Zendesk vs Intercom: Which Solution to Choose in 2024?

It’s virtually impossible to predict what you’ll pay for Intercom at the end of the day. They charge for customer service representative seats and people reached, don’t reveal their prices, and offer tons of custom add-ons at additional cost. Each successful customer service depends on the efficiency of its ticketing software. Willing to know more about help desk software import and export and customer service ​​enhancement? The customer service reps I talked to were very helpful during the entire process. The cost will mostly lean on the business data volume you need to transfer, the complexity of your requirements, and the options you’ll select or customizations you’ll inquire.

Intercom’s solution aims to streamline high-volume ticket influx and provide personalized, conversational support. It also includes extensive integrations with over 350 CRM, email, ticketing, and reporting tools. The platform is recognized for its ability to resolve a significant portion of common questions automatically, ensuring faster response times. Choosing the right customer service platform is pivotal for enhancing business-client interactions. In this context, Zendesk and Intercom emerge as key contenders, each offering distinct features tailored to dynamic customer service environments.

The overall sentiment from users indicates a satisfactory level of support, although opinions vary. 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.

In this paragraph, let’s explain some common issues that users usually ask about when choosing between Zendesk and Intercom platforms. Though the Intercom chat window says that their customer success team typically replies https://chat.openai.com/ in a few hours, don’t expect to receive any real answer in chat for at least a couple of days. To sum things up, one can get really confused trying to make sense of the Zendesk suite pricing, let alone calculate costs.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. The Migration Wizard will includes measure for ensuring your data security during all phases of the migration process. To provide the utmost guard of your support service records whether they are in import or at rest, we apply valid runthrough. Here is contained handling frequent security analysis, keeping our servers guarded, obeying several commands, and more. Intercom has limited scalability compared to Zendesk, which is unsuitable for large-scale enterprises.

The final prices are revealed after engaging in sales demos and are not revealed upfront. This lack of transparency can create budgeting problems for businesses. 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.

Zendesk excels in its ticketing system, offering users an intuitive platform for collaboration among support agents. Its robust workflows streamline the ticket resolution system and efficiently handle all customer complaints. It also enables agents to perform customized workflow management, assign tickets to the right agent for request handling, and track the ticket’s progress. However, businesses must choose between Zendesk vs Intercom based on their needs and requirements. In today’s business world, customer service is fast-paced, and customers have higher expectations. To enhance customer satisfaction, businesses must equip their teams with customer support solutions and customer service software.

Zendesk’s help center tools are slightly better, but Intercom’s chatbot is more robust

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 and Intercom are robust tools with a wide range of customer service and CRM features. For small companies and startups, Intercom offers a Starter plan — with a balanced suite of features from each of the solutions below — at $74 per month per user, billed annually. You can create an omnichannel CRM suite with a mix of productivity, collaboration, eCommerce, CRM, analytics, email marketing, social media, and other tools. Both app stores include many popular integrations, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Zapier. 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.

Does Zendesk have Intercom integration?

Here’s what you need to know about Zendesk vs. Intercom as customer support and relationship management tools. Intercom live chat is modern, smooth, and has many advanced features that other chat tools don’t. It’s highly customizable, too, so you can adjust it according to your website or product’s style. Basically, if you have a complicated support process, go with Zendesk, an excellent Intercom alternative, for its help desk functionality. If you’re a sales-oriented corporation, use Intercom for its automation options.

• But don’t just take our word for it—listen to what customers say about why they picked Zendesk.
• Starting at $19 per user per month, it’s also on the cheaper end of the spectrum compared to high-end CRMs like ActiveCampaign and HubSpot.
• On the other hand, Intercom is generally praised for its support features, despite facing challenges with its AI chatbot and the complexity of its help articles.
• Plus, Zendesk’s integration with various channels ensures customers can always find a convenient way to reach out.

