Intercom vs Zendesk: Which One is Right for Your Business?

While Zendesk can be integrated with third-party email marketing tools like MailChimp, Intercom may be your best bet if regular communication with your customers is a priority. Intercom works with any website or web-based product and aims to be your one-way stop for all of your customer communication needs. In this article, we’ll compare Zendesk vs Intercom to find out which is the right customer support tool for you. 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.

Proactive, in-app messages are notifications sent to users while using an app on mobile or desktop. It allows businesses to engage users while they’re active in the app, delivering information based on relevant time or behavior intercom versus zendesk triggers. They can be used to share product updates, offer support, or promote offers relevant to their needs. Overall, I actually liked Zendesk’s user experience better than Intercom’s in terms of its messaging dashboard.

Customer stories: Learn why so many businesses are choosing Zendesk

Here is a Zendesk vs. Intercom based on the customer support offered by these brands. “Favorable” and “Critical” user reviews are selected using the review helpfulness score. The helpfulness score predicts the relative value a user receives from a given review based on a number of factors. Factors may include the content in the review, feedback provided by other readers, the age of the review, and other factors that indicate review quality. The favorable review displayed is selected from the most helpful 4 or 5 star review.

• Their template triggers are fairly limited with only seven options, but they do enable users to create new custom triggers, which can be a game-changer for agents with more complex workflows.
• In comparison, Intercom has marketed itself as a messaging platform as opposed to a full CRM solution.
• In-app messaging is useful for a variety of reasons, including onboarding new users, converting users from a free trial, and asking users for feedback.
• Zendesk for Service and Zendesk for Sales are sold as two separate solutions, each with three pricing plans, or tiers.

NovoChat, on the other hand, is great for businesses that primarily engage with their clients through messaging apps. The program is simple to use and includes all of the necessary capabilities for providing good customer service. The primary function of Intercom’s mobile app is the business messenger suite, including personalized messaging, real-time support tools, push notifications, in-app messaging and emailing. Intercom also does mobile carousels to help please the eye with fresh designs.

Zendesk has more all-in-one potential with additional CRM, but Intercom comes closer to being a standalone CRM out of the box

While Zendesk’s chat widget is rich with features such as shortcuts, automated triggers, and live chat analytics, the default design looks outdated compared to Intercom’s. In addition, if you choose to change the look of the chat widget, the customization options become limited. Intercom and Zendesk both have knowledge bases to help you get the most out of their platforms. Zendesk’s knowledge base is easy to navigate, dividing articles into a few main topics so you can find what you’re looking for quickly. There is also a list of common questions at the bottom of the knowledge base homepage so you can easily find answers to common issues.

Zendesk for Service, a customer service solution, provides unified customer-facing communication channels, self-service, collaboration, customer routing, and analytics–all organized in one dashboard. But keep in mind that Zendesk is viewed more as a support and ticketing solution, while Intercom is CRM functionality-oriented. Which means it’s rather a customer relationship management platform than anything else.

When it comes to which company is the better fit for your business, there’s no clear answer. It really depends on what features you need and what type of customer service strategy you plan to implement. Both Zendesk Support and HubSpot Service Hub enable smooth integration with third parties. Developers can also use API to build custom integrations for unavailable apps. However, HubSpot enables pre-built integrations with more apps and has a more extensive Application Programming Interface (API).

One place Intercom really shines as a standalone CRM is its data utility. As with just about any customer support software, you can easily view standard user data within the messenger related to customer journey—things like recent pages viewed, activity, or contact information. Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates.

Best Hiver Alternative Platforms for Customer Support Teams in 2023

You could say something similar for Zendesk’s standard service offering, so it’s at least good to know they have Zendesk Sell, a capable CRM option to supplement it. You can use Zendesk Sell to track tasks, streamline workflows, improve engagement, nurture leads, and much more. Understanding these fundamental differences should go a long way in helping you pick between the two, but does that mean you can’t use one platform to do what the other does better? These are both still very versatile products, so don’t think you have to get too siloed into a single use case. Discover customer and product issues with instant replays, in-app cobrowsing, and console logs. This is not a huge difference; however, it does indicate that customers are generally more satisfied with Intercom’s offerings than Zendesk’s.

• As you can imagine, banking from anywhere requires a flexible, robust customer service experience.
• But keep in mind that Zendesk is viewed more as a support and ticketing solution, while Intercom is CRM functionality-oriented.
• Key offerings include automated support with help center articles, a messenger-first ticketing system, and a powerful inbox to centralize customer queries.
• Moreover, talk to a current customer of the software and solicit their feedback regarding the solution in question.
• Zendesk, with its extensive toolkit, is often preferred by businesses seeking an all-encompassing customer support solution.

The software helps you to keep track of all support requests, quickly respond to questions, and track the effectiveness of your customer service reps. Zendesk has a help center that is open to all to find out answers to common questions. 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. There are 3 Basic support plans at $19, $49 and $99 per user per month billed annually, and 5 Suite plans at $49, $79, $99, $150, and $215 per user per month billed annually. Create a help center combining knowledge base articles and a customer contact request form, embeddable into any webpage or mobile app.

Collaboration tools enable agents to work together in resolving customer tickets and making sales. In an omnichannel contact center, agents can manage customer interactions across channels, no matter which channel a customer uses to contact the company. Intercom and Zendesk are two of the most popular customer service platforms, each with its own set of distinct advantages and drawbacks. The two essential things that Zendesk lacks in comparison to Intercom are in-app messages and email marketing tools. On the other hand, Intercom lacks many ticketing functionality that can be essential for big companies with a huge client support load. So when it comes to chatting features, the choice is not really Intercom vs Zendesk.

Depending on your needs, you can set up Intercom on your website or mobile app and add your automations. Setting up Intercom help centers is also very easy and intuitive, with no previous knowledge required. 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)? You can even improve efficiency and transparency by setting up task sequences, defining sales triggers, and strategizing with advanced forecasting and reporting tools. Starting at $19 per user per month, it’s also on the cheaper end of the spectrum compared to high-end CRMs like ActiveCampaign and HubSpot.