Switching from Zendesk to Intercom

Overall, Zendesk has a slight edge over Intercom when it comes to ticketing capabilities. It provides a variety of customer service automation features like auto-closing tickets, setting auto-responses, and creating chat triggers to keep tickets moving automatically. It started as a ticketing tool just for customer service teams and has evolved over the years into a complete customer support platform. Since, its name has become somewhat synonymous with customer service and support. 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.

When an agent takes on one of these critical cases, they aren’t starting cold — they already see case histories and details such as recent service changes or recurring issues on their dashboard. This proactive information delivery cuts down on the typical hunt-and-peck for details, enabling agents to address the problem directly. We will start syncing the last 24 hours of data from your Intercom account. This may take some time depending on the options you selected and your conversation volume.

But this solution wins because it’s an all-in-one tool with a modern live chat widget, allowing you to improve your customer experiences easily. It has a more sophisticated user interface and a wide range of features, such as an in-app messenger, an email marketing tool, and an AI-powered chatbot. At the same time, Zendesk looks slightly outdated and can’t offer some features. Both Zendesk and Intercom are customer support management solutions that offer features like ticket management, live chat and messaging, automation workflows, knowledge centers, and analytics. Zendesk has traditionally been more focused on customer support management, while Intercom has been more focused on live support solutions like its chat solution. It allows businesses to organize and share helpful documentation or answer customers’ common questions.

How to choose the right customer experience tool

The platform supports multiple languages allowing clients to communicate in their preferred language. This feature proves useful if you cater to a diverse customer base. Consider which features will be the most helpful for your business, your support team, and your customers.

That means automating customer service and sales processes so the people visiting your website don’t actually have to interact with anyone before they take action. It’s much easier if you decide to go with the Zendesk Suite, which includes Support, Chat, Talk, and Guide tools. There are two options there — Professional for $109 or Enterprise for $179 if you pay monthly. The difference between the two is that the Professional subscription lacks some things like chat widget unbranding, custom agent roles, multiple help centers, etc. Their help desk is a single inbox to handle customer requests, where your customer support agents can leave private notes for each other and automatically assign requests to the right people.

What’s also great is the app marketplace, which lets you securely integrate with services like DocuSign for contracts, Stripe for payments, and Airtable for managing tasks. You can tailor the look and feel of the portal to match your brand, making it an integrated part of your business rather than an add-on. Additionally, the portal integrates with Zendesk’s omnichannel ticketing system, so you can track and manage requests alongside other support channels, such as messaging, chat, email, or phone. Security is crucial to everyone and so your CX tool needs to be responsible and compliant with international standards like GDPR and CCPA. Moreover, it’s best you also check for the following to ensure customer service security.

Even better, it’s the most cost-effective, lightweight, and speedy live chat solution available for Shopify business owners. Zendesk receives positive feedback for its intuitive interface, wide range of integrations, and robust reporting tools. However, some users find customization challenging, and the platform is considered expensive, requiring careful cost evaluation. If money is limited for your business, a help desk that can be a Zendesk alternative or an Intercom alternative is ThriveDesk. Choose the plan that suits your support requirements and budget, whether you’re a small team or a growing enterprise.

Zendesk also offers a number of integrations with third-party applications. It is great to have CRM functionality inside your customer service platform because it helps maintain great customer experiences by storing all past customer engagements and conversation histories. This method helps offer more personalized support as well as get faster response and resolution times. ThriveDesk empowers small businesses to manage real-time customer communications. Intercom has a different approach, one that’s all about sales, marketing, and personalized messaging. Intercom has your back if you’re looking to supercharge your sales efforts.

Zendesk, on the other hand, has revamped its security since its security breach in 2016. It is now trusted by multiple Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies. With Zendesk, you can anticipate zendesk intercom customer questions, allowing for shorter reply periods. With its CRM, you have the ability to place your clients in your sales funnels and follow through with them until conversion.

