Intercom App Integration with Zendesk Support

But Intercom’s friendliness for growing companies is something you can’t afford to ignore. If your business is established and you need to cut down on those ticket resolution times, Zendesk may be worth it. While both Zendesk and Intercom offer robust features, their pricing models might still be a hurdle for businesses looking to just start out with a help desk on a comparatively smaller budget. To sum up, if you are looking for a helpdesk with no advanced AI capabilities, you can choose Intercom. Their basic plan is cheaper than Zendesk, but you’ll not get to use any of their AI-powered add-ons.

Again, Zendesk has surpassed the number of reviewers when compared to Intercom. Some of the highly-rated features include ticket creation user experience, email to case, and live chat reporting. When you see pricing plans starting for $79/month, you should get a clear understanding of how expensive other plans can become for your business. What’s worse, Intercom doesn’t offer a free trial to its prospect to help them test the product before onboarding with their services. Instead, they offer a product demo when prospects reach out to learn more about their pricing structure.

By team

On the other hand, Intercom enables agents to convert a conversation into a ticket with one click. This helps support teams to resolve customer issues without losing context. A customer service department is only as good as its support team members, and these highly-prized employees need to rely on one another. Tools that allow support agents to communicate and collaborate are important aspect of customer service software.

However, businesses must choose between Zendesk vs Intercom based on their needs and requirements. 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. I’ll dive into their chatbots more later, but their bot automation features are also stronger. Pipedrive is limited to third-party customer service integrations and, unlike Zendesk, does not offer customer service software.

If you prioritize seamless, personalized customer interactions, it’s arguably the better option of the two. That being said, it sometimes lacks the advanced customization and automation offered by other AI-powered chatbots, like Intercom’s. While its integrations are not as far-reaching as Zendesk’s, it seamlessly works with modern communication and business tools, like WhatsApp and the most prominent CRMS. Not to mention marketing and sales tools, like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Google Analytics. Zendesk also has an Answer Bot, instantly taking your knowledge base game to the next level.

The former is one of the oldest and most reliable solutions on the market, while the latter sets the bar high regarding innovative and out-of-the-box features. Zendesk also offers a straightforward interface to operators that helps them identify the entire interaction pathway with the customers. Compared to being detailed, Zendesk gives a tough competition to Intercom. Operators can easily switch from one conversation to another, therefore helping operators manage more interactions simultaneously. ProProfs Live Chat Editorial Team is a diverse group of professionals passionate about customer support and engagement.

At-a-glance comparison: Zendesk vs. Intercom

The dashboard provides an overview of ticket volume, agent performance, and other key metrics. The ticket view often includes detailed information about the customer, history of interactions, and other details. 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. The app includes features like automated messages and conversation routing — so businesses can manage customer conversations more efficiently. Zendesk offers a free 30-day trial, after which customers will need to upgrade to one of their paid plans.

Zendesk’s automation is centered around streamlining ticket management by bringing together customer inquiries from various sources—email, phone, web, chat, and social media—into a single platform. Use ticketing systems to efficiently manage high ticket volume, deliver timely customer support, and boost agent productivity. Zendesk AI is the intelligence layer that infuses CX intelligence into every step of the customer journey. In addition to being pre-trained on billions of real support interactions, our AI powers bots, agent and admin assist, and intelligent workflows that lead to 83 percent lower administrative costs.

• Both Zendesk and Intercom have knowledge bases to help customers get the most out of their platforms.
• There are many features to help bigger customer service teams collaborate more effectively, such as private notes or a real-time view of who’s handling a given ticket at the moment.
• Customer expectations are already high, but with the rise of AI, customers are expecting even more.
• Instead, they offer a product demo when prospects reach out to learn more about their pricing structure.

By going with Customerly for your customer service needs, you can get the best of both worlds (Zendesk and Intercom), plus some extra features and benefits you haven’t even thought of, yet. Zendesk offers a slightly broader selection of plans, with an enterprise solution for customers with bespoke needs. Intercom is a customer-focused communication platform with basic CRM capabilities.

Zendesk or Intercom: CRM

Intercom also has a community forum where users can help one another with questions and solutions. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Intercom has limited scalability compared to Zendesk, which is unsuitable for large-scale enterprises. If transparency in pricing is not an issue for you and you are a small business, contact Intercom.

