Intercom App Integration with Zendesk Support

The company was founded in 2007 and today serves over 170,000 customers worldwide. Zendesk’s mission is to build software designed to improve customer relationships. Just like Userpilot, it offers you tools for onboarding, in-app communication, and customer support. You can also use it for employee onboarding and it works on mobile apps as well as web ones.

It has very limited customization options in comparison to its competitors. For small companies and startups, Zendesk offers a six-month free trial of up to 50 agents redeemable for any combination of Zendesk Support and Sell products. Zendesk and Intercom each have their own marketplace/app store where users can find all the integrations for each platform. Learn more about the differences between leading chat support solutions Intercom and Zendesk so that you can choose the right tool for your needs. Zendesk, less user-friendly and with higher costs for quality vendor support, might not suit budget-conscious or smaller businesses. Zendesk’s mobile app is also good for ticketing, helping you create new support tickets with macros and updates.

If you’re just looking for a CRM to help your customer support efforts, Zendesk is the best helpdesk software you can get, according to our research. It scores an impressive 4.7 overall, beating out the likes of Freshdesk (4.5/5) and Zoho Desk (4.5/5) for the top spot. This is largely due to it having the largest support feature catalog and excellent customization options. Support’s Professional plan costs $55 per user, per month and, and offers 24/5 phone and email support from the Zendesk team.

Zendesk Support has voicemail, text messages, and embedded voice, and it displays the phone number on the widget. Intercom has a community forum where users can engage with each other and gain insights from their experiences. Zendesk is a ticketing system before anything else, and its ticketing functionality is overwhelming in the best possible way. Currently based in Albuquerque, NM, Bryce Emley holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NC State and nearly a decade of writing and editing experience. 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 does have a ticketing dashboard that has omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk.

This has helped to make Zendesk one of the most popular customer service software platforms on the market. Salesforce Service Hub, for example, is a popular option if you’re looking for robust analytics and data visualization, but it’s a bit expensive compared to Zendesk. Freshdesk pricing is comparable to Zendesk and still offers a lot of features. Additionally, if you’re a small business, Zoho CRM pricing makes it our top choice, offering the best bang for your buck. Crisp is a customer messaging platform that enables businesses to communicate with their customers through various channels, including live chat, email, text messages, and social media.

Zendesk

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. Well, I must admit, the tool is gradually transforming from a platform for communicating with users to a tool that helps you automate every aspect of your routine. They’ve been marketing themselves as a messaging platform right from the beginning. 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.

Zendesk directly competes with Intercom when it comes to integrations. This live chat service provider offers 200+ integrations to its user base. 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. Intercom is better for smaller companies that are looking for a simple and capable customer service platform. Instead, using it and setting it up is very easy, and very advanced chatbots and predictive tools are included to boost your customer service.

You’d probably want to know how much it costs to get Zendesk or Intercom for your business, so let’s talk money now. As it turns, it’s quite difficult to compare Zendesk against Intercom as they serve different purposes and will fit different businesses. While doing my research for this article, I’ve not only tested both Intercom and Zendesk myself, but also read a pile of different articles, comparisons, guides, showdowns and all this kind of stuff. What really struck me though is that people seemed to like Zendesk more.

Intercom allows visitors to search for and view articles from the messenger widget. Customers won’t need to leave your app or website to find the help they need.Zendesk, on the other hand, will redirect the customer to a new web page. Intercom does not offer a native call center tool, so it cannot handle calls through a cloud-based phone system or calling app on its own. However, you can connect Intercom with over 40 compatible phone and video integrations. Zendesk’s per-agent pricing structure makes it a budget-friendly option for smaller teams, allowing costs to scale with team growth. Both platforms have their unique strengths in multichannel support, with Zendesk offering a more comprehensive range of integrated channels and Intercom focusing on a dynamic, chat-centric experience.

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Compared to Zendesk, Intercom offers few integrations, which may hinder its scalability. There are many features to help bigger customer service teams collaborate more effectively — like private notes or a real-time view of who’s handling a given ticket at the moment, etc. At the same time, the vendor offers powerful reporting capabilities to help you grow and improve your business. Why don’t you try something equally powerful yet more affordable, like HelpCrunch?