But this solution is great because it’s an all-in-one tool with a modern live chat widget, allowing you to easily improve your customer experiences. At the same time, Zendesk looks slightly outdated and can’t offer some features. Intercom, while differing from Zendesk, offers specialized features aimed at enhancing customer relationships.

There are many features to help bigger customer service teams collaborate more effectively — like private notes or a real-time view of who’s handling a given ticket at the moment, etc. At the same time, the vendor offers powerful reporting capabilities to help you grow and improve your business. Founded in 2007, Zendesk started as a ticketing tool for customer success teams. It was later that they started adding all kinds of other features, like live chat for customer conversations. They bought out the Zopim live chat solution and integrated it with their toolset.

Our Zendesk import solutions also include the ability to work with CSV data files, allowing you to execute actual imports with ease. You can choose from various import types and options, making Help Desk Migration the go-to platform for all your Zendesk import automation needs. Whether it’s ticket imports, additional import types, or automating the entire Zendesk import process, we’ve got you covered.

Select the most suitable time to start the help desk migration workflow. Start by exporting historical records and continue with move ahead to the Delta function to import your during migration changed data entities. 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.

Intercom is a customer support platform known for its effective messaging and automation, enhancing in-context support within products, apps, or websites. It features the Intercom Messenger, which works with existing support tools for self-serve or live support. ThriveDesk empowers small businesses to manage real-time customer communications.

You’d probably want to know how much it costs to get each of the platforms for your business, so let’s talk money now. You can create dozens of articles in a simple, intuitive WYSIWYG text editor, divide them by categories and sections, and customize with your custom themes. All customer questions, be it via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel, are landing in one dashboard, where your agents can solve them quickly and efficiently. It guarantees continuous omnichannel support that meets customer expectations.

One of Zendesk’s standout features that we need to shine a spotlight on is its extensive marketplace of third-party integrations and extensions. Imagine having the power to connect your helpdesk solution with a wide range of tools and applications that your team already uses. Whether it’s syncing data with your CRM, enhancing communication via messaging platforms, or automating tasks with productivity apps, Zendesk makes it possible.

Security and compliance

Nodes come with global operations and settings, as well as app-specific parameters that can be configured. You can also use the HTTP Request node to query data from any app or service with a REST API. 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.

But sooner or later, you’ll have to decide on the subscription plan, and here’s what you’ll have to pay. Zendesk is a ticketing system before anything else, and its ticketing functionality is overwhelming in the best possible way. They’ve been marketing themselves as a messaging platform right from the beginning. Once connected, you can add Zendesk Support to your inbox, and start creating Zendesk tickets from Intercom conversations. Before you start, you’ll need to retrieve your Zendesk credentials and create a Zendesk API key. You can do this by going to your settings within Zendesk (click on the cog on the left hand side), and navigating to API in the ‘Channels’ section.

• Higher-tier plans in Zendesk come packed with advanced functionalities such as chatbots, customizable knowledge bases, and performance dashboards.
• There are many features to help bigger customer service teams collaborate more effectively — like private notes or a real-time view of who’s handling a given ticket at the moment, etc.
• You can use it for customer support, but that’s not its core strength.
• This feature ensures that each customer request is handled by the best-suited agent, improving the overall efficiency of the support team.
• It also excels in the silo approach in a company and allows easy access to information to anyone in the company through this integration.

Examine the details of data types you can migrate incorporating automation service without extra assistance from tech service reps. As we delve into the features of Zendesk, we can identify the following weaknesses regarding user experience. Zendesk also allows Advanced AI and Advanced data privacy and protection plans, which cost $50 per month for each Advanced add-on. For large-scale businesses, the budget for such investments is usually higher than for startups, but they need to analyze if the investment is worth it.

Add comments to Zendesk tickets when new tags are added to Intercom users

Intercom has more customization features for features like bots, themes, triggers, and funnels. Using this, agents can chat across teams within a ticket via email, Slack, or Zendesk’s ticketing system. This packs all resolution information into a single ticket, so there’s no extra searching or backtracking needed to bring a ticket through to resolution, even if it involves multiple agents.

