Intercom vs Zendesk: Comparing features, integrations, and pricing

While Intercom focuses more on customer messaging and personalization, Zendesk focuses more on traditional customer support ticket management. Ultimately, the choice between these two platforms will depend on the specific needs of the business and the type of customer interactions they are looking to manage. Intercom is an all-in-one business communications tool that offers support, marketing, and sales features. It is known for its automation options and customizable capabilities, making it a popular choice for small-to-medium businesses.

We also provide real-time and historical reporting dashboards so you can take action at the moment and learn from past trends. Meanwhile, our WFM software enables businesses to analyze employee metrics and performance, helping them identify improvements, implement strategies, and set long-term goals. Zendesk is built to grow alongside your business, resulting in less downtime, better cost savings, and the stability needed to provide 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. Our robust, no-code integrations enable you to adapt our software to new and growing use cases. Compared to Zendesk, Intercom offers few integrations, which may hinder its scalability.

Whether you’re looking for a CRM for small businesses or an enterprise, the Zendesk sales CRM has the flexibility to grow with you, supporting up to 2 million deals across all of our plans. On the other hand, entry-level Pipedrive users are limited to only 3,000 open deals per company, making it an insufficient CRM for enterprises and growing companies. Simplesat for Messaging adds one-click CSAT, CES, or NPS surveys to Zendesk Messaging.

Intercom does not offer a native call center tool, so it cannot handle calls through a cloud-based phone system or calling app on its own. However, you can connect Intercom with over 40 compatible phone and video integrations. You can use both Zendesk and Intercom simultaneously to leverage their respective strengths and provide comprehensive customer support across different channels and touchpoints. Intercom and Zendesk offer competitive pricing plans with various features to suit different business needs. Businesses should carefully evaluate their requirements and choose the best method for their needs and budget.

Intercom and Zendesk are two of the most popular customer support tools available. Both platforms offer a range of features that enable businesses to communicate with their customers seamlessly. In this section, we will briefly overview Intercom and Zendesk, including their history and key features. It allows businesses to organize and share helpful documentation or answer customers’ common questions.

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. 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.

Gain further context about feedback by retrieving ticket info through the Zendesk API. You can sync requesters, companies, agents, groups, and any custom ticket fields. Sync ratings with Zendesk ticket private comments and tags to increase visibility and transparency.

These are both still very versatile products, so don’t think you have to get too siloed into a single use case. After setting up the Request, it is important to test it to ensure it creates the correct data in the connected third-party system. To do this, input a Test value such as Message Body, Email, Full_name or Conversation ID and click Test to verify that the Custom Action is properly configured. Refer to How to create an authentication with Zendesk for Custom Actions for more details.

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. Once connected, you can add Zendesk Support to your Help Desk, and start creating Zendesk tickets from Intercom conversations. How to set up a regular sync of all public articles from your Zendesk Guide Help Center into Intercom. 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. Check out this tutorial to import ticket types and tickets data into your Intercom workspace.

But with perks like more advanced chatbots, automation, and lead management capabilities, Intercom could have an edge for many users. Founded in 2007, Zendesk started as a ticketing tool for customer success teams. Later, they started adding all kinds of other features, like live chat for customer conversations. Pipedrive offers access to app integrations built by Pipedrive and third-party vendors, including Zendesk.

Zendesk Sunshine is a separate feature set that focuses on unified customer views. 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. 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.

If you use both Intercom and Zendesk, you can streamline your workflow and improve customer service by integrating them through Custom Actions. In this article, we will show you step-by-step guidelines on how to create tickets in Zendesk from a conversation in Intercom using Custom Actions. With industry-leading AI that infuses intelligence into every interaction, robust integrations, and exceptional data security and compliance, it’s Chat GPT no wonder why Zendesk is a trusted leader in CX. Whether you want to integrate Slack for internal team communication or PandaDoc to send and track sales proposals, Zendesk supports easy-to-set-up app integrations to help boost employee productivity. 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.

