Zendesk vs Intercom: Which is better? 2023

Intercom’s chatbot feels a little more robust than Zendesk’s (though it’s worth noting that some features are only available at the Engage and Convert tiers). You can set office hours, live chat with logged-in users via their user profiles, and set up a chatbot. Customization is more nuanced than Zendesk’s, but it’s still really straightforward to implement. You can opt for code via JavaScript or Rails or even integrate directly with the likes of Google Tag Manager, WordPress, or Shopify. Overall, I actually liked Zendesk’s user experience better than Intercom’s in terms of its messaging dashboard.

We are able to keep our service free of charge thanks to cooperation with some of the vendors, who are willing to pay us for traffic and sales opportunities provided by our website. Zendesk’s dashboard ties together your customer interactions from every possible channel. This makes it easy for agents to manage requests and communicate with customers more efficiently.

Contact Center of the Future: Empower Agents with AI…

If you only need the services Intercom offers, then you’ll only spend around $75 a month for two seats. Zendesk is around the same price for its smallest suite offering. Intercom has a unique pricing structure, offering three separate solutions, each intended for a distinct use case. We wish some of their great features were offered in multiple plans, but none features overlap among plans. Zendesk wins the self-service tools category because it provides extensive help center customization options. Zendesk’s chatbot, Answer Bot, automatically answers customer questions asynchronously in up to 40 languages–via any text-based channel.

Zendesk identifies itself as a growth-enabling, all-in-one solution. Agents can respond in any channel by typing in the text box and have access to deep customer experience history and background in the metadialog.com right-hand column. Sequence all channels–chat, web post, email, chatbot outreach, tour message, banner, push notification, or carousel–mixing and matching modes of outreach to fit campaign goals.

Crisp, the fast-growing software

In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the most expensive tools on the market. To sum things up, one can get really confused trying to make sense of the Zendesk suite pricing, let alone to calculate costs. They’ve been marketing themselves as a messaging platform right from the beginning. Currently based in Albuquerque, NM, Bryce Emley holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NC State and nearly a decade of writing and editing experience.

There is power to be realized in partnerships and the strategic combination of forces, and companies using chatbots for customer service can further enhance the CX, taking it to new heights. Netomi’s virtual agents sit alongside human agents to supplement and enhance the capacity of support teams, ensuring the seamless resolution of customer queries. Zendesk was founded in 2007 and as such, is one of the oldest customer service management software offerings available on the market today. Zendesk provides a variety of solutions including customized ticketing automation, self-service solutions, and customizable configurations based on your business needs.

Intercom vs LivechatInc

The top of the agent workspace shows an agent’s open tickets, ticket statistics, and satisfaction statistics, as well as tabs depicting all current tickets. Intercom’s role-based permissions allow administrators full control over each department’s and agent’s capabilities, and access to channels and information. The admin and manager dashboard provides a zoomed-out view of all activity taking place in each inbox, for whole departments and individual agents. The dashboard’s left-hand column organizes and sorts all tickets by urgency.

There is no harm in testing the waters before committing to one or the other, as both Zendesk and Intercom offer free trials. Below, we’ve compared the pros and cons for Intercom vs Zendesk. While Intercom does not offer free trials, they do offer demo versions of each plan. Zendesk Sales Engagement Tools (Reach) uses a credit system to help you find new leads or add information to existing leads. Create entry rules that trigger when the messaging campaign begins, choosing the target audiences and when follow-up messages generate. Create code-free screencast tours of products, websites, webpages, and applications within your website.

Intercom

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. 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.

When he isn’t writing content, poetry, or creative nonfiction, he enjoys traveling, baking, playing music, reliving his barista days in his own kitchen, camping, and being bad at carpentry. Though Zendesk now considers itself to be a “service-first CRM company,” since its founding in 2007, their bread and butter offering has leaned much more heavily toward the “service” part of that equation. Understanding these fundamental differences should go a long way in helping you pick between the two, but does that mean you can’t use one platform to do what the other does better? These are both still very versatile products, so don’t think you have to get too siloed into a single use case.

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More than channels, Crisp lets you gather your teams around the inbox to improve collaboration and reduce the time to resolution of each conversation. Combined with data accessible to your fingertips, Crisp helps you to personalize each interaction on every channel to build the best customer experience possible. Intercom’s app store has popular integrations for things like WhatsApp, Stripe, Instagram, and Slack.

