Zendesk Chat vs Intercom Which One Should You Use?

• By Chan Lian
• 4 June, 2024
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11 Best Intercom Alternatives for Customer Service Free

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. 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 intercom vs zopim user per month or surveys at $49 per month. 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. Tawk.to has a very impressive user base and their live chat widget is available on almost 300,000 websites. They give you an advanced live chat for free and encourage you to hire live chat agents.

You can set business rules, SLA, and ticket routing based on the agent’s skills, language, and expertise. Zendesk also enables the integration of public and private apps. Each message will have identifiers so that they will be easy to recognize at a glance. As a result, you’ll be able to see the sender, anyone who replied, and the dates of their interaction.

Which means it’s rather a customer relationship management platform than anything else. In a nutshell, none of the customer support software companies provide decent assistance for users. Intercom live chat is modern, smooth, and has many advanced features that other chat tools don’t. It’s highly customizable, too, so you can adjust it according to your website or product’s style.

It also allows you to archive chat transcripts, so you can search through conversations on previous interactions with customers with ease. While we use Resolution Bot and Custom Bots to streamline our user-facing work, we deploy Task Bots to automate our backend tasks. Task Bots are simple but powerful automations that help us gain efficiency and save valuable minutes, sometimes hours, from our workflows. At Intercom, we use them across sales, marketing and customer support.

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But it’s designed so well that you really enjoy staying in their inbox and communicating with clients. The Zendesk chat tool has most of the necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers, and live chat analytics. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Nothing fancy, it covers just basic customer communication needs. The Intercom versus Zendesk conundrum is probably the greatest problem in the customer service software world.

Like Intercom, LiveAgent offers a ticketing system, chat engine, and customer profile features. It also integrates with a number of external applications, including Zendesk and Salesforce. Zendesk Chat, also known as Zopim, allows customer service reps to quickly and easily provide support to customers. It includes features like chat transcripts, canned replies, and team collaboration.

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In the duel between Zendesk vs Intercom, it seems that Zendesk chat rises slightly above Intercom. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Zendesk chat is right for your business. It all ultimately comes down to whether you get what you pay for. You can definitely get more bang for your buck with some cheaper alternatives to Intercom. Yes, we know you’re here to find an alternative to Intercom but let’s first talk about the platform itself for a second.

It is designed for small businesses, while Intercom and HubSpot are more suited for larger companies. Freshdesk is also more affordable than Intercom, although both products offer a similar range of features. Just like Intercom, Zendesk offers a suite of customer service tools, including a help desk, chat, and several automation modules for marketing. You can decide which features you need and create your own setup within Zendesk Support Suite. It is a powerful set of tools that can be real life-savers for online businesses. It has a help desk ticketing system, customer management features, chatbots—you name it.

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. If you thought Zendesk prices were confusing, let me introduce you to the Intercom charges. It’s virtually impossible to predict what you’ll pay for Intercom at the end of the day.

With its user-friendly interface and advanced functionalities, Intercom offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed to effectively communicate and engage with customers. Don’t worry; we’ve analyzed both the products thoroughly for you. After this live chat software comparison, you’ll get a better picture of what’s better for your business. 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. The best way, however, to maximize their potential is through Intercom Zendesk integrations on Appy Pie Connect.

Intercom VS Zendesk Chat Feature comparision

Zopim offers features such as chat transcripts, chat ratings, chat routing, and proactive chat invitations. While it may lack some of the more advanced features found in Intercom, Zopim excels in its simplicity and reliability. It allows businesses to have real-time conversations with customers, resolve queries efficiently, and monitor chat performance through analytics.

Gorgias also allows you to set up automatic replies to common questions, set up order tracking bots, apply loyalty points, manage subscriptions, and more. It is one of the more chatbot-oriented solutions in our ranking, just like Tidio and Drift. Drift is one of the major players in the conversational AI market. It is designed to help your business grow revenue, shorten sales cycles, deliver excellent customer experiences, and strengthen brand loyalty. It does it all by focusing on the customer lifecycle with conversational marketing and conversational sales. Tidio allows businesses to communicate with their customers through live chat, which is a quick and efficient way to resolve any issues customers may have.

Their solution targeted companies that wanted to build relationships with their customers through instant messaging. Businesses, ecommerce in particular, have recognized the value of this technology. In addition, you can evaluate their strengths and weaknesses feature by feature, including their contract conditions and costs. By comparing products you are more likely to pick the best software for your business. It’s clear you must understand your specific needs to realize which solution matches those needs. They can spend this time crafting more personal conversations with each lead.

