Zendesk vs Intercom: Which Is Right For Your Business in 2023?

Since the user is spending a considerable amount of time on your site, it is more likely that they will engage with your business and potentially become a customer. Intercom has more customization features for features like bots, themes, triggers, and funnels. Old metrics won’t help you meet new opportunities, so support teams need to redefine how they measure and report on core metrics and KPIs to get a true measure of value and success. Aitvaric is an easy-to-use theme with side panel navigation and an optional toggle for your users to switch between light and dark mode. Tailor the visual experience to suit diverse user preferences, providing a comfortable and personalized reading environment.

Apart from this feature, the customer support options at Zendesk are quite limited. First, you can only talk to the support team if you are a registered user. Overall, Zendesk empowers businesses to deliver exceptional customer support experiences across channels, making it a popular choice for enhancing support operations. Intercom, of course, allows its customer support team to collaborate and communicate too, but overall, Zendesk wins this group. 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.

Which Solution is Right for your Company?

Businesses should always consider a tool’s TCO before committing to a purchase. Many software vendors aren’t upfront about the cost of using their products, maintenance costs, or integration fees. Altogether, this can significantly impact affordability in the long term. Intercom is the new guy on the block when it comes to help desk ticketing systems.

Your typical Zendesk review will often praise the platform’s simplicity and affordability, as well as its constant updates and rolling out of new features, like Zendesk Sunshine. For example, you can read in many Zendesk Sell reviews how adding sales tools benefits Zendesk Support users. Both platforms have their unique strengths in multichannel support, with Zendesk offering a more comprehensive range of integrated channels and Intercom focusing on a dynamic, chat-centric experience.

Features:

Hivers offers round-the-clock proactive support across all its plans, ensuring that no matter the time or issue, expert assistance is always available. This 24/7 support model is designed to provide continuous, real-time solutions to clients, enhancing the overall reliability and responsiveness of Hivers’ services. This exploration aims to provide a detailed comparison, aiding businesses in making an informed decision that aligns with their customer service goals. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer robust solutions, but the choice ultimately depends on specific business needs. Choosing the right customer service platform is pivotal for enhancing business-client interactions.

• What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously.
• 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.
• Many software vendors aren’t upfront about the cost of using their products, maintenance costs, or integration fees.
• With Intercom workload management tools, administrators can ensure that incoming conversations, traffic, and workload are evenly distributed among team members.

This can help your agents determine where they should allocate their time to assist their customers most effectively. Intercom’s Help Center is also efficient with comparable features to Zendesk. You can publish knowledge base articles, organize them by category and integrate them into your messenger to streamline your chat experience. Zendesk is billed more as a customer support and ticketing solution, while Intercom includes more native CRM functionality.

Featured in Customer Engagement

Drift is leading companies through the customer solution-driven revolution by using conversations to unlock and expand their compound annual rate. Intercom’s live chat widget is modern, smooth, and loaded with advanced features that make them one of the best messaging platforms in the industry. It is also highly customizable, so you can match the look to the style of your brand, product, or website. Zendesk offers powerful automation tools to create better experiences for both your agents and your customers. The two main types of automated workflows in Zendesk are triggers and automations.

Intercom self-service chatbot widgets, highly customizable and capable of conversing in 32 different languages, embed into your website or application. Self-service tools let customers resolve their own issues quickly and 24/7, improving satisfaction and reducing excessive agent workload. While Intercom lacks some common customer-service channels like voice calling and video conferencing, it supports other unique features that transfer across channels. 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. View your users’ Zendesk tickets in Intercom and create new ones directly from conversations. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously.

Top 10 Intercom Alternatives for Amazing Customer Support

Some of the links that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation. However, this is somewhat subjective, and depending on your business needs and favorite tools, you may argue we got it all mixed up, and Intercom is truly superior. Some startups and small businesses may prefer one app, while large companies and enterprise operations will have their own requirements.

Intercom reviewers complain about its lack of scalability, the increase in costs as your customer base grows, and challenges accessing a customer service agent when in need of assistance. Zendesk aims to improve customer service for all of its clients, building software that exceeds customer expectations and sets support teams up for success. 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.

As it turns, it’s quite difficult to compare Zendesk against Intercom as they serve different purposes and will fit different businesses. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. We hope that this Intercom VS Zendesk comparison helps you choose one that matches your support, marketing, and sales needs.

Intercom’s chat window states that their team usually replies in a few hours, but they will often respond in a matter of minutes. While Zendesk’s support is also fast, it is only available if you’re already a Zendesk user. If you’re only browsing their website, intercom and zendesk you will have to send a message to their sales team by entering your email address. 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.

Zendesk, just like its competitor, offers a knowledge base solution that is easy to customize. Their users can create a knowledge repository to create articles or edit existing ones as per the changes in the services or product. It also provides detailed reports on how each self-help article performs in your knowledge base and helps you identify how each piece can be improved further. Zendesk also offers digital support during business hours, and their website has a chatbot. Premiere Zendesk plans have 24/7 proactive support with faster response times. Other customer service add-ons with Zendesk include custom training and professional services.