• Its ability to seamlessly integrate with various applications further amplifies its versatility.
• For Intercom’s pricing plan, on the other hand, there is much less information on their website.
• This is largely due to it having the largest support feature catalog and excellent customization options.
• The ProProfs Live Chat Editorial Team is a passionate group of customer service experts dedicated to empowering your live chat experiences with top-notch content.

If you’re exploring popular chat support tools Zendesk and Intercom, you may be trying to understand which solution is right for you. In this detailed comparison, we’ll explore the features and characteristics of Intercom and Zendesk, highlighting each of their unique capabilities, so you can identify the right solution for your needs. Choose Zendesk for a scalable, team-size-based pricing model and Intercom for initial low-cost access with flexibility in adding advanced features. 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.

Zendesk vs Intercom Comparison 2024: Which One Is Better?

So, by now, you can see that according to this article, Zendesk inches past Intercom as the better customer support platform. Intercom has a full suite of email marketing tools, although they are part of a pricier package. With Intercom, you get email features like targeted and personalized outbound emailing, dynamic content fields, and an email-to-inbox forwarding feature.

You can also set up interactive product tours to highlight new features in-product and explain how they work. Both Zendesk Messaging and Intercom Messenger offer live chat features and AI-enabled chatbots for 24/7 support to customers. Additionally, you can trigger incoming messages to automatically assign an agent and create dashboards to monitor the team’s performance on live chat. Chatbots are automated customer support tools that can assist with low-level ticket triage and ticket routing in real-time.

You’d probably want to know how much it costs to get each of the platforms for your business, so let’s talk money now. You can create dozens of articles in a simple, intuitive WYSIWYG text editor, divide them by categories and sections, and customize with your custom themes. All customer questions, be it via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel, are landing in one dashboard, where your agents can solve them quickly and efficiently. It guarantees continuous omnichannel support that meets customer expectations.

On the other hand, Zendesk Sell is one of the worst CRM for sales on the market. Subsequently, we’d recommend looking elsewhere for your software needs, unless you’re already utilizing Zendesk Support and need to add sales functionality after the fact. Read on for more information about what these specific Zendesk CRM plans offer and how much they will cost your business. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. The Elite plan for Zendesk Sell costs $169 per user, per month, billed annually. Furthermore, Userpilot’s entry-level plan includes access to all UI patterns and should include everything that most mid-market SaaS businesses need to get started.

Intercom’s ticketing system and help desk SaaS is also pretty great, just not as amazing as Zendesk’s. 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.

Twilio: Best for managing customer data

However, if you’re looking for a streamlined, all-in-one messaging platform, there is no better option than Messagely. Chat agents also get a comprehensive look at their entire customer’s journey, so they will have a better idea of what your customers need, without needing to ask many questions. Since Intercom is so intuitive, the time you’ll need to spend training new users on how to interact with the platform is greatly reduced.

Zendesk is more robust in terms of its ticket management capabilities, it offers more customization options and advanced features like a virtual call center app. On the other hand, Intercom is more focused on conversational customer support, and has more help desk features suited for live chat and messaging. Intercom is a customer messaging platform that enables businesses to engage with customers through personalized and real-time communication. It’s known for its unified agent workspace which combines different communication methods like email, social media messaging, live chat, and SMS, all in one place. This makes it easier for support teams to handle customer interactions without switching between different systems. Plus, Zendesk’s integration with various channels ensures customers can always find a convenient way to reach out.

Research by Zoho reports that customer relationship management (CRM) systems can help companies triple lead conversion rates. Those same tools also increase customer retention by 27% while saving 23% on sales and marketing costs. Intercom stands out for its modern and user-friendly messenger functionality, which includes advanced zendesk and intercom features with a focus on automation and real-time insights. Its AI Chatbot, Fin, is particularly noted for handling complex queries efficiently. 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.

• Once you add them all to the picture, their existing plans can turn out to be quite expensive.
• This guide will help you choose the right apps for your business from the more than 1,200 available on the Marketplace.
• Help Scout offers three different pricing plans, with the total cost based on the number of users.
• Using this, agents can chat across teams within a ticket via email, Slack, or Zendesk’s ticketing system.
• When you combine the help desk with Intercom Messenger, you get added channels for customer engagement.

