Zendesk vs Intercom: Customer Experience Comparison

Both app stores include many popular integrations, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Zapier. Because Intercom started as a live chat service, its messenger functionality is very robust. It feels very modern, and Intercom offers some advanced messenger features that Zendesk does not. 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. Zendesk has many amazing team collaboration and communication features, like whisper mode, which lets multiple agents chime in to help each other without the customer knowing.

• Choosing the ideal customer service tool is definitely not the easiest of decisions your business will ever make.
• But Zendesk UI is pretty straightforward, so if you need an uncomplicated system to help customers, collaborate and manage projects; choose Zendesk.
• This gets you unlimited email addresses and email templates in both text form and HTML.
• Altogether, this can significantly impact affordability in the long term.
• You can publish your knowledge base articles, divide them by categories and also integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience.
• Zoho’s support features include automation, AI chatbots, self-service support, and omnichannel communication.

This live chat software allows companies, such as ours, to have real conversations with customers. Intercom software is designed to resemble the messaging apps we use every day, Intercom allows you to talk to consumers from inside your app, across your website, and via email. With Intercom, it is self-explanatory where customers need to address their queries. There is a blue chat box in the right-hand corner of our software where customers pop in their queries.

Top Differences Between Gorgias and Intercom

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. Businesses of all sizes can rely on the Zendesk customer service platform and benefit from workflow management, powerful AI tools, robust insights, and more. If that sounds good to you, sign up for a free demo to see our software in action and get started. Intercom enables customers to self-serve through its messaging platform. Agents can easily find resources for customers from their agent workspace.

• Meanwhile, robust ticketing features such as ticket routing, time tracking, CSAT ratings, service level agreements, etc. ensure your agents are always a step ahead.
• Let’s just say, I’ve tried every single help desk on the market (and continue to evaluate new solutions), and yet I keep finding myself coming back to Help Scout, and here’s why…
• Try out mParticle and see how to integrate and orchestrate customer data the right way for your business.
• We cut the outsourced support agents by half and saved $100K in salaries.
• Customers won’t need to leave your app or website to find the help they need.Zendesk, on the other hand, will redirect the customer to a new web page.
• Your business is unique and that’s what’s going to make you grow.

After starting life as a simple chat widget, Intercom has added lots of new features to its messaging platform, but catering for customer support seems like more of an afterthought. Whatever people are using to communicate with each other, whether it be online or over the phone, they expect to also be able to talk to the businesses they use with those same tools and platforms. Among the many challenges facing businesses today is the pressing need to meet their customers where they are.

Integrate with your existing Help Desk

However, with Zendesk, agents can gain relevant context by viewing a customer’s profile and past interactions. This helps them offer fast and more personalized chat responses. Moreover, features such as typing indicators, delivery events, and rich message types like emojis, GIFs, etc. can give life to any conversation. In this section, we will be doing an in-depth analysis of the various help desk, live chat, and knowledge base features of these tools.

Today’s digital world means more automation for every business. Overall, when comparing Zendesk to Intercom, Zendesk’s features will probably win out over time. But the most important thing is that you get a help desk that you believe in—and that you integrate it into a website as thoroughly as possible. 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. Any business knows that the front desk is where everything happens.

Direct to your Inbox

You can even create an internal knowledge base to keep your agents well-trained and ready to delight customers. 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.

The actual visual work is actually very similar to what you would see at somewhere like Mixpanel or Amplitude or really any event tracking analytics tool. You have events, you have user attributes, you identify users, and so on. So really from the visual perspective, all three of them would be very similar, if you look at just integrations, like an app store, or if you go to different tools, Intercom will do much better. Now all of them will tend to have an API you can work with, that you can send data to, so we don’t really compare on that. We assume that, if we wanted to work directly with the API, we do that. The point is to find SDKs that could make that a little easier.

What content is publishing Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk on Social Media?

A collection of these reports can enable your business to identify the right resources responsible for bringing engagement to your business. 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. Intercom offers an easy way to nurture your qualified leads (prospects) into customers with Intercom Series. Using Intercom Series, you can create rules that trigger when the sales campaign begins, choose a target audience, and set the time you want to follow up, whether via email, messenger, or within your product. 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.

