Intercom App Integration with Zendesk Support

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. Pendo has two paid plans and one free version that is limited to 500 MAUs which makes it accessible to startups but difficult to scale in the long run. Userpilot’s transparent pricing ranges from $249/month on the entry-level end to an Enterprise tier for larger companies. This a native tooltip example built with Userpilot, not an actual tooltip from Calendar by Google.

However, competitive pricing is a promise and not a compromise to make decent customer support accessible for all. 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 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. Zendesk also offers a sales pipeline feature through its Zendesk Sell product.

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. 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.

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.

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 Chat GPT company. To sum things up, one can get really confused trying to make sense of the Zendesk suite pricing, let alone calculate costs. 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.

If I had to describe Intercom’s help desk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools. It’s great, it’s convenient, it’s not nearly as advanced as the one by Zendesk. We hope this list has provided you with a better grasp of each platform and its features.

It is also not too difficult to program your own bot rules using Intercon’s system. 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. You need a complete customer service platform that’s seamlessly integrated and AI-enhanced. 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)?

For standard reporting like response times, leads generated by source, bot performance, messages sent, and email deliverability, you’ll easily find all the metrics you need. Beyond that, you can create custom reports that combine all of the stats listed above (and many more) and present them as counts, columns, lines, or tables. 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. 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.

• After this, you’ll have to set up your workflows, personalizing your tickets and storing them by topic.
• Zendesk directly competes with Intercom when it comes to integrations.
• These features collectively help businesses build stronger relationships with their customers, provide quality customer service, and drive growth by increasing customer engagement and satisfaction.
• What makes Desku unique is that it has competitively priced services with similar features as those provided by other companies but at a lower cost.

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. Intercom, of course, allows its customer support team to collaborate and communicate too, but overall, Zendesk wins this group.

This additional cost can be a considerable factor for businesses to consider when evaluating their customer support needs against their budget constraints. Intercom’s solution aims to streamline high-volume ticket influx and provide personalized, conversational support. It also includes extensive integrations with over 350 CRM, email, ticketing, and reporting tools. The platform is recognized for its ability to resolve a significant portion of common questions automatically, ensuring faster response times. This exploration aims to provide a detailed comparison, aiding businesses in making an informed decision that aligns with their customer service goals.

Because of the app called Intercom Messenger, one can see that their focus is less on the voice and more on the text. This is fine, as not every customer support team wants to be so available on the phone. Intercom has a very robust advanced chatbot set of tools for your business needs. There is a conversation routing bot, an operator bot, a lead qualification bot, and an article-suggesting bot, among others.

Intercom

It is favored by customer support, helpdesk, IT service management, and contact center teams. 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.

You can see their attention to detail in everything — from their tools to their website. 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.

Since Intercom doesn’t offer a CRM, its pricing is divided into basic messaging and messaging with automations. Both Zendesk and Intercom have their own “app stores” where users can find all of the integrations for each platform. 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. Users also point out that it can take a couple of hours to get used to the flow of tickets, which doesn’t happen in CRM, and they aren’t pleased with the product’s downtime.

Its easy navigability allows you to switch between different sections smoothly. Zendesk is yet another powerful way to help businesses interact with their customers. Zendesk and Intercom each have their own marketplace/app store where users can find all the integrations for each platform. They have a 2-day SLA, no phone support, and the times I have had to work with them they have been incredibly difficult to work with.

Intercom excels in real-time messaging and customer engagement, while Zendesk focuses on ticketing and strong customer support. The choice between the two depends on specific business needs and budget considerations. If you want to enjoy the benefits of both Zendesk and Intercom in one place and enjoy better value for money overall, Desku is a strong alternative. Both tools also allow you to connect your email account and manage it from within the application to track open and click-through rates. In addition, Zendesk and Intercom feature advanced sales reporting and analytics that make it easy for sales teams to understand their prospects and customers more deeply. 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.