And potentially a world where maybe not every issue, but for a lot issues, they can be answered only once. Second, if you want chat software that integrates all your chat channels in one solution, Intercom isn’t for you. With Intercom, you can only put your chatbot on your website or your App, but not on other channels, such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and SMS.

On the other hand, it is possible to duplicate your chatbot flows and chatbot elements, so that you can easily reuse them. What is weird about these last plans is that they don’t provide you with all the features of the platform. For example, in the Conversational Marketing plan, you don’t have the Series feature, but in the Conversational Customer engagement plan, you do have that feature.

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. This method helps offer more personalized support as well as get faster response and resolution times. 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. Additionally, the platform allows users to customize their experience by setting up automation workflows, creating ticket rules, and utilizing analytics.

Now, their use cases comprise support, engagement, and conversion. Their chat widget looks and works great, and they invest a lot of effort to make it a modern, convenient customer communication tool. Easily track your service team’s performance and unlock coaching opportunities with AI-powered insights. 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. Zendesk has been stitched together using disparate tools, making it slow, inefficient, and difficult to use.

Intercom pricing

They both offer some state-of-the-art core functionality and numerous unusual features. 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.

With Intercom, businesses can engage with users through targeted messages based on their behavior, segment users into different groups, and even automate responses. It also provides a CRM system that allows businesses to track customer interactions and manage their relationships effectively. Intercom’s user-friendly interface and robust analytics make it a popular choice for companies seeking a unified customer communication solution. In conclusion, Intercom and Zopim offer valuable live chat solutions for businesses, but they have different approaches and target different needs.

Unfortunately, you cannot use any optimization in your chatbot flows, such as A/B Testing. Then, by using Chats, you can send personalized greeting messages to your users. If you want to automatically reply to questions of your users, you need to use the Resolution Bot of Intercom. To sum up this Intercom vs Zendesk battle, the latter is a great support-oriented tool that will be a good choice for big teams with various departments. Intercom feels more wholesome and is more client-success-oriented, but it can be too costly for smaller companies.

Zendesk, unlike Intercom, is a more affordable and predictable customer service platform. Also, it’s the pioneer in the support and communication tools market. You can always count on it if you need a reliable customer support platform to process tickets, support users, and get advanced reporting. The cheapest plan for small businesses – Starter – costs $89 monthly, including 2 seats and 1,000 people reached/mo. Each additional 1,000 contacts on a Starter plan will cost you $25/mo. Pro plan is rather a team plan that costs $395/mo and includes 5 seats.

Intercom features phone support, online support, and a knowledge base. Therefore, if you happen to have Zoho CRM and want to integrate your chat feature with it, you should go with Zendesk. When a customer works with two agents and receives two different answers, they’re going to be very frustrated and won’t value the experience. We have reviewed and tested several customer messaging solutions. And we had one goal in mind—finding the best alternative to 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 chat allows businesses to reach out and connect to customers before they ask a question. The clothing rental company, Le Tote, uses an automated trigger feature to offer help when its customers are lingering at the checkout. This easy-to-use live chat app comes with customizable widgets and good reporting dashboards. You can monitor customer success metrics to evaluate team performance.

Moreover, Intercom has a WooCommerce integration (built by ektagon, $15 per month) that allows you to sync data between WooCommerce and Intercom. In my opinion, there is no better way of onboarding new customers than just showing them how to do it, step-by-step. What is so great about their App Store, is that every developer can contribute to it.

Product improvement is the process of making meaningful product changes that result in new customers or increased benefits for existing customers. And you know, with GPT-3.5 and with ChatGPT, if it doesn’t know something, it’s almost like it wants to please you, to give you what you want. And with GPT-4, they obviously have done a bunch of work on reducing that. So when we put it kind of through our tests, it’s possible to get it to say, ‘I don’t know’, or to express uncertainty a lot more. Moreover, they also provide support through live chat and email.

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. So when it comes to chatting features, the choice is not really Intercom vs Zendesk.

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. On the contrary, Intercom is far less predictable when it comes to pricing and can cost hundreds/thousands of dollars per month. But this solution is great because it’s an all-in-one tool with a modern live chat widget, allowing you to easily improve your customer experiences.

We were like, ‘Wow, okay, this suddenly feels like this is something. This is good enough to build a bot with, this is a generation ahead of the GPT-3.5 we’re using. It’s just a lot further along, in terms of how trustworthy it is. The world of AI is moving fast, and here at Intercom, we’re helping set that pace.

It is possible to use these channels with live chat, but not with your chatbot. At first, the interface makes it a bit hard to set up your chatbot, because Intercom is such a large product (with chatbots, setting up helpdesk and more). Also, the interface uses terms like