Zendesk Support app Help Center

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. I tested both options (using Zendesk’s Suite Professional trial and Intercom’s Support trial) and found clearly defined differences between the two.

Why don’t you try something equally powerful yet more affordable, like HelpCrunch? Users can benefit from using Intercom’s CX platform and AI software as a standalone tool for business messaging. But to provide a more robust customer experience, businesses may need to consider integrating Intercom’s AI tool with a third-party customer service platform, as it falls short of a full-stack offering. 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 fact, the Zendesk Marketplace has 1,300+ apps and integrations, from billing software to marketing automation tools.

Pricing & Scalability

It’s virtually impossible to predict what you’ll pay for Intercom at the end of the day. They charge for customer service representative seats and people reached, don’t reveal their prices, and offer tons of custom add-ons at additional cost. Zendesk also has an Answer Bot, which instantly takes your knowledge base game to the next level. It can automatically suggest relevant articles for agents during business hours to share with clients, reducing your support agents’ workload.

• Zendesk offers more advanced automation capabilities than Intercom, which may be a deciding factor for businesses that require complex workflows.
• With this feature, businesses can easily handle and keep track of customer requests, making sure that no issues get lost.
• All client contacts, whether via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel, land in one dashboard, where your agents can quickly and efficiently resolve them.
• Intercom’s UI excels in modern design and intuitive functionality, particularly noted for its real-time messaging and advanced features.
• Before you make your choice, check out Messagely’s features and compare them to discover which platform is best for you.

But it’s designed so well that you really enjoy staying in their inbox and communicating with clients. Whether you’ve just started searching for a customer support tool or have been using one for a while, chances are you know about Zendesk and Intercom. The former is one of the oldest and most reliable solutions on the market, while the latter sets the bar high in terms of innovative and out-of-the-box features. 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.

Can I install Intercom to talk to customers on my mobile app?

Then, you can begin filling in details such as your account’s name and icon and your agents’ profiles and security features. 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.

With simple setup, and handy importers you’ll be up and running in no time, ready to unlock the Support Funnel and deliver fast and personal customer support. Advanced workflows are useful to customer service teams because they automate processes that make it easier for agents to provide great customer service. The Zendesk support system stands out in particular because of its enormous integration ecosystem, which includes a wide variety zendesk intercom of plugins and applications developed by third-party developers. The availability of this variety enables users to link Zendesk with a wide range of applications and services in a seamless manner, which results in a workflow that is more streamlined and efficient. Considering the huge number of connectors that Zendesk provides, it appears that the company takes a holistic approach to meeting the varied requirements of businesses.

The Zendesk chat tool has most of the necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers, and live chat analytics. 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. 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. Intercom built additional tools to aid in marketing and engagement to supplement its customer service solution. But we doubled down and created a truly full-service CX solution capable of handling any support request. Novo has been a Zendesk customer since 2019 but didn’t immediately start taking full advantage of all our features and capabilities. Intercom is second to none when it comes to providing great customer service, particularly in terms of proactive contact and the customisation of in-app experiences.

If a customer isn’t satisfied with Answer Bot’s response, Answer Bot quickly routes them to an agent best suited to help. Zendesk wins the omnichannel capabilities category because it offers voice as a service, which we think is absolutely critical. Agents can use the desktop chatbox to respond to customers in any outbound channel. Zendesk for Sales, or Zendesk Sell, is Zendesk’s sales pipeline and CRM tool with its own dashboard for lead generation and conversion.

On the other hand, Intercom lacks many ticketing functionality that can be essential for big companies with a huge client support load. 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.

The company’s products include a messaging platform, knowledge base tools, and an analytics dashboard. Many businesses choose to work with Intercom because of its focus on personalization and flexibility, allowing companies to completely customize their customer service experience. Zendesk, on the other hand, may not stress the same conversation-driven method, even though it has powerful team management tools. Its strength is that it offers a wide range of tools for organising teams, such as booking systems, knowledge bases, and customer service features.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Chatbots are automated customer support tools that can assist with low-level ticket triage and ticket routing in real-time. How easy it is to program a chatbot and how effective a chatbot is at assisting human reps is an important factor for this category. Intercom bills itself first and foremost as a platform to make the business of customer service more personalized, among other things.

• Fin will use your history to recognize and suggest common questions to create answers for.
• Prioritize the agent experience to maximize productivity and customer satisfaction while reducing employee turnover.
• 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.
• These plans make Hiver a versatile tool, catering to a range of business sizes and needs, from startups to large enterprises looking for a comprehensive customer support solution within Gmail.

It is essential to evaluate the compatibility of the connectors offered by each platform with the tools and workflows that you already have in place. During this phase, you will determine the essential features, functionalities, and tools that are essential to the operations of your firm. On the other hand, Intercom, starting at a lower price point, could be more attractive for very small teams or individual users.

Some of the links that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation. Many use cases call for different approaches, and Zendesk and Intercom are but two software solutions for each case. Visit either of their app marketplaces and look up the Intercom Zendesk integration. Like with many other apps, Zapier seems to be the best and most simple way to connect Intercom to Zendesk. 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.

Using this, agents can chat across teams within a ticket via email, Slack, or Zendesk’s ticketing system. This packs all resolution information into a single ticket, so there’s no extra searching or backtracking needed to bring a ticket through to resolution, even if it involves multiple agents. If you’re not ready to make the full switch to Intercom just yet, you can integrate Intercom with your Zendesk account. This will provide live data on who your users are and what they do in your app.

I’ll dive into their chatbots more later, but their bot automation features are also stronger. Zendesk provides limited customer support for its basic plan users, along with costly premium assistance options. On the other hand, Intercom is generally praised for its support features, despite facing challenges with its AI chatbot and the complexity of its help articles.

