Freshservice vs Intercom vs. Zendesk: ITSM Comparison 2024: Features Pricing Pros & Cons

With both tools, you can also use support bots to automatically suggest specific articles, track customers’ ratings, and localize help center content to serve your customers in their native language. Intercom does not offer a native call center tool, so it cannot handle calls through a cloud-based phone system or calling app on its own. However, you can connect Intercom with over 40 compatible phone and video integrations. 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. When comparing Zendesk and Intercom, various factors come into play, each focusing on different aspects, strengths, and weaknesses of these customer support platforms.

Both solutions provide a campaign tool, live chat, and a knowledge base. We will compare those customer service solutions in terms of functionality and price. Intercom distinguishes itself by excelling in real-time customer engagement.

Its suite of tools goes beyond traditional ticketing and focuses on customer engagement and messaging automation. From in-app chat to personalized autoresponders, Intercom provides a unified experience across multiple channels, creating a support ecosystem that nurtures and converts leads. For businesses that want to focus on simple and effective customer engagement, Intercom is an easy choice.

It calculates the cost of its Pro and Premium plans based on the number of AI resolutions, people reached, and seats (or users). This can make it challenging to estimate the cost yourself during your research and you need to speak with Intercom for more information. Luckily, a range of customer service solutions is available that enables you to communicate directly with your customers in real-time. These tools are ideal for personalizing the customer experience and building better customer relationships. They offer an omnichannel live chat solution that integrates with multiple messaging platforms and marketing channels and even automates incoming support processes with bots.

Both Zendesk Messaging and Intercom Messenger offer live chat features and AI-enabled chatbots for 24/7 support to customers. Additionally, you can trigger incoming messages to automatically assign an agent and create dashboards to monitor the team’s performance on live chat. Zendesk and Intercom also both offer analytics and reporting capabilities that allow businesses to analyze and monitor customer agents’ productivity.

That their customers are fully satisfied with their products and services, and so is the motto of our Desku chatbots. So, by holding Desku’s hand, you can open doors for a long list of happy and fully satisfied customers. On the other hand, if you prioritize customer engagement, sales, and personalized messaging, Intercom is a compelling option, especially for startups and rapidly scaling businesses.

Create a help center combining knowledge base articles and a customer contact request form, embeddable into any webpage or mobile app. It’s known for its unified agent workspace which combines different communication methods like email, social media messaging, live chat, and SMS, all in one place. This makes it easier for support teams to handle customer interactions without switching between different systems. Plus, Zendesk’s integration with various channels ensures customers can always find a convenient way to reach out. On the contrary, Intercom is far less predictable when it comes to pricing and can cost hundreds/thousands of dollars per month.

Along with Omni channel integrations with chat (their own or other chat solutions), email, phone and so on. The Intercom vs. Zendesk pricing may be justified by the value-added services and minor features that they have for their all-in-one pricing. For example, for businesses that want just a couple of features, there are subscription packages.

As well as Intercom, it allows sharing of private notes with other support agents. 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.

Essentially, Desku is not an option but a reliable replacement for Zendesk and Intercom that companies can rely on at lower costs and improved performance. With ThriveDesk, you can supercharge your website’s growth and streamline customer interactions like never before. Zendesk’s pricing is very competitive for the market and is presented in a straightforward way that makes predicting costs simple and accurate. Their most popular tier (Suite Professional) is $115/month and includes a feature set that is very hard to beat at that price. Intercom is also easy to learn and its guided onboarding and training resources are especially helpful to new users. Discover customer and product issues with instant replays, in-app cobrowsing, and console logs.

Once you add live chat to your website, your visitors will be able to reach you through the chat widget. When comparing the cost of Intercom to Zendesk, it’s important to consider the pricing structures and potential variations based on your specific customer support and engagement needs. If you are looking for more integration options and budget is not an issue, Intercom can be the perfect live chat solution for your business. It is also ideal for businesses who are searching for conversational chatbot functionality. Their AI-powered chatbot can enable your business to boost engagement and improve marketing efforts in real-time. Here comes Desku as the strong competitor, which can effectively substitute Zendesk and Intercom.

Intercom + Zendesk Integration Unito Two-Way Sync

Advanced workflows are useful to customer service teams because they automate processes that make it easier for agents to provide great customer service. Intercom’s integration capabilities are limited, and some apps don’t integrate well with third-party customer service technology. This can make it more difficult to import CRM data and obtain complete context from customer data. For example, Intercom’s Salesforce integration doesn’t create a view of cases in Salesforce. In a nutshell, none of the customer support software companies provide decent assistance for users.

