Intercom vs Zendesk Help Desk & Chat Comparison 2023

Some startups and small businesses may prefer one app, while large companies and enterprise operations will have their own requirements. So, by now, you can see that according to this article, Zendesk inches past Intercom as the better customer support platform. Zendesk is not far behind Intercom when it comes to email features.

While both Intercom and Zendesk excel in customer support and engagement, the decision between the two depends on your specific requirements. It’s well-suited for organizations aiming to enhance customer engagement through real-time communication. Zendesk and Intercom offer help desk management solutions to their users. 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.

Customer Support: How Zendesk and Intercom Stack up

If you don’t go with ActiveCampaign, then Zoho would be my second choice. But their support and quality is not as good, they feel like a new product even though they have been in business a while. You keep having to get around their bugs, which you can, it is just annoying. Finally, we also have some B2B customers (funeral homes) and expect this part of our business to grow significantly in 2021.

Intercom’s chat tool, also called the Intercom Messenger, looks quite modern and offers advanced features that many chat tools don’t have. If you’re looking for the best messaging option or a tool that offers the best interface, choose Intercom. If you wish to strengthen both your sales and customer support teams and enjoy plenty of integrated features, go for Zendesk. On the other hand, if you are looking for a feature-rich tool that comes at less than half the cost of Zendesk and Intercom, then ProProfs can be your ideal support partner. Intercom distinguishes itself by excelling in real-time customer engagement.

Intercom details

Intercom can even integrate with Zendesk and other sources to import past help center content. I just found Zendesk’s help center to be slightly better integrated into their workflows and more customizable. Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates. Zendesk’s help center tools should also come in handy for helping customers help themselves—something Zendesk claims eight out of 10 customers would rather do than contact support. To that end, you can import themes or apply your own custom themes to brand your help center the way you want it.

• While both Intercom and Zendesk excel in customer support and engagement, the decision between the two depends on your specific requirements.
• One important part of creating an amazing customer experience is remembering your customers, what they’ve bought from you, and any previous issues they’ve had.
• Interactive product tours and smart tips significantly improve your user retention.
• This can make it challenging to estimate the cost yourself during your research and you need to speak with Intercom for more information.
• Zendesk offers a versatile array of communication channels, including email, chat, social media, phone, and web forms.

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. Zendesk wins the omnichannel capabilities category because it offers voice as a service, which we think is absolutely critical. Set automatic triggers so that certain events send push notifications to targeted customers, or use them as part of communication campaigns and series, and run A/B testing to compare two notifications. Whether Intercom is cheaper than Zendesk depends on your specific usage, feature requirements, and the number of users in your organization. The three tiers—Suite Team, Suite Growth, and Suite Professional—also give you more options outside of Intercom’s static structure.

One seamless platform

Automatic assignment rules establish criteria that automatically route tickets to the right agent or team, based on message or user data. While Intercom also provides a user-friendly interface, some users may find it a tad overwhelming, especially when juggling multiple support requests. Zendesk’s simplicity, combined with its robust functionality, significantly reduces the margin for errors and confusion.

However, ZenDesk has recently undergone a rebranding and is steadily pushing away customers who require complex customer-focused, creating value, and educate the audience are the main characteristics when it comes to Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk content. Also, they succeed in building a familiar and personal feeling around their messages, wrapping the content simply and straightforwardly way.

This is aided by the fact that the look and feel of Zendesk’s user interface are neat and minimal, with few cluttering features. For Intercom’s pricing plan, on the other hand, there is much less information on their website. There is a Starter plan for small businesses at $74 per month billed annually, and there are add-ons like a WhatsApp add-on at $9 per user per month or surveys at $49 per month. For small companies and startups, Zendesk offers a six-month free trial of up to 50 agents redeemable for any combination of Zendesk Support and Sell products.

In fact, the Zendesk Marketplace has 1,300+ apps and integrations, from billing software to marketing automation tools. 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?).

• The starter pack is $45/month with increased limits feature and marketing automation.
• At $15/agent/month, you have unlimited access to ticket history and API integrations.
• Companies looking for a more complete customer service product–without niche bells and whistles, but with all the basic channels you want–should look to Zendesk.
• This scalability ensures businesses can align their support infrastructure with their evolving requirements, ensuring a seamless customer experience.
• This customized dashboard will help you see metrics that you’d like to focus on regularly.

Both tools can be quite heavy on your budget since they mainly target big enterprises and don’t offer their full toolset at an affordable price. Zendesk is billed more as a customer support and ticketing solution, while Intercom includes more native CRM functionality. Intercom isn’t quite as strong as Zendesk in comparison to some of Zendesk’s customer support strengths, but it has more features for sales and lead nurturing.

What Live Chat Software To Choose

If you thought Zendesk prices were confusing, let me introduce you to the Intercom charges. 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. So yeah, all the features talk actually brings us to the most sacred question — the question of pricing. 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. The Help Center software by Intercom is also a very efficient tool.

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. Intercom recently ramped up its features to include helpdesk and ticketing functionality. Zendesk, on the other hand, started as a ticketing tool, and therefore has one of the market’s best help desk and ticket management features. Use ticketing systems to manage the influx and provide your customers with timely responses. Advanced workflows are useful to customer service teams because they automate processes that make it easier for agents to provide great customer service.

It enables them to engage with visitors who are genuinely interested in their services. You get to engage with them further and get to know more about their expectations. This becomes the perfect opportunity to personalize the experience, offer assistance to prospects as per their needs, and convert them into customers.

Below, we present the main features, pros, and cons of a popular Zendesk alternative – Intercom. ClickDesk’s support features are unique in this list, as they offer voice and video support in addition to live chat. This can help support agents to help customers through complex issues that simply don’t translate well via live chat. It also provides customers with yet another way to reach your company based on their support preferences.

Zoho can pull in all your customer interactions across multiple channels for you to send a response to. While Zoho Desk does offer a basic free plan, the suite as a whole is ideal for larger companies with bigger budgets. Intercom is a popular customer communications platform, but its focus has always been on sales and marketing. 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. With Dixa’s user-friendly tools, you can quickly create a seamless customer experience across multiple channels.

Zendesk chat provides a personal connection with customers who need support. Zendesk Chat shows up as a chat bar docked at the bottom of your site. Both Zendesk Chat and Intercom have a free trial available and a freemium model to test out which chat service will work best for your company. Therefore, Intercom may be a better fit for larger businesses with multiple agents helping people. Reporting tools are essential to helping support leaders analyze and improve their customer support operations.

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