Zendesk vs Intercom in 2023: Detailed Analysis of Features, Pricing, and More

With Intercom workload management tools, administrators can ensure that incoming conversations, traffic, and workload are evenly distributed among team members. While Intercom lacks some common customer-service channels like voice calling and video conferencing, it supports other unique features that transfer across channels. Zendesk wins the ticketing system category due to its easy-to-use interface and side conversations tool. Pre-selected assignment rules customize each ticket’s destination, assigning routing paths to agents or departments based on customer priority status, query type, or issue details.

The company was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Intercom’s products are used by over 25,000 customers, from small tech startups to large enterprises. Businesses of all sizes can rely on the Zendesk customer service platform and benefit from workflow management, powerful AI tools, robust insights, and more. If that sounds good to you, sign up for a free demo to see our software in action and get started. Advanced workflows are useful to customer service teams because they automate processes that make it easier for agents to provide great customer service. Zendesk offers robust, pre-built reports for sales and support teams.

There is no need to spend numerous hours stopping over every step of data migration. Save your time just by letting us to manage the complicated data transition process for you. Our team can significantly shorten the time spent on import and altogether provide comfort for your clients and management workforce throughout the process.

This way, your clients will never have to repeat themselves or get frustrated because their new representative doesn’t know their background. With Zendesk, you can anticipate 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.

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 Users report feeling as though the interface is outdated and cluttered and complain about how long it takes to set up new features and customize existing ones. Discover customer and product issues with instant replays, in-app cobrowsing, and console logs.

Fintech startup Novo had to pivot to new ways of working in 2020, just like everyone else. But the company’s story isn’t just one of pandemic-induced change—in the first half of the year, Novo’s client base grew from 2,000 to tens of thousands. Check out the research-backed comparison below to better understand how each solution can add value to your organization. Keeping this general theme in mind, I’ll dive deeper into how each software’s features compare, so you can decide which use case might best fit your needs. Understanding these fundamental differences should go a long way in helping you pick between the two, but does that mean you can’t use one platform to do what the other does better? These are both still very versatile products, so don’t think you have to get too siloed into a single use case.

Zendesk pricing is divided between a customer support product called “Zendesk for support”, and a fully-fledged CRM called “Zendesk for sales”. Intercom users often mention how impressed they are with its ease of use and their ability to quickly create useful tasks and set up automations. Even reviewers who hadn’t used the platform highlight how beautifully designed it is and how simple it is to interact with for both users and clients alike.

Multilingual content and other advanced features come with a $49 price per agent per month. They have a dedicated help section that provides instructions on how to set up and effectively use Intercom. Founded in 2007, Zendesk started as a ticketing tool for customer success teams.

Say goodbye to manual data transfers and hello to a more efficient way of conducting business. Trust us for your Zendesk data migration needs and discover the convenience of a bulk user import feature that streamlines the process from start to finish. When it comes to Zendesk import, Help Desk Migration is your trusted partner.

Intercom

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. You can even moderate user content to leverage your customer community. Overall, I actually liked Zendesk’s user experience better than Intercom’s in terms of its messaging dashboard. Intercom has a dark mode that I think many people will appreciate, and I wouldn’t say it’s lacking in any way.

Intercom is the new guy on the block when it comes to help desk ticketing systems. This means the company is still working out some kinks and operating with limited capabilities. Intercom does have a ticketing dashboard that has omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk. Their reports are attractive, dynamic, and integrated right out of the box.

If you are a considerate person that makes calculative choices – you should obviously want to analyze the functionality of our data migration service. It is none other than the modern customer support software of Helpwise. Here is a Zendesk vs. Intercom based on the customer support offered by these brands. Help Desk Migration ensures you experience no downtime and continue serving your customers seamlessly. Once the Full Data Migration is complete, run a Delta Migration to import only new or updated records from Intercom to Zendesk without duplicating data.

As you can imagine, banking from anywhere requires a flexible, robust customer service experience. Monese is another fintech company that provides a banking app, account, and debit card to make settling in a new country easier. By providing banking without boundaries, the company aims to provide users with quick access to their finances, wherever they happen to be. Track customer service metrics to gain valuable insights and improve customer service processes and agent performance.

