Zendesk vs Intercom: Which Solution to Choose in 2024?

Intercom bills itself first and foremost as a platform to make the business 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. Two intercom zendesk leading contenders in the customer service platform space, Zendesk and Intercom, have transformed businesses’ customer engagement by offering powerful software solutions that enhance support systems. 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.

In fact, the Zendesk Marketplace has 1,300+ apps and integrations, from billing software to marketing automation tools. 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.

What is a ticketing system? (+3 ways companies use them)

When you combine the help desk with Intercom Messenger, you get added channels for customer engagement. Zendesk also offers digital support during business hours, and their website has a chatbot. Premiere Zendesk plans have 24/7 proactive support with faster response times. Other customer service add-ons with Zendesk include custom training and professional services. They have a dedicated help section that provides instructions on how to set up and effectively use Intercom. We make it easy for anyone within your company to access contextual customer information—including their conversation and purchase history—to provide better experiences.

In 2023, conversational messaging will play an essential role in customer service. Customers increasingly expect to receive fast, convenient, and personalized support. Provide self-service alternatives so customers can resolve their own issues.

Advanced workflows and automation

For very small companies and startups, Intercom also offers a Starter plan–with a balanced suite of features from each of the above solutions–at $74 monthly per user. Intercom wins the sales pipeline tools category because its campaigning and sequencing tools integrate all channels and unique services, like carousels and product tours. Users with light access–such as knowledgeable agents and supervisors–can be added to tickets for browsing and feedback. While light agents cannot interact with the customer on the ticket, they can make notes and interact privately with other team members and agents involved with the ticket.

But it’s designed so well that you really enjoy staying in their inbox and communicating with clients. 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.

From triggers to triggering Workflows

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. As you can imagine, banking from anywhere requires a flexible, robust customer service experience. The support team faced spiking ticket volumes, numerous new customer accounts, and the need to shift to remote work. Track customer service metrics to gain valuable insights and improve customer service processes and agent performance.

• The company was founded in 2007 and today serves over 170,000 customers worldwide.
• 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.
• Intercom, on the other hand, is designed to be more of a complete solution for sales, marketing, and customer relationship nurturing.
• 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.

Though Zendesk now considers itself to be a “service-first CRM company,” since its founding in 2007, their bread and butter offering has leaned much more heavily toward the “service” part of that equation. G2 ranks Intercom higher than Zendesk for ease of setup, and support quality—so you can expect a smooth transition, effortless onboarding, and continuous success. Whether you’re starting fresh with Intercom or migrating from Zendesk, set up is quick and easy. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page. While Intercom does not offer free trials, they do offer demo versions of each plan.

The more expensive Intercom plans offer AI-powered content cues, triage, and conversation insights. Intercom, of course, allows its customer support team to collaborate and communicate too, but overall, Zendesk wins this group. Zendesk has many amazing team collaboration and communication features, like whisper mode, which lets multiple agents chime in to help each other without the customer knowing. 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. In the category of customer support, Zendesk appears to be just slightly better than Intercom based on the availability of regular service and response times. However, it is possible Intercom’s support is superior at the premium level.

It really depends on what features you need and what type of customer service strategy you plan to implement. Check out our list of unified communications providers for more information. Companies looking for a more complete customer service product–without niche bells and whistles, but with all the basic channels you want–should look to Zendesk. Small businesses who prioritize collaboration will also enjoy Zendesk for Service.

Zendesk or Intercom: Workflows and automation

What’s really nice about this is that even within a ticket, you can switch between communication modes without changing views. 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 is billed more as a customer support and ticketing solution, while Intercom includes more native CRM functionality. Intercom isn’t quite as strong as Zendesk in comparison to some of Zendesk’s customer support strengths, but it has more features for sales and lead nurturing. Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates.

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. Zendesk offers a free 30-day trial, after which customers will need to upgrade to one of their paid plans. Intercom is a customer relationship management (CRM) software company that provides a suite of tools for managing customer interactions. The company was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Intercom’s products are used by over 25,000 customers, from small tech startups to large enterprises.

Customer service systems like Zendesk and Intercom should provide a simple workflow builder as well as many pre-built automations which can be used right out of the box. You get call recording, muting and holding, conference calling, and call blocking. Zendesk also offers callback requests, call monitoring and call quality notifications, among other telephone tools. There is a simple email integration tool for whatever email provider you regularly use. This gets you unlimited email addresses and email templates in both text form and HTML. For those of you who have been waiting for the big showdown between these two customer support heavyweights, we are glad to present the ultimate Zendesk vs Intercom comparison article.

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. 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.

In this paragraph, let’s explain some common issues that users usually ask about when choosing between Zendesk and Intercom platforms. And there’s still no way to know how much you’ll pay for them since the prices are only revealed after you go through a few sale demos with the Intercom team. Zendesk is a ticketing system before anything else, and its ticketing functionality is overwhelming in the best possible way. They’ve been marketing themselves as a messaging platform right from the beginning.