Zendesk vs Intercom: Which Solution to Choose in 2024?

It will allow you to leverage some Intercom capabilities while keeping your account at the time-tested platform. Though the Intercom chat window says that their customer success team typically replies in a few hours, don’t expect to receive any real answer in chat for at least a couple of days. Say what you will, but Intercom’s design and overall user experience leave all its competitors far behind. You can see their attention to detail — from tools to the website. Besides, the prices differ depending on the company’s size and specific needs.

The cheapest (aka Essential) ‘All of Intercom’ package will cost you $136 per month, but if you only need their essential chat tools only, you can get them for $49 per month. Intercom doesn’t really provide free stuff, but they have a tool called Platform, which is free. The free Intercom Platform lets you see who your customers are and what they do in your workspace.

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. With mParticle, you can connect your Zendesk and Intercom data with other marketing, analytics, and business intelligence platforms without any custom engineering effort. So yeah, two essential things that Zendesk lacks in comparison to Intercom are in-app messages and email marketing tools. Intercom on the other hand lacks many ticketing functionality that can be essential for big companies with a huge customer support load.

However, additional costs for advanced features can quickly increase the total expense. Understanding the unique attributes of Zendesk and Intercom is crucial in this comparison. Zendesk is renowned for its comprehensive range of functionalities, including advanced email ticketing, live chat, phone support, and a vast knowledge base. Its ability to seamlessly integrate with various applications further amplifies its versatility. Experience the power of Help Desk Migration’s Zendesk import solutions and take advantage of our comprehensive import app. Say goodbye to manual data transfers and hello to a more efficient way of conducting business.

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. 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. Don’t worry about experiencing hardships whilst doing your Supported Platform data import and export. With plenty of accomplished data export/import experience, they can fin a solution to any challenge related to your help desk data import or even supply assistance during the complete data import and export. As you can imagine, banking from anywhere requires a flexible, robust customer service experience.

Whether you’ve just started searching for a customer support tool or have been using one for a while, chances are you know about Zendesk and Intercom. The former is one of the oldest and most reliable solutions on the market, while the latter sets the bar high in terms of innovative and out-of-the-box features. Is it as simple as knowing whether you want software strictly for customer support (like Zendesk) or for some blend of customer relationship management and sales support (like Intercom)? Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates. Intercom’s chatbot feels a little more robust than Zendesk’s (though it’s worth noting that some features are only available at the Engage and Convert tiers). You can set office hours, live chat with logged-in users via their user profiles, and set up a chatbot.

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. If a customer starts an interaction by talking to a chatbot and can’t find a solution, our chatbot can open a ticket and intelligently route it to the most qualified agent. Track customer service metrics to gain valuable insights and improve customer service processes and agent performance. To sum up this Intercom vs Zendesk battle, the latter is a great support-oriented tool that will be a good choice for big teams with various departments. Intercom feels more wholesome and is more client-success-oriented, but it can be too costly for smaller companies.

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If that sounds good to you, sign up for a free demo to see our software in action and get started. Intercom also has an omnichannel customer service solution, but it’s fairly limited, with no native voice capabilities and minimal voice integrations. But it’s designed so well that you really enjoy staying in their inbox and communicating with clients.

Intercom does just enough that smaller businesses could use it as a standalone CRM or supplement it with a simpler CRM at a lower pricing tier, but bigger companies may not be satisfied with Intercom alone. Intercom stands out here due to its ability  to tailor sales workflows. You can also set up interactive product tours to highlight new features in-product and explain how they work. Research by Zoho reports that customer relationship management (CRM) systems can help companies triple lead conversion rates.

However, it’s essential to consider the strengths of Zendesk, which offers a comprehensive and versatile customer support platform. While Intercom excels in certain aspects of customer communication, Zendesk offers its own set of strengths that cater to different aspects of customer support and engagement. Luckily, a range of customer service solutions is available that enables you to communicate directly with your customers in real-time. These tools are ideal for personalizing the customer experience and building better customer relationships.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Whether agents are facing customers via chat, email, social media, or good old-fashioned phone, they can keep it all confined to a single, easy-to-navigate dashboard. That not only saves them the headache of having to constantly switch between dashboards while streamlining resolution processes—it also leads to better customer and agent experience overall. Zendesk is among the industry’s best ticketing and customer support software, and most of its additional functionality is icing on the proverbial cake.

Also, their in-app messenger is worth a separate mention as it’s one of their distinctive tools (especially since Zendesk doesn’t really have one). With Intercom you can send targeted email, push, and in-app messages which can be based on the most relevant time or behavior triggers. But I don’t want to sell their chat tool short as it still has most of necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers and live chat analytics. Learn their benefits, integration steps, best tools to try and common pitfalls to avoid. Zendesk’s per-agent pricing structure makes it a budget-friendly option for smaller teams, allowing costs to scale with team growth.

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 go puff. Intercom has more customization features for features like bots, themes, triggers, and funnels. What’s really nice about this is that even within a ticket, you can switch between communication modes without changing views. So if intercom zendesk an agent needs to switch from chat to phone to email (or vice versa) with a customer, it’s all on the same ticketing page. There’s even on-the-spot translation built right in, which is extremely helpful. 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.