From tracking brand performance to diving deep into user experience, Qualtrics XM helps you respond swiftly to market shifts and fine-tune your strategy with actionable insights. It tends to perform well on the marketing and sales side of things, which is key for a growing company. And considering that its tools (including live chat options) are so easy to use, it’s probably going to be easier for a small business to get integrated and set up. Zendesk also offers digital support during business hours, and their website has a chatbot.

Intercom’s customer service software offers a range of features designed to enhance the customer experience. It lets businesses set up multilingual help centers, so customers from different regions can self-serve. With tools for managing workloads and assigning tasks, it ensures that issues reach the right agents efficiently.

With all accounted for, it seems that Zendesk still has a number of user interface issues. Zendesk has over 150,000 customer accounts from 160 countries and territories. They have offices all around the world including countries such as Mexico City, Tokyo, New York, Paris, Singapore, São Paulo, London, and Dublin. As an avid learner interested in all things tech, Jelisaveta always strives to share her knowledge with others and help people and businesses reach their goals. Discover how this Shopify store used Tidio to offer better service, recover carts, and boost sales. Customerly allows you to rate prospects, either manually or automatically, so you can prioritize the most valuable leads.

As your business grows, so does the volume of customer inquiries and support tickets. Managing everything manually is becoming increasingly difficult, and you need a robust customer support platform to streamline your operations. Both Zendesk and Intercom are excellent customer service solutions. However, the right fit for your business will depend on your particular needs and budget. 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 base and is less expensive, then Intercom might be a better fit.

If you want automated options, Intercom starts at either $499 or $999 per month for up to ten users, depending on the level of automation you’re looking for. Its $99 bracket includes advanced options, such as customer satisfaction prediction and multi-brand support, and in the $199 bracket, you also get advanced security and other very advanced features. Yes, you can continue using Intercom as the consumer-facing CRM experience, but integrate with Zendesk for customer service in the back end for more customer support functionality. Intercom offers fewer integrations, supporting just over 450 third-party apps. This makes it challenging to customize the software as your business grows. Furthermore, data on customer reviews, installation numbers, and ecommerce integrations is not readily available.

Once connected, you can add Zendesk Support to your Help Desk, and start creating Zendesk tickets from Intercom conversations. Before you start, you’ll need to retrieve your Zendesk credentials and create a Zendesk API key. You can do this by going to your settings within Zendesk (click on the cog on the left hand side), and navigating to API in the ‘Channels’ section. Yes, you can support multiple brands or businesses from a single Help Desk, while ensuring the Messenger is a perfect match for each of your different domains.

Which offers more customization, Intercom or Zendesk?

To sum up this Intercom vs Zendesk battle, the latter is a great support-oriented tool that will be a good choice for big teams with various departments. Intercom feels modern and is more client-success-oriented, but it can be too costly for smaller companies. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how its tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. So yeah, all the features talk actually brings us to the most sacred question — the question of pricing.

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. The learning and knowledgebase category is another one where it is a close call between Zendesk and Intercom.

Conversation history

Yes, you can localize the Messenger to work with multiple languages, resolve conversations automatically in multiple languages and support multiple languages in your Help Center. After switching to Intercom, you can start training Custom Answers for Fin AI Agent right away by importing your historic data from Zendesk. Fin AI Agent will use your history to recognize and suggest common questions to create answers for.

Setting up Intercom help centers is also very easy and intuitive, with no previous knowledge required. After this, you’ll have to set up your workflows, personalizing your tickets and storing them by topic. You can then add automations and triggers, such as automatically closing a ticket or sending a message to a user. Although it can be pricey, Zendesk’s platform is a very robust one, with powerful reporting and insight tools, a large number of integrations, and excellent scalability features. The Zendesk marketplace hosts over 1,500 third-party apps and integrations. The software is known for its agile APIs and proven custom integration references.

• It comes with a unified omnichannel dashboard, custom reports, and an advanced ticketing system.
• Sure, you can have a front desk—but you don’t necessarily have to plunk down the cost it would take to buy that desk, train an employee, and add them to your payroll.
• This is fine, as not every customer support team wants to be so available on the phone.
• It will allow you to leverage some Intercom capabilities while keeping your account at the time-tested platform.
• If you’re here, it’s safe to assume that you’re looking for a new customer service solution to support your teams and delight your audience.
• Customers can also sign in using their Google or Twitter accounts, which saves them the trouble of setting up a new login.

