Zendesk vs Intercom: Which Ticketing Tool is Best for You?

We also adhere to numerous industry standards and regulations, such as HIPAA, SOC2, ISO 27001, HDS, FedRAMP LI-SaaS, ISO 27018, and ISO 27701. In a nutshell, none of the customer support software companies provide decent user assistance. The Intercom versus Zendesk conundrum is probably the greatest problem in customer service software. They both offer some state-of-the-art core functionality and numerous unusual features. You need help desk software that enables you to deliver employee experiences that are intuitive, efficient, personalized, and secure. When deciding between Zendesk vs. Spiceworks, Zendesk is the right choice.

It relies on fairly basic automation while routing more complex issues to live agents. While both Zendesk and Intercom offer strong ticketing systems, they differ in the depth of automation capabilities. 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. 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.

You get an immediate overview of key metrics, such as ticket volume and agent performance as well as a summary of key customer data points. Intercom also uses AI and features a chatbot called Fin, but negative reviews note basic reporting and a lack of customization. Fin is priced at $0.99 per resolution, so companies handling large volumes of queries might find it costly.

Since Intercom is so intuitive, the time you’ll need to spend training new users on how to interact with the platform is greatly reduced. Users also point out that it can take a couple of hours to get used to the flow of tickets, which doesn’t happen in CRM, and they aren’t pleased with the product’s downtime. Although Zendesk isn’t hard to use, it’s not a perfectly smooth experience either. Users report feeling as though the interface is outdated and cluttered and complain about how long it takes to set up new features and customize existing ones. Then, you can begin filling in details such as your account’s name and icon and your agents’ profiles and security features.

And while Pipedrive’s mobile app can help you look at where your leads are on the map, you won’t be able to log sales visits using geolocation features. Intercom offers a simplistic dashboard with a detailed view of all customer details in one place. Operators will find its dashboard quite beneficial as it will take them seconds to find necessary features during an ongoing chat with the customers.

This is not a huge difference; however, it does indicate that customers are generally more satisfied with Intercom’s offerings than Zendesk’s. Zendesk is a much larger company than Intercom; it has over 170,000 customers, while Intercom has over 25,000. While this may seem like a positive for Zendesk, it’s important to consider that a larger company may not be as agile or responsive to customer needs as a smaller company. So yeah, all the features talk actually brings us to the most sacred question — the question of pricing. You’d probably want to know how much it costs to get each platform for your business, so let’s talk money now. This was the first match between two teams from last season’s Serie A top four.

Conversely, Spiceworks has limited compliance certifications and lacks features like single sign-on (SSO) and lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) login capabilities. With Zendesk, you can use lead tracking features to filter and segment your leads in real time. For example, you can create a smart list that only includes leads that haven’t responded to your message, allowing you to separate prospects for lead nurturing. You can then leverage customizable sequences, email automation, and desktop text messaging to help keep these prospects engaged. Pipedrive has workflow automation features, like setting triggers and desired actions, scheduling customer interactions, and automating lead assignment. However, one user noted that important features like automation are often down for an extensive amount of time.

Intercom’s user interface is also quite straightforward and easy to understand; it includes a range of features such as live chat, messaging campaigns, and automation workflows. Additionally, the platform allows for customizations such as customized user flows and onboarding experiences. Intercom also offers a 14-day free trial, after which customers can upgrade to a paid plan or use the basic free plan. Unlike Zendesk, the prices for Intercom are based on the number of seats and contacts, with each plan tailored to each customer, meaning that the pricing can be quite flexible. This is especially helpful for smaller businesses that may not need a lot of features.

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Operators can easily switch from one conversation to another, therefore helping operators manage more interactions simultaneously. However, you’ll likely end up paying more for Zendesk, and in-app messenger and other advanced customer communication tools will not be included. Depending on your needs, you can set up Intercom on your website or mobile app and add your automations. Setting up Intercom help centers is also very easy and intuitive, with no previous knowledge required. You can construct an omnichannel suite by combining productivity, e-commerce, CRM, analytics, social media, and other applications.

