Zendesk vs Intercom in 2023: Detailed Analysis of Features, Pricing, and More

In this section, we will briefly overview Intercom and Zendesk, including their history and key features. With a mix of productivity, collaboration, eCommerce, CRM, analytics, email marketing, social media, and other tools, you get the option to create an omnichannel suite. Zendesk offers a comprehensive service suite with features such as a ticketing system and workflow configuration available to desktop and mobile device users. Its customer portal also helps businesses track customer interactions and provides a self-service portal, community forums and knowledge base for your customers.

The choice between the two may be personal preference or specific feature requirements. We hope that this Intercom VS Zendesk comparison helps you choose one that matches your support, marketing, and sales needs. But in case you are in search of something beyond these two, then ProProfs Chat can be an option. Zendesk also offers detailed reports that can be shared with others and enable team members to collaborate on them simultaneously. You can either track your performance on a pre-built dashboard or customize and build one for yourself. This customized dashboard will help you see metrics that you’d like to focus on regularly.

How to Master Proactive Customer Service

Their customer service management tools have a shared inbox for support teams. When you combine the help desk with Intercom Messenger, you get added channels for customer engagement. We make it easy for anyone within your company to access contextual customer information—including their conversation and purchase history—to provide better experiences.

Overall, Zendesk empowers businesses to deliver exceptional customer support experiences across channels, making it a popular choice for enhancing support operations. Some of the links that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation. Zendesk’s mobile app is also good for ticketing, helping you create new support tickets with macros and updates. It’s also good for sending and receiving notifications, as well as for quick filtering through the queue of open tickets. There are pre-built workflows to help with things like ticket sharing, as well as conversation routing based on metrics like agent skill set or availability. There are even automations to help with things like SLAs, or service level agreements, to do things like send out notifications when headlights are due.

What is the difference between Zendesk and Intercom?

So if 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. Learn how top CX leaders are scaling personalized customer service at their companies. Zendesk and HubSpot are two of the best marketing CRMs, with Zendesk being the best for boosting conversions and HubSpot being the best for cross-channel lead nurturing marketing. However, HubSpot beats Zendesk for its comprehensiveness and free version offering. HubSpot CRM also made it to our list of the best CRM software for small businesses, especially for scaling startups.

When choosing the right customer support tool, pricing is an essential factor to consider. In this section, we will compare the pricing structures of Intercom and Zendesk. Intercom’s user interface is known for being modern, intuitive, and user-friendly. The dashboard is customizable, allowing users to efficiently access the features they use most frequently. Intercom’s clean and minimalistic design focuses on white space and easy-to-read fonts. The user interface is also highly responsive, making it easy to use on mobile devices.

Those same tools also increase customer retention by 27% while saving 23% on sales and marketing costs. Intercom isn’t as great with sales, but it allows for better communication. With Intercom, you can keep track of your customers and what they do on your website in real time. Like Zendesk, Intercom allows you to chat with online visitors and assist with their issues. Depending on your needs, you can set up Intercom on your website or mobile app and add your automations.

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. Intercom has more customization features for features like bots, themes, triggers, and funnels. Intercom does have a ticketing dashboard that has omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk. 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.

After this, you’ll have to set up your workflows, personalizing your tickets and storing them by topic. You can then add automations and triggers, such as automatically closing a ticket or sending a message to a user. 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. On the other hand, Intercom, starting at a lower price point, could be more attractive for very small teams or individual users. However, additional costs for advanced features can quickly increase the total expense.

Zendesk’s mission is to build software designed to improve customer relationships. One of HubSpot’s advantages is its scalability, and with the option to begin at $0, you can test its features without committing. HubSpot CRM’s free version is also generous, serving marketing, customer service and operation teams, so it’s no surprise that it’s one of the best free CRM systems. As a Zendesk Sell user, you’ll get a unified platform with access to everything you need to manage leads and contacts and monitor them through a sales process. Zendesk’s interface intuitive and easy to use, making it easier for your teams to navigate and collaborate on interacting with customers at the appropriate time and with the best approach.

With all accounted for, it seems that Zendesk still has a number of user interface issues. Since Zendesk has many features, it takes a while to learn how to use the options you’ll be needing. We hope this list has provided you with a better grasp of each platform and its features. Remember that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and the optimal platform for you will be determined by your individual demands.

As customers come closer to purchasing, they often find themselves weighing the same pros and cons. In our experience, when future clients start thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of intercom vs. zendesk, these are the questions they want answers to. Like so many others, Monese determined that Zendesk was the best solution to provide seamless, omnichannel support because of its scalability and reliability.

Is HubSpot cheaper than Zendesk?

From the inbox, live agents and chatbots can refer to and link knowledge base articles, to elaborate on replies and help customers locate answers. Intercom built additional tools to 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. Zendesk is among the industry’s best ticketing and customer support software, and most of its additional functionality is icing on the proverbial cake. Intercom, on the other hand, is designed to be more of a complete solution for sales, marketing, and customer relationship nurturing.

You can also set up interactive product tours to highlight new features in-product and explain how they work. 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.

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 has a very robust advanced chatbot set of tools for your business needs. There is a conversation routing bot, an operator bot, a lead qualification bot, and an article-suggesting bot, among others. It is also not too difficult to program your own bot rules using Intercon’s system. The best help desks are also ticketing systems, which lets support reps create a support ticket out of issues that can then be tracked. For Intercom’s pricing plan, on the other hand, there is much less information on their website.