• Zendesk Support has voicemail, text messages, and embedded voice, and it displays the phone number on the widget.
• What’s more, it helps its clients build an integrated community forum and help center to improve the support experience in real-time.
• Agents can use basic automation (like auto-closing tickets or setting auto-responses), apply list organization to stay on top of their tasks, or set up triggers to keep tickets moving automatically.
• There is no harm in testing the waters before committing to one or the other, as both Zendesk and Intercom offer free trials.
• Both app stores include many popular integrations, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Zapier.
• So, Intercom Articles will be opposed to Zendesk Suite – in that way the contrast is (more or less) fair.

This live chat service provider offers 200+ integrations to its user base. With a mix of productivity, collaboration, eCommerce, CRM, analytics, email marketing, social media, and other tools, you get the option to create an omnichannel suite. This feature ensures that each customer request is handled by the best-suited agent, improving the overall efficiency of the support team.

Zendesk Agent Dashboard

Along with Omni channel integrations with chat (their own or other chat solutions), email, phone and so on. Based on verified reviews from real users in the CRM Customer Engagement Center market. See side-by-side comparisons of product capabilities, customer experience, pros and cons, and reviewer demographics to find the best fit for your organization. Based on verified reviews from real users in the Social Customer Service Applications market. Again, Zendesk has surpassed the number of reviewers when compared to Intercom.

Each message will have identifiers so that they will be easy to recognize at a glance. As a result, you’ll be able to see the sender, anyone who replied, and the dates of their interaction. As well as Intercom, it allows sharing of private notes with other support agents. To begin with, putting help desk platforms “side by side” is a thankless job as software differs in functionality, price, and purposes. The compared vendors share a strategy of delivering their services as either separate add-ons or all-in-one tools. Intercom also offers a few features that are unique to its platform – one of these being the ability to segment users based on their behavior.

MOBILE APPS

Intercom calculates the price based on the number of seats (users) you request. Depending on the seat type (subscription plan), users get access to different features. For example, the Messaging feature is not available in the Support plan, while Articles aren’t available in the Engage and Conver plans.

However, customers should keep in mind that Intercom does not offer voice. For very small companies and startups, Intercom also offers a Starter plan–with a balanced suite of features from each of the above solutions–at $74 monthly per user. Zendesk for Service, a customer service solution, provides unified customer-facing communication channels, self-service, collaboration, customer routing, and analytics–all organized in one dashboard. This article will compare intercom vs zendesk, outlining each tool’s features, ease-of-use, pricing and plans, pros and cons, and user-support options.

They also offer features that enhance collaboration amongst employees if you have a bigger team. Create a help center combining knowledge base articles and a customer contact request form, embeddable into any webpage or mobile app. Customers can search the help center by query keywords and sort through articles in 40 languages. It has a direct integration with Shopify and other tools including powerful B2B customer handling. It also satisfies all the requirements you’ve outlined including order history, interaction history, notes, tickets etc.

• As well as Intercom, it allows sharing of private notes with other support agents.
• There is power to be realized in partnerships and the strategic combination of forces, and companies using chatbots for customer service can further enhance the CX, taking it to new heights.
• Survey responses automatically save as data in users’ profiles, and Intercom provides survey data in analytics and reporting.
• Existing customers have complained consistently about how they aren’t available at the right time to offer support to customers.
• This method helps offer more personalized support as well as get faster response and resolution times.
• We wish some of their great features were offered in multiple plans, but none features overlap among plans.

Zendesk, just like its competitor, offers a knowledge base solution that is easy to customize. Their users can create a knowledge repository to create articles or edit existing ones as per the changes in the services or product. Zendesk, like Intercom, offers multilingual language functionality. It also provides detailed reports on how each self-help article performs in your knowledge base and helps you identify how each piece can be improved further. Zendesk wins the major category of help desk and ticketing system software.

• 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.
• The admin and manager dashboard provides a zoomed-out view of all activity taking place in each inbox, for whole departments and individual agents.
• As an example, Intercom and Zendesk are scored at 8.9 and 9.7, respectively, for all round quality and performance.
• Streamline the support you give by enabling customers to self-service with our knowledge base feature.
• As with just about any customer support software, you can easily view standard user data within the messenger related to customer journey—things like recent pages viewed, activity, or contact information.
• You can even moderate user content to leverage your customer community.