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. Conversations allow you to chat to your customers in a personal way. Use them to quickly resolve customer question on, for example, how to use your product.

Additionally, Freshdesk’s ticket forms make it easy for customers to contact you through the support portal. They gather all the necessary information upfront, so your agents don’t have to ask repetitive questions. Finding the right customer experience software is nothing short of hitting the jackpot. Simply because of just how easily one puts your customer engagement on auto-pilot so you can intervene when you absolutely need to. A good customer experience platform should be powered with state-of-the-art AI to help you with the following use cases. Redefine customer service with an AI-powered platform that unifies voice, digital and social channels.

It’s an opportunity for Zendesk to differentiate itself, but unfortunately it didn’t get very high marks from users, either. Reviewers were frustrated by how long it took for their tickets to get resolved, as well as the complexity with which they were tossed around from department to department. Given that these are two services predicated on making you better at customer support, you’d think they’d be able to handle it better themselves. However, reading the reviews, it’s probably more accurate to say that Zendesk is “mixed” on customer support, whereas Intercom doesn’t have a stellar record.

The top-tier Suite Professional plan, available at $149 per agent, provides the full range of Zendesk’s capabilities, including custom reporting, advanced AI features, and enterprise-grade support. With industry-leading AI that infuses intelligence into every interaction, robust integrations, and exceptional data security and compliance, it’s no wonder why Zendesk is a trusted leader in CX. It offers a self-service customer portal feature, that’s really helpful for businesses that run more than one brand. You can set up separate help centers for each of your brands, and you get to decide exactly how they look and work.

If your goal is to deliver outstanding customer support to your audience, then Zendesk is a good option. It comes with a unified omnichannel dashboard, custom reports, and an advanced ticketing system. However, if you aim to nurture leads and grow sales, then Intercom is the better option. Its AI-powered tools and virtual assistants make it a formidable CRM-powered software. Zendesk fully utilizes AI tools to enhance user experiences at every stage of the customer journey.

Meanwhile, our WFM software enables businesses to analyze employee metrics and performance, helping them identify improvements, implement strategies, and set long-term goals. Zendesk is built to grow alongside your business, resulting in less downtime, better cost savings, and the stability needed to provide exceptional customer support. Many customers start using Zendesk as small or mid-sized businesses (SMBs) and continue to use our software as they scale their operations, hire more staff, and serve more customers.

As the more recent of the two, offering a modern look-and-feel and frictionless experience is a key magnet for Intercom. It effortlessly brings together in-app chat, automated chatbots, and a unified inquiry inbox in its help center. While its integrations are not as far-reaching as Zendesk’s, it seamlessly works with modern communication and business tools, like WhatsApp and the most prominent CRMS. Not to mention marketing and sales tools, like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Google Analytics. However, after patting yourself on the back, you now realize you’re faced with the daunting task of choosing between the two.

What’s also great is that you can brand the portal with your logo and colors, giving it a consistent look that feels like part of your company. If you manage multiple shared inboxes, Hiver lets you set up individual portals for each one, each with its own custom URL. Make life easier for your customers, your agents and yourself with Sprinklr’s all-in-one contact center platform.

Integrations are the best way to enhance the toolkit of your apps by connecting them for interoperable actions and features. Both Zendesk and Intercom have integration libraries, and you can also use a connecting tool like Zapier for added integrations and add-ons. Zendesk is not far behind Intercom when it comes to email features. 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.

Zendesk vs. Intercom: The Ultimate Comparison Guide for 2024

Salesforce is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that helps businesses manage everything from sales to customer support. Salesforce’s customer support portal includes a built-in knowledge base where customers can access solutions to common questions. Customer experience software is a suite of tools designed to manage and improve how customers interact with a company throughout their entire journey. This software captures interactions across multiple channels — whether it’s via email, phone, web, or in-person — to provide a unified view of the customer.

