Intercom vs Zendesk Why HubSpot is the Best Zendesk Alternative

Negative reviews often mention that Intercom’s ticket management and sorting functionalities are more limited than other solutions on the market. Other reviewers detracted points based on the fact that many essential support tools are behind paywalls. The Pega Customer Service platform is very solid in areas like case management and workflow, and it can allow you to execute complex processes easily. With capabilities like unified messaging, automation, social & digital channel integrations, and assisted workflows for call center agents it makes customer service a smooth experience for everyone. HappyFox is one of the companies like Zendesk that offers all-in-one ticketing capabilities. This provides multichannel support and integrates with essential business services like accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), client feedback tracking, commerce, etc.

It’s a pretty okay ticketing system starting at the price point of $29/mo for one agent with no collaboration features. The only advantage it has over other Zendesk alternatives in this article is that it can be self-hosted. They have advanced compliance levels like HIPAA for serious B2C clients like doctors but no SLAs and priority levels for B2B clients.

What are the disadvantages of Zendesk?

Zendesk might be the more affordable option, but Intercom allows you to integrate with platforms like Shopify without having to add on an additional product. Your best bet may be to try out both products and see which one works out better for your needs. If you don’t have the option to give it a test drive, look up reviews from professionals. Read a few on different review sites, and you’ll get a pretty good picture of what the software is like. Don’t forget to look out for common customer issues as they may provide a window into your own experience. ServiceNow is popular with companies in IT service management, development, and other IT operations.

Without further ado, let’s dive into the 14 best competitors to Zendesk’s popular help desk software. Digital Marketing Manager @LTVplus

Actively participating in the digital marketing world for more than 5 years. Currently making sure that our website content is up-to-date and our blog is filled with actionable tips and advice for online retail businesses. Another great feature is the ability to better route and qualify leads.

Intercom VS. Zendesk: Feature Analysis

Each of such packages contains a set of tools from basic to advanced features. These products are able to integrate with each other, which offers customers more personalized customer experiences. Zendesk also offers tons of APIs to customize the software to the users’ needs. Intercom plays a very important role in the customer experience through messaging platforms, team collaboration products, and a valuable knowledge base solution.

• You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads.
• ClickDesk’s support features are unique in this list, as they offer voice and video support in addition to live chat.
• The platform offers a range of features, including live chat, pre-chat surveys, conversation ratings, event tracking, and widget customization.
• The time this ultimately takes is heavily dependent on the rate limits of the platforms, and cannot be overridden by developers.
• You get to engage with them further and get to know more about their expectations.
• Powered by Explore, Zendesk’s reporting capabilities are pretty impressive.

They offer an advanced feature for customer data management that goes beyond basic CRM stuff. It gives detailed contact profiles enriched by company data, behavioral data, conversation data, and other custom fields. 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. Richpanel is another Zendesk alternative that is designed for eCommerce businesses.

Zendesk Pricing vs Intercom Pricing

This feature is browser-based, so you don’t need additional software or hardware. Intercom offers call center features for your business via add-ons. Services such as CallHippo, Ozonetel, Toky, Aircall Now are just a few of many more add-ons in lieu of call center tools built into the help desk software. Zendesk does not provide its customers with email marketing tools for the basic subscriptions at the time of writing. However, the add-on Customer Lists available for Professional and Enterprise subscriptions does have mass email options.

If you only need the services Intercom offers, then you’ll only spend around $75 a month for two seats. Another feature Intercom offers that Zendesk doesn’t is email marketing tools. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to communicate with your customers. Erika is Groove’s Customer Success Manager, committed to helping you find the right software solution for your business needs. She loves finding innovative ways for your support team to scale and grow, always putting the customer first. She also loves to run marathons and play softball in her spare time.

Verdict: Zendesk –

Zendesk makes support, sales, and customer engagement software for everyone with a quick to implement, easy to use, platform. To begin with, communication with customers is important these days. Without proper channels to reach you, usually, customers will take their business elsewhere. And, thanks to the internet, a few taps will lead them right to your competitor! Most businesses use live chats as their main customer communication channel.

