Zendesk vs Intercom: the ultimate comparison by Ana Khlystova HelpCrunch

Our comparative review of Freshdesk vs. Zendesk provides an in-depth analysis of user experiences. We will look at parameters such as ease of use, integrations, pricing, and customer support to determine the best platform. For support teams, ensuring that agents are on the same page is an essential part of the customer experience. These products are able to integrate with each other, which offers customers more personalized customer experiences. Zendesk also offers tons of APIs to customize the software to the users’ needs.

Groove is more affordable than Intercom, however, you should also consider that Groove may not have all the features offered by Intercom. Additionally, you should verify the ease of use, integrations with other tools, and customer support when comparing Groove and Intercom. Additionally, Missive offers shared contact, shared labels, and shared canned responses to help manage customer interactions. Another feature is the auto follow-up, which allows team members to schedule follow-up messages to customers.

Key Features

Their customer service management tools have a shared inbox for support teams. When you combine the help desk with Intercom Messenger, you get added channels for customer engagement. If your team primarily focuses on ticketing solutions to manage both internal and external issues, Jetdocs is an excellent choice. It offers a comprehensive set metadialog.com of B2B features, such as SLAs, priority levels, and approval workflows, which can streamline your support process and improve response times. Additionally, Jetdocs’ competitive pricing at 1/5th the cost of Zendesk makes it an attractive option for businesses of all sizes looking to optimize their customer support without breaking the bank.

If cost is not an issue and you are looking for an overall tool to solve all your needs, Intercom is a good Zendesk alternative. Drift Intel allows brands to create company profiles for anonymous visitors that land on the site. The newsletter, send by Drift to its users, it features a conversation between a Drift member and a recent customer that has chosen to use Drift because Intercom did not satisfy her expectations. Excellent marketing strategy – definitely, a reason to keep an eye on your competitors’ newsletters to spot these kinds of situations that put you in a bad light in front of a big community. Compared to Zendesk, Zoho Desk has very similar items regarding reporting features, a knowledge base feature, and advanced features. This feature alone facilitates the operation process on incoming tickets, as agents can use their favorite social channels to get in touch with each other without swapping applications.

Software Shortlist

Looking for alternatives to Zendesk is important if addon costs are piling up for you in Zendesk. At Zendesk, we understand that every company is unique and so are their customer service needs. Our plans range from Suite Team ($49/month per user when billed annually) all the way up to Suite Enterprise ($150/month per user when billed annually). And don’t forget – all our plans come with a 30-day free trial, so you can test them out before making your final decision. Additionally, its reporting tools make it easy to measure key performance metrics like response time and customer satisfaction ratings.

Both tools can be quite heavy on your budget, since they’re mainly targeting big enterprises and don’t offer their full toolset at an affordable price. With a varying approach, ultimately it’s the customer experience that suffers. HubSpot’s suite of software hubs include Marketing, Sales, CMS (Content Management System), Operations, and Service. Most people who look for the best live chat software will come across Zendesk. While it offers well-rounded customer service tools, its live chat is no slouch. Obviously, we need to be upfront and mention we may be biased towards HubSpot.

Ticketing on the Intercom platform

The Active Subscriptions Dashlet displays a list of purchased goods and services, along with subscription statuses, enabling upselling or cross-selling opportunities. Best competitor to Zendesk for teams looking to enhance their communication and collaboration capabilities. After a client’s issue has been resolved (or has not been resolved), Intercom provides the company with a report regarding the issue at hand. This allows organizations to revisit their knowledge base and make the appropriate changes to specific help documents.

• They’ll also have access to console information during this process for easier diagnosis and troubleshooting.
• These robust features are mostly related to the chat features, such as a chance to customize chatbots, provide a more extensive customer satisfaction survey, and give product tours regarding the chat software.
• The chat can be customized to fit your brand and translate into any language you’d like.
• Intercom’s knowledge base feature allows companies to develop and share articles, FAQs, and other types of content that customers can access through a search box or categorized catalog.
• Existing live chat platforms make poor use of AI, forcing customers to interact with a bot that has limited information and provides a  limited set of predetermined options.
• This makes things more complicated for both parties involved, and it’s not an efficient use of time or resources if you need to solve complex technical issues.

Just because HubSpot is easy to use doesn’t mean it can’t do powerful things. It’s an intuitive software that provides agility in ways that don’t obstruct the flow of business. The good news is that the right software can alleviate most customer mind-reading challenges, ensuring your team delivers relevant, cohesive experiences at every stage of the customer journey. There’s a free plan with limited functionality, but premium tiers range from $15 to $49 per agent, per month.

Join 10,000+ teams creating better experiences

Customer service plans come with an Answerbot designed to answer support questions, while sales plans use bots to collect data and ask qualifying questions to identify hot leads. In this article, we’ll look at Drift vs. Intercom vs. Zendesk to help you get a sense of how customer success platforms can help you deliver better experiences to your audience. The point is, customer success tools allow you to build better relationships with your audience by customizing content and serving up the right message at the right time.