For smaller teams that have to handle multiple tasks, do not forget to check JustReply.ai, which is a user-friendly customer support tool. It will seamlessly integrate with Slack and offers everything you need for your favorite communication platform. Intercom’s AI has the transformative power to enhance customer service by offering multilingual support and contextual responses. Fin uses seamless communication across customer bases, breaking language barriers and catering to global audiences. In addition to all these features, Suite Growth Plan offers light agents, multilingual support, multiple ticket forms, and a self-service customer portal. On the other hand, Intercom may have a lower ROI when compared to Zendesk due to the limited depth of features it offers.

Zendesk has a low TCO because it has no hidden costs and can be easily set up without needing developers or third-party help, saving you time and money. Alternatively, Pipedrive users should prepare to pay more for even simple CRM features like email tracking, whereas email tracking is available for all Zendesk Sell plans. This live chat software provider also enables your business to send proactive chat messages to customers and engage effectively in real-time. This is one of the best ways to qualify high-quality leads for your business and improve your chances of closing a sale faster. Zendesk is another popular customer service, support, and sales platform that enables clients to connect and engage with their customers in seconds. Just like Intercom, Zendesk can also integrate with multiple messaging platforms and ensure that your business never misses out on a support opportunity.

Zendesk Explore allows you to create custom reports and visualizations in order to gain deeper insights into your support operations and setup. Similarly, if you require Fin AI Agent – to resolve customer queries without human intervention, you’ll need to pay an additional $0.99 per resolution. Keep in mind that this is an add-on expense, on top of your chosen plan. Intercom, on the other hand, focuses on automating tasks that help improve customer engagement. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer automation features to streamline workflows and improve efficiency, but the way they do it is different. Learn how top CX leaders are scaling personalized customer service at their companies.

Given that these are two services predicated on making you better at customer support, you’d think they’d be able to handle it better themselves. However, reading the reviews, it’s probably more accurate to say that Zendesk is “mixed” on customer support, whereas Intercom doesn’t have a stellar record. It starts with as low as $19/user/month and can go up to $49/user/ month. This means, even when you choose a higher plan, you’ll be paying considerably less than what you would have to pay for Zendesk or intercom. When you onboard a customer support platform, it’s important to consider the level of support the vendor offers. That’s because if there’s a glitch or a system outage, you want an immediate fix or clarity on the resolution.

When visitors click on it, they’ll be directed to one of your customer service teammates. On the other hand, Zendesk’s customer support includes a knowledge base that’s very intuitive and easy to navigate. It divides all articles into a few main topics so you can quickly find the one you’re looking for. It also includes a list of common questions you can browse through at the bottom of the knowledge base home page so you can find answers to common issues.

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. Zendesk has a broad range of security and compliance features to protect customer data privacy, such as SSO (single sign-on) and native content redaction for sensitive data. Keep up with emerging trends in customer service and learn from top industry experts. Master Tidio with in-depth guides and uncover real-world success stories in our case studies. Discover the blueprint for exceptional customer experiences and unlock new pathways for business success. Intercom also charges additional charges for specific features, such as charging $0.99 for every resolution.

The dashboard of Zendesk is sleek, simple, and highly responsive, offering a seamless experience for managing customer interactions. 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. 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. 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.

If compared to Intercom’s chatbot, Zendesk offers a relatively latest platform that makes support automation possible. So far, the chatbot can transfer chats to agents or resolve less complex queries in seconds. That means all you have to do is add the code to your website and enable it right away. Welcome to another blog post that helps you gauge which live chat solution is compatible with your customer support needs. And in this post, we will analyze two popular names in the SaaS industry – Intercom & Zendesk.

It’s also more exclusively focused on providing help support, whereas Intercom sometimes moonlights as being part-time sales. The result is that Zendesk generally wins on ratings when it comes to support capacity. Also, all of Hiver’s pricing plans come with a 7-day free trial, and no credit card is required to sign up for the trial. But you also need to consider the fact that Intercom has many add-ons that cost extra, especially their AI features.

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. Their reports are attractive, dynamic, and integrated right out of the box.

So, get ready for an insightful journey through the landscapes of Zendesk and Intercom, where support excellence converges with AI innovation. Messagely’s live chat platform is smooth, effective, and easy to set up. With Messagely, you can increase your customer satisfaction and solve customers’ issues while they’re still visiting your site. Its sales CRM software starts at $19 per month per user, but you’ll have to pay $49 to get Zapier integrations and $99 for Hubspot integrations. Finally, you can pay $199 per month per user for unlimited sales pipelines and advanced reporting along with other features.

