Zendesk vs Intercom: Which Solution to Choose in 2024?

Zendesk Sunshine is a separate feature set that focuses on unified customer views. 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. Intercom offers admin full visibility and control over all company inboxes, as well as agent access controls and role management. 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.

• To sum things up, one can get really confused trying to make sense of the Zendesk suite pricing, let alone calculate costs.
• I’ll dive into their chatbots more later, but their bot automation features are also stronger.
• You can use Zendesk Sell to track tasks, streamline workflows, improve engagement, nurture leads, and much more.

Small businesses who prioritize collaboration will also enjoy Zendesk for Service. For very small companies and startups, Intercom also offers a Starter plan–with a balanced suite of features from each of the above solutions–at $74 monthly per user. The Zendesk Admin Center panels allow administrators to control settings, accessibility, automations, and workflows for everything from chatbots to integrations and custom APIs. Users with light access–such as knowledgeable agents and supervisors–can be added to tickets for browsing and feedback. While light agents cannot interact with the customer on the ticket, they can make notes and interact privately with other team members and agents involved with the ticket. Intercom live chat is modern, smooth, and has many advanced features that other chat tools don’t.

Zendesk VS Intercom: In-Depth Analysis & Review

The support team faced spiking ticket volumes, numerous new customer accounts, and the need to shift to remote work. Sendcloud adopted these solutions to replace siloed systems like Intercom and a local voice support provider in favor of unified, omnichannel support. Prioritize the agent experience to maximize productivity and customer satisfaction while reducing employee turnover. On the other hand, Intercom’s knowledge base isn’t nearly as intuitive, with articles divided into about 20 topics with dozens of articles for each. This makes navigating through the knowledge base complicated, and it is less likely that you will find a solution quickly. In-app messaging is useful for a variety of reasons, including onboarding new users, converting users from a free trial, and asking users for feedback.

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. Zendesk is billed more as a customer support and ticketing solution, while Intercom includes more native CRM functionality. Intercom isn’t quite as strong as Zendesk in comparison to some of Zendesk’s customer support strengths, but it has more features for sales and lead nurturing. You could technically consider Intercom a CRM, but it’s really more of a customer-focused communication product. 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.

In-App Messaging Explained (With Examples and Best Practices)

If a customer isn’t satisfied with Answer Bot’s response, Answer Bot quickly routes them to an agent best suited to help. Zendesk wins the collaboration tools category because of its easy-to-use side conversations feature. Agents can use the desktop chatbox to respond to customers in any outbound channel. With so many solutions to choose from, finding the right option for your business can feel like an uphill battle.

This allows customers to resolve their own issues quickly, reducing inbound conversation volume and scaling your team’s support capacity. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer automation features that improve efficiency and reduce your labor costs. However, if you’re looking for support that goes the extra mile, look no further than Ada.

Pricing Info

Whether you’re starting fresh with Intercom or migrating from Zendesk, set up is quick and easy. While Intercom does not offer free trials, they do offer demo versions of each plan. Below, we’ve compared the usability of Zendesk’s and Intercom’s agent dashboards and administrator controls. Survey composer allows you to create the question and answer format, also customizing color, rating scales, and greetings. 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.

We recommend using the available 14-day free trials to get a feel for which one of these two CRM tools best suits your business needs. What’s more, you can create custom carousels for your app for a more pleasing experience. Taking advantage of all that support data can seriously improve your business processes with the right analytics and good reports.

Customers can search the help center by query keywords and sort through articles in 40 languages. In a nutshell, none of the customer support software companies provide decent assistance for users. The cheapest plan for small businesses – Starter – costs $89 monthly, including 2 seats and 1,000 people reached/mo.

This enables your operators to understand visitor intent faster and provide them with a personalized experience. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page. Users can also access a resource library to stay updated on the latest trends, product announcements, and best practices. Intercom regularly hosts webinars that are recorded and stored for future reference. G2 ranks Intercom higher than Zendesk for ease of setup, and support quality—so you can expect a smooth transition, effortless onboarding, and continuous success.

For example, you can assign all inbound technical queries to an engineer; or, assign all pricing queries to the sales team. Zendesk for Sales, or Zendesk Sell, is Zendesk’s sales pipeline and CRM tool with its own dashboard for lead generation and conversion. In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the most expensive tools on the market. And there’s still no way to know how much you’ll pay for them since the prices are only revealed after you go through a few sale demos with the Intercom team.

However, they are available even to free users, with HubSpot’s free plan offering three dashboards and 10 reports per dashboard. HubSpot CRM’s paid plans provide 10 to 50 dashboards that allow 10 to 30 reports each. Its Professional and Enterprise plans offer users 100 to 500 custom reports, respectively. You’ll also find asset comparison reporting and behavioral triggers included in the reports.

As mentioned before, the bot builder is a visual drag-and-drop system that requires no coding knowledge; this is also how other basic workflows are designed. The more expensive Intercom plans offer AI-powered content cues, triage, and conversation insights. 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.

Intercom is a customer relationship management (CRM) software company that provides a suite of tools for managing customer interactions. 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.

We have numerous customers that do this and benefit greatly from our out-of-the-box integration with Intercom. Yes—as your business’s needs grow, you will require a more sophisticated case management system. But that doesn’t mean you have to completely switch from your current provider if you’re not quite ready. The Kustomer open CRM platform minimizes costs by acting as a single interaction channel. It manages and records essential data to drive more intelligent processes that enable businesses to achieve a higher degree of success. Unless you are a small business purchasing the Start or Grow plan, it is difficult to estimate how much you will pay for Intercom.

HubSpot and Salesforce are also available when support needs to work with marketing and sales teams. Further, if companies plan to create multi-channel campaigns, Intercom makes a great fit. However, customers should keep in mind that Intercom does not offer voice. Intercom built additional tools to intercom versus zendesk aid in marketing and engagement to supplement its customer service solution. But we doubled down and created a truly full-service CX solution capable of handling any support request. Here are our top reporting and analytics features and an overview of where Intercom’s reporting limitations lie.

• 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.
• 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.
• App users can receive immediate in-app help with automated solutions for simple to complex issues.
• With a very streamlined design, Intercom’s interface is far better than many alternatives, including Zendesk.

Intercom’s dashboards may not be as aesthetically pleasing as Zendesk’s, but they still allow users to navigate their tools with few distractions. 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. 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.