You can use it for customer support, but that’s not its core strength. Zendesk has an app available for both Android and iOS, which makes it easy to stay connected with customers while on the go. The app includes features like push notifications and real-time customer engagement — so businesses can respond quickly to customer inquiries. Intercom also offers a 14-day free trial, after which customers can upgrade to a paid plan or use the basic free plan. Unlike Zendesk, the prices for Intercom are based on the number of seats and contacts, with each plan tailored to each customer, meaning that the pricing can be quite flexible.

After testing these analytic capabilities ourselves, we were impressed by the granular level of control they gave its users. The platform provides multiple menu views and reporting styles to help you measure a wide variety of metrics. In our opinion, this more than justifies this plans larger price tag, especially for teams with ambitions growth targets. Apart from its CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions, it also offers bespoke tools for automating and streamlining customer service and support operations. While the Standard plan is suitable for small teams with limited budgets, the Pro plan is a good fit for large businesses.

Send conversations to Zendesk from your Help Desk

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, on the other hand, was built for business messaging, so communication is one of their strong suits. Combine that with their prowess in automation and sales solutions, and you’ve got a really strong product that can handle myriad customer relationship needs. Zendesk’s user face is quite intuitive and easy to use, allowing customers to quickly find what they are looking for.

Zendesk can also save key customer information in their platform, which helps reps get a faster idea of who they are dealing with as well as any historical data that might assist in the support. Zendesk Sunshine is a separate feature set that focuses on unified customer views. When it comes to self-service portals for things like knowledgebases, Intercom has a useful set of resources. Intercom also has a community forum where users can help one another with questions and solutions.

To sum things up, one can get really confused trying to make sense of the Zendesk suite pricing, let alone calculate costs. If you’d want to test Intercom vs Zendesk before deciding on a tool for good, they both provide free trials for 14 days. But sooner or later, you’ll have to decide on the subscription plan, and here’s what you’ll have to pay. If I had to describe Intercom’s helpdesk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools.

The best help desks are also ticketing systems, which lets support reps create a support ticket out of issues that can then be tracked. Ticket routing helps to send the ticket to the best support team agent. For Intercom’s pricing plan, on the other hand, there is much less information on their website. There is a Starter plan for small businesses at $74 per month billed annually, and there are add-ons like a WhatsApp add-on at $9 per user per month or surveys at $49 per month. Here is a Zendesk vs. Intercom based on the customer support offered by these brands. So yeah, all the features talk actually brings us to the most sacred question — the question of pricing.

We also adhere to numerous industry standards and regulations, such as HIPAA, SOC2, ISO 27001, HDS, FedRAMP LI-SaaS, ISO 27018, and ISO 27701. The cheapest plan for small businesses – Essential – costs $39 monthly per seat. But that’s not it, if you want to resolve customer common questions with the help of the vendor’s new tool – Fin bot, you will have to pay $0.99 per resolution per month. Intercom has a wider range of uses out of the box than Zendesk, though by adding Zendesk Sell, you could more than make up for it. Both options are well designed, easy to use, and share some pretty key functionality like behavioral triggers and omnichannel-ality (omnichannel-centricity?). But with perks like more advanced chatbots, automation, and lead management capabilities, Intercom could have an edge for many users.

While the company is smaller than Zendesk, Intercom has earned a reputation for building high-quality customer service software. The company’s products include a messaging platform, knowledge base tools, and an analytics dashboard. Many businesses choose to work Chat GPT with Intercom because of its focus on personalization and flexibility, allowing companies to completely customize their customer service experience. It offers customizable live chat widgets, omnichannel support capabilities, and integrations with over 300 apps.

However, compared to the more contemporary designs like Intercom’s, Zendesk’s UI may appear outdated, particularly in aspects such as chat widget and customization options. This could impact user experience and efficiency for new users grappling with its complexity​​​​​​. Intercom’s app store has popular integrations for things like WhatsApp, Stripe, Instagram, and Slack. There is a really useful one for Shopify to provide customer support for e-commerce operations.

Zendesk Sell doesn’t compete as admirably against other CRMs for sales, as it netted a mere 3.4/5 overall in our research, well behind Zoho CRM (4.7/5) and Freshsales (4.5/5). The cause of this low score is that it simply doesn’t offer as many features as other CRMs, and it’s still quite expensive. That, combined with poor help and support options means that Zendesk Sell might not be your best option. The primary feature that makes Suite more attractive than the outright Support plans is that it provides additional communication channels to keep in contact with team members and clients alike. Enterprise’s features are powerful but only worth it if you have a team that knows how to use them and an operation large enough to benefit from implementing them at scale.

