Zendesk vs Intercom Comparison 2024: Which One Is Better?

Zendesk vs Intercom: Which Solution to Choose in 2024?

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. 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. Zendesk also packs some pretty potent tools into their platform, so you can empower your agents to do what they do with less repetition. Agents can use basic automation (like auto-closing tickets or setting auto-responses), apply list organization to stay on top of their tasks, or set up triggers to keep tickets moving automatically. I tested both options (using Zendesk’s Suite Professional trial and Intercom’s Support trial) and found clearly defined differences between the two.

To select the ideal fit for your business, it is crucial to compare these industry giants and assess which aligns best with your specific requirements. While administrators can automatically assign tickets to certain agents or teams, they can also manually assign tickets to members of sales or customer service teams. Team inboxes aggregate tickets applicable to the whole team–or a specific department–that any agent can address. Founded in 2007, Zendesk started as a ticketing tool for customer success teams.

Best CRM for Small Business Compared (February

Intercom’s role-based permissions allow administrators full control over each department’s and agent’s capabilities, and access to channels and information. The admin and manager dashboard provides a zoomed-out view of all activity taking place in each inbox, for whole departments and individual agents. Survey intercom vs. zendesk responses automatically save as data in users’ profiles, and Intercom provides survey data in analytics and reporting. Intercom’s Messenger lets users schedule timely, targeted, and personal messages sent based on triggers and customer actions, and is automatically translatable into over 30 languages.

• This gets you unlimited email addresses and email templates in both text form and HTML.
• Intercom and Zendesk offer competitive pricing plans with various features to suit different business needs.
• Intercom and Zendesk offer integration capabilities to help businesses streamline their workflow and improve customer support.
• 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.

Zendesk has also introduced its chatbot to help its clients send automated answers to some frequently asked questions to stay ahead in the competitive marketplace. What’s more, it helps its clients build an integrated community forum and help center to improve the support experience in real-time. Intercom recently ramped up its features to include helpdesk and ticketing functionality. 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 pricing is divided between a customer support product called “Zendesk for support”, and a fully-fledged CRM called “Zendesk for sales”. With a very streamlined design, Intercom’s interface is far better than many alternatives, including Zendesk.

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

They both offer some state-of-the-art core functionality and numerous unusual features. Basically, if you have a complicated support process, go with Zendesk, an excellent Intercom alternative, for its help desk functionality. If you’re a sales-oriented corporation, use Intercom for its automation options.

However, some are unhappy about the occasional platform crash and slowdown, which reduces their productivity. A few users also complained of integration issues that caused errors and delayed response times with their clients. One of the standout features of Zendesk’s user interface is the ability to view customer interactions in a timeline format, which can help track the progress of a customer’s support request.

There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. We’re big fans of Zendesk’s dashboard with built-in collaboration tools, but we wish the Agent Workspace came with the Team or Growth plans–not just Professional. Zendesk for Service sells three plans, ranging from $49 to $99 monthly per user, with a 30-day free trial available for each plan. Inside a ticket, the workspace center console displays the ticket’s conversation. The right side of the screen displays all customer contact information and company interaction history, and the agent can contact the customer via any channel with just a few clicks. The top of the agent workspace shows an agent’s open tickets, ticket statistics, and satisfaction statistics, as well as tabs depicting all current tickets.

• Zendesk’s ticketing system is fully integrated, enabling multiple and conditional ticket forms across several channels.
• It caters to a wide range of industries, particularly excelling in e-commerce, SaaS, technology, and telecommunications.
• Set triggers to target particular audiences at the right time, utilize carousels as part of a communication campaign, and compare carousels with A/B testing.
• With mParticle, you can connect your Zendesk and Intercom data with other marketing, analytics, and business intelligence platforms without any custom engineering effort.
• The platform is recognized for its ability to resolve a significant portion of common questions automatically, ensuring faster response times.
• Also, many users find combining its products and hubs complex and expensive.