Visit either of their app marketplaces and look up the Intercom Zendesk integration. Like with many other apps, Zapier seems to be the best and most simple way to connect Intercom to Zendesk. No matter what Zendesk Suite plan you are on, you get workflow triggers, which are simple business rules-based actions to streamline many tasks. Help desk SaaS is how you manage general customer communication and for handling customer questions. Zendesk has more pricing options, and its most affordable plan is likely cheaper than Intercom’s, although without exact Intercom numbers, it is not easy to truly know the cost. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks.

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 track tasks, streamline workflows, improve engagement, nurture leads, and much more. Boost your lead gen and sales funnels with Flows – no-code automation paths that trigger at crucial moments in the customer journey. Customerly’s reporting tools are built on the principle that you can’t improve what you can’t measure. However, you won’t miss out on any of the essentials when it comes to live chat.

It isn’t as adept at purer sales tasks like lead management, list engagement, advanced reporting, forecasting, and workflow management as you’d expect a more complete CRM to be. 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. Intercom’s CRM features include customer journey tracking, custom data parameters, and list segmentation, which are useful for targeted marketing and engagement.

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Finally, you can pay $199 per month per user for unlimited sales pipelines and advanced reporting along with other features. 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. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. In-app messages and email marketing tools are two crucial features that Zendesk lacks when compared to Intercom.

With Intercom, you get email features like targeted and personalized outbound emailing, dynamic content fields, and an email-to-inbox forwarding feature. Zendesk has a broad range of security and compliance features to protect customer data privacy, such as SSO (single sign-on) and native content redaction for sensitive data. In comparison, Intercom’s reporting and analytics are limited in scope when it comes to consumer behavior metrics, custom reporting, and custom metrics. Zendesk has excellent reporting and analytics tools that allow you to decipher the underlying issues behind your help desk metrics. Hit the ground running – Master Tidio quickly with our extensive resource library.

The Zendesk marketplace is also where you can get a lot of great add-ons. There are also several different Shopify integrations to choose from, as well as CRM integrations like HubSpot and Salesforce. 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. The learning and knowledgebase category is another one where it is a close call between Zendesk and Intercom. However, we will say that Intercom just edges past Zendesk when it comes to self-service resources.

Discover the blueprint for exceptional customer experiences and unlock new pathways for business success. Customerly’s Helpdesk is designed to boost efficiency and collaboration with the help of AI. Agents can easily view ongoing interactions, and take over from Aura AI at any moment if they feel intervention is needed.

The more expensive Intercom plans offer AI-powered content cues, triage, and conversation insights. Intercom, of course, allows its customer support team to collaborate and communicate too, but overall, Zendesk wins this group. 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. However, it is possible Intercom’s support is superior at the premium level. 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.

Intercom, on the other hand, is designed to be more of a complete solution for sales, marketing, and customer relationship nurturing. You can use it for customer support, but that’s not its core strength. It started as a ticketing tool just for customer service teams and has evolved over the years into a complete customer support platform.

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. 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.

With Intercom, you can keep track of your customers and what they do on your website in real time. Like Zendesk, Intercom allows you to chat with online visitors and assist with their issues. Its sales CRM software starts at $19 per month per user, but you’ll have to pay $49 to get Zapier integrations and $99 for Hubspot integrations.

With so many features to consider, not to mention pricing, user experience, and scalability, we don’t blame you if you feel your head spinning. If delivering an outstanding customer experience and employee experience is your top priority, Zendesk should be your top pick over Intercom. Zendesk has the CX expertise to help businesses of all sizes scale their service experience without compromise. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how its tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. 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 puff. Chat features are integral to modern business communication, enabling real-time customer interaction and team collaboration.

Additionally, Zendesk is built to scale and has a low TCO, meaning your business can quickly get up and running without needing help from developers. Yes, you can integrate Pipedrive with Zendesk to access information between the two services organized in one place. If that’s not detailed enough, then surely their visitor browsing details will leave you surprised. This enables your operators to understand visitor intent faster and provide them with a personalized experience. As expected, the right choice between Zendesk and Intercom will depend on your budget, your company, and your needs.

One of the things that sets Zendesk apart from other customer service software providers is its focus on design. The company’s products are built with an emphasis on simplicity and usability. This has helped to make Zendesk one of the most popular customer service software platforms on the market.