If you thought Zendesk prices were confusing, let me introduce you to the Intercom charges. It’s virtually impossible to predict what you’ll pay for Intercom at the end of the day. They charge for customer service representative seats and people reached, don’t reveal their prices, and offer tons of custom add-ons at additional cost.

If a customer isn’t satisfied with Answer Bot’s response, Answer Bot quickly routes them to an agent best suited to help. The entire thread is saved within the ticket for future agents to reference. Agents can add each other to internal notes within a ticket, looping in team members to collaborate when necessary. For example, you can assign all inbound technical queries to an engineer; or, assign all pricing queries to the sales team. Automation and AI save resources and time–every automated workflow and routing decision frees an agent to work on more complex issues.

In our experience, when future clients start thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of Intercom vs. Zendesk, these are the questions they want answers to. The support team faced spiking ticket volumes, numerous new customer accounts, and the need to shift to remote work. Sendcloud is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that allows users to generate packing slips and labels to help online retailers streamline their shipping process. Prioritize the agent experience to maximize productivity and customer satisfaction while reducing employee turnover. Intercom has more customization features for features like bots, themes, triggers, and funnels. For standard reporting like response times, leads generated by source, bot performance, messages sent, and email deliverability, you’ll easily find all the metrics you need.

Well, I must admit, the tool is gradually transforming from a platform for communicating with users to a tool that helps you automate every aspect of your routine. So you see, it’s okay to feel dizzy when comparing Zendesk vs Intercom platforms. While both Zendesk and Intercom are great and robust platforms, none of them are able to provide you with the same value Messagely gives you at such an  affordable price. Messagely pulls together all of the information about the customer contacting you and gives your representatives information on each interaction they’ve had with them, all within a streamlined platform.

Intercom vs Zendesk: Overview

Just visit Articles in Intercom, click Get started with articles and then Migrate from Zendesk. First, here’s an overview of how concepts you’re familiar with in Zendesk map to Intercom. Our integration with Intercom enables bi-directional contact and case synchronization, so you can continue using Intercom as your front-end digital experience and use Zendesk for case management.

You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads. 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. In this paragraph, let’s explain some common issues that users usually ask about when choosing between Zendesk and Intercom platforms.

Operator, Intercom’s automation engine, empowers Intercom chatbots to gather key information from each website visitor to qualify leads and route customers to the right destination. An inbound customer message through any of these channels becomes a ticket for your support agents, whose reply reaches the customer through the same channel they originally used. In an omnichannel contact center, agents can manage customer interactions across channels, no matter which channel a customer uses to contact the company. You can collect ticket data from customers when they fill out the ticket, update them manually as you handle the conversation.

This tool took the “painful” and “time-consuming” factors out of the data migration. We’re big fans of Zendesk’s dashboard with built-in collaboration tools, but we wish the Agent Workspace came with the Team or Growth plans–not just Professional. Zendesk for Sales offers three plans, ranging from $19 to $99 monthly per user, with free trials available for each plan.

Intercom also has very good guides, which show you  the whole process step by step. 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. 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. We recommend that you use the most out of our free trial demonstration.

Easily reply to customer conversations and manage workload in a smart & automated way. Personalized messaging, in-app messaging, product tours, and chatbot capabilities set Intercom apart from Zendesk. Don’t worry about experiencing hardships whilst doing your Supported Platform data import and export. Help Desk Migration solution will spare you from copy pasting data entities or setting lacking fields throughout Intercom to Zendesk migration. Help Desk Migration app permits you map record fields and transform your data migration.

But that’s not it, if you want to resolve customer common questions with the help of the vendor’s new tool – Fin bot, you will have to pay $0.99 per resolution per month. Their chat widget looks and works great, and they invest a lot of effort to make it a modern, convenient customer communication tool. The Intercom versus Zendesk conundrum is probably the greatest problem in the customer service software world. They both offer some state-of-the-art core functionality and numerous unusual features. Intercom isn’t as great with sales, but it allows for better communication. With Intercom, you can keep track of your customers and what they do on your website in real time.