Choose Zendesk for a scalable, team-size-based pricing model and Intercom for initial low-cost access with flexibility in adding advanced features. When comparing Zendesk and Intercom, various factors come into play, each focusing on different aspects, strengths, and weaknesses of these customer support platforms. The customer service reps I talked to were very helpful during the entire process.

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Novo has been a Zendesk customer since 2019 but didn’t immediately start taking full advantage of all our features and capabilities. At first, the company relied on Intercom for its live chat support needs, but with the rapid changes and sky-high service needs, it quickly became apparent that the support team needed a full-service solution. 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. Zendesk and Intercom both offer noteworthy tools, but if you’re looking for a full-service solution, there is one clear winner. Whichever solution you choose, mParticle can help integrate your data.

• Unito supports dozens of integrations, with more being added monthly.
• Pricing for both services varies based on the specific needs and scale of your business.
• While both Intercom and Zendesk excel in customer support and engagement, the decision between the two depends on your specific requirements.
• But to provide a more robust customer experience, businesses may need to consider integrating Intercom’s AI tool with a third-party customer service platform, as it falls short of a full-stack offering.

It is tailored for automation and quick access to insights, offering a user-friendly experience. Nevertheless, the platform’s support consistency can be a concern, and the unpredictable pricing structure might lead to increased costs for larger organizations. Founded in 2007, Zendesk started off as a ticketing tool for customer support teams.

Test any of HelpCrunch pricing plans for free for 14 days and see our tools in action right away. At the same time, they both provide great and easy user onboarding. In this paragraph, let’s explain some common issues that users usually ask about when choosing between Zendesk and Intercom platforms. To sum things up, one can get really confused trying to make sense of the Zendesk suite pricing, let alone calculate costs. 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. Intercom does have a ticketing dashboard that has omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk.

What is the cost of your Intercom to Zendesk data migration?

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. Founded in 2007, Zendesk started as a ticketing tool for customer success teams. It was later that they started adding all kinds of other features, like live chat for customer conversations. They bought out the Zopim live chat solution and integrated it with their toolset. However, if you are looking for a robust messaging solution with customer support features, go for Intercom.

Intercom distinguishes itself by excelling in real-time customer engagement. It offers a comprehensive suite of features that empowers businesses to foster immediate connections with their customers. With Intercom, businesses can engage in real-time chats, schedule meetings, and strategically deploy chat boxes https://chat.openai.com/ to specific customer segments. What truly sets Intercom apart is its data-driven approach to customer engagement. It actively collects and utilizes customer data to facilitate highly personalized conversations. For instance, it can use past interactions and behaviors to tailor recommendations or responses.

Zendesk and Intercom each have their own marketplace/app store where users can find all the integrations for each platform. Zendesk also offers a sales pipeline feature through its Zendesk Sell product. You can set up email sequences that specify how and when leads and contacts are engaged. With Zendesk Sell, you can also customize how deals move through your pipeline by setting pipeline stages that reflect your sales cycle.

Help Desk Migration accomplishes to top security principles, providing maximum safety for your business data. We meet the demands and requirements of HIPAA, CCPA, PCI DSS Level 1, GDPR, and other essential data protection levels. Additionally, only users with admin rights can export your Intercom information.

As a result, companies can identify trends and areas for improvement, allowing them to continuously improve their support processes and provide better service to their customers. Intercom’s pricing typically includes different plans designed to accommodate businesses of various sizes and needs. While Intercom offers a free trial, it’s important to note that the cost can increase as you scale and add more features or users. Zendesk provides limited customer support for its basic plan users, along with costly premium assistance options. On the other hand, Intercom is generally praised for its support features, despite facing challenges with its AI chatbot and the complexity of its help articles.

Say what you will, but Intercom’s design and overall user experience are leaving all its competitors far behind. It’s beautifully crafted and thought through, and their custom-made illustrations are just next level stuff. You can see their attention to detail in everything — from their tools to their website. It has very limited customization options in comparison to its competitors.

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 started in 2007 as a web-based SaaS product for managing incoming customer support requests. Since then, it has evolved into a full-fledged CRM that offers a suite of software applications to its over 160,000 customers like Uber, Siemens, and Tesco. It introduces shared inboxes tailored for different teams, such as sales, marketing, and customer success. These shared inboxes facilitate seamless customer interactions across multiple channels, ensuring that teams can collaborate efficiently and maintain consistent, top-notch support.

They have a 2-day SLA, no phone support, and the times I have had to work with them they have been incredibly difficult to work with. Very rarely do they understand the issue (mostly with Explore) that I am trying to communicate to them. The support documentation is incredibly lackluster, and it’s often impossible to know which guide to use as they have non-sensical terminology that makes even finding the appropriate guide very difficult. Pricing for both services varies based on the specific needs and scale of your business. Once your Demo Migration is complete, review the migration results table to see which records were migrated, failed, or skipped. To ensure everything migrated correctly, download the reports and copy the record IDs to check.