Two 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. Intercom also uses AI and features a chatbot called Fin, but negative reviews note basic reporting and a lack of customization. Fin is priced at $0.99 per resolution, so companies handling large volumes of queries might find it costly. In comparison, Zendesk customers pay a fixed price of $50 per agent—and only Zendesk AI is modeled on the world’s largest CX-specific dataset.

Customer experience will be no exception, and AI models that are purpose-built for CX lead to better results at scale. You need a complete customer service platform that’s seamlessly integrated and AI-enhanced. 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. Zendesk also has an Answer Bot, which instantly takes your knowledge base game to the next level.

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. The strength of Zendesk’s UI lies in its structured and comprehensive environment, adept at managing numerous customer interactions and integrating various channels seamlessly.

After an in-depth analysis such as this, it can be pretty challenging for your business to settle with either option. That’s why it would be better to review where both the options would be ideal to use. Zendesk also offers detailed reports that can be shared with others and enable team members to collaborate on them simultaneously.

This gets you unlimited email addresses and email templates in both text form and HTML. There is automatic email archiving and incoming email authentication. Help desk SaaS is how you manage general customer communication and for handling customer questions. Zendesk is quite famous for designing its platform to be intuitive and its tools to be quite simple to learn. This is aided by the fact that the look and feel of Zendesk’s user interface are neat and minimal, with few cluttering features. Zendesk has more pricing options, and its most affordable plan is likely cheaper than Intercom’s, although without exact Intercom numbers, it is not easy to truly know the cost.

Intercom feels more wholesome and is more client-success-oriented, but it can be too costly for smaller companies. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. Besides, the prices differ depending on the company’s size and specific needs. We conducted a little study of our own and found that all Intercom users share different amounts of money they pay for the plans, which can reach over $1000/mo. The price levels can even be much higher if we’re talking of a larger company. Just like Zendesk, Intercom also offers its Operator bot, which will automatically suggest relevant articles to clients right in a chat widget.

It is also not too difficult to program your own bot rules using Intercon’s system. 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. 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. Intercom is ideal for personalized messaging, while Zendesk offers robust ticket management and self-service options.

Zendesk Sunshine is available in the Suite, which means you can get it from $55 per agent per month. This is a great deal, considering the Sunshine platform on its own will cost you at least $495 per month, although it depends on how many agents you have using it. Our research into CRM software revealed that Zendesk Support is one of, if not the best helpdesk software that you can use.

Admins will also like the fact that they can see the progress of all their teams and who all are actively answering a customer’s query in real-time. Messagely’s pricing starts at just $29 per month, which includes live chat, targeted messages, shared inbox, mobile apps, and over 750 powerful integrations. Messagely’s chatbots are powerful tools for qualifying and converting leads while your team is otherwise occupied or away. With chatbots, you can generate leads to hand over to your sales team and solve common customer queries without the need of a customer service representative behind a keyboard. In short, Zendesk is perfect for large companies looking to streamline their customer support process; Intercom is great for smaller companies looking for advanced customer service features. Zendesk chat allows you to talk with your visitors in real time through a small chat bar at the bottom of your site.

It’s beautifully crafted and thought through, and their custom-made illustrations are just next level stuff. You can see their attention to detail in everything — from their tools to their website. Intercom doesn’t really provide free stuff, but they have a tool called Platform, which is free. The free Intercom Platform lets you see who your customers are and what they do in your workspace. If you’d want to test Zendesk and Intercom before deciding on a tool for good, they both provide free trials. Intercom has a standard trial period for a SaaS product which is 14 days, while Zendesk offers a 30-day trial.

Just as Zendesk, Intercom also offers its own Operator bot which will automatically suggest relevant articles to customers who ask for help. It’s modern, it’s smooth, it looks great and it has so many advanced features. See how leading multi-channel consumer brands solve E2E customer data challenges with a real-time customer data platform. 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. Zendesk has over 1,300 integrations, compared to Intercom’s 300+ apps, making it the leader in this category. However, you can browse their respective sites to find which tools each platform supports.