Similarly, the ability of Zendesk to scale also makes it the best fit for enterprise-level organizations. 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. Zendesk allows businesses to group their resources in the help center, providing customers with self-service personalized support.

Overall, I actually liked Zendesk’s user experience better than Intercom’s in terms of its messaging dashboard. 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. The two essential things that Zendesk lacks in comparison to Intercom are in-app messages and email marketing tools. On the other hand, Intercom lacks many ticketing functionality that can be essential for big companies with a huge client support load. If you thought Zendesk prices were confusing, let me introduce you to the Intercom charges.

As a result, companies can identify trends and areas for improvement, allowing them to continuously improve their support processes and provide better service to their customers. This feature ensures that each customer request is handled by the best-suited agent, improving the overall efficiency of the support team. It really shines in its modern messenger interface, making real-time chat a breeze. Its multichannel support is more focused on engaging customers through its chat and messaging systems, including mobile carousels and interactive communication tools.

Both Zendesk and Intercom have AI capabilities that deserve special mention. Zendesk’s AI (Fin) helps with automated responses, ensuring your customers get quick answers. On the other hand, Intercom’s AI-powered chatbots and messaging are designed to enhance your marketing and sales efforts, giving you an edge in the competitive market. But keep in mind that Zendesk is viewed more as a support and ticketing solution, while Intercom is CRM functionality-oriented.

Zendesk offers simple chatbots and provides businesses with straightforward chatbot creation tools, allowing them to set up automated responses and assist customers with common queries. Zendesk may be unable to Chat PG give the agents more advanced features or customization options for chatbots. On the contrary, Intercom is far less predictable when it comes to pricing and can cost hundreds/thousands of dollars per month.

Zendesk has more all-in-one potential with additional CRM, but Intercom comes closer to being a standalone CRM out of the box

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. Before choosing the customer support software, it is crucial to consider the size of the business.

In addition to Intercom vs Zendesk, alternative helpdesk solutions are available in the market. ThriveDesk is a feature-rich helpdesk solution that offers a comprehensive set of tools to manage customer support effectively. Intercom has a different approach, one that’s all about sales, marketing, and personalized messaging.

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. 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. At Help Desk Migration, we follow all the necessary security standards to safeguard your data during the transfer.

Customer support and security are vital aspects to consider when evaluating helpdesk solutions like Zendesk and Intercom. Let’s examine and compare how each platform addresses intercom and zendesk these crucial areas to ensure effective support operations and data protection. Gain valuable insights with Intercom’s analytics and reporting capabilities.

We have implemented both organizational and technical measures to ensure your data security. Being my first time dealing with a migration, they were very patient with me as I guided myself through the process of migrating data. They were very prompt and thorough throughout the entire process, very willing to help ensure that the migration is done correctly, and answered all questions I had in a very timely manner. Help Desk Migration accomplishes to top security principles, providing maximum safety for your business data.

A trigger is an event that starts a workflow, and an action is an event a Zap performs. With Zapier’s 6,000 integrations, you can unify your tools within a connected system to improve your team’s efficiency and deepen their impact. With Zapier, you can integrate everything from basic data entry to end-to-end processes.

With Zendesk, you get next-level AI-powered support software that’s intuitively designed, scalable, and cost-effective. Compare Zendesk vs. Intercom and future-proof your business with reliable, easy-to-use software. Intercom’s reporting is average compared to Zendesk, as it offers some standard reporting and analytics tools. Its analytics do not provide deeper insights into consumer interactions as well. Zendesk offers robust reporting capabilities, providing businesses with detailed insights into consumer interactions, ticketing systems, agent performance, and more.

Although Intercom offers an omnichannel messaging dashboard, it has slightly less functionality than Zendesk. 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. 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. Research by Zoho reports that customer relationship management (CRM) systems can help companies triple lead conversion rates. Those same tools also increase customer retention by 27% while saving 23% on sales and marketing costs.