Zendesk vs Intercom Head to Head Comparison in 2024

Compared to Zendesk and Intercom, Helpwise offers competitive and transparent pricing plans. Its straightforward pricing structure ensures businesses get access to the required features without complex tiers or hidden costs, making it an attractive option for cost-conscious organizations. With Messagely, you can increase your customer satisfaction and solve customers’ issues while they’re still visiting your site. In short, Zendesk is perfect for large companies looking to streamline their customer support process; Intercom is great for smaller companies looking for advanced customer service features.

It provides a real-time feed and historical data, so agents can respond instantly to consumer queries, as well as learn from past CX trends. By using its workforce management functionality, businesses can analyze employee performance, and implement strategies to improve them. While not included with its customer service suite, it offers a full-fledged standalone CRM called Zendesk Sell.

Zendesk vs Intercom: Feature-by-Feature Comparison

So, whether you’re a startup or a global giant, Zendesk’s got your back for top-notch customer support. Zendesk lets you chat with customers through email, chat, social media, or phone. However, for businesses seeking a more cost-effective and user-friendly solution, Hiver presents a compelling alternative. It works on top of your inbox and offers essential helpdesk functionalities. Moreover, for users who require more dedicated and personalized support, Zendesk charges an additional premium. With Explore, you can share and collaborate with anyone customer service reports.

In this article, we’ll compare Zendesk vs Intercom to find out which is the right customer support tool for you. Zendesk has a broad range of security and compliance features to protect customer data privacy, such as SSO (single sign-on) and native content redaction for sensitive data. In comparison, Intercom’s reporting and analytics are limited in scope when it comes to consumer behavior metrics, custom reporting, and custom metrics. Provide a clear path for customer questions to improve the shopping experience you offer. Customerly’s CRM is designed to help businesses build stronger relationships by keeping customer data organized and actionable. Simply put, we believe that our Aura AI chatbot is a game-changer when it comes to automating your customer service.

Its proactive support features, unified inbox, and customizable bots are highly beneficial for businesses looking to engage customers dynamically and manage conversations effortlessly. Zendesk excels in providing in-depth performance metrics for your support team. It offers  comprehensive insights on ticket volume, agent performance, customer satisfaction, first contact resolution rates and more. Intercom generally has the edge when it comes to user interface and design. With its in-app messenger, the UI resembles a chat interface, making interactions feel conversational.

Intercom doesn’t really provide free stuff, but they have a tool called Platform, which is free. The free Intercom Platform lets you see who your customers are and what they do in your workspace. It has very limited customization options in comparison to its competitors. While Intercom and Zendesk both offer robust features, they may not be the perfect fit for everyone. To help you explore more options, we’ve put together a list of the best Zendesk alternatives as well as the best Intercom alternatives you might want to consider.

HubSpot is trusted by over 205,000 businesses in more than 135 countries.

You can create these knowledge base articles in your target audience’s native language as their software is multilingual. 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. By aiming to resolve most customer conversations without human intervention, Intercom allows teams to focus on higher-value interactions. This not only increases customer satisfaction but also reduces operational costs. One stand out automation feature is its co-pilot, also known as Fin AI Copilot. It is an AI-powered assistant that functions as a knowledge base search tool, equipping agents with instant answers when they interact with customers, directly within the Intercom inbox.

• ThriveDesk empowers small businesses to manage real-time customer communications.
• While they like the ease of use this product offers its users, they’ve indeed rated them low in terms of services.
• Furthermore, data on customer reviews, installation numbers, and ecommerce integrations is not readily available.
• 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.

With its integrated suite of applications, Intercom provides a comprehensive solution that caters to businesses seeking a unified ecosystem to manage customer interactions. This scalability ensures businesses can align their support infrastructure with their evolving requirements, ensuring a seamless customer experience. Zendesk’s pricing structure provides increasing levels of features and capabilities as businesses move up the tiers. This scalability allows organizations to adapt their support operations to their expanding customer base. Higher-tier plans in Zendesk come packed with advanced functionalities such as chatbots, customizable knowledge bases, and performance dashboards. These features can add significant value for businesses aiming to implement more sophisticated support capabilities as they scale.

Brief History of Zendesk

Zendesk has an app available for both Android and iOS, which makes it easy to stay connected with customers while on the go. 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.

If delivering an outstanding customer experience and employee experience is your top priority, Zendesk should be your top pick over Intercom. Zendesk has the CX expertise to help businesses of all sizes scale their service experience without compromise. Make life easier for your customers, your agents and yourself with Sprinklr’s all-in-one contact center platform.

Features like macros, triggers, and automations allow businesses to create custom workflows tailored to their specific needs. By integrating seamlessly into your app, it offers an intuitive in-app chat experience that fosters direct customer engagement. What makes Intercom https://chat.openai.com/ 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.

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. Picking customer service software to run your business is not a decision you make lightly.