Remember that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and the optimal platform for you will be determined by your individual demands. On the other hand, it’s nearly impossible to foresee how much Intercom will cost at the end of the day. They charge for agent seats and connections, don’t disclose their prices, and package add-ons at a premium. While both offer a wide number of integration options, Zendesk wins the top spot in this category. However, if you’re looking for a streamlined, all-in-one messaging platform, there is no better option than Messagely.

Seamlessly integrate Intercom with popular third-party tools and platforms, centralizing customer data and improving workflow efficiency. 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. Zendesk is a customer service platform that allows you to communicate with customers via any channel. That being said, in your search for the best customer support tool, you must have come across Zendesk and Intercom. Zendesk pricing is divided between a customer support product called “Zendesk for support”, and a fully-fledged CRM called “Zendesk for sales”.

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. Zendesk also makes it easy to customize your help center, with out-of-the-box tools to design color, theme, and layout–both on mobile and desktop. Intercom wins the automation and AI category because its chatbots have some impressive capabilities, like lead qualification and advanced routing. An inbound customer message through any of these channels becomes a ticket for your support agents, whose reply reaches the customer through the same channel they originally used. Zendesk wins the ticketing system category due to its easy-to-use interface and side conversations tool.

Lead Converted to User

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. Intercom is a customer support platform known for its effective messaging and automation, enhancing in-context support within products, apps, or websites. It features the Intercom Messenger, which works with existing support tools for self-serve or live support. Ultimately, it’s important to consider what features each platform offers before making a decision, as well as their pricing options and customer support policies. Since both are such well-established market leader companies, you can rest assured that whichever one you choose will offer a quality customer service solution.

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. HubSpot and Salesforce are also available when support needs to work with marketing and sales teams.

Choose the plan that suits your support requirements and budget, whether you’re a small team or a growing enterprise. So, get ready for an insightful journey through the landscapes of Zendesk and Intercom, where support excellence converges with AI innovation. In-app messages and email marketing tools are two crucial features that Zendesk lacks when compared to Intercom.

If you want dashboard reporting and integrations, you’ll need to pay $19 per agent per month. Multilingual content and other advanced features come with a $49 price per agent per month. Zendesk, unlike Intercom, is a more affordable and predictable customer service platform. You can always count on it if you need a reliable customer support platform to process tickets, support users, and get advanced reporting.

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. If I had to describe Intercom’s helpdesk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools. So you see, it’s okay to feel dizzy when comparing Zendesk vs Intercom platforms. You could say something similar for Zendesk’s standard service offering, so it’s at least good to know they have Zendesk Sell, a capable CRM option to supplement it. You can use Zendesk Sell to track tasks, streamline workflows, improve engagement, nurture leads, and much more. Before you start, you’ll need to retrieve your Zendesk credentials and create a Zendesk API key.

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. The Zendesk Admin Center panels allow administrators to control settings, accessibility, automations, and workflows for everything from chatbots to integrations and custom APIs. 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.

Let’s explore these unique offerings and see how they can benefit your business. As your business grows, so does the volume of customer inquiries and support tickets. Managing everything manually is becoming increasingly difficult, and you need a robust customer support platform to streamline your operations. NovoChat, on the other hand, is great for businesses that primarily engage with their clients through messaging apps.

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. 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. Yes, you can support multiple brands or businesses from a single Help Desk, while ensuring the Messenger is a perfect match for each of your different domains. Yes, you can localize the Messenger to work with multiple languages, resolve conversations automatically in multiple languages and support multiple languages in your Help Center. When you switch from Zendesk, you can also create dynamic macros to speed up your response time to common queries, like feature requests and bug reports.

Administrator reports allow managers to observe real-time CSAT scores, conversation volume, first response time, and time to close. Intercom’s Inbox organizes all of an agent’s core functions into one interface. Below, we’ve compared the usability of Zendesk’s and Intercom’s agent dashboards and administrator controls. Survey composer allows you to create the question and answer format, also customizing color, rating scales, and greetings. Create code-free screencast tours of products, websites, webpages, and applications within your website. In the Response section, you can map data from the Zendesk API response to Conversation or People attributes.

From the inbox, live agents and chatbots can refer to and link knowledge base articles, to elaborate on replies and help customers locate answers. 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.

But this also means the customer experience ROI tends to be lower than what it would be if you went with a best-in-class solution like Zendesk. If a customer starts an interaction by talking to a chatbot and can’t find a solution, our chatbot can open a ticket and intelligently route it to the most qualified agent. There is a better user experience with Intercom because the layout is more streamlined. The goal is to make it easier for new users to get around the site and use all of its features without having to go through extra steps. This focus on making things easier for users is meant to make users happier generally and get more people to use the Intercom platform. Ever wondered how effective your business could be by merging all email communication with your customer relationship management (CRM) system?

Zendesk and Intercom both offer noteworthy tools, but if you’re looking for a full-service solution, there is one clear winner. ThriveDesk empowers small businesses to manage real-time customer communications. One of Zendesk’s standout features that we need to shine a spotlight on is its extensive marketplace of third-party integrations and extensions. Imagine having the power to connect your helpdesk solution with a wide range of tools and applications that your team already uses.

Zapier lets you build automated workflows between two or more apps—no code necessary. All plans come with a 7-day free trial, and no credit card is required to sign up for the trial. With ThriveDesk, you can supercharge your website’s growth and streamline customer interactions like never before. It can team up with tools like Salesforce and Slack, so everything runs smoothly. Although the Intercom chat window claims that their team responds within a few hours, user reviews have stated that they had to wait for a few days. Intercom is the clear victor in terms of user experience, leaving all of its competitors in the dust.

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. Both tools can be quite heavy on your budget since they mainly target big enterprises and don’t offer their full toolset at an affordable price. 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)?