Intercom vs Zendesk: The Ultimate Head-to-Head Showdown in 2018

Inbox focuses on the organizational aspect of all those messages your business is sending and receiving. Users can assign, reply to, and close conversations across their entire website with Inbox. Intercom, essentially, is offering businesses an omnichannel approach to customers interested in reaching out with whatever channel they’re most comfortable with. Intercom is a customer communication platform with a suite of integrated products for every team—including sales, marketing, product, and support.

Zendesk Guide is a powerful knowledge base product just like Intercom Articles. Users can take advantage of many of the same features Intercom offers. Zendesk understands how important self-service support options are, so let’s look at how much it costs users for these options, and what they are exactly.

Zendesk Agent Dashboard

Zendesk offers seven different products for businesses interested in helpdesk CRM software (Here’s our Beginner’s Guide to Understanding Helpdesk Software) to choose from. We’re going to focus on four products that we consider to be the closest comparisons to what Intercom offers their customers. They also have an integrated capability where you see everything related to the one customer in one spot – all their interactions with you, and can move the customer through your custom stages.

• Once customers send their questions, the team members linked to customer support at Hire-Hive are notified via email.
• The features not included in the Essential plan also aren’t as game-changing as in Intercom Messages.
• Use HubSpot to deepen your relationship with your customers, elevate their voice, and provide a best-in-class experience.
• Some of these tasks include identifying and routing customers to support and sales agents.
• From SLAs to ticketing, build automated workflows that efficiently manage VIP and complex issues.
• Built on one of the most extensive customer service platforms, Zendesk offers a call center solution for businesses of every size.

Intercom pricing packages can also be customized with add-ons for conducting product tours, account-based marketing, multi-channel campaigns, and resolution reporting. 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. There’s a plethora of features to help bigger teams collaborate more effectively — like private notes or real-time view of who’s handling a given ticket at the moment, etc. Drift is the closest alternative to Intercom in that it also focuses heavily on sales and marketing. But because of its live chat and custom chatbot tools, we wanted to include them on this list as an alternative your business may want to consider.

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To sum up this Intercom vs Zendesk battle, Zendesk is a great customer support oriented tool which will be a great choice for big teams with various departments. Intercom feels more wholesome and is more customer success oriented, but can be too costly for smaller companies. Create a rich experience for your customers—surface content, automatically answer FAQs, or add apps like Shopify and Stripe for complete self-service. Offer your customers support that’s just right for them, whether that’s live chat, asynchronous messaging, a self-serve-only experience, or a little of everything—all from one Messenger. These 13 Intercom alternatives provide great options for sales, marketing, and support help for your business. LiveAgent is an Intercom alternative you might want to consider as it offers a number of support features that Intercom doesn’t.

Customers desiring strong stability, predictability, and robustness in their platform may prefer HubSpot. Service Hub includes more features in the core package, requiring fewer add-ons to implement for similar use cases. Intercom is more of a specialized point solution and is suited for smaller teams than Zendesk, and therefore, is more difficult to customize. Intercom does offer customizable bots with code-free editing to match the look and feel of the website where they live.

Zendesk v/s Intercom

Through paid add-ons, Zendesk allows for robust customization to fit your business’s data needs – at a premium, of course. One such customization includes Zendesk Explore, a proprietary analytics product that touts omnichannel analytics and customer engagement metrics across multiple marketing and service channels. Beyond Explore, Zendesk dashboard features enable service leaders to simply interpret, evaluate, and improve team performance and ticket throughput.

• Also, they can assign/snooze conversations, use private notes, and @mentions.
• Eliminate manual triage with Custom Bots—prioritize urgent issues and connect customers to the right team members, automatically.
• However, the Zendesk support itself leaves much to be desired.
• However, some users remarked that a developer is needed to properly install the software or run the risks of problems in the future.
• Enterprise, which includes the Professional plan + roles and permissions, skill-based routing, AI chatbots, web SDK, and widget branding.
• Beyond Explore, Zendesk dashboard features enable service leaders to simply interpret, evaluate, and improve team performance and ticket throughput.

If your business is established and you need to cut down on those ticket resolution times, Zendesk may be worth it. Zendesk for Sales offers three plans, ranging from $19 to $99 monthly per user, with free trials available for each plan. Intercom has a unique pricing structure, offering three separate solutions, each intended for a distinct use case. We wish some of their great features were offered in multiple plans, but none features overlap among plans. Inside a ticket, the workspace center console displays the ticket’s conversation.

Service Hub is the Leader in Customer Service

If you do go with ActiveCampaign, I HIGHLY recommend that you take their paid training. It will really help you get up faster and understand the product deeper, and not waste time. ActiveCampaign is difficult to learn on your own since it is so full featured. Sign up for a trial through a salesperson and then ask if it is possible to get in the class for less money.

So here we will be comparing two most popular chatbot software Zendesk and Intercom. MailChimp helps you design email newsletters, share them on social networks, integrate with services you already use, and track your results. Finally, we also have some B2B customers and expect this part of our business to grow significantly in 2021. What I like most about Intercom is that it makes conversing with our customers super easy. The three tiers—Suite Team, Suite Growth, and Suite Professional—also give you more options outside of Intercom’s static structure.

Product

HubSpot is trusted by over 121,000 businesses in more than 120 countries. Zendesk is a great and robust support too, but is Intercom a replacement for Zendesk in terms of functionality? Your Premier Services team will partner with you every step of the way to make sure you and your team are set up for long term success. Just three of the reasons we outperform traditional ticketing systems like Zendesk on G2.

• The helpfulness score predicts the relative value a user receives from a given review based on a number of factors.
• 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.
• Whether you’ve just started searching for a customer support tool or have been using one for a while, chances are you know about both Zendesk and Intercom.
• Here’s a quick introduction to both the customer support tools.
• This includes chatbots and helpdesk to track all customer queries.
• If a ticket isn’t answered in a timely manner, a pre-set automation can escalate it to high-priority status.

We hope that this Intercom VS Zendesk comparison helps you choose one that matches your support, marketing, and sales needs. But in case you are in search of something beyond these two, then ProProfs Chat can be an option. Whether it’s getting set up or figuring out the best way to customize meetings for your needs, there are over 85,000 community members willing to help. HubSpot’s Solution Partner Program is a network of over a thousand agencies to help you resource your marketing strategy with HubSpot. Whether you need someone to help create content, set up ads, or build workflows, there’s a partner here for you. See how InspectionXpert switched from Zendesk to HubSpot Service Hub and decreased support tickets by 25%.

Zendesk Chat is most comparable to Intercom’s Messages product. Zendesk Chat allows businesses to reach their customers instantly via web, mobile, and messaging. Given how well Zendesk is priced, you would think that it would fit small businesses more neatly.

For example, for businesses that want just a couple of features, there are subscription packages. Each of such packages contains a set of tools from basic to advanced features. Therefore, to gauge if your Intercom VS Zendesk chosen help desk is effective or not, you use analytics. In this case, each customer service software has a unique way of generating reports such as scheduling, the scope of the analysis, and more.