To provide the right level of customer support, you need the right software, and there are plenty of features to consider. While the exact features can vary from product to product, a few are typically included. Zendesk chat allows businesses to reach out and connect to customers before they ask a question.

Sure, Intercom allows you to create articles and deliver a bot that answers customer questions with specific articles and resolves issues faster. As a rule, Intercom reviews are positive as many users praise the interface, the ease of use, and the deployment of the software. However, some users remarked that a developer is needed to properly install the software or run the risks of problems in the future. The Intercom Messenger, in particular, performs well compared to the Zendesk alternative.

Feature Set Comparison: Zendesk vs Intercom

But in case you are in search of something beyond these two, then ProProfs Chat can be an option. Now that we know a little about both tools, it is time to make an in-depth analysis and identify which one of these will be perfect for your business. Here’s a list of criteria we’ve used to differentiate the two for you. The three tiers—Suite Team, Suite Growth, and Suite Professional—also give you more options outside of Intercom’s static structure.

• The system allows every department to work collectively and send faster responses, organize messages across every channel easier, and maintain personal connections.
• Price (Discount offered on annual plans. For proactive agent collision as well as 24/7 email and chat support, you need to start with their Enterprise plan).
• It also offers several integrations with other tools and analytics to give insight into what’s support team is up to and the common issues customers are facing.
• This includes automatic delivery of help desk tickets to the correct department or agent, prioritization of inquiries based on severity, and escalation of urgent issues.
• Both platforms offer reporting dashboards out of the box, but Intercom’s real-time data will cost more.
• Though Intercom has a Surveys product, it’s an additional $49 per month.

Customers can search the help center by query keywords and sort through articles in 40 languages. Users with light access–such as knowledgeable agents and supervisors–can be added to tickets for browsing and feedback. While light agents cannot interact with the customer on the ticket, they can make notes and interact privately with other team members and agents involved with the ticket. In fact, agents can even add customers to private messaging chats when necessary, and the customer will receive the whole conversation history by email to ensure they’re up to date.

Overall impression (aka very subjective take on user experience):

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.

• If you thought Zendesk’s pricing was confusing, let me introduce you to Intercom’s pricing.
• Zendesk is a better solution to do strictly customer support but lacks some sales and marketing features of Intercom.
• When we compare Intercom and Zendesk, we realize that both the tools are quite expensive and may not be the right option for startups or small businesses, or for that matter, any business on a budget.
• Even though I think that’s a big plus on their behalf, it also makes the pricing page super complicated.
• Additionally, its omnichannel takes social media integration to the next level, thanks to communication channels, such as Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, and WhatsApp.
• This will not only help improve your live chat workflow, but the whole customer experience can benefit, too.

You may find that a more affordable alternative has all the features you need, while still being within your budget. In this guide, we’ll explore the top Intercom alternatives that will not only save you time but also keep your budget intact. Since the given prices are per agent, it can be expensive, especially when working with larger teams. It can help you to reach out to customers and help them complete purchases.

CRM Integrations: The Key to a More Efficient and Productive Team

Using Zendesk, you can create community forums where customers can connect, comment, and collaborate, creating a way to harness customers’ expertise and promote feedback. Community managers can also escalate posts to support agents when one-on-one help is needed. Zendesk’s Agent Workspace and Intercom’s Inbox have similar features to convert phone, chat, email, and social media support requests into tickets in a single inbox, making managing and responding to them easier.

However, with so many claiming to offer the fastest WordPress hosting out there, how do you decide which company to use? WordPress is an excellent solution for how to start a blog, plus we think blogs are super awesome! A premium upgrade will remove the branding of the chat box, although this isn’t metadialog.com necessary. Reduce waiting times with interactive guidance when users need it most. Highlight new, critical or undiscovered features to drive deeper engagement. Automation features can be configured to generate reports automatically, saving your representatives from repetitive data entry tasks.

Zendesk vs Intercom: the ultimate comparison

If you’re looking for a single solution to integrate all of your customer support tools, Zapier is the way to go. It allows you to create custom « zaps » (Zapier’s word for automations) that automate tasks in different apps. The Intercom vs. Zendesk pricing may be justified by the value-added services and minor features that they have for their all-in-one pricing. For example, for businesses that want just a couple of features, there are subscription packages. Each of such packages contains a set of tools from basic to advanced features. Also, this software offers a feature called ‘Business Messenger’ that comes with its own AI chatbot.

This robust platform offers a high-definition view of customer experiences by providing real-time insights into satisfaction, sentiment analysis, case resolution time, agent performance, and more. Front’s omnichannel, shared inbox allows you to collect customer messages from all your communication channels. This enables all departments to collaborate seamlessly, organizing their messages and delivering timely support to customers while maintaining a personal connection. Finally, Help Scout enables companies to create customer-facing self-service portals. These portals can include knowledge bases and other such content to help customers find the answers they’re looking for without needing to contact customer support. Zendesk’s suite provides an all-in-one solution for organizations needing a customer relationship management tool, help desk software, online knowledge management, team collaboration, and more.

Data Change Request –

Omnichannel support ensures accessibility via email, phone, live chat, social media, feedback widgets, web forms, and self-service portals. HubSpot’s live chat feature enables businesses to engage with website visitors in real time. It allows for automatic routing of chats to the appropriate team members, whether it’s your customer service team or sales team.

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. 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. Intercom stands out here due to its ability  to tailor sales workflows. You can also set up interactive product tours to highlight new features in-product and explain how they work.

The HubSpot CRM Platform

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. Intercom’s solution offers several use cases, meaning the product’s investments and success resources have a broad focus. But this also means the customer experience ROI tends to be lower than what it would be if you went with a best-in-class solution like Zendesk. Intercom enables customers to self-serve through its messaging platform. Agents can easily find resources for customers from their agent workspace. No matter how a customer contacts your business, your agents will have access to the tools and information they need to continue and close conversations on any channel.

Moreover, Intercom bots can converse naturally with customers by using conversation starters, and respond with self-help, and knowledge base articles. For automation and messaging at scale, you can choose from two plans- Accelerate ($499) or Scale ($999) per month for up to ten users, depending on your business needs. Intercom costs can go even higher with custom add-ons such as Product Tours (from $199/month, Advanced lead generation (from $499/month), Advanced customer engagement (from $499/month), etc.

Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

There is a really useful one for Shopify to provide customer support for e-commerce operations. HubSpot and Salesforce are also available when support needs to work with marketing and sales teams. Intercom bills itself first and foremost as a platform to make the business of customer service more personalized, among other things. They offer an advanced feature for customer data management that goes beyond basic CRM stuff. It gives detailed contact profiles enriched by company data, behavioral data, conversation data, and other custom fields.

Integrations are the best way to enhance the toolkit of your apps by connecting them for interoperable actions and features. Both Zendesk and Intercom have integration libraries, and you can also use a connecting tool like Zapier for added integrations and add-ons. 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.

For businesses with complex products — especially in SaaS — having these features can go a low way towards making it easier for support agents to resolve support tickets. Intercom doesn’t offer session replays, which are an essential tool if you want to understand how users are actually behaving in your product. Session replays are video-like recordings of user sessions in your web app. Even though Intercom doesn’t offer this feature natively, there are integrations for it — including ours — which we’ll delve into shortly. 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.