How to Integrate Webhooks with Zendesk

Discover 5 ways HR and IT teams can leverage Zendesk integrations to optimize business operations and enhance employee experiences. Make life easier for your customers, your agents and yourself with Sprinklr’s all-in-one contact center platform. CX tools help visualize and analyze the entire customer journey, identifying bottlenecks or drop-off points. They can help you track every step a customer takes, from browsing to buying, spotting any bumps along the way. Fixing these friction points not only makes the journey smoother but also increases the chances they’ll hit “buy” and come back happy for more. CX platforms empower you with social listening, using which you can monitor the digital space for specific keywords and sentiments related to your brand.

Why don’t you try something equally powerful yet more affordable, like HelpCrunch? A sales CRM should also provide you with the benefits of pipeline management software. Zendesk gives you a bird’s-eye view of all of your deals in one place, allowing you to see what stage each deal is in and quickly identify any bottlenecks in your sales cycle that you may need to address. Zendesk helps you manage and update your leads, analyze your pipeline, and create customizable reports on the go with our mobile CRM app. Plus, visit tagging and geolocation features allow your sales team to effortlessly log in-person sales visits, letting you monitor all your sales interactions in one centralized place. Pipedrive provides a mobile app to manage sales leads, view your calendar, and access your to-do list.

Intercom’s products are used by over 25,000 customers, from small tech startups to large enterprises. Like Intercom, Zendesk has received generally positive customer reviews, with an overall rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars on Gartner Peer Insights. Customers appreciate the platform’s ease of use, customization options, and robust reporting capabilities.

Yes, you can localize the Messenger to work with multiple languages, resolve conversations automatically in multiple languages and support multiple languages in your Help Center. After switching to Intercom, you can start training Custom Answers for Fin AI Agent right away by importing your historic data from Zendesk. Fin AI Agent will use your history to recognize and suggest common questions to create answers for. When you migrate your articles from Zendesk, we’ll retain your organizational structure for you.

Additionally, the platform allows for customizations such as customized user flows and onboarding experiences. Today, both companies offer a broad range of customer support features, making them both strong contenders in the market. Zendesk offers more advanced automation capabilities than Intercom, which may be a deciding factor for businesses that require complex workflows. Intercom’s ticketing system and help desk SaaS is also pretty great, just not as amazing as Zendesk’s.

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. At all tiers, there is an additional fee to work with a member of the Zendesk success team on unique engagements. Their reports are attractive, dynamic, and integrated right out of the box. You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads. In the Response section, you can map data from the Zendesk API response to Conversation or People attributes.

User Interface and Experience

Qualtrics XM is a tool designed to optimize customer interactions by combining surveys, feedback and data into one platform, giving businesses a clear view of customer experiences. From tracking brand performance to diving deep into user experience, Qualtrics XM helps you respond swiftly to market shifts and fine-tune your strategy with actionable insights. Both tools also allow you to connect your email account and manage it from within the application to track open and click-through rates. In addition, Zendesk and Intercom feature advanced sales reporting and analytics that make it easy for sales teams to understand their prospects and customers more deeply.

In this article, we list out the 7 best customer experience software for you to choose from, along with their key benefits, market perceptions, price, trial information and of course, our final verdicts. 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.

Simply because of just how easily one puts your customer engagement on auto-pilot so you can intervene when you absolutely need to. A good customer experience platform should be powered with state-of-the-art AI to help you with the following use cases. For small companies and startups, Intercom offers a Starter plan — with a balanced suite of features from each of the solutions below — at $74 per month per user, billed annually.

• Moreover, it’s best you also check for the following to ensure customer service security.
• As more organizations adopt AI, it will be critical to choose a data model that aligns with how your business operates.
• 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.
• Intercom has a community forum where users can engage with each other and gain insights from their experiences.
• Connecting Zendesk Support and Zendesk Sell allows its customer service and sales-oriented wholesale team to work together effortlessly.
• But they also add features like automatic meeting booking (in the Convert package), and their custom inbox rules and workflows just feel a little more, well, custom.

Power channel-less interactions and seamless resolution no matter the channel of contact. 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. You can also add apps to your Intercom Messenger home to help users and visitors get what they need, without having to start a conversation. Intercom recently ramped up its features to include helpdesk and ticketing functionality. Zendesk, on the other hand, started as a ticketing tool, and therefore has one of the market’s best help desk and ticket management features.