Zendesk Sell provides robust CRM features such as lead tracking, task management, and workflow automation. Not to mention its advanced reporting capabilities, customizable dashboards, and seamless mobile app experience for an always-on approach to service. It’s built for function over form — the layout is highly organized and clearly designed around ticket management.

Security and compliance

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. 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. It also provides seamless navigation between a unified inbox, teams, and customer interactions, while putting all the most important information right at your fingertips. This makes it easy for teams to prioritize tasks, stay aligned, and deliver superior service.

While Zendesk doesn’t have a native asset management feature, you can easily add a third-party asset management provider via one of our 1,500-plus integrations. Spiceworks has https://chat.openai.com/ a limited selection of integrations, most of which focus on IT management. This may be problematic for businesses that must build on or supplement Spiceworks’ capabilities.

You need a complete customer service platform that’s seamlessly integrated and AI-enhanced. When it comes to which company is the better fit for your business, there’s no clear answer. It really depends on what features you need and what type of customer service strategy you plan to implement. You can use both Zendesk and Intercom simultaneously to leverage their respective strengths and provide comprehensive customer support across different channels and touchpoints. Intercom live chat is modern, smooth, and has many advanced features that other chat tools lack. It’s also highly customizable, so you can adjust it according to the style of your website or product.

Our AI also accelerates query resolution by intelligently routing tickets and providing contextual information to agents in real-time. Aura AI also excels in simplifying complex tasks by collecting data conversationally and automating intricate processes. When things get tricky, Aura AI smartly escalates the conversation to a human agent, ensuring that no customer is left frustrated. Plus, Aura AI’s global, multilingual support breaks down language barriers, making it an ideal solution for businesses with an international customer base. Simply put, we believe that our Aura AI chatbot is a game-changer when it comes to automating your customer service. To make your ticket handling a breeze, Customerly offers an intuitive, all-in-one platform that consolidates customer inquiries from various channels into a unified inbox.

When selecting a sales CRM, you’ll want to consider its total cost of ownership (TCO). Zendesk has a low TCO because it has no hidden costs and can be easily set up without needing developers or third-party help, saving you time and money. Alternatively, Pipedrive users should prepare to pay more for even simple CRM features like email tracking, whereas email tracking is available for all Zendesk Sell plans. Again, Zendesk has surpassed the number of reviewers when compared to Intercom. Some of the highly-rated features include ticket creation user experience, email to case, and live chat reporting.

It’s definitely something that both your agents and customers will feel equally comfortable using. When comparing chatbots, it’s important to consider their level of intelligence, “trainability,” and customization. While both Zendesk and Intercom offer the essentials, like ticketing, issue resolution, and automation, the devil’s in the details when it comes to which is best for your unique needs.

Customers of Zendesk can purchase priority assistance at the enterprise tier, which includes a 99.9% uptime service level agreement and a 1-hour service level goal. At all tiers, there is an additional fee to work with a member of the Zendesk success team on unique engagements. Intercom has more customization features for features like bots, themes, triggers, and funnels. Discover how to awe shoppers with stellar customer service during peak season. They fall within roughly the same price range, that most SMEs and larger enterprises should find within their budget. Both also use a two-pronged pricing system, based on the number of agents/seats and the level of features needed.

• And while Pipedrive’s mobile app can help you look at where your leads are on the map, you won’t be able to log sales visits using geolocation features.
• On the other hand, Intercom enables agents to convert a conversation into a ticket with one click.
• By the end of the article, you’ll not only know all of the main differences between Zendesk and Intercom, but you’ll know which is the right tool for you.
• That being said, it sometimes lacks the advanced customization and automation offered by other AI-powered chatbots, like Intercom’s.
• While this may seem like a positive for Zendesk, it’s important to consider that a larger company may not be as agile or responsive to customer needs as a smaller company.

Their basic plan is cheaper than Zendesk, but you’ll not get to use any of their AI-powered add-ons. So, the actual pricing of Intercom would depend on whether or not you’re going to need their AI features – the AI Copilot and AI Agent. The AI Copilot is limited to assisting ten conversations per support agent and for anything more, it costs $35 per month per agent. However, if you’re interested in understanding customer behavior, product usage, and in need of AI-powered predictive insights, Intercom’s user analytics might be a better fit.