Although many people tout it as the solution for large businesses, its bottom pricing tier is a nice entry for any small business looking to add customer service to its front page. For instance, Intercom can guide a new software user through each feature step by step, providing context and assistance along the way. In contrast, Zendesk primarily relies on a knowledge base, housing articles, FAQs, and self-help resources.

Our thoroughly picked out crew is always prepared to respond to your queries. Zendesk offers a basic plan that is affordable and will suit my needs. However, I do recommend Intercom for eCommerce stores that may need to integrate the features with their store. It enables you to get quality product feedback from the right customers at the right time through the app or by email.

So when it comes to chatting features, the choice is not really Intercom vs Zendesk. The latter offers a chat widget that is simple, outdated, and limited in customization options, while the former puts all of its resources into its messenger. Whether you’ve just started searching for a customer support tool or have been using one for a while, chances are you know about 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. Zendesk also packs some pretty potent tools into their platform, so you can empower your agents to do what they do with less repetition.

You’ve made it this far. let’s automate your customer support.

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. Intercom and Zendesk are two of the most popular customer service platforms, each with its own set of distinct advantages and drawbacks. It has a lot of great features that help us provide a great customer support service which is important for a successful business. The UI is intuitive, the software is futuristic, and packs plenty of perks and features. Customer support would score a 3 out of 5, and you’ll get a good value for your money, as this is one of the best ITSM software available in the market. Skyvia offers powerful visual editors which allow precise mapping configuration to quickly configure your data migration or synchronization between Intercom and Zendesk.

Our integration with Intercom enables bi-directional contact and case synchronization, so you can continue using Intercom as your front-end digital experience and use Zendesk for case management. Like so many others, Monese determined that Zendesk was the best solution to provide seamless, omnichannel support because of its scalability and reliability. Brian Kale, the head of customer success at Bank Novo, describes how Zendesk helped Bank Novo boost productivity and streamline service. Sendcloud adopted these solutions to replace siloed systems like Intercom and a local voice support provider in favor of unified, omnichannel support. To sum things up, one can get really confused trying to make sense of the Zendesk suite pricing, let alone calculate costs. If you’d want to test Intercom vs Zendesk before deciding on a tool for good, they both provide free trials for 14 days.

• Front is a multi-channel solution, so you can reply to customers using multiple channels but can only respond on the channel the inbound message was received.
• One of the most significant downsides of Intercom is its customer support.
• Another critical difference between Zendesk and Intercom is their approach to CRM.
• It is tailored for automation and quick access to insights, offering a user-friendly experience.
• However, if you are looking for a robust messaging solution with customer support features, go for Intercom.

Use HubSpot Service Hub to provide seamless, fast, and delightful customer service. As customers come closer to purchasing, they often find themselves weighing the same pros and cons. In our experience, when future clients start thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of Intercom vs. Zendesk, these are the questions they want answers to.

Communication Channels:

For instance, it can use past interactions and behaviors to tailor recommendations or responses. While the company is smaller than Zendesk, Intercom has earned a reputation for building high-quality customer service software. The company’s products include a messaging platform, knowledge base tools, and an analytics dashboard.

Their chat widget looks and works great, and they invest a lot of effort to make it a modern, convenient customer communication tool. Zendesk also has an Answer Bot, which instantly takes your knowledge base game to the next level. It can automatically suggest relevant articles for agents during business hours to share with clients, reducing your support agents’ workload. 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. 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)?

Zendesk excels as a robust and versatile customer support platform, offering comprehensive tools for managing customer inquiries and support operations across various channels. If your business values a feature-rich and customizable solution for customer interactions, Zendesk may be the better choice. Therefore, it becomes all the more important to review your options carefully. ProProfs offers incredible live chat features that help you offer 24×7 assistance and close more sales.

Both platforms offer robust features and functionalities, but which one should you choose? In this article, we will compare the two tools based on different criteria and help you make an informed decision. Don’t miss out on the latest tips, tools, and tactics at the forefront of customer support. Formerly known as Insights, Zendesk now uses Explore to provide analytics to help businesses tailor their services to increase customer satisfaction. Zendesk chat vs Intercom offers similar chat features but still has a couple of differences. In any case, if you choose Zendesk or Intercom, you get wide chatting possibilities.

Intercom vs Zendesk: User Assistance and Support

We’ve developed a Looker Block for Zendesk Support data provisioned by Stitch. This block includes prebuilt code to create dashboards and models that can help uncover insights from your Zendesk Support data. Test any of HelpCrunch pricing plans for free for 14 days and see our tools in action right away. If you thought Zendesk prices were confusing, let me introduce you to the Intercom charges.