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. The two essential things that Zendesk lacks in comparison to Intercom are in-app messages and email marketing tools. All interactions with customers, be it via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel, are landing in one dashboard, where your agents can solve them fast and efficiently.

Zendesk VS Intercom

Since Zendesk’s inception, its ticketing system has remained the best in the business. The three tiers—Suite Team, Suite Growth, and Suite Professional—also give you more options outside of Intercom’s static structure. Suite Team is more affordable than Intercom’s $79/month tier; Suite Professional is more expensive.

• So once a user became a user, once they give you the email address on sign-up, then you wanna be able to send them messages across the very similar channels that Intercom had.
• Whether you’ve just started searching for a customer support tool or have been using one for a while, chances are you know about both Zendesk and Intercom.
• Plus, it’s easy to upgrade to a larger package when your business grows.
• The overall design of Zendesk’s chat widget looks outdated and offers very limited customization options.
• Both app stores include many popular integrations, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Zapier.
• Zendesk also offers detailed reports that can be shared with others and enable team members to collaborate on them simultaneously.

This feature provides real-time support to customers via desktop or mobile app. The built-in screen share option encourages a live step-by-step tutorial for customers to avoid any doubts or unanswered questions about their inquiries. Based on that, for software companies that have mobile apps or cross-platform, they might have a mobile app or a web app, Intercom tends to stand out as a really solid option.

Intercom VS. Zendesk: Which Live Chat Software is the Best?

ProProfs Help Desk is known in the market for its honest, and simple pricing. Just a quick glance at the pricing plans and you can easily calculate how much your team will spend upfront as there are no hidden costs. ProProfs takes knowledge management to a whole different level by allowing you to create an online knowledge base, user manuals, documentation, and more.

• If you’re exploring popular chat support tools Zendesk and Intercom, you may be trying to understand which solution is right for you.
• Yes, you heard it right, Jetdocs does not feature block users or place limitations, or make you buy extra add-ons to access core features.
• If you are looking for a way to provide your customers with the best possible customer service experience, you need help desk software for that.
• You can also schedule messages for later, filter them based on several criteria and make tags showing each conversation’s progress.
• It allows you to chat with visitors on your website and convert them into customers.
• Quickly, do a quick, you know, the different plans here, essentially the pro and the premium, just look at the different differences real quick.

This is a pretty common request these days, specifically companies will say, “You know, hey, we wanna improve our onboarding flow after users sign up”. The point is to send those messages at maybe very specific actions or points, and then guide users along a certain path or journey you wanna take them. Integrate your apps, data, and channels into the same tool you use to message your customers.

Contact Center of the Future: Empower Agents with AI…

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. Both Intercom and Zendesk provide you with their own Operator bot, which immediately suggests relevant material to clients via the chat widget. When it comes to creating an optimum knowledge base experience, both Intercom and Zendesk are excellent choices with similar capabilities for your needs. 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.

There are even instances where customers don’t receive the first response in more than seven days. Zendesk also offers a straightforward interface to operators that helps them identify the entire interaction pathway with the customers. Compared to being detailed, Zendesk gives a tough competition to Intercom. Operators can easily switch from one conversation to another, therefore helping operators manage more interactions simultaneously. 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. Intercom allows visitors to search for and view articles from the messenger widget.

This means that you can use keyword searches through old chats to find a solution quickly. Plus, research shows that 67% of people actually prefer self-service over a talk with a human agent. So here we will be comparing two most popular chatbot software Zendesk and Intercom. That’s their main support, metadialog.com so let’s look a little bit beyond email. Alright, so we have email, we have webhooks, you know webhooks is for integrating just like we said before. Then we can do Twilio for SMS, Urban Airship, which is actually for in-app notifications like web and so on, and then Slack and Zapier for anything else.

Therefore, it becomes all the more important to review your options carefully. You can add agents, create teams, and set agent roles & permissions to decide their level of access to the tool. Automated ticket routing ensures that all tickets have an owner and are shared with the most capable agents. You can also choose their Round-robin ticket assignment feature to equally distribute tickets among your agents. Moreover, you can keep your dashboard tidy with ticket organization features such as ticket prioritization, labels, and filters. Managers can choose to automatically route tickets and agents can prioritize conversations that need immediate attention.