Zendesk vs Intercom: the ultimate comparison by Ana Khlystova HelpCrunch

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. These plans are not inclusive of the add-ons or access to all integrations. Once you add them all to the picture, their existing plans can turn out to be quite expensive. Zendesk also offers a straightforward interface to operators that helps them identify the entire interaction pathway with the customers.

What’s more, it helps its clients build an integrated community forum and help center to improve the support experience in real-time. You can use this support desk to help customers or you can forward potential new users to your sales department. You can create a help platform to assist users in guiding themselves, or you can use AI-enabled responses to create a more “human” like effect. Zendesk has more pricing options, which means you’re free to choose your tier from the get-go.

• Read these resources to learn more about why users choose Zendesk vs Intercom.
• Check these 7 Zendesk alternatives to improve your customer support.
• Zendesk is among the industry’s best ticketing and customer support software, and most of its additional functionality is icing on the proverbial cake.
• You can integrate different apps (like Google Meet or Stripe among others) with your messenger and make it a high end point for your customers.

What makes Intercom stand out from the crowd are their chatbots and lots of chat automation features that can be very helpful for your team. You can integrate different apps (like Google Meet or Stripe among others) with your messenger and make it a high end point for your customers. Zendesk also has the Answer Bot, which can take your knowledge base game to the next level instantly. It can automatically suggest your customer relevant articles reducing the workload for your support agents.

Zendesk vs. Intercom: An Overview

This single window allows your team members to combine several channels for better efficiency and improved customer experience. 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. Intercom offers advanced customer service through its automated functions and is suitable for businesses looking for a sophisticated customer support solution. Another advantage of using Intercom is that it not only enhances customer engagement but is also a great way to increase customer support teams’ productivity.

• There’s even on-the-spot translation built right in, which is extremely helpful.
• Using any plan, this integration is available to all customers, making the customer support experience and onboarding smooth.
• 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.
• You can use it for customer support, but that’s not its core strength.
• Overall, when comparing Zendesk to Intercom, Zendesk’s features will probably win out over time.

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.

Security features

If you want to get to the nitty-gritty of your customer service team’s performance, Zendesk is the way to go. It’s built for function over form — the layout is highly organized and clearly designed around ticket management. You get an immediate https://chat.openai.com/ overview of key metrics, such as ticket volume and agent performance as well as a summary of key customer data points. However, the latter is more of a support and ticketing solution, while Intercom is CRM functionality-oriented.

Not to mention marketing and sales tools, like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Google Analytics. One of Zendesk’s other key strengths has also been its massive library of integrations. It works seamlessly with over 1,000 business tools, like Salesforce, Slack, and Shopify. With its features and pricing, Zendesk is geared toward businesses that full in the range from mid-sized to enterprise-level. 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.

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 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. You could technically consider Intercom zendesk to intercom a CRM, but it’s really more of a customer-focused communication product. It isn’t as adept at purer sales tasks like lead management, list engagement, advanced reporting, forecasting, and workflow management as you’d expect a more complete CRM to be. Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates.

Right off the bat, Intercom’s Chatbot is more advanced and customizable. If you prioritize seamless, personalized customer interactions, it’s arguably the better option of the two. Having only Chat GPT appeared in 2011, Intercom lacks a few years of experience on Zendesk. It also made its name as a messaging-first platform for fostering personalized conversational experiences for customers.

Because of this, you’ll want to make sure you’re selecting a cloud-based CRM, like Zendesk, with strong security features. Zendesk meets global security and privacy compliance standards and includes features like single sign-on (SSO) to help provide protection against cyberattacks and keep your data safe. A sales CRM should also provide you with the benefits of pipeline management software.

Once the sync is complete, you’ll receive an email to your registered Intercom email address which confirms how many articles were synchronized. In the Response section, you can map data from the Zendesk API response to Conversation or People attributes. After setting up the Request, it is important to test it to ensure it creates the correct data in the connected third-party system.

To do this, input a Test value such as Message Body, Email, Full_name or Conversation ID and click Test to verify that the Custom Action is properly configured. Refer to How to create an authentication with Zendesk for Custom Actions for more details. Yes, you can integrate Pipedrive with Zendesk to access information between the two services organized in one place. 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. If a title has been set for a conversation it will use this to populate the resulting Zendesk ticket title.

Zendesk offers more flexibility with its pricing options and also has free services. In addition, the costs of Zendesk’s services are slightly easier to calculate. However, regardless of whether your choice is Zendesk or Intercom, you will be spending some time trying to figure out how much you will pay for the services. Has live chat analytics to monitor customer satisfaction, employee performance. Overall, Zendesk’s Chat is less customizable than Intercom’s but still has all the essentials.

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. Intercom has a wider range of uses out of the box than Zendesk, though by adding Zendesk Sell, you could more than make up for it. Both options are well designed, easy to use, and share some pretty key functionality like behavioral triggers and omnichannel-ality (omnichannel-centricity?). But with perks like more advanced chatbots, automation, and lead management capabilities, Intercom could have an edge for many users.

