configure Zendesk.

This allows agents to work on their own device anytime and anywhere. LiveAgent is an Intercom alternative you might want to consider as it offers a number of support features that Intercom doesn’t. Built-in call center support, SLA management, audit logs, and success managers are all available with LiveAgent’s tool. Crisp’s top features include co-browsing, a CRM, a shared inbox, a chatbot, a ticketing system, and more. Plus, it has a number of integrations to make the process even easier for your team, like Slack, Zapier, Salesforce, and WhatsApp.

Customers

But Zendesk UI is pretty straightforward, so if you need an uncomplicated system to help customers, collaborate and manage projects; choose Zendesk. You can’t have more than 5 employees, and your user base must be small; 1000 people reached per month. If you want to meet these requirements, you must have a niche and your product must solve a very critical problem for investors to believe in your product enough to invest more than $1 million. You can also create a product tour guide to help new customers understand your product. It demystifies your product by showing them how to use all your product features. They both have this program to help companies in their early stage acquire customers and serve these customers effectively.

There are even instances where customers don’t receive the first response in more than seven days. 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 has over 1,300 integrations, compared to Intercom’s 300+ apps, making it the leader in this category. However, you can browse their respective sites to find which tools each platform supports.

Intercom – Intercom w

Want to automate scenarios that require taking actions across multiple apps? Richpanel has prebuilt integrations with 20+ apps and provides a powerful APIs to connect more. Replace Zendesk completely with a help desk that’s built for speed. Easy to use UI and customer context helps agents resolve faster without switching tabs. Best for Teams looking for an advanced platform to engage with customers in meaningful ways and analyze customer feedback in real-time.

• But it’s also a given that many people will approach their reviews to Zendesk and Intercom with some specific missions in mind, and that’s bound to change how they feel about the platforms.
• Help Scout’s shared inbox makes it easy to collaborate on customer support issues and ensures the customer experience is seamless from all sides.
• Automate most of the tasks so customers don’t need to contact you in the first place.
• What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously.
• It gives detailed contact profiles enriched by company data, behavioral data, conversation data, and other custom fields.
• 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.

Agents can participate in forums and turn forum posts into tickets; they also can turn community-post replies into articles for future customers. Community forums enable customers to assist each other by asking questions and sharing tips, experiences, and best practices–creating a unique, user-based, searchable information hub. Zendesk’s chatbot, Answer Bot, automatically answers customer questions asynchronously in up to 40 languages–via any text-based channel. Intercom’s help center allows you to draft and organize collections of articles, accessible to customers via a search bar in the Messenger widget. Operator, Intercom’s automation engine, empowers Intercom chatbots to gather key information from each website visitor to qualify leads and route customers to the right destination.

Customer Outreach and Engagement That Doesn’t Come at a Premium

It is also ideal for businesses who are searching for conversational chatbot functionality. Their AI-powered chatbot can enable your business to boost engagement and improve marketing efforts in real-time. However, if you are looking for a robust messaging solution with customer support features, go for Intercom. Its intuitive messenger can help your business boost engagement and improve sales and marketing efforts. In general, Zendesk offers a wide range of live chat features such as customizable chat widgets, automatic greetings, offline messaging, and chat triggers. In addition to these features, Intercom offers messaging automation and real-time visitor insights.

Do note, that if your primary requirement is live chat then it’s only available in their highest tier which is around $50/mo/user. At that price point, it’s not too far away from where Intercom stands. Unlike platforms like Jetdocs, which gives you unlimited departments in their pro plan, Zoho limits you to 15 departments even on their highest tier. It’s much easier if you decide to go with the Zendesk Suite, which includes Support, Chat, Talk, and Guide tools. There are two options there — Professional for $109 or Enterprise for $179 if you pay monthly. The difference between the two is that the Professional subscription lacks some things like chat widget unbranding, custom agent roles, multiple help centers, etc.

Drift Customers Reviews Page

It can automatically suggest necessary help articles to customers and connect them to an agent if the need arises. Moreover, your customer service operators can anticipate what a visitor or customer is going to type next and accordingly transfer chats to relevant members to reduce the resolution time. You can add individual operator greetings, create canned responses, and engage potential leads by giving them product tours. Once, the ticket is created, customers get a notification that their issue or request has been received and registered. Meanwhile, robust ticketing features such as ticket routing, time tracking, CSAT ratings, service level agreements, etc. ensure your agents are always a step ahead. Intercom has been marketing itself as a business messaging platform right from the start.

• You can use it for customer support, but that’s not its core strength.
• Both tools offer robust features and attractive solutions, but they are not free of weaknesses, and none of them could be called the leader of customer-centric communications.
• However, it is possible Intercom’s support is superior at the premium level.
• These plans are not inclusive of the add-ons or access to all integrations.
• The debate rages between WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce for best ecomm platform — we’ll help you find the best one for you.
• You don’t worry about being looked at as incompetent, you can help customers resolves issues even when you’re not in the office with AI chatbots.

If you’re out there looking for a simple yet robust tool with cool features, such as collision detection, try Help Scout as soon as possible. What makes Help Scout a good alternative to Zendesk is the ease that comes with a unified dashboard that boosts team collaboration, thanks to its modern interface. I mean that this product fully operates on your IT system essentials, such as handling tickets, managing assets, and eliminating all the manual work.

Zendesk Overview

Then we can do Twilio for SMS, Urban Airship, which is actually for in-app notifications like web and so on, and then Slack and Zapier for anything else. So we’re really seeing, we’re really set up with email, and if you want anything else, you have to do it yourself. You have to integrate either with the direct API or find something, maybe within Zapier or something else, that can help you do that.