But I like that Zendesk just feels slightly cleaner, has easy online/away toggling, more visual customer journey notes, and a handy widget for exploring the knowledge base on the fly. With Zendesk’s Answer Bot, relevant articles are automatically suggested to your customers, saving them time while they look for solutions. In navigating this conundrum, several digital tools can come in handy, and two of the most popular options are Intercom and Zendesk. As both platforms have their pros and cons, it can be difficult to decide which one is right for your business. To guide your decision-making, we explain the key features and qualities of each, and the role that a omnichannel conversational AI platform (Netomi!) can play, for the ultimate CX strategy. 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.

In the realm of user-friendliness, Zendesk clearly emerges as the superior choice. Now, let’s delve into the Zendesk vs. Intercom comparison to help you make an informed decision when selecting the right customer support and engagement platform that aligns with your specific needs. Just like Intercom, Zendesk’s customer service is quite disappointing.

Zendesk is among the industry’s best ticketing and customer support software, and most of its additional functionality is icing on the proverbial cake. You can use it for customer support, but that’s not its core strength. From the inbox, live agents and chatbots can refer to and link knowledge base articles, to elaborate on replies and help customers locate answers.

They have great quality of support, good training material, and they still keep releasing. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Embedded chats with history are quite nice, it has both the messages and notes left by the supporting team members to each other. However, The solution’s pricing doesn’t fit medium sized organizations well.

So you see, it’s okay to feel dizzy when comparing Zendesk vs Intercom platforms. Intercom has more customization features for features like bots, themes, triggers, and funnels. What’s really nice about this is that even within a ticket, you can switch between communication modes without changing views. So if an agent needs to switch from chat to phone to email (or vice versa) with a customer, it’s all on the same ticketing page. There’s even on-the-spot translation built right in, which is extremely helpful.

Especially if you need to deal with SLAs and similar more advanced options. The customer service of both platforms is robust, though users might feel Intercom’s service doesn’t match its price point, while Zendesk has variable customer support response times. For example, you can assign all inbound technical queries to an engineer; or, assign all pricing queries to the sales team. With so many solutions to choose from, finding the right option for your business can feel like an uphill battle. Intercom’s native mobile apps are good for iOS, Android, React Native, and Cordova, while Zendesk only has mobile apps for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. Stitch delivers all your data to the leading data lakes, warehouses, and storage platforms.

It’s well-suited for organizations aiming to enhance customer engagement through real-time communication. However, it’s essential to recognize that Zendesk has its own array of strengths, particularly in its comprehensive and versatile customer support platform. Another critical difference between Zendesk and Intercom is their approach to CRM.

It excels in real-time customer communication and helps support teams create personalized customer experiences. Zendesk, unlike Intercom, is a more affordable and predictable customer service platform. Also, it’s the pioneer in the support and communication tools market. You can always count on it if you need a reliable customer support platform to process tickets, support users, and get advanced reporting.

In 2023, conversational messaging will play an essential role in customer service. Customers increasingly expect to receive fast, convenient, and personalized support. No matter how a customer contacts your business, your agents will have access to the tools and information they need to continue and close conversations on any channel.

While the pricing can be flexible, it may become more costly as your organization’s requirements and usage increase. They’ve been rated as one of the easy live chat solutions with more integrated options. It enables them to engage with visitors who are genuinely interested in their services.

The entire thread is saved within the ticket for future agents to reference. Agents can add each other to internal notes within a ticket, looping in team members to collaborate when necessary. While both platforms aim to be user-friendly, Intercom may seem complex to beginners due to its steep learning curve. Miss out on nothing, be where your customers are, and be there in time and style.

• Use HubSpot Service Hub to provide seamless, fast, and delightful customer service.
• But, you would not be able to enjoy such a live tracking experience on Intercom.
• They’ve been marketing themselves as a messaging platform right from the beginning.
• 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.
• So, whether you’re a startup or a global giant, Zendesk’s got your back for top-notch customer support.

If you’re looking for a comprehensive solution with lots of features and integrations, then Zendesk would be a good choice. On the other hand, if you need something that is more tailored to your customer intercom vs zendesk base and is less expensive, then Intercom might be a better fit. Novo has been a Zendesk customer since 2019 but didn’t immediately start taking full advantage of all our features and capabilities.

Intercom feels more wholesome and is more client-success-oriented, but it can be too costly for smaller companies. If you create a new chat with the team, land on a page with no widget, and go back to the browser for some reason, your chat will go puff. 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.