Zendesk is quite famous for designing its platform to be intuitive and its tools to be quite simple to learn. This is aided by the fact that the look and feel of Zendesk’s user interface are neat and minimal, with few cluttering features. As for Intercom’s general pricing structure, there are three plans, but you’ll have to contact them to get exact prices.

Since, its name has become somewhat synonymous with customer service and support. Zendesk is built to grow alongside your business, resulting in less downtime, better cost savings, and the stability needed to provide Chat GPT 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.

Meanwhile, Intercom excels with its comprehensive AI automation capabilities, all built on a unified AI system. Zendesk fully utilizes AI tools to enhance user experiences at every stage of the customer journey. Its AI chatbots leverage machine learning to gain a deeper understanding of customer interactions.

Read our list of the most important customer service skills for cultivating excellent CX, and utilize our templates to seamlessly incorporate these skills into your resume. We’ve helped thousands of companies improve their intercom versus zendesk support operations and have customer stories to prove it. It includes the most important service desk software features—a few of which we’ll cover in more detail later—needed to deliver the best employee experience.

What makes Intercom stand out from the crowd are their chatbots and lots of chat automation features that can be very helpful for your team. You can integrate different apps (like Google Meet or Stripe among others) with your messenger and make it a high end point for your customers. In this blog, we contrast Zendesk’s comprehensive customer support platform with LiveChat’s focused approach to real-time… If ticket management and workflow optimization are your primary concerns, Zendesk’s automation capabilities might be a better fit. However, if you’re looking to improve your customer’s user journey with personalized conversations, Intercom’s automation features and AI assistant are likely to be beneficial.

Our reporting and analytics tools allow you to access real-time and historical data to spot any inefficiencies, take action on that information, and improve your IT operations. Also, our reports are pre-built and customizable, so you can monitor the data that matters most to your team. Intercom offers an integrated knowledge base functionality to its user base. Using the existing knowledge base functionality, they can display self-help articles in the chat window before the customer approaches your team for support. You can create these knowledge base articles in your target audience’s native language as their software is multilingual.

This is fine, as not every customer support team wants to be so available on the phone. Email marketing, for example, is a big deal, but less so when it comes to customer service. Still, for either of these platforms to have some email marketing or other email functionality is common sense. Zendesk has many amazing team collaboration and communication features, like whisper mode, which lets multiple agents chime in to help each other without the customer knowing. There is also something called warm transfers, which let one rep add contextual notes to a ticket before transferring it to another rep. You also get a side conversation tool.

Configure Settings

Pipedrive offers access to app integrations built by Pipedrive and third-party vendors, including Zendesk. But unlike the Zendesk sales CRM, Pipedrive does not seamlessly integrate with native customer service software and relies on third-party alternatives. Intercom’s live chat reports aren’t just offering what your customers are doing or whether they are satisfied with your services. They offer more detailed insights like lead generation sources, a complete message report to track customer engagement, and detailed information on the support team’s performance.

You can use these features to create custom funnels, segment users based on specific behaviors, and automate personalized communications. While not included with its customer service suite, it offers a full-fledged standalone CRM called Zendesk Sell. While it’s a separate product with separate costs, it does integrate seamlessly with Zendesk’s customer service platform. Traditional ticketing systems are one of the major customer service bottlenecks companies want to solve with automation. Intelligent automated ticketing helps streamline customer service management and handling inquiries while reducing manual work.

It makes sure that you don’t miss a single inquiry by queuing tickets for agent handling. You can configure it to assign tickets using various methods, such as skills, load balancing, and round-robin to ensure efficient handling. If you’re already using Intercom and want to continue using it as the front-end CRM experience, integrating with Zendesk can improve it.

Additionally, the Zendesk sales CRM seamlessly integrates with the Zendesk Support Suite, allowing your customer service and sales teams to share information in a centralized place. The Zendesk sales CRM hits all of the functions you’d expect from CRM software, like reporting and analytics tools that can deliver key sales metrics with pre-built dashboards right out of the box. On top of that, you can use drag-and-drop widgets to create custom CRM reports with the data most important to your goals. With Pipedrive, users have access to visual reporting dashboards, but adding custom fields is limited to their Professional, Power, and Enterprise plans.