This customized dashboard will help you see metrics that you’d like to focus on regularly. 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. Use HubSpot to deepen your relationship with your customers, elevate their voice, and provide a best-in-class experience. HubSpot’s Solution Partner Program is a network of over a thousand agencies to help you resource your marketing strategy with HubSpot.

Zapier Automation Platform

There is a simple email integration tool for whatever email provider you regularly use. This gets you unlimited email addresses and email templates in both text form and HTML. There is automatic email archiving and incoming email authentication.

In addition to these features, Intercom offers messaging automation and real-time visitor insights. You can also add apps to your Intercom Messenger home to help users and visitors get what they need, without having to start a conversation. Intercom’s app store has popular integrations for things like WhatsApp, Stripe, Instagram, and Slack. There is a really useful one for Shopify to provide customer support for e-commerce operations.

Self-service that’s light years ahead

Zendesk also has the Z Bot, which will take your knowledge base game to the next level instantly. It can automatically suggest relevant articles to customers reducing the workload for your support agents. Whether you’ve just started searching for a customer support tool or have been using one for a while, chances are you know about both Zendesk and Intercom. The former is one of the oldest and most reliable solutions on the market, while the latter sets the bar high in terms of innovative and out-of-the-box features. Is it as simple as knowing whether you want software strictly for customer support (like Zendesk) or for some blend of customer relationship management and sales support (like Intercom)? One place Intercom really shines as a standalone CRM is its data utility.

For businesses looking for basic chat and messaging features, Intercom charges a flat fee of $59 per month for its Start plan with one user and $119 per month for its Grow plan with up to 5 users. It sets the perfect platform for collaboration between your sales and support teams. For instance, you can automatically assign sales inquiries and support requests to the right teams or individual team members. Moreover, you can view in-depth information about who you’re chatting with right alongside conversations. Intercom’s chat tool, also called the Intercom Messenger, looks quite modern and offers advanced features that many chat tools don’t have. With Zendesk, you can easily sort or filter your tickets using parameters such as date, ticket priority, tags, source, and more.

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Customers now expect a more personalized experience, and businesses try to give them the best service possible for their satisfaction. While Zendesk and Freshdesk are known in the customer service industry, it’s also good to know that other alternatives are worth considering. For example, Customerly, the product we build, is an advanced behavioral messaging platform and an exciting option to consider.

No credit card is required and there are no cancellation fees. If no payment method is added at the end of the trial period, the account is deleted 90 days after the trial expiration date. Get to a resolution faster by switching to voice calls and share your screen – without switching to another platform. Powerful analytics to help you understand the reason for contact and generate ideas for automation.

The Intercom team will usually answer to all questions on this forum. If you’re code savvy and you’re really tied to a particular web service there is an API available for creating integrations. You can see exactly if your support metadialog.com volume is increasing, if your team is responding fast enough to your users and leads, and who on your team is the busiest. Your support insights will show you data about your signed up users and visitors to your site.

It enables you to get quality product feedback from the right customers at the right time through the app or by email. Intercom assists with the onboarding and retention of customers through targeted email and in-app messages triggered by time or behavior. Therefore, Intercom may be a better fit for larger businesses with multiple agents helping people.

• The Zendesk marketplace is also where you can get a lot of great add-ons.
• Zendesk – Founded in 2007, Zendesk has been around the longest of the customer support tools, and has become the 800 pound Gorilla of the customer support world.
• Intercom on the other hand is a Conversational Relationship Platform (CRP).
• While it is feature rich, it is less intuitive than a tool like Gorgias and requires more development resources to set up and optimize.
• You pay a monthly fee for a product, and then there is – sorry – there’s a monthly fee for the product which is tied to actual people.
• The more expensive Intercom plans offer AI-powered content cues, triage, and conversation insights.

Once customers send their questions, the team members linked to customer support at Hire-Hive are notified via email. Intercom software is simple, personal, Intuitive, and Informative. The company prides itself on building software that offers the best customer experiences. Zendesk stimulates business growth and helps companies to support customers across all channels. The customer service platform helps businesses to personalize users’ experiences to deliver excellent customer service. Founded by Mikkel Svane, Alexander Aghassipour, and Morten Primdahl in 2007, the company has now customers around the world and defines itself as the world leader in the ticketing system industry.