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

Therefore, Intercom may be a better fit for larger businesses with multiple agents helping people. Zendesk also has solutions for small to mid-sized companies as well. It will also depend on the size of your business, how many features you’ll need to use, your budget, and how much support you need. Similarly to LiveAgent, HappyFox is an all-in-one solution for an organization’s help desk software needs.

Intercom’s integration capabilities are limited, and some apps don’t integrate well with third-party customer service technology. This can make it more difficult to import CRM data and obtain complete context from customer data. For example, Intercom’s Salesforce integration doesn’t create a view of cases in Salesforce. So when it comes to chatting features, the choice is not really Intercom vs Zendesk. The latter offers a chat widget that is simple, outdated, and limited in customization options, while the former puts all of its resources into their messenger.

Intercom or Zendesk: Help desk and ticketing

The result is that Zendesk generally wins on ratings when it comes to support capacity. And if you want to invest in making more sales and conversions with your help desk software, it may be worth it to put some money into Intercom for its uniquely conversational approach to front desk help. Depending on the complexity of the script and the amount of your data, the transfer process can take anywhere from a few hours to several weeks. You should be prepared for this process to take an extended period of time.

• It plans on using this funding to research machine learning technology instead of just lining their own pockets.
• Intercom

  – Intercom is a customer relationship management and messaging tool for web businesses.

• We make it easy for anyone within your company to access contextual customer information—including their conversation and purchase history—to provide better experiences.
• Intercom also offers a few features that are unique to its platform – one of these being the ability to segment users based on their behavior.
• The compared vendors share a strategy of delivering their services as either separate add-ons or all-in-one tools.
• Furthermore, with Groove, users can create support widgets that are displayed on their websites.

This is aided by the fact that the look and feel of Zendesk’s user interface are neat and minimal, with few cluttering features. Monese is another fintech company that provides a banking app, account, and debit card to make settling in a new country easier. By providing banking without boundaries, the company aims to provide users with quick access to their finances, wherever they happen to be. Track customer service metrics to gain valuable insights and improve customer service processes and agent performance. Lots of users complain that Intercom support is not available most of the time, so you’re forced to repeat your question over and over again to a bot. And when they do answer, they’re usually not even helpful or will try to transfer you to the sales department right away.

Zendesk is angled more for managing customer support, while Intercom is better for managing customer relationships

Keeping this general theme in mind, I’ll dive deeper into how each software’s features compare, so you can decide which use case might best fit your needs. 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. If want to add your widget to specific pages, use the HTML Module. Your account settings can be accessed from the top right of you screen.

If you’re still experiencing problems, don’t hesitate to reach out to the support team for further assistance. It enables you to get quality product feedback from the right customers at the right time through the app or by email. Intercom assists with the onboarding and retention of customers through targeted email and in-app messages triggered by time or behavior. Both Zendesk Chat and Intercom have a free trial available and a freemium model to test out which chat service will work best for your company.

Features Zendesk

There’s even on-the-spot translation built right in, which is extremely helpful. The help desk interface looks similar to an older version of Gmail and is useful for receiving and handling customer requests. It is important to note that the only metadialog.com communication channel included in cheaper packages is email. So, if you want to use social media or other channels, then you will need to upgrade your plan. Moreover, Gorgias is one of the few platforms that place ticket limits on monthly plans.

You could technically consider Intercom a CRM, but it’s really more of a customer-focused communication product. 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. Intercom does just enough that smaller businesses could use it as a standalone CRM or supplement it with a simpler CRM at a lower pricing tier, but bigger companies may not be satisfied with Intercom alone. 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.

Zendesk VS Intercom

This information helps organizations revisit the knowledge base and make changes to help documents as necessary. To integrate an external service with a Refined site, you can use the custom HTML setting located on the Site Configuration page in Refined admin. The only requirement is that the service you’re integrating has a widget. Note that any code you add here will apply the widget site-wide (see below if you only want the widget to appear on certain pages).

Automated service to migrate your data between help desk platforms without programming skills — just follow simple Migration Wizard. As a rule, Intercom reviews are positive as many users praise the interface, the ease of use, and the deployment of the software. However, some users remarked that a developer is needed to properly install the software or run the risks of problems in the future. The Intercom Messenger, in particular, performs well compared to the Zendesk alternative. We give the edge to Zendesk here, as it’s typically aimed for more complex environments. It’s also more exclusively focused on providing help support, whereas Intercom sometimes moonlights as being part-time sales.