Finally, you can pay $199 per month per user for unlimited sales pipelines and advanced reporting along with other features. That being said, Intercom has an impressive array of features as well. These include chatbot automation features, customer segmentation, and targeted SMS messaging to reach the right audience efficiently. Customerly’s Helpdesk is designed to boost efficiency and collaboration with the help of AI.

Plus, you never have to start from scratch — just tweak existing workflows to suit new needs or languages, saving time and effort. For example, imagine Ally, a makeup enthusiast, visits an offline beauty store to check out the newly launched lip kit line. She engages with representatives, gives them info and tests products. And considering how appropriate Zendesk is for larger companies, there’s a good chance you may need to take them up on that. If a title has been set for a conversation it will use this to populate the resulting Zendesk ticket title. Check out this tutorial to import ticket types and tickets data into your Intercom workspace.

Zendesk has a help center that is open to all to find out answers to common questions. Apart from this feature, the customer support options at Zendesk are quite limited. First, you can only talk to the support team if you are a registered user. In this article, we comprehensively do a comparison of Zendesk vs Intercom, examining their key features, benefits, and industry use cases. By exploring their distinct offerings, we aim to assist businesses in making informed decisions when selecting a customer service platform. Messagely’s chatbots are powerful tools for qualifying and converting leads while your team is otherwise occupied or away.

Fin is priced at $0.99 per resolution, so companies handling large volumes of queries might find it costly. In comparison, Zendesk customers pay a fixed price of $50 per agent—and only Zendesk AI is modeled on the world’s largest CX-specific dataset. Intercom offers reporting and analytics tools with limited capabilities for custom reporting, user behavior metrics, and advanced visualization. It also lacks advanced features like collaboration reporting, custom metrics, metric correlation, and drill-in attribution. Intercom does not have a dedicated workforce management solution, either. Qualtrics XM is a tool designed to optimize customer interactions by combining surveys, feedback and data into one platform, giving businesses a clear view of customer experiences.

Far from impersonalizing customer service, chatbots offer an immediate and efficient way to address common queries that end in satisfaction. Nowadays, it’s a crucial component in helping businesses focus on high-priority interactions and scale their customer service. If you thought Zendesk prices were confusing, let me introduce you to Intercom prices.

You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads. You could say something similar for Zendesk’s standard service offering, so it’s at least good to know they have Zendesk Sell, a capable CRM option to supplement it. You can use Zendesk Sell to Chat GPT track tasks, streamline workflows, improve engagement, nurture leads, and much more. Yes, you can integrate the Intercom solution into your Zendesk account. It will allow you to leverage some Intercom capabilities while keeping your account at the time-tested platform.

Company

However, we will say that Intercom just edges past Zendesk when it comes to self-service resources. What better way to start a Zendesk vs. Intercom than to compare their features? As expected, the right choice between Zendesk and Intercom will depend on your budget, your company, and your needs. Zendesk’s list of compliances and security memberships is very long, and they have won a number of security seals and awards. Zendesk also has multiple security filters that range from where it stores its files to the people it hires. Finally, you’ll have to choose your reporting preferences including details about what you’ll be tracking and how often you want to be reported of changes.

You need a complete customer service platform that’s seamlessly integrated and AI-enhanced. Zendesk lacks in-app messages and email marketing tools, which are essential for big companies with heavy client support loads. Conversely, Intercom lacks ticketing functionality, which can also be essential for big companies. Zendesk also has an Answer Bot, instantly taking your knowledge base game to the next level. It can automatically suggest relevant articles for agents to share during business hours with clients, reducing your support agents’ workload.

• Struck not in a bad way, more like in a very neutral ‘huh, this may be interesting’ way.
• Podium simplifies customer interactions with tools for text marketing, payment handling, review collection, live chat and an integrated agent inbox.
• Admins have the necessary permissions needed to view and manage Zendesk data.
• With Sprinklr Reporting and Analytics, you can map your end-to-end customer journey and monitor, respond to, or mitigate critical events in real time.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. That being said, while both platforms offer extensive features, they can be costly, especially for smaller enterprises. Ultimately, your choice should reflect whether your priority is comprehensive customer support (Zendesk) or a blend of CRM and sales support (Intercom). Zendesk Sell provides robust CRM features such as lead tracking, task management, and workflow automation.