These products range from customer communication tools to a fully-fledged CRM. Zendesk boasts incredibly robust sales capabilities and security features. Apps and integrations are critical to creating a 360 view of the customer across the company and ensuring agents have easy access to key customer context. When agents don’t have to waste time toggling between different systems and tools to access the customer details they need, they can deliver faster, more personalized customer service. In today’s world of fast-paced customer service and high customer expectations, it’s essential for business leaders to equip their teams with the best support tools available.

Intercom vs. Zendesk: Omnichannel Capabilities

At the same time, the vendor offers powerful reporting capabilities to help you grow and improve your business. Intercom is better for smaller companies that are looking for a simple and capable customer service platform. Instead, using it and setting it up is very easy, and very advanced chatbots and predictive tools are included to boost your customer service. Zendesk is a great option for large companies or companies that are looking for a very strong sales and customer service platform.

The admin and manager dashboard provides a zoomed-out view of all activity taking place in each inbox, for whole departments and individual agents. Agents can respond in any channel by typing in the text box and have access to deep customer experience history and background in the right-hand column. The dashboard’s left-hand column organizes and sorts all tickets by urgency. When an agent clicks on a conversation, the full conversation history populates the middle screen. Agents can participate in forums and turn forum posts into tickets; they also can turn community-post replies into articles for future customers.

When it comes to importing help desk data from Intercom to Zendesk – you can exploit their specific API or take the advantage from accessible CSV file. Lastly, Intercom offers an academy that offers concise courses to help users make the most out of their Intercom experience. 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.

Intercom vs Zendesk: overall impression

Here are our top reporting and analytics features and an overview of where Intercom’s reporting limitations lie. Intercom’s integration capabilities are limited, and some apps don’t integrate well with third-party customer service technology. This can make it more difficult to import CRM data and obtain complete context from customer data. For example, Intercom’s Salesforce integration doesn’t create a view of cases in Salesforce. Zendesk is billed more as a customer support and ticketing solution, while Intercom includes more native CRM functionality.

You can create articles, share them internally, group them for users, and assign them as responses for bots—all pretty standard fare. 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.

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. Just like Zendesk, Intercom also offers its Operator bot, which will automatically suggest relevant articles to clients right in a chat widget. You can publish your self-service resources, divide them by categories, and integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience.

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. The initial action towards achieving sufficient automated Zendesk import is to prepare by creating relevant custom fields and agent accounts. You have to turn off prior automation rules along with other triggers that may affect the migration process. You can contact the sales team if you’re just looking around, but you will not receive decent customer support unless you buy their service. The customer service reps I talked to were very helpful during the entire process.

AI and ML make customer service functionalities like chatbots, sentiment analysis, ticket creation, and workflow automation possible. All these features are necessary for operational efficiency and help agents deliver fast, personalized customer experiences. We make it easy for anyone within your company to access contextual customer information—including their conversation and purchase history—to provide better experiences. In fact, the Zendesk Marketplace has 1,300+ apps and integrations, from billing software to marketing automation tools. With a multi-channel ticketing system, Zendesk Support helps you and your team to know exactly who you’re talking to and keep track of tickets throughout all channels without losing context. The setup is designed to seamlessly connect your customer support team with customers across all platforms.

Pricing: Zendesk Vs. Intercom

On the contrary, Intercom is far less predictable when it comes to pricing and can cost hundreds/thousands of dollars per month. But this solution is great because it’s an all-in-one tool with a modern live chat widget, allowing you to easily improve your customer experiences. At the same time, Zendesk looks slightly outdated and can’t offer some features. Zendesk, unlike Intercom, is a more affordable and predictable customer service platform. Also, it’s the pioneer in the support and communication tools market. You can always count on it if you need a reliable customer support platform to process tickets, support users, and get advanced reporting.

With Messagely, you can increase your customer satisfaction and solve customers’ issues while they’re still visiting your site. Zendesk’s user face is quite intuitive and easy to use, allowing customers to quickly find what they are looking for. Additionally, the platform allows users to customize their experience by setting up automation workflows, creating ticket rules, and utilizing analytics. 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.