This packs all resolution information into a single ticket, so there’s no extra searching or backtracking needed to bring a ticket through to resolution, even if it involves multiple agents. Unlike Zendesk, which requires more initial setup for advanced automation, Customerly’s out-of-the-box automation features are designed to be user-friendly and easily customizable. Not to brag 😏, but we specifically developed our platform to address the shortcomings in the current market.

If you thought Zendesk prices were confusing, let me introduce you to Intercom prices. At first glance, they seem like simple three packages for small, medium, and big businesses. But it’s virtually impossible to predict what you’ll pay for Intercom at the end of the day. They charge not only for customer service representative seats but also for feature usage and offer tons of features as custom add-ons at additional cost.

In addition to these features, Intercom offers messaging automation and real-time visitor insights. If your goal is to deliver outstanding customer support to your audience, then Zendesk is a good option. It comes with a unified omnichannel dashboard, custom reports, and an advanced ticketing system. However, if you aim to nurture leads and grow sales, then Intercom is the better option. Its AI-powered tools and virtual assistants make it a formidable CRM-powered software.

Zendesk and Intercom are robust tools with a wide range of customer service and CRM features. You can create an omnichannel CRM suite with a mix of productivity, collaboration, eCommerce, CRM, analytics, email marketing, social media, and other tools. Both app stores include many popular integrations, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Zapier. Zendesk’s Help Center and Intercom’s Articles both offer features to easily embed help centers into your website or product using their web widgets, SDKs, and APIs. With help centers in place, it’s easier for your customers to reliably find answers, tips, and other important information in a self-service manner.

You get an immediate overview of key metrics, such as ticket volume and agent performance as well as a summary of key customer data points. Furthermore, Intercom offers advanced automation features such as custom inbox rules, targeted messaging, and dynamic triggers based on customer segments. The Zendesk chat tool has most of the necessary features, like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers, and live chat analytics. A sales CRM should also provide you with the benefits of pipeline management software. When selecting a sales CRM, you’ll want to consider its total cost of ownership (TCO).

It allows businesses to organize and share helpful documentation or answer customers’ common questions. Self-service resources always relieve the burden on customer support teams, and both of our subjects have this tool in their packages. Zendesk for sales makes integrating with the tools you already use easy.

Zendesk offers your agents a unified workspace to collaborate on support tickets. This single window allows your team members to combine several channels for better efficiency and improved customer experience. And according to research, brands adopting omnichannel customer service software experience a decline in cost per contact by 7.5% every year, so having this feature is definitely a plus.

Agents can use this to anticipate and proactively address issues before the escalate, or even arise in the first place. It goes without saying that you can generate custom reports to hone in on particular areas of interest. Whether you’re into traditional bar charts, pie charts, treemaps, word clouds, or any other type of visualization, Zendesk is a data “nerd’s” dream.

Zendesk boasts incredibly robust sales capabilities and security features. This feature ensures that each customer request is handled by the best-suited agent, improving the overall efficiency of the support team. Intercom bills itself first and foremost as a platform to make the business Chat GPT of customer service more personalized, among other things. They offer an advanced feature for customer data management that goes beyond basic CRM stuff. It gives detailed contact profiles enriched by company data, behavioral data, conversation data, and other custom fields.

Although it can be pricey, Zendesk’s platform is a very robust one, with powerful reporting and insight tools, a large number of integrations, and excellent scalability features. 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. 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. Intercom recently ramped up its features to include helpdesk and ticketing functionality.

Those same tools also increase customer retention by 27% while saving 23% on sales and marketing costs. It provides a real-time feed and historical data, so agents can respond instantly to consumer queries, as well as learn from past CX trends. By using its workforce management functionality, businesses can analyze employee performance, and implement strategies intercom to zendesk to improve them. Handle conversations, manage tickets, and resolve issues quickly to improve your CSAT. 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.

• We will discuss these differentiating factors to help you make the right choice for your business and help it excel in offering extraordinary customer service.
• Zendesk has over 150,000 customer accounts from 160 countries and territories.
• Intercom also offers a 14-day free trial, after which customers can upgrade to a paid plan or use the basic free plan.
• Ultimately, your choice should reflect whether your priority is comprehensive customer support (Zendesk) or a blend of CRM and sales support (Intercom).

The only other downside is that the chat widget can feel a bit static and outdated. When comparing chatbots, it’s important to consider their level of intelligence, “trainability,” and customization. According to G2, Intercom has a slight edge over Zendesk with a 4.5-star rating, but from just half the number of users. Similar to Zendesk, though, users praise its ease of use and feature set. While no area of concern really stands out, there are some complaints about the company’s billing practices.