You can also use Intercom as a customer service platform, but given its broad focus, you may not get the same level of specialized expertise. Gainsight offers a solid platform tailored to improve customer experience management. Its Gainsight CS tool provides a comprehensive view of your customers, making it easier to boost product adoption, reduce churn and build customer communities. Top companies widely use it for its ability to deliver real-time insights into customer behaviors and sentiments. While the company is smaller than Zendesk, Intercom has earned a reputation for building high-quality customer service software.

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. Whether it’s the platform’s security or response needed in times of crisis, Sprinklr’s Trust Center ensures you’re ever ready to combat any mishaps with stealth and precision. Zendesk and Intercom both have an editor preview feature that makes it easier to add images, videos, call-to-action buttons, and interactive guides to your help articles. Discover customer and product issues with instant replays, in-app cobrowsing, and console logs.

Zendesk also offers a community forum where users can ask questions and get help from others. This can be a valuable resource for users looking for solutions to specific problems or wanting to learn more about the platform. Intercom also offers a community forum where users can ask questions and get help from other users. The offers that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site (including, for example, the order in which they appear).

Conversely, Intercom lacks ticketing functionality, which can also be essential for big companies. Intercom is more for improving sales cycles and customer relationships, while Zendesk, an excellent Intercom alternative, has everything a customer support representative can dream about. Basically, if you have a complicated support process, go with Zendesk for its help desk functionality. If you’re a sales-oriented corporation, use Intercom for its automation options. Both tools can be quite heavy on your budget since they mainly target big enterprises and don’t offer their full toolset at an affordable price. If you’re not ready to make the full switch to Intercom just yet, you can integrate Intercom with your Zendesk account.

Both Zendesk Messaging and Intercom Messenger offer live chat features and AI-enabled chatbots for 24/7 support to customers. Additionally, you can trigger incoming messages to automatically assign an agent and create dashboards to monitor the team’s performance on live chat. Zendesk takes the slight lead here because it offers some advanced help desk features, which Intercom does not. 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.

When deciding between Intercom and Zendesk, businesses should consider their specific needs and goals. For those with a complicated customer support process, Zendesk may be the better option. However, Intercom may be the better choice if a business is more sales-oriented.

You can collect ticket data from customers when they fill out the ticket, update them manually as you handle the conversation. Customer experience tools use analytics to turn data into a goldmine of insights that help you get ahead. The AI acts like a smart filter, triaging through incoming issues to find and bring urgent ones, such as service disruptions, to the forefront. When an agent takes on one of these critical cases, they aren’t starting cold — they already see case histories and details such as recent service changes or recurring issues on their dashboard. This proactive information delivery cuts down on the typical hunt-and-peck for details, enabling agents to address the problem directly. For small companies and startups, Zendesk offers a six-month free trial of up to 50 agents redeemable for any combination of Zendesk Support and Sell products.

Say what you will, but Intercom’s design and overall user experience leave all its competitors far behind. If you want to test Intercom vs Zendesk before deciding intercom zendesk integration on a tool for good, they both provide free 14-day trials. But sooner or later, you’ll have to decide on the subscription plan, and here’s what you’ll have to pay.

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. So when it comes to chatting features, the choice is not really Intercom vs Zendesk. The latter offers a chat widget that is simple, outdated, and limited in customization options, while the former puts all of its resources into its messenger. 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.

This guarantees continuous omnichannel support that meets customer expectations. Pipedrive also includes lead management features like automatic lead nurturing, labeling, and bulk imports. However, Pipedrive does not include native desktop text messaging features. One user noted that, in some cases, it can take Pipedrive at least eight hours to populate saved leads, making it difficult to quickly communicate with hot leads.

The platform is known for its ease of use, customizable workflows, and extensive integrations with other business tools. Because of the app called Intercom Messenger, one can see that their focus is less on the voice and more on the text. This is fine, as not every customer support team wants to be so available on the phone. Intercom has a very robust advanced chatbot set of tools for your business needs.

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At the end of the day, the best sales CRM delivers on the features that matter most to you and your business. To determine which one takes the cake, let’s dive into a feature comparison of Pipedrive vs. Zendesk. Yes, you can install the Messenger on your iOS or Android app so customers can get in touch from your mobile app.