Intercom generally receives positive feedback for its customer support, with users appreciating the comprehensive features and team-oriented tools. However, there are occasional criticisms regarding the effectiveness of its AI chatbot and some interface navigation challenges. As any free tool, the functionalities there are quite limited, but nevertheless.

Essential Plan

Customers have also noted that they can implement Zendesk AI five times faster than other solutions. 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. We also adhere to numerous industry standards and regulations, such as HIPAA, SOC2, ISO 27001, HDS, FedRAMP LI-SaaS, ISO 27018, and ISO 27701.

Intercom has received generally positive customer reviews, with an overall rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars on Gartner Peer Insights. Customers appreciate the platform’s ease of use, flexibility, and robust feature set. However, some users have reported issues zendesk vs intercom with the platform’s pricing and customer support. When it comes to customer support and services, both Intercom and Zendesk offer robust solutions. In this section, we will take a closer look at the customer support options provided by each platform.

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. While some of these functionalities related to AI are included in the Zendesk suite, others are part of advanced AI add-ons.

While both Zendesk and Intercom offer the essentials, like ticketing, issue resolution, and automation, the devil’s in the details when it comes to which is best for your unique needs. Their reports are attractive, dynamic, and integrated right out of the box. You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads. In this paragraph, let’s explain some common issues users usually ask about when choosing between Zendesk and Intercom platforms.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. 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. You can even improve efficiency and transparency by setting up task sequences, defining sales triggers, and strategizing with advanced forecasting and reporting tools. 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.

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. 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. 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.

Agents can easily view ongoing interactions, and take over from Aura AI at any moment if they feel intervention is needed. Our AI also accelerates query resolution by intelligently routing tickets and providing contextual information to agents in real-time. Aura AI also excels in simplifying complex tasks by collecting data conversationally and automating intricate processes. When things get tricky, Aura AI smartly escalates the conversation to a human agent, ensuring that no customer is left frustrated.

Zendesk offers various pricing tiers depending on the functionalities needed, with plans ranging from $49 to $215 per agent per month. This gives businesses the flexibility to choose a plan that best suits their needs and budget. Zendesk provides a good set of tools for managing customer relationships, but it requires additional enrollment in ‘Sell’ for a comprehensive CRM solution. The best help desks are also ticketing systems, which lets support reps create a support ticket out of issues that can then be tracked.

It also helps promote automation in routine tasks by automating repetitive processes and helps agents save time and errors. Its messaging also has real-time notifications and automated responses, enhancing customer communication. In today’s business world, customer service is fast-paced, and customers have higher expectations.

Users also point out that it can take a couple of hours to get used to the flow of tickets, which doesn’t happen in CRM, and they aren’t pleased with the product’s downtime. Zendesk has over 150,000 customer accounts from 160 countries and territories. They have offices all around the world including countries such as Mexico City, Tokyo, New York, Paris, Singapore, São Paulo, London, and Dublin. Boost your lead gen and sales funnels with Flows – no-code automation paths that trigger at crucial moments in the customer journey. 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.

With smart automation and AI, it streamlines case handling, prioritization and agent support. Not only is optimizing customer experiences for the weak of the heart, but also is keeping track of each experience, at each touchpoint. Customer interactions are often spilled all over the place and making sense of them all Chat GPT can be tricky. Here are the benefits of using a customer experience tool for your business. Intercom and Zendesk offer robust integration capabilities that allow businesses to streamline their workflow and improve customer support. Choosing Intercom or Zendesk will depend on your specific needs and requirements.

But you also need to consider the fact that Intercom has many add-ons that cost extra, especially their AI features. Pricing for both services varies based on the specific needs and scale of your business. Both Zendesk and Intercom have very different and distinct user interfaces. In this guide, I compare Zendesk and Intercom – on pricing and features – to help you make an informed decision. 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).

Messagely’s chatbots are powerful tools for qualifying and converting leads while your team is otherwise occupied or away. With chatbots, you can generate leads to hand over to your sales team and solve common customer queries without the need of a customer service representative behind a keyboard. Meanwhile, Intercom excels with its comprehensive AI automation capabilities, all built on a unified AI system. That being said, while both platforms offer extensive features, they can be costly, especially for smaller enterprises.

Discover the blueprint for exceptional customer experiences and unlock new pathways for business success. You can access detailed customer data at a glance while chatting, enabling you to make informed decisions in real time. The customer journey timeline provides a clear view of customer activities, helping you understand behaviors and tailor your responses accordingly.

Using any plan, this integration is available to all customers, making the customer support experience and onboarding smooth. On the other hand, Intercom’s chatbots have more advanced features but do not sacrifice simplicity and ease of use. It helps businesses create highly personalized chatbots for interactive customer communication. Zendesk and Intercom offer basic features, including live chat, a help desk, and a pre-built knowledge base. They have great UX and a normal pricing range, making it difficult for businesses to choose one, as both software almost looks similar in their offerings. Intercom focuses on real-time customer messaging, while Zendesk provides a comprehensive suite for ticketing, knowledge base, and self-service support.