Because of this, ranking high on a review website is, in many cases, even better than ranking high on google. Based on my estimations, one Zendesk salesperson handles roughly 50 accounts and is responsible for, on average, $37,800 in monthly revenue. All Zendesk has to do now is develop useful products and add-ons and the cycle continues. To prove my point, this is how much an average Zendesk user was spending on Zendesk products from 2013 to 2020. So if you want to grow your SaaS business up and to the right then read on for a deep dive into 12 marketing tips from Zendesk.

Can I use Intercom on the front end and Zendesk on the back?

The Zendesk marketplace is also where you can get a lot of great add-ons. There are also several different Shopify integrations to choose from, as well as CRM integrations like HubSpot and Salesforce. No matter what Zendesk Suite plan you are on, you get workflow triggers, which are simple business rules-based actions to streamline many tasks. As for the category of voice and phone features, Zendesk is a clear winner. Zendesk Support has voicemail, text messages, and embedded voice, and it displays the phone number on the widget. We hope that this Intercom VS Zendesk comparison helps you choose one that matches your support, marketing, and sales needs.

These come at affordable pricing, starting at $24 per month, with plans to satisfy small and enterprise customers. You can try our tool by signing up here for free; no credit cards are required. When customers access a Help Scout Beacon, they can submit an email request or start a live chat if an agent is available.

Sales

LiveAgent is an all-in-one customer service platform that makes it easy to manage customer interactions. With LiveAgent, you can create tickets, send messages to customers, and track progress in real-time. Additionally, its AI-powered chatbot allows you to automate conversations with customers and answer their questions instantly. Plus, it integrates with popular tools like Facebook Messenger and Twitter so you can provide support on those channels as well.

• Groove is an all-in-one customer service platform that helps teams provide personalized and efficient customer service.
• To sum things up, Zendesk is a great customer support oriented tool which will be a great choice for big teams with various departments.
• To summarize, its advanced features have made Intercom one of the most powerful Zendesk alternatives.
• It also contains a customer support self-service system, where users can easily find answers to their questions.
• Looking for alternatives to Zendesk is important if addon costs are piling up for you in Zendesk.
• Sure, you can try to scale your marketing, but even that will eventually collapse.

This Zendesk alternative is best for small businesses looking for a simple yet powerful help desk software with email-based support. LiveAgent also gamifies the process of providing customer service, allowing agents to earn “badges” for completing certain customer-related tasks as needed. This enables organizations to identify top performers – and also to determine where extra training may be necessary for some. Users can easily create help articles by adding titles, content and enhancing visual appeal with built-in editing tools, images, videos, and other media. Code samples can also be included for technical directions or demonstrations.

Service Hub Overview

Users can benefit from using Intercom’s CX platform and AI software as a standalone tool for business messaging. But to provide a more robust customer experience, businesses may need to consider integrating Intercom’s AI tool with a third-party customer service platform, as it falls short of a full-stack offering. Apps and integrations are critical to creating a 360 view of the customer across the company and ensuring agents have easy access to key customer context. When agents don’t have to waste time toggling between different systems and tools to access the customer details they need, they can deliver faster, more personalized customer service.

There are even instances where customers don’t receive the first response in more than seven days. When you see pricing plans starting for $79/month, you should get a clear understanding of how expensive other plans can become for your business. What’s worse, Intercom doesn’t offer a free trial to its prospect to help them test the product before onboarding with their services. Instead, they offer a product demo when prospects reach out to learn more about their pricing structure. Erika is Groove’s Customer Success Manager, committed to helping you find the right software solution for your business needs. She loves finding innovative ways for your support team to scale and grow, always putting the customer first.

So far, the chatbot can transfer chats to agents or resolve less complex queries in seconds. That means all you have to do is add the code to your website and enable it right away. Welcome to another blog post that helps you gauge which live chat solution is compatible with your customer support needs. And in this post, we will analyze two popular names in the SaaS industry – Intercom & Zendesk. You can use this support desk to help customers or you can forward potential new users to your sales department.

• Learn more about the differences between leading chat support solutions Intercom and Zendesk so that you can choose the right tool for your needs.
• On the downside, its design is a little outdated and the workflow is difficult to get used to for new employees.
• However, it’s important to keep in mind that it may not have all the advanced features of Intercom.
• Search our comprehensive Knowledge Base to answer any question you might have about our products.
• Intercom also has an omnichannel customer service solution, but it’s fairly limited, with no native voice capabilities and minimal voice integrations.
• The demands of customers on your support will be extreme in some cases.

Moreover, Intercom bots can converse naturally with customers by using conversation starters, respond with self-help, and knowledge base articles. However, if you compare Zendesk vs Intercom chat in ease of use, the letter wins. Create a chatbot with minimal coding and customize it to your heart’s content. 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.

Whether it’s getting set up or figuring out the best way to customize HubSpot Service Hub for your needs, there are more than 85,000 community members ready to answer your questions online. As of August 2022, Zendesk has received an average of 4.3 out of 5 stars for ease of use on the technology review site Capterra.com. However, individual user reviews cite cons related to usability, such as having to “spend a lot of time figuring out how to use the dashboard” and that the overall “training and learning cost is high”. The web host you choose to power your WordPress site plays a key role in its speed and performance.