A trigger is an event that starts a workflow, and an action is an event a Zap performs. Zapier lets you build automated workflows between two or more apps—no code necessary. When comparing the user interfaces (UI) of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms exhibit distinct characteristics and strengths catering to different user preferences and needs.

We conducted a little study of our own and found that all Intercom users share different amounts of money they pay for the plans, which can reach over $1000/mo. The price levels can even be much higher if we’re talking of a larger company. If I had to describe Intercom’s helpdesk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools.

Zendesk is distinguished by its robust and versatile customer support solutions. It provides a comprehensive platform for managing customer inquiries, support tickets, and interactions across multiple channels. On the other hand, Intercom shines in its focus on conversational engagement and real-time communication with customers.

Intercom stands out for its modern and user-friendly messenger functionality, which includes advanced features with a focus on automation and real-time insights. Its AI Chatbot, Fin, is particularly noted for handling complex queries efficiently. 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. Key offerings include automated support with help center articles, a messenger-first ticketing system, and a powerful inbox to centralize customer queries. Our Zendesk import solutions also include the ability to work with CSV data files, allowing you to execute actual imports with ease. You can choose from various import types and options, making Help Desk Migration the go-to platform for all your Zendesk import automation needs.

The future of customer service is integrated, AI-enhanced—and powered by Intercom

Whether it’s ticket imports, additional import types, or automating the entire Zendesk import process, we’ve got you covered. Help Desk Migration is your ultimate solution for a seamless Zendesk import and Zendesk data migration process. We specialize in importing data to Zendesk, utilizing Chat PG our state-of-the-art Zendesk data importer. When it comes to advanced workflows and ticketing systems, Zendesk boasts a more full-featured solution. Due to our intelligent routing capabilities and numerous automated workflows, our users can free up hours to focus on other tasks.

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. You can publish your knowledge base articles and divide them by categories and also integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience.

It integrates customer support, sales, and marketing communications, aiming to improve client relationships. Known for its scalability, Zendesk is suitable for various business sizes, from startups to large corporations. In the realm of automation and workflow management, Zendesk truly shines as a frontrunner. It empowers businesses with a robust suite of automation tools, enabling them to streamline their support processes seamlessly. Zendesk allows for the creation of predefined rules and workflows that efficiently route tickets to the appropriate agents, ensuring swift and precise issue resolution.

Their chat widget looks and works great, and they invest a lot of effort to make it a modern, convenient customer communication tool. Zendesk also has an Answer Bot, which instantly takes your knowledge base game to the next level. It can automatically suggest relevant articles for agents during business hours to share with clients, reducing your support agents’ workload. 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.

If you’re a huge corporation with a complicated customer support process, go Zendesk for its help desk functionality. If you’re smaller more sales oriented startup with enough money, go Intercom. For instance, Intercom can guide a new software user through each feature step by step, providing context and assistance along the way. In contrast, Zendesk primarily relies on a knowledge base, housing articles, FAQs, and self-help resources. While this resource center can reduce the dependency on agent assistance, it lacks the interactive element found in Intercom’s onboarding process.

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. 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. Zendesk is billed more as a customer support and ticketing solution, while Intercom includes more native CRM functionality.

Brian Kale, the head of customer success at Bank Novo, describes how Zendesk helped Bank Novo boost productivity and streamline service. Sendcloud adopted these solutions to replace siloed systems like Intercom and a local voice support provider in favor of unified, omnichannel support. 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. Prioritize the agent experience to maximize productivity and customer satisfaction while reducing employee turnover. Yes, you can integrate the Intercom solution into your Zendesk account.

This could impact user experience and efficiency for new users grappling with its complexity​​​​​​. Intercom is a customer support platform known for its effective messaging and automation, enhancing in-context support within products, apps, or websites. It features the Intercom Messenger, which works with existing support tools for self-serve or live support. 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. The highlight of Zendesk’s ticketing software is its omnichannel-ality (omnichannality?).

The skipped and failed records reports will show the reason for unsuccessful transfers. Being my first time dealing with a migration, they were very patient with me as I guided myself through the process of migrating data. They were very prompt and thorough throughout the entire process, very willing to help ensure that the migration is done correctly, and answered all questions I had in a very timely manner.

Help Desk Migration app permits you map record fields and transform your data migration. You preserve the structure of your business data with minimum effort. However, as Monese grew and eyed a European expansion, it became clear that the company needed to centralize data in a single solution that would scale along with them. 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.

We even offer a bulk organization import feature for your convenience. In a nutshell, none of the customer support software companies provide decent assistance for users. The cheapest plan for small businesses – Essential – costs $39 monthly per seat. 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. Now, their use cases comprise support, engagement, and conversion.

It offers a chat-first approach, making it ideal for companies looking to prioritize interactive and personalized customer interactions. When comparing Zendesk and Intercom, Zendesk stands out with its robust and versatile customer support solutions. It offers a comprehensive platform for managing customer inquiries and support tickets across multiple channels, providing businesses with a powerful toolset for customer service management. Zendesk’s extensive feature set and customizable workflows are particularly appealing to organizations looking to streamline and scale their customer support operations efficiently.