Master Tidio with in-depth guides and uncover real-world success stories in our case studies. Discover the blueprint for exceptional customer experiences and unlock new pathways for business success. You can access detailed customer data at a glance while chatting, enabling you to make informed decisions in real time. The customer journey timeline provides a clear view of customer activities, helping you understand behaviors and tailor your responses accordingly. Not to brag 😏, but we specifically developed our platform to address the shortcomings in the current market. By going with Customerly for your customer service needs, you can get the best of both worlds (Zendesk and Intercom), plus some extra features and benefits you haven’t even thought of, yet.

You can create dozens of articles in a simple, intuitive WYSIWYG text editor, divide them by categories and sections, and customize them with your custom themes. All customer questions, whether via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel, are landed in one dashboard, where your agents can solve them quickly and efficiently. This guarantees continuous omnichannel support that meets customer expectations. Intercom is an all-in-one solution, and compared to Zendesk, Intercom has a less intuitive design and can be complicated for new users to learn. It also offers a confusing pricing structure and fewer integrations, making it less scalable and cost-effective.

Zendesk team can be just a little bit faster depending on the time of the day. Zendesk is popular due to its user-friendly interface, extensive customization options, scalability, multichannel support, robust analytics, and seamless integration capabilities. These features make it suitable for businesses of all sizes, helping them streamline their support operations and enhance the overall customer experience. Today, both companies offer a broad range of customer support features, making them both strong contenders in the market. Zendesk offers more advanced automation capabilities than Intercom, which may be a deciding factor for businesses that require complex workflows. Intercom bills itself first and foremost as a platform to make the business of customer service more personalized, among other things.

Moreover, it lacks native content redaction for sensitive information. Automatically answer common questions and perform recurring tasks with AI. Luca Micheli is a serial tech entrepreneur https://chat.openai.com/ with one exited company and a passion for bootstrap digital projects. He’s passionate about helping companies to succeed with marketing and business development tips.

So, get ready for an insightful journey through the landscapes of Zendesk and Intercom, where support excellence converges with AI innovation. Intercom has a very robust advanced chatbot set of tools for your business needs. There is a conversation routing bot, an operator bot, a lead qualification bot, and an article-suggesting bot, among others. It is also not too difficult to program your own bot rules using Intercon’s system. 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 basic chat and messaging, Intercom charges a flat fee of $39 per month for its basic plan with one user and $99 per month for its team plan with up to 5 users.

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. 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. From there, you can include FAQs, announcements, and article guides and then save them into pre-set lists for your customers to explore.

It supports personalized service through tools for omnichannel management, from social messaging to email and phone and integrates with over 1,200 apps, all while being easy to implement and adjust. Intercom also offers scalability within its pricing plans, enabling businesses to upgrade to higher tiers as their support needs grow. With its integrated suite of applications, Intercom provides a comprehensive solution that caters to businesses seeking a unified ecosystem to manage customer interactions. This scalability ensures businesses can align their support infrastructure with their evolving requirements, ensuring a seamless customer experience. Zendesk is a customer service software company that provides businesses with a suite of tools to manage customer interactions. The company was founded in 2007 and today serves over 170,000 customers worldwide.

This means you can use the Help Desk Migration product to import data from a variety of source tools (e.g. Zendesk, ZOHOdesk, Freshdesk, SFDC etc) to Intercom tickets. There are four different subscription packages you can choose from, all of which also have Essential, Pro, and Premium options for businesses of different sizes. You’d need to chat with Intercom sales team for get the costs for the Premium subscription, though. Just as Zendesk, Intercom also offers its own Operator bot which will automatically suggest relevant articles to customers who ask for help. It’s modern, it’s smooth, it looks great and it has so many advanced features.