I just found Zendesk’s help center to be slightly better integrated into their workflows and more customizable. Triggers should prove especially useful for agents, allowing them to do things like automate notifications for actions like ticket assignments, ticket closing/reopening, or new ticket creation. 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. 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. Using this, agents can chat across teams within a ticket via email, Slack, or Zendesk’s ticketing system.

Meanwhile, our WFM software enables businesses to analyze employee metrics and performance, helping them identify improvements, implement strategies, and set long-term goals. The highlight of Zendesk’s ticketing software is its omnichannel-ality (omnichannality?). Whether agents are facing customers via chat, email, social media, or good old-fashioned phone, they can keep it all confined to a single, easy-to-navigate dashboard. That not only saves them the headache of having to constantly switch between dashboards while streamlining resolution processes—it also leads to better customer and agent experience overall. 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.

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. Zendesk is a much larger company than Intercom; it has over 170,000 customers, while Intercom has over 25,000. While this may seem like a positive for Zendesk, it’s important to consider that a larger company may not be as agile or responsive to customer needs as a smaller company.

Intercom is 4 years younger than Zendesk and has fancied itself as a messaging platform right from the beginning. Intercom lets businesses send their customers targeted in-app messages. In today’s environment, where customer expectations are constantly evolving, choosing the right ticketing tool that aligns with your business needs is crucial. This comparison will delve into the features, similarities, differences, pros, cons, and use cases of Zendesk and Intercom, providing you with the insights needed to make an informed decision. With both tools, you can also use support bots to automatically suggest specific articles, track customers’ ratings, and localize help center content to serve your customers in their native language.

Additionally, the platform allows users to customize their experience by setting up automation workflows, creating ticket rules, and utilizing analytics. However, the right fit for your business will depend on your particular needs and budget. If you’re looking for a comprehensive solution with lots of features and integrations, then Zendesk would be a good choice. On the other hand, if you need something that is more tailored to your customer base and is less expensive, then Intercom might be a better fit. Intercom also has a mobile app available for both Android and iOS, which makes it easy to stay connected with customers even when away from the computer. The app includes features like automated messages and conversation routing — so businesses can manage customer conversations more efficiently.

Customers want speed, anticipation, and a hyper-personalized experience conveniently on their channel of choice. Intelligence has become key to delivering the kinds of experiences customers expect at a lower operational cost. As more organizations adopt AI, it will be critical to choose a data model that aligns with how your business operates.

Zendesk Suite also offers an Enterprise Plus plan, but you will have to contact the sales team to get an exact quote for your business. The Enterprise plan for Zendesk Sell costs $115 per user per month, billed annually. The Professional plan for Zendesk Sell costs $55 per user per month, billed annually. The Team plan for Zendesk Sell costs $19 per user per month, billed annually.

Some of the links that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation. 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. Lastly, Intercom offers an academy that offers concise courses to help users make the most out of their Intercom experience. With only the Enterprise tier offering round-the-clock email, phone, and chat help, Zendesk support is sharply separated by tiers.

Some startups and small businesses may prefer one app, while large companies and enterprise operations will have their own requirements. Integrations are the best way to enhance the toolkit of your apps by connecting them for interoperable actions and features. Both Zendesk and Intercom have integration libraries, and you can also use a connecting tool like Zapier for added integrations and add-ons. Every single bit of business SaaS in the world needs to leverage the efficiency power of workflows and automation. 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.

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 https://chat.openai.com/ more features for sales and lead nurturing. One of the things that sets Zendesk apart from other customer service software providers is its focus on design. The company’s products are built with an emphasis on simplicity and usability.

So, you can get the best of both worlds without choosing between Intercom or Zendesk. Check out our chart that compares the capabilities of Zendesk vs. Intercom. 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.

It offers every single feature from the Professional suite, plus more features and AI abilities, 24/7 support, and greater customization. Outside of that, you also get access to advanced analytics and API functionality, on top of a substantial increase in the amount of storage allowed per user (25GB). The added cost is substantial at nearly double the Enterprise plan, but these added features are nothing to scoff at if you think they could improve your business in a meaningful way. It provides tools that facilitate real-time interactions and support, allowing businesses to manage support tickets effectively. Use them to quickly resolve customer question on, for example, how to use your product.