• Intercom, on the other hand, was built for business messaging, so communication is one of their strong suits.
• You can use Zendesk Sell to track tasks, streamline workflows, improve engagement, nurture leads, and much more.
• The setup can be so complex that there are tutorials by third parties to teach new users how to do it right.
• 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.

Intercom is more for improving sales cycle and customer relationships, while Zendesk has everything a customer support representative can dream about, but it does lack wide email functionality. On the other hand, it provides call center functionalities, unlike Intercom. In short, Zendesk is perfect for large companies looking to streamline their customer support process; Intercom is great for smaller companies looking for advanced customer service features. 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. 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. Did you know that integrations between Zendesk and Intercom are possible?

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. The Zendesk Admin Center panels allow administrators to control settings, accessibility, automations, and workflows for everything from chatbots to integrations and custom APIs. 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. Collaboration tools enable agents to work together in resolving customer tickets and making sales. 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.

Connect your tools and unlock the power of automation

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. One place Intercom really shines Chat PG as a standalone CRM is its data utility. Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates. Triggers should prove especially useful for agents, allowing them to do things like automate notifications for actions like ticket assignments, ticket closing/reopening, or new ticket creation.

Inside a ticket, the workspace center console displays the ticket’s conversation. The right side of the screen displays all customer contact information and company interaction history, and the agent can contact the customer via any channel with just a few clicks. 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.

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. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. With a very streamlined design, Intercom’s interface is far better than many alternatives, including Zendesk. It has a very intuitive design that goes far beyond its platform and into its articles, product guides, and even its illustrations. 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.

It’s highly customizable, too, so you can adjust it according to your website or product’s style. However, you’ll likely end up paying more for Zendesk, and in-app messenger and other advanced customer communication tools will not be included. If you want https://chat.openai.com/ both customer support and CRM, you can choose between paying $79 or $125 per month per user, depending on how many advanced features you require. After this, you’ll have to set up your workflows, personalizing your tickets and storing them by topic.

The cost will mostly lean on the business data volume you need to transfer, the complexity of your requirements, and the options you’ll select or customizations you’ll inquire. Run a Free Demo to test the Migration Wizard performance and figure out how much your migration will cost. Here, we’ve outlined the support options that Intercom and Zendesk provide to companies using their platforms. 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. The workspace left-hand column notifies agents of all ticket updates.

But sooner or later, you’ll have to decide on the subscription plan, and here’s what you’ll have to pay. So yeah, all the features talk actually brings us to the most intercom to zendesk sacred question — the question of pricing. You’d probably want to know how much it costs to get each of the platforms for your business, so let’s talk money now.

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’s chatbot, Answer Bot, automatically answers customer questions asynchronously in up to 40 languages–via any text-based channel. 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.

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. In a nutshell, none of the customer support software companies provide decent assistance for users. Intercom live chat is modern, smooth, and has many advanced features that other chat tools don’t.

Set triggers to target particular audiences at the right time, utilize carousels as part of a communication campaign, and compare carousels with A/B testing. Zapier lets you build automated workflows between two or more apps—no code necessary. 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. When you switch from Zendesk, you can also create dynamic macros to speed up your response time to common queries, like feature requests and bug reports. If you’ve already set up macros in Zendesk just copy and paste them over.

We meet the demands and requirements of HIPAA, CCPA, PCI DSS Level 1, GDPR, and other essential data protection levels. Send surveys at key points throughout the customer buying cycle, utilizing multiple types of question formats. Surveys turn customer insights into action, with triggers and campaign response adjustments depending on customer responses. The Sell dashboard’s Tasks page sorts all of an agent’s tasks by due date. Sequence all channels–chat, web post, email, chatbot outreach, tour message, banner, push notification, or carousel–mixing and matching modes of outreach to fit campaign goals.

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. You can transfer data through API– however the role of a good team is to take care of coding issues and center upon ending of the job in time. The designing of the data transition applications and their functionality usually contradict each other.