While Zendesk features are plenty, someone using it for the first time can find it overwhelming. With only the Enterprise tier offering round-the-clock email, phone, and chat help, Zendesk support is sharply separated by tiers. Currently based in Albuquerque, NM, Bryce Emley holds an https://chat.openai.com/ MFA in Creative Writing from NC State and nearly a decade of writing and editing experience. When he isn’t writing content, poetry, or creative nonfiction, he enjoys traveling, baking, playing music, reliving his barista days in his own kitchen, camping, and being bad at carpentry.

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. With Sprinklr Reporting and Analytics, you can map your end-to-end customer journey and monitor, respond to, or mitigate critical events in real time. You can even monitor conversations happening in real-time across 30+ channels, analyze your team’s performance, identify skill issues and coach your teams with targeted insights. Freshdesk, by Freshworks Inc. gathers requests from email, web, phone, chat, messaging and social media into a unified ticketing system, making it easy to manage interactions across channels. With smart automation and AI, it streamlines case handling, prioritization and agent support. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. MParticle is a Customer Data Platform offering plug-and-play integrations to Zendesk and Intercom, along with over 300 other marketing, analytics, and data warehousing tools.

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. 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.

It has a more sophisticated user interface and a wide range of features, such as an in-app messenger, an email marketing tool, and an AI-powered chatbot. At the same time, Zendesk looks slightly outdated and can’t offer some features. According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2023, 78 percent of business leaders want to combine their customer service and sales data.

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. However, the latter is more of a support and ticketing solution, while Intercom is CRM functionality-oriented. This means it’s a customer relationship management platform rather than anything else.

In addition, they provide a comprehensive knowledge base that includes articles, videos, and tutorials to help users get the most out of the platform. Intercom is a customer messaging platform that enables businesses to engage with customers through personalized and real-time communication. Both Zendesk and Intercom are customer support management solutions that offer features like ticket management, live chat and messaging, automation workflows, knowledge centers, and analytics.

Yes, Zendesk has an Intercom integration that you can find in the Zendesk Marketplace—it’s free to install. So, you can get the best of both worlds without choosing between Intercom or Zendesk. Zendesk is a ticketing system before anything else, and its ticketing functionality is overwhelming in the best possible way. If a title has been set for a conversation it will use this to populate the resulting Zendesk ticket title.

Zendesk also has an Answer Bot, instantly taking your knowledge base game to the next level. It can automatically suggest relevant articles for agents to share during business hours with clients, reducing your support agents’ workload. Chat features are integral to modern business communication, enabling real-time customer interaction and team collaboration. Given that we’re neither Intercom nor Zendesk, we ourselves were curious to see how these two titans of customer service differ.

The company’s products include a messaging platform, knowledge base tools, and an analytics dashboard. Many businesses choose to work with Intercom because of its focus on personalization and flexibility, allowing companies to completely customize their customer service experience. Zendesk also offers various integrations with third-party tools, including CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and analytics tools. Some of the popular integrations include Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and Google Analytics. Zendesk’s integration with these tools allows businesses to track customer interactions, personalize messaging, and automate workflows. Intercom offers a wide range of integrations with various third-party tools, including CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and analytics tools.

Choosing Intercom or Zendesk will depend on your specific needs and requirements. Intercom’s app store has popular integrations for things like WhatsApp, Stripe, Instagram, and Slack. There is a really useful one for Shopify to provide customer support for e-commerce operations.

Intercom has a full suite of email marketing tools, although they are part of a pricier package. With Intercom, you get email features like targeted and personalized outbound emailing, dynamic content fields, and an email-to-inbox forwarding feature. 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. Here is a Zendesk vs. Intercom based on the customer support offered by these brands. Zendesk is designed with the agent in mind, delivering a modern, intuitive experience.

This means smoother transitions, interfaces that are a breeze to navigate and features that make sense for on-the-go users. Security is crucial to everyone and so your CX tool needs to be responsible and compliant with international standards like GDPR and CCPA. Moreover, it’s best you also check for the following to ensure customer service security.

Ultimately, the decision between these two tools will depend on company size, budget, and specific business needs. In 2023, businesses will have an abundance of options when it comes to choosing a customer support and relationship management tool. Both of these tools have unique strengths and weaknesses, and choosing between them can be difficult for businesses of all sizes.