How Zendesk & Intercom Integrations Work

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. Zendesk is another popular customer service, support, and sales platform that enables clients to connect and engage with their customers in seconds.

• Zendesk is billed more as a customer support and ticketing solution, while Intercom includes more native CRM functionality.
• Intercom has a full suite of email marketing tools, although they are part of a pricier package.
• One of the best things about Intercom is that it can be extended with various app integrations.
• You have to go to their customer details page, locate their phone number (if you have it), and then call them some other way.
• Their chat widget looks and works great, and they invest a lot of effort to make it a modern, convenient customer communication tool.
• Zendesk has great intelligent routing and escalation protocols as well.

She also loves to run marathons and play softball in her spare time. Any business knows that the front desk is where everything happens. It’s where customers ask the questions that may result in the largest sales in your company’s history. But Intercom’s friendliness for growing companies is something you can’t afford to ignore.

Make Copper an Efficient App

If you’re interested in just live chat, you’ll want to look into the Acquiring package. “Fullview helped us navigate through replays of the customers and this helped us discover and rectify hundreds of bugs and glitches in the product.” With over 80 data source connections, you can gather all your business data in one place in minutes.

In general, Zendesk offers a wide range of live chat features such as customizable chat widgets, automatic greetings, offline messaging, and chat triggers. In addition to these features, Intercom offers messaging automation and real-time visitor insights. Novo has been a Zendesk customer since 2019 but didn’t immediately start taking full advantage of all our features and capabilities.

Integrating Zendesk and Intercom with Refined-based Confluence and Jira sites is a simple five-step process.

Panoply makes it easy to learn more about your customer communication habits, purchases, and product usage behavior, all from within one end to end data management platform. These are just a few examples of the positive feedback we’ve received from our users. We’re constantly working to improve our integrations and provide the best possible experience for our users. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team.

Don’t opt for a more advanced tool because you “might” use the more advanced features at some point in the future. Rather, go with the tool that will help you solve your most pressing issues now, while keeping the door open for other options in the future. Groove is another Zendesk alternative that streamlines the process of collecting customer inquiries and providing support as needed. This Zendesk alternative is best for small businesses looking for a simple yet powerful help desk software with email-based support. Best Zendesk alternative for businesses looking for an all-in-one solution for ticket intake and service provision. Help Scout also makes it easy for organizations to track engagements with specific customers from the moment an internal ticket is open to the moment the issue is resolved.

• And considering that its tools (including live chat options) are so easy to use, it’s probably going to be easier for a small business to get integrated and set up.
• Both Zendesk Chat and Intercom will integrate with Salesforce Sales Cloud, Zendesk, and WordPress.
• The tool was later integrated with Zendesk, making it more robust.
• Popular integrations include Slack, MailChimp, Dropbox, and Jira.
• As you probably know, Refined integrates with Atlassian platforms to help you create intranets, documentation sites, and support sites, but we can do more.
• But I like that Zendesk just feels slightly cleaner, has easy online/away toggling, more visual customer journey notes, and a handy widget for exploring the knowledge base on the fly.

They do have a ton of similarities, but recognizing the differences may help you to make the crucial decision about which one to use for your business. For freelancers and enterprises, Zendesk is likely to be a better fit. It plans on using this funding to research machine learning technology instead of just lining their own pockets. It is worthwhile to explore the features of both, prior to making a decision on which one you should use. In the duel between Zendesk vs Intercom, it seems that Zendesk chat rises slightly above Intercom.

In this post, we’ll cover some of our favorite Intercom integrations and explain how you can use them to get the most out of this powerful tool. Want to explore Zendesk + Intercom quick connects for faster integration? It can help you to reach out to customers and help them complete purchases. Intercom integrates with far more applications than Zendesk Chat.

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. Try out mParticle and see how to integrate and orchestrate customer data the right way for your business. Pricing is an important factor to consider when choosing between Zendesk and Intercom as the support tool you choose can have a significant impact on your business’s budget and overall return on investment. Learn more about the differences between leading chat support solutions Intercom and Zendesk so that you can choose the right tool for your needs.