Zendesk vs Intercom: the ultimate comparison by Ana Khlystova HelpCrunch

MParticle is a Customer Data Platform offering plug-and-play integrations to Zendesk and Intercom, along with over 300 other marketing, analytics, and data warehousing tools. With mParticle, you can connect your Zendesk and Intercom data with other marketing, analytics, and business intelligence platforms without any custom engineering effort. 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 takes the slight lead here because it offers some advanced help desk features, which Intercom does not. This feature ensures that each customer request is handled by the best-suited agent, improving the overall efficiency of the support team.

• You can even improve efficiency and transparency by setting up task sequences, defining sales triggers, and strategizing with advanced forecasting and reporting tools.
• With Zendesk, organizational data silos can be a thing of the past.
• If you are looking to deflect support requests to self-service options, then Kustomer has no-code chatbots available to help.
• 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.
• All interactions with customers be it via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel are landing in one dashboard, where your agents can solve them fast and efficiently.
• Plus, it has a number of integrations to make the process even easier for your team, like Slack, Zapier, Salesforce, and WhatsApp.

Once customers send their questions, the team members linked to customer support at Hire-Hive are notified via email. Intercom software is simple, personal, Intuitive, and Informative. In summary, the best alternative to Zendesk depends on your unique business requirements and use case. Jetdocs is the top choice for teams focusing on ticketing solutions, while Intercom excels in offering a comprehensive customer experience platform. Gist presents an affordable option with unlimited seats, JitBit caters to businesses seeking a self-hosted solution, and Crisp.Chat provides an amazing free live chat service. Crisp is the next-level customer engagement platform that takes customer service to a whole new level.

Free Tools

And when they do answer, they’re usually not even helpful or will try to transfer you to the sales department right away. There’s the cheapest plan for small businesses – Starter – that cost $74 per month and will include 1 seat and 1,000 people reached/mo. If you create a new chat with the team, land on a page with no widget, and go back in the browser for some reason, your chat will go puff. When Zendesk emerged, it was seen as a strongly functional provider with many features, whereas Freshdesk was a more economical substitute created in response to rising Zendesk prices. Yet, since its inauguration in 2010, Freshdesk has made many strides in improving.

The Zendesk Admin Center panels allow administrators to control settings, accessibility, automations, and workflows for everything from chatbots to integrations and custom APIs. Intercom offers admin full visibility and control over all company inboxes, as well as agent access controls and role management. Intercom wins the sales pipeline tools category because its campaigning and sequencing tools integrate all channels and unique services, like carousels and product tours. Zendesk wins the self-service tools category because it provides extensive help center customization options. Users with light access–such as knowledgeable agents and supervisors–can be added to tickets for browsing and feedback.

Zapier Automation Platform

You can acquire new customers, retain existing customers, and provide quality customer support with Enterprise Plan with Zendesk or Intercom. It’s hard to give premium customer support manually, that’s what customer support software like Zendesk or Intercom does for you. They also do way more than customer support, you can use them for team collaboration, project management, marketing, and sales. For automation and messaging at scale, you can choose from two plans- Accelerate ($499) or Scale ($999) per month for up to ten users, depending on your business needs. Intercom costs can go even higher with custom add-ons such as Product Tours (from $199/month, Advanced lead generation (from $499/month), Advanced customer engagement (from $499/month), etc. Intercom’s pricing can be divided into basic messaging and messaging with automation.

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. Intercom is a popular customer communications platform, but its focus has always been on sales and marketing.

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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. 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. Whichever solution you choose, mParticle can help integrate your data.

However, compared to Zendesk, JitBit is much cheaper with a starting price of just under $25/month (billed annually). Zoho is a private company that promises practical help desk software, especially for small and mid-sized businesses. Ask for feedback from your customers as soon as the conversation ends to get a better understanding of how your interactions are influencing the entire customer experience, and make adjustments ASAP. Keep the conversation going across a range of channels without missing a beat. Consolidate every part of the conversation –  including live chat, email, and SMS – in a single inbox. Use the drag and drop builder to create self service flows for your most frequent customer service questions.

Freshdesk?

Zendesk chatbot software is a suite of support app that helps transform your customer service into actionable customer retention and lead source via agent deployment. It has one of the most flexible plan structures, making it ideal for businesses of any size. It consists of support, chats, calls center solution, and knowledge base modules that you can upgrade separately. Zendesk makes support, sales, and customer engagement software for everyone with a quick to implement, easy to use, platform. AzureDesk is an excellent Zendesk alternative for businesses looking for an easy-to-use and comprehensive customer service platform. It provides a full suite of tools to help you manage customer interactions, including ticketing, messaging, and automated workflows.

Easy assigning of Email Queries and Live Chat to the right support agent to solve them precisely. Report and Analytics of businesses can gain valuable insights and improve their support strategy. This can help businesses make data-driven decisions that can lead to improved customer satisfaction and retention. Basic E-commerce Support – Gorgias specializes in customer service software tailored for e-commerce businesses. It integrates seamlessly with popular e-commerce platforms, such as Shopify and Magento, providing a unified interface for managing customer inquiries. Gorgias automates repetitive tasks, offers order tracking features, and facilitates personalized responses, making it an appealing choice for online retailers.

The “SaaS” Live Chat: Intercom

You can opt for code via JavaScript or Rails or even integrate directly with the likes of Google Tag Manager, WordPress, or Shopify. Intercom, on the other hand, was built for business messaging, so communication is one of their strong suits. Combine that with their prowess in automation and sales solutions, and you’ve got a really strong product that can handle myriad customer relationship needs. Another key feature of HappyFox is that it enables companies to build a knowledge base that integrates with the software’s self-service functionality. With this, HappyFox’s self-service portal provides pertinent information rewarding a customer’s inquiries and can check information about the logistics of the issue.

Many use cases call for different approaches, and Zendesk and Intercom are but two software solutions for each case. The main idea here is to rid the average support agent of a slew of mundane and repetitive tasks, giving them more time and mental energy to help customers with tougher issues. You get call recording, muting metadialog.com and holding, conference calling, and call blocking. Zendesk also offers callback requests, call monitoring and call quality notifications, among other telephone tools. Intercom’s dashboards may not be as aesthetically pleasing as Zendesk’s, but they still allow users to navigate their tools with few distractions.