Who Is the Winner in This Zendesk vs Intercom Showdown?

Zendesk also offers a sales pipeline feature through its Zendesk Sell product. You can set up email sequences that specify how and when leads and contacts are engaged. With Zendesk Sell, you can also customize how deals move through your pipeline by setting pipeline stages that reflect your sales cycle. 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. If you’re exploring popular chat support tools Zendesk and Intercom, you may be trying to understand which solution is right for you. In this detailed comparison, we’ll explore the features and characteristics of Intercom and Zendesk, highlighting each of their unique capabilities, so you can identify the right solution for your needs.

Intercom and Zendesk are neck to neck in reviews from various sites such as G2, Capterra, Financesonline, and more. We’ve analyzed a dozen of reviews to help you get an average estimate of Zendesk vs Intercom functionality. Let’s compare Intercom and Zendesk using the help desk features they https://www.metadialog.com/blog/intercom-vs-zendesk/ have. In this case, we’ll see what their similarities and differences are. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.

Choose Technologies to compare

Our team is experienced in consolidating Zendesk instances and merging instances of other help desk and service desk systems. Intercom is a user intelligence and behavioral targeting platform to better understand, improve, and benefit from your customer communication. As an example, Intercom and Zendesk are scored at 8.9 and 9.7, respectively, for all round quality and performance. Similarly, Intercom and Zendesk have a user satisfaction rating of 96% and 98%, respectively, which shows the general satisfaction they get from customers.

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)? Powered by Explore, Zendesk’s reporting capabilities are pretty impressive. Right out of the gate, you’ve got dozens of pre-set report options on everything from satisfaction ratings and time in status to abandoned calls and Answer Bot resolutions. You can even save custom dashboards for a more tailored reporting experience.

Intercom Agent Dashboard

Whatever people are using to communicate with each other, whether it be online or over the phone, they expect to also be able to talk to the businesses they use with those same tools and platforms. Among the many challenges facing businesses today is the pressing need to meet their customers where they are. Zendesk would be a perfect option for businesses that are searching for a well-integrated support system. It offers a suite that compiles help desk, live chat, and knowledge base to their user base.

Intercom stands out here due to its ability  to tailor sales workflows. You can also set up interactive product tours to highlight new features in-product and explain how they work. In general, Zendesk offers a wide range of live chat features such as customizable chat widgets, automatic greetings, offline messaging, and chat triggers. In addition to these features, Intercom offers messaging automation and real-time visitor insights. Zendesk takes the slight lead here because it offers some advanced help desk features, which Intercom does not. Zendesk is billed more as a customer support and ticketing solution, while Intercom includes more native CRM functionality.

Intercom vs Zendesk

We will help you find alternatives and reviews of the products you already use. As a rule, Intercom reviews are positive as many users praise the interface, the ease of use, and the deployment of the software. However, some users remarked that a developer is needed to properly install the software or run the risks of problems in the future.

Beyond that, you can create custom reports that combine all of the stats listed above (and many more) and present them as counts, columns, lines, or tables. Sure, Intercom allows you to create articles and deliver a bot that answers customer questions with specific articles and resolves issues faster. But, if you just need a secure and quick data transfer, opt for Help Desk Migration. Pricing starts at $39 and varies based on the number of records you want to migrate.

Zendesk vs. Intercom at a glance

Zendesk for Service transforms customer queries and conversations from all channels–call, web chat, tweet, text, or email–into tickets in the Agent Workspace. Pre-selected assignment rules customize each ticket’s destination, assigning routing paths to agents or metadialog.com departments based on customer priority status, query type, or issue details. On Capterra, Intercom has a rating of 4.5 given by 784 reviewers. While they like the ease of use this product offers its users, they’ve indeed rated them low in terms of services.

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. In the category of customer support, Zendesk appears to be just slightly better than Intercom based on the availability of regular service and response times.

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There’s even on-the-spot translation built right in, which is extremely helpful. Intercom Inbox has features that vaguely remind Zendesk Support, but the offered package Acquire customer (Messages and Inbox) is more paralleled with Zendesk Support + Chat. Having the two presented side by side, which is the best CRM solution? The answer, as with most things in life, is that it depends on your specific needs and ultimate goals. While Intercom offers a “Starter Plan” for very small businesses, the price for larger companies is scaled upward, too.

• Admins will also like the fact that they can see the progress of all their teams and who all are actively answering a customer’s query in real-time.
• Zendesk has great intelligent routing and escalation protocols as well.
• HubSpot’s Solution Partner Program is a network of over a thousand agencies to help you resource your marketing strategy with HubSpot.
• Using Zendesk, you can create community forums where customers can connect, comment, and collaborate, creating a way to harness customers’ expertise and promote feedback.
• Automatic assignment rules establish criteria that automatically route tickets to the right agent or team, based on message or user data.
• Below, we’ve compared the pros and cons for Intercom vs Zendesk.

Ticket routing helps to send the ticket to the best support team agent. Using Zendesk, you can create community forums where customers can connect, comment, and collaborate, creating a way to harness customers’ expertise and promote feedback. Community managers can also escalate posts to support agents when one-on-one help is needed. Intercom allows visitors to search for and view articles from the messenger widget.

Intercom or Zendesk: Voice and phone tools

Their template triggers are fairly limited with only seven options, but they do enable users to create new custom triggers, which can be a game-changer for agents with more complex workflows. I tested both options (using Zendesk’s Suite Professional trial and Intercom’s Support trial) and found clearly defined differences between the two. Here’s what you need to know about Zendesk vs. Intercom as customer support and relationship management tools. Zendesk stands out as a champion of customer support due to its easy-to-use work-frame, many useful add-ons, and features in all tiers. Therefore, to gauge if your 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.

Another feature Intercom offers that Zendesk doesn’t is email marketing tools. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to communicate with your customers. While Zendesk offers a wide array of support features, many more than Intercom, there are a couple of major features it lacks that Intercom has. The first is proactive, in-app messaging, and the second is email marketing capabilities.

Zendesk Pricing vs Intercom Pricing

While Intercom offers unique feature options that weave together well into campaigns and series, it lacks voice calling–a critical feature–and spreads its more advanced features out too much among plans. However, customers can purchase multiple Intercom plans to use together, or purchase add-ons to select just the features they want. The Zendesk Admin Center panels allow administrators to control settings, accessibility, automations, and workflows for everything from chatbots to integrations and custom APIs. Intercom wins the sales pipeline tools category because its campaigning and sequencing tools integrate all channels and unique services, like carousels and product tours. Intercom’s Messenger lets users schedule timely, targeted, and personal messages sent based on triggers and customer actions, and is automatically translatable into over 30 languages. In fact, agents can even add customers to private messaging chats when necessary, and the customer will receive the whole conversation history by email to ensure they’re up to date.

Community forums enable customers to assist each other by asking questions and sharing tips, experiences, and best practices–creating a unique, user-based, searchable information hub. Zendesk also makes it easy to customize your help center, with out-of-the-box tools to design color, theme, and layout–both on mobile and desktop. When a customer asks a question in the Messenger widget, the Operator automatically suggests a handful of relevant articles based on keywords to help customers resolve their own issues.

• Whichever solution you choose, mParticle can help integrate your data.
• There are also several different Shopify integrations to choose from, as well as CRM integrations like HubSpot and Salesforce.
• It’s virtually impossible to predict what you’re going to pay for Intercom at the end of the day.
• Zendesk also packs some pretty potent tools into their platform, so you can empower your agents to do what they do with less repetition.
• Zendesk wins the major category of help desk and ticketing system software.
• Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to communicate with your customers.