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. Intercom, on the other hand, was built for business messaging, so communication is one of their strong suits.

While they like the ease of use this product offers its users, they’ve indeed rated them low in terms of services. Given that both of these platforms seem aimed at one sort of market or another, it shouldn’t surprise you that we might find a few gaps in the sorts of services they provide. But it’s also a given that many people will approach their reviews to Zendesk and Intercom with some specific missions in mind, and that’s bound to change how they feel about the platforms. Moreover, for users who require more dedicated and personalized support, Zendesk charges an additional premium. However, if you’re interested in understanding customer behavior, product usage, and in need of AI-powered predictive insights, Intercom’s user analytics might be a better fit. With Explore, you can share and collaborate with anyone customer service reports.

HubSpot and Salesforce are also available when support needs to work with marketing and sales teams. Intercom’s AI capabilities extend beyond the traditional chatbots; Fin is renowned for solving complex problems and providing safer, accurate answers. Fin’s advanced algorithm and machine learning enable the precision handling of queries. Fin enables businesses to set new standards for offering customer service. Integrating AI in the help center helps agents find answers to customer inquiries, providing a seamless customer experience. Zendesk’s AI offers automated responses to customer inquiries, increasing the team’s productivity, as they can spend time on the most crucial things.

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. Customization is more nuanced than Zendesk’s, but it’s still really straightforward to implement. You can opt for code via JavaScript or Rails or even integrate directly with the likes of Google Tag Manager, WordPress, or Shopify. 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.

Intercom’s user interface is also quite straightforward and easy to understand; it includes a range of features such as live chat, messaging campaigns, and automation workflows. Additionally, the platform allows for customizations such as customized user flows and onboarding experiences. In addition to Intercom vs Zendesk, alternative helpdesk solutions are available in the market. ThriveDesk is a feature-rich helpdesk solution that offers a comprehensive set of tools to manage customer support effectively.

Aura AI transcends the limits of traditional chatbots that typically struggle with anything but the simplest user queries. Instead, Aura AI continuously learns from your knowledge base and canned responses, growing and learning — just like a real-life agent. Simply put, we believe that our Aura AI chatbot is a game-changer when it comes to automating your customer service. To make your ticket handling a breeze, Customerly offers an intuitive, all-in-one platform that consolidates customer inquiries from various channels into a unified inbox.

Learn about features, customize your experience, and find out how to set up integrations and use our apps. The offers that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation. This https://chat.openai.com/ compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site (including, for example, the order in which they appear). This site does not include all software companies or all available software companies offers.

Pipedrive offers access to app integrations built by Pipedrive and third-party vendors, including Zendesk. But unlike the Zendesk sales CRM, Pipedrive does not seamlessly integrate with native customer service software and relies on third-party alternatives. Intercom is a customer support messenger, bot, and live chat service provider that empowers its clients to provide instant support in real-time.

Pipedrive has workflow automation features, like setting triggers and desired actions, scheduling customer interactions, and automating lead assignment. However, one user noted that important features like automation are often down for an extensive amount of time. 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.

It lets customers reach out via messaging, a live chat tool, voice, and social media. Zendesk supports teams that can then field these issues from a nice unified dashboard. Zendesk has great intelligent routing and escalation protocols as well. AI is integral to customer relationship management software and facilitates consumer interactions. AI helps businesses gain detailed insight into consumer data in real-time. It also helps promote automation in routine tasks by automating repetitive processes and helps agents save time and errors.

Intercom offers an integrated knowledge base functionality to its user base. Using the existing knowledge base functionality, they can display self-help articles in the chat window before the customer approaches your team for support. You can create these knowledge base articles in your target audience’s native language as their software is multilingual. One stand out automation feature is its co-pilot, also known as Fin AI Copilot. It is an AI-powered assistant that functions as a knowledge base search tool, equipping agents with instant answers when they interact with customers, directly within the Intercom inbox. This helps companies resolve common customer queries without any human intervention.

Zendesk’s Answer Bot is capable of helping customers with common queries by providing canned responses and links to relevant help articles. It relies on fairly basic automation while routing more complex issues to live agents. While both Zendesk and Intercom offer strong ticketing systems, they differ in the depth of automation capabilities. However, after patting yourself on the back, you now realize you’re faced with the daunting task of choosing between the two. With so many features to consider, not to mention pricing, user experience, and scalability, we don’t blame you if you feel your head spinning. If delivering an outstanding customer experience and employee experience is your top priority, Zendesk should be your top pick over Intercom.