Moreover, these are new prices as they’re in the middle of changing their pricing policy right now (and they’re definitely not getting cheaper). If you thought Zendesk’s pricing was confusing, let me introduce you to Intercom’s pricing. It’s virtually impossible to predict what you’re going to pay for Intercom at end of the day. So when I realized lots of companies actually prefer Zendesk over Intercom, I was surprised. Now that we know the differences between Intercom vs. Zendesk, let’s analyze which one is the better service option. Grow faster with done-for-you automation, tailored optimization strategies, and custom limits.

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.

In a nutshell, both these companies provide great customer support. I tested both of their live chats and their support agents were answering in very quickly and right to the point. Zendesk team can be just a little bit faster depending on the time of the day. Overall, Zendesk has a slight edge over Intercom when it comes to ticketing capabilities. It provides a variety of customer service automation features like auto-closing tickets, setting auto-responses, and creating chat triggers to keep tickets moving automatically.

The result is that Zendesk generally wins on ratings when it comes to support capacity. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the hardest on your pocket. Zendesk can be more flexible and predictable in this area as you can buy different tools separately (or even use their limited versions for free).

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Admins will also like the fact that they can see the progress of all their teams and who all are actively answering a customer’s query in real-time. 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. There are four different subscription packages you can choose from, all of which also have Essential, Pro, and Premium options for businesses of different sizes. You’d need to chat with Intercom sales team for get the costs for the Premium subscription, though.

This helps the service teams connect to applications like Shopify, Jira, Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Slack, etc., all through Zendesk’s service platform. Handle conversations, manage tickets, and resolve issues quickly to improve your CSAT. Before choosing the customer support software, it is crucial to consider the size of the business.

Zendesk offers fast time to value, especially at the enterprise level. Its ability to scale with the businesses makes it an attractive option for growing companies. Its customizable options enable businesses to quickly gain value from its features by enhancing agility.

Agents can use this to anticipate and proactively address issues before the escalate, or even arise in the first place. It goes without saying that you can generate custom reports to hone in on particular areas of interest. 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. Yes, Zendesk has an Intercom integration that you can find in the Zendesk Marketplace—it’s free to install.

What is the difference between Zendesk and Intercom?

We also adhere to numerous industry standards and regulations, such as HIPAA, SOC2, ISO 27001, HDS, FedRAMP LI-SaaS, ISO 27018, and ISO 27701. Zendesk lacks in-app messages and email marketing tools, which are essential for big companies with heavy client support loads. Conversely, Intercom lacks ticketing functionality, which can also be essential for big companies. Intercom live chat is modern, smooth, and has many advanced features that other chat tools lack.

The Zendesk chat tool has most of the necessary features, like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers, and live chat analytics. You can also enable some forms for collecting user info on the go. It’s nothing fancy; it covers just basic customer communication needs. 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. Zendesk helps you manage and update your leads, analyze your pipeline, and create customizable reports on the go with our mobile CRM app.

Comments and tickets from these users will be mapped to a default inactive contact with name “Inactive Intercom Contact”. Just like Intercom, Zendesk’s customer service is quite disappointing. The only relief is that they do reach out to customers, but it gets too late. 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.

After switching to Intercom, you can start training Custom Answers for Fin AI Agent right away by importing your historic data from Zendesk. Fin AI Agent will use your history to recognize and suggest common questions to create answers for.

Honestly, when it comes to Zendesk, it is not the most modern tool out there. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk, though is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. To sum things up, one can get really confused trying to make sense of Zendesk’s pricing, let alone to calculate costs. 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. As we delve into the features of Zendesk, we can identify the following weaknesses regarding user experience.

It has a more sophisticated user interface and a wide range of features, such as an in-app messenger, an email marketing tool, and an AI-powered chatbot. At the same time, Zendesk looks slightly outdated and can’t offer some features. Pipedrive is limited to third-party customer service integrations and, unlike Zendesk, does not offer customer service software.

What’s really nice about this is that even within a ticket, you can switch between communication modes without changing views. So if an agent needs to switch from chat to phone to email (or vice versa) with a customer, it’s all on the same ticketing page. There’s even on-the-spot translation built right in, which is extremely helpful. Simply put, we believe that our Aura AI chatbot is a game-changer when it comes to automating your customer service.

At the same time, Fin AI Copilot background support to agents, acting as a personal, real-time AI assistant for dealing with inquiries. That being said, it sometimes lacks the advanced customization and automation offered by other AI-powered chatbots, like Intercom’s. 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.

Their template triggers are fairly limited with only seven options, but they do enable users to create new custom triggers, which can be a game-changer for agents with more complex workflows. Zendesk also packs some pretty potent tools into their platform, so you can empower your agents to do what they do with less repetition. 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.