Crossing the threshold: Exploring Intercom's Customer Service Trends Report for 2024

So, by now, you can see that according to this article, Zendesk inches past Intercom as the better customer support platform. The main idea here is to rid the average support agent of a slew of mundane and repetitive tasks, giving them more time and mental energy to help customers with tougher issues. There is a simple email integration tool for whatever email provider you regularly use.

This will provide live data on who your users are and what they do in your app. Personalized messaging, in-app messaging, product tours, and chatbot capabilities set Intercom apart from Zendesk. You can contact the sales team if you’re just looking intercom and zendesk around, but you will not receive decent customer support unless you buy their service. 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.

FreshDesk Messaging

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. Zendesk’s mobile app is also good for ticketing, helping you create new support tickets with macros and updates. It’s also good for sending and receiving notifications, as well as for quick filtering through the queue of open tickets.

Zendesk’s ticketing system is fully integrated, enabling multiple and conditional ticket forms across several channels. 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.

Intercom User Assistance and Support

At the same time, the vendor offers powerful reporting capabilities to help you grow and improve your business. AI and ML make customer service functionalities like chatbots, sentiment analysis, ticket creation, and workflow automation possible. All these features are necessary for operational efficiency and help agents deliver fast, personalized customer experiences. Apps and integrations are critical to creating a 360 view of the customer across the company and ensuring agents have easy access to key customer context. When agents don’t have to waste time toggling between different systems and tools to access the customer details they need, they can deliver faster, more personalized customer service.

Use them to quickly resolve customer question on, for example, how to use your product. You can then create linked tickets for any bug reports or issues that require further troubleshooting by technical teams. Intercom is ideal for personalized messaging, while Zendesk offers robust ticket management and self-service options. 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.

As customers’ needs are constantly evolving, businesses must adapt and keep up to guarantee the best customer experience and satisfaction. You can collect ticket data from customers when they fill out the ticket, update them manually as you handle the conversation. This means you can use the Help Desk Migration product to import data from a variety of source tools (e.g. Zendesk, ZOHOdesk, Freshdesk, SFDC etc) to Intercom tickets. 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.

• Pricing for both services varies based on the specific needs and scale of your business.
• 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.
• Yes, HubSpot allows users to integrate with Zendesk in the same way Zendesk allows a smooth integration with HubSpot.
• Existing customers have complained consistently about how they aren’t available at the right time to offer support to customers.

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. Administrator reports allow managers to observe real-time CSAT scores, conversation volume, first response time, and time to close.

Use Conversation data in place of ticket fields

There’s a plethora of features to help bigger teams collaborate more effectively — like private notes or real-time view of who’s handling a given ticket at the moment, etc. If you are looking for more integration options and budget is not an issue, Intercom can be the perfect live chat solution for your business. It is also ideal for businesses who are searching for conversational chatbot functionality. Their AI-powered chatbot can enable your business to boost engagement and improve marketing efforts in real-time.

App users can receive immediate in-app help with automated solutions for simple to complex issues. A few of HelpShift's known clients are Square, Supercell, Tencent, Brex, Niantic, TBS/TNT, and other platforms in the mobile gaming industry. The Answer Bot tool seamlessly integrates with your knowledge base, delivering automatic suggestions to relevant articles. This saves your customers time when finding solutions and reduces the workload of your support agents. They also offer some advanced features to facilitate collaboration for larger teams, like private notes and the ability to see who’s handling a certain ticket in real-time.

Engaging Product Update Email Templates

When you see pricing plans starting for $79/month, you should get a clear understanding of how expensive other plans can become for your business. What’s worse, Intercom doesn’t offer a free trial to its prospect to help them test the product before onboarding with their services. Instead, they offer a product demo when prospects reach out to learn more about their pricing structure. After this live chat software comparison, you’ll get a better picture of what’s better for your business.

They offer an omnichannel live chat solution that integrates with multiple messaging platforms and marketing channels and even automates incoming support processes with bots. It is quite the all-rounder as it even has a help center and ticketing system that completes its omnichannel support cycle. Intercom’s ticketing system and help desk SaaS is also pretty great, just not as amazing as Zendesk’s.

The company launched its platform last 2016, and as of today, they are one of the most robust AI chatbot software in the industry. As a call center solution, Zendesk is quick to set up and easy to manage. Due to its cloud-based nature, your agents can be located anywhere in the world, as long as they have a headset and an Internet connection.

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. These features demonstrate that Ada is the most flexible platform available, especially for SMEs or eCommerce businesses, at a fraction of the cost.

• This article will compare Intercom vs Zendesk, outlining each tool’s features, ease-of-use, pricing and plans, pros and cons, and user-support options.
• Zendesk has a help center that is open to all to find out answers to common questions.
• There's even on-the-spot translation built right in, which is extremely helpful.
• 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).
• It offers a suite that compiles help desk, live chat, and knowledge base to their user base.

As Anthony points out, only 18% of customer service professionals think that their existing tech stack covers everything they need in order to fully support their customers. There are too many tools that don’t integrate seamlessly enough to provide a quality experience for customers. This reinforces the need for integrated CS platforms with AI at their core. While Zendesk and HubSpot are great options for automating customer relationship management, HubSpot holds a slight edge for its features.

Here, we’ve outlined the support options that Intercom and Zendesk provide to companies using their platforms. Community forums enable customers to assist each other by asking questions and sharing tips, experiences, and best practices–creating a unique, user-based, searchable information hub. 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.

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. 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. Use ticketing systems to manage the influx and provide your customers with timely responses.

Behavior-based messaging allows you to customize every last detail of triggers and rules including–which channel sends the message, when it sends, where it sends, and who gets targeted. Agents can participate in forums and turn forum posts into tickets; they also can turn community-post replies into articles for future customers. Intercom’s help center allows you to draft and organize collections of articles, accessible to customers via a search bar in the Messenger widget.