They have a dedicated help section that provides instructions on how to set up and effectively use Intercom. To select the ideal fit for your business, it is crucial to compare these industry giants and assess which aligns best with your specific requirements. 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. Both options are well designed, easy to use, and share some pretty key functionality like behavioral triggers and omnichannel-ality (omnichannel-centricity?). But with perks like more advanced chatbots, automation, and lead management capabilities, Intercom could have an edge for many users. The Suite Team plan, priced at $69 per agent, adds features like live chat and messaging, while the Suite Growth plan at $115 per agent introduces automation and advanced analytics.

Intercom is ideal for personalized messaging, while Zendesk offers robust ticket management and self-service options. Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates. Zendesk also packs some pretty potent tools into their platform, so you can empower your agents to do what they do with less repetition. Agents can use basic automation (like auto-closing tickets or setting auto-responses), apply list organization to stay on top of their tasks, or set up triggers to keep tickets moving automatically. 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.

Zendesk AI offers advanced features that have been pre-trained on IT ticket data and can be used out of the box. You can use our AI-powered employee experience solutions to deliver 24/7 service, solve employee issues faster, optimize your internal knowledge base and self-service capabilities, and more. For example, leverage our advanced chatbots to immediately understand and solve common employee issues. Or, use our AI-powered intelligent triage and routing to automatically send tickets to the right team and improve service efficiency. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer compelling features and capabilities aimed at improving customer service through efficient ticketing systems.

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. Basically, you can create new articles, divide them by categories and sections — make it a high end destination for customers when they have questions or issues. In today’s environment, where customer expectations are constantly evolving, choosing the right ticketing tool that aligns with your business needs is crucial. This comparison will delve into the features, similarities, differences, pros, cons, and use cases of Zendesk and Intercom, providing you with the insights needed to make an informed decision. Learn their benefits, integration steps, best tools to try and common pitfalls to avoid.

Zendesk offers a free 30-day trial, after which customers will need to upgrade to one of their paid plans. Their help desk software has a single inbox to handle customer inquiries. Your customer service agents can leave private notes for each other and enjoy automatic ticket assignments to the right specialists. It’s designed so well that you really enjoy staying in their inbox and communicating with clients. Spiceworks provides limited options for support and primarily focuses on ticket creation through email, mobile apps, and web browsers.

When you combine the help desk with Intercom Messenger, you get added channels for customer engagement. Zendesk excels with its AI-enhanced user experience and robust omnichannel support, making it ideal for businesses focused on customer service. On the other hand, Intercom shines with its advanced AI-driven automation and insightful analytics, perfect for those who value seamless communication and in-app messaging. Consider which features align best with your business needs to make the right choice.

Zendesk is with you for the long haul, providing a solution for today and scaling alongside you as your company grows. We also have IT, HR, and CX capabilities, so you can use Zendesk for your customer- and employee-facing needs. On the other hand, Spiceworks lacks critical features and functionality to help you scale, such as robust integrations.

I tested both of their live chats and their support agents were answering in very quickly and right to the point. Zendesk team can be just a little bit faster depending on the time of the day. This makes it an ideal choice for businesses looking to engage customers directly within their product, app or website. It also supports email and other channels – like Whatsapp, SMS, social media channels and more, through integrations. But its core strength lies in providing a seamless, conversational experience for customers.

It allows businesses to organize and share helpful documentation or answer customers’ common questions. Self-service resources always relieve the burden on customer support teams, and both of our subjects have this tool in their packages. Pipedrive is limited to third-party customer service integrations and, unlike Zendesk, does not offer customer service software. The customer support platform starts at just $5 per agent per month, which is a very basic customer support tool. If you want dashboard reporting and integrations, you’ll need to pay $19 per agent per month.

The platform also lacks transparency in displaying reviews, install counts, and purpose-built customer service integrations. The Zendesk Marketplace offers over 1,500 no-code apps and integrations. As a result, customers can implement the help desk software quickly—without the need for developers—and see a faster return on investment. Plus, our transparent pricing doesn’t have hidden fees or endless add-ons, so customers know exactly what they’re paying for and can calculate the total cost of ownership ahead of time. In comparison, Intercom’s confusing pricing structure that features multiple add-ons may be unsuitable for small businesses. Intercom also has a mobile app available for both Android and iOS, which makes it easy to stay connected with customers even when away from the computer.