Userpilot: Best for in-app engagement and support

If you’re already using Intercom and want to continue using it as the front-end CRM experience, integrating with Zendesk can improve it. Yes, Zendesk has an Intercom zendesk or intercom integration that you can find in the Zendesk Marketplace—it’s free to install. So, you can get the best of both worlds without choosing between Intercom or Zendesk.

• 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.
• Zendesk, like Intercom, offers multilingual language functionality.
• Intercom can even integrate with Zendesk and other sources to import past help center content.
• All plans come with a 7-day free trial, and no credit card is required to sign up for the trial.

Here is a Zendesk vs. Intercom based on the customer support offered by these brands. The offers that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site (including, for example, the order in which they appear). This site does not include all software companies or all available software companies offers.

First, you can only talk to the support team if you are a registered user. 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.

Its straightforward pricing structure ensures businesses get access to the required features without complex tiers or hidden costs, making it an attractive option for cost-conscious organizations. In this article, we comprehensively do a comparison of Zendesk vs Intercom, examining their key features, benefits, and industry use cases. By exploring their distinct offerings, we aim to assist businesses in making informed decisions when selecting a customer service platform. A customer service department is only as good as its support team members, and these highly-prized employees need to rely on one another. Tools that allow support agents to communicate and collaborate are important aspect of customer service software. But keep in mind that Zendesk is viewed more as a support and ticketing solution, while Intercom is CRM functionality-oriented.

At the same time, the vendor offers powerful reporting capabilities to help you grow and improve your business. Intercom offers reporting and analytics tools with limited capabilities for custom reporting, user behavior metrics, and advanced visualization. It also lacks advanced features like collaboration reporting, custom metrics, metric correlation, and drill-in attribution. Intercom does not have a dedicated workforce management solution, either.

Unique Features

With Zendesk, you can anticipate customer questions, allowing for shorter reply periods. With its CRM, you have the ability to place your clients in your sales funnels and follow through with them until conversion. With all accounted for, it seems that Zendesk still has a number of user interface issues. Finally, you’ll have to choose your reporting preferences including details about what you’ll be tracking and how often you want to be reported of changes.

Zendesk has the CX expertise to help businesses of all sizes scale their service experience without compromise. You can also integrate HubSpot and Userpilot for omnichannel customer engagement and support. Compared to Intercom, Zendesk’s pricing starts at $49/month, which is still understandable but not meant for startups looking for affordable pricing plans. These plans are not inclusive of the add-ons or access to all integrations.

Intercom, on the other hand, can be a complicated system, creating a steep learning curve for new users. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. This guide will help you choose the right apps for your business from the more than 1,200 available on the Marketplace. 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. 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. Even though Zendesk’s site does not clearly specify the duration of the free trial, other web resources state that it lasts for 30 days, which is twice as long as Intercom’s free trial.

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. 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.

Intercom also does not offer a free trial period for users to examine the software prior to joining up for their services. That being said the customer support for both Zendesk and Intercom is lacking. Messagely also provides you with a shared inbox so anyone from your team can follow up with your users, regardless of who the user was in contact with first.

Customers will stay with you long if they are not getting any support from your company, especially when you are new to them. Some issues are so crucial that they need to be solved on the spot. If not, then you should because it will ease much of your workload as you would not have to waste your precious time in finding the helpdesk operator, plus zero management issues. Working on customer queries from Gmail was exactly what we needed.

Reporting and analytics

Intercom, on the other hand, is designed to be more of a complete solution for sales, marketing, and customer relationship nurturing. You can use it for customer support, but that’s not its core strength. As a result, customers can implement the help desk software quickly—without the need for developers—and see a faster return on investment. Plus, our transparent pricing doesn’t have hidden fees or endless add-ons, so customers know exactly what they’re paying for and can calculate the total cost of ownership ahead of time. In comparison, Intercom’s confusing pricing structure that features multiple add-ons may be unsuitable for small businesses. Zendesk is a well-known customer service platform for large companies.

I’m pretty sure it’s a benchmark for other chat widgets out there. Basically, you can create new articles, divide them by categories and sections — make it a high end destination for customers when they have questions or issues. Respond to all conversations across different messaging platforms in one place and avoid juggling between dozens of tabs. Collaborate with your teammates by easily assigning the right rep to best handle a customer query. Intercom’s chatbots and product tours differentiate it from Zendesk. The platform is evolving from a platform for engaging with consumers to a tool that assists you in automating every element of your daily routine.

However, if you are looking for a robust messaging solution with customer support features, go for Intercom. Its intuitive messenger can help your business boost engagement and improve sales and marketing efforts. Zendesk takes the slight lead here because it offers some advanced help desk features, which Intercom does not. Intercom offers a range of customer support options to its users. They have a dedicated help section that provides instructions on how to set up and effectively use Intercom. 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.

So, by now, you can see that according to this article, Zendesk inches past Intercom as the better customer support platform. Intercom’s large series of bots obviously run on automations as well. As mentioned before, the bot builder is a visual drag-and-drop system that requires no coding knowledge; this is also how other basic workflows are designed. The more expensive Intercom plans offer AI-powered content cues, triage, and conversation insights. 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. There are even automations to help with things like SLAs, or service level agreements, to do things like send out notifications when headlights are due.

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. Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates. 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.

Zendesk also has the Answer Bot, which can take your knowledge base game to the next level instantly. It can automatically suggest your customer relevant articles reducing the workload for your support agents. NovoChat, on the other hand, is great for businesses that primarily engage with their clients https://chat.openai.com/ through messaging apps. The program is simple to use and includes all of the necessary capabilities for providing good customer service. Zendesk’s Suite Team plan (the cheapest plan) costs $49 per user per month. You get multiple support channels at no extra cost with over 1000 APIs and integrations.

Because Intercom started as a live chat service, its messenger functionality is very robust. It feels very modern, and Intercom offers some advanced messenger features that Zendesk does not. 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. Moreover, for users who require more dedicated and personalized support, Zendesk charges an additional premium. These premium support services can range in cost, typically between $1,500 and $2,800.

You can also contact Zendesk support 24/7, whereas Intercom support only has live agents during business hours. It’s divided into about 20 topics with dozens of articles each, so navigating through it can be complicated. Since Zendesk has many features, it takes a while to learn how to use the options you’ll be needing. But, you would not be able to experience such a good in-app messaging service on Zendesk. Amid tight budgeting times, Desku proves to be the buddy for excellent worth and without any costly expenditure. However, the approach is far much wider than merely focusing on what would be more cost-effective but instead exploring ways through which a solution that would suit you best could be realized.

Unlike Intercom, Zendesk is scalable, intuitively designed for CX, and offers a low total cost of ownership. Intercom also excels in real-time chat solutions, making it a strong contender for businesses seeking dynamic customer interaction. This unpredictability in pricing might lead to higher costs, especially for larger companies. While it offers a range of advanced features, the overall costs and potential inconsistencies in support could be a concern for some businesses​​​​. Zendesk also offers digital support during business hours, and their website has a chatbot.

Zendesk, less user-friendly and with higher costs for quality vendor support, might not suit budget-conscious or smaller businesses. Pricing for both services varies based on the specific needs and scale of your business. When comparing the omnichannel support functionalities of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms show distinct strengths and weaknesses. When comparing the user interfaces (UI) of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms exhibit distinct characteristics and strengths catering to different user preferences and needs. Easily reply to customer conversations and manage workload in a smart & automated way. Some of the links that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation.

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. As for the category of voice and phone features, Zendesk is a clear winner.

Intercom offers an easy way to nurture your qualified leads (prospects) into customers with Intercom Series. Now that we’ve discussed the customer service-focused features of Zendesk and Intercom, let’s turn our attention to how these platforms can support sales and marketing efforts. Zendesk’s Help Center and Intercom’s Articles both offer features to easily embed help centers into your website or product using their web widgets, SDKs, and APIs. With help centers in place, it’s easier for your customers to reliably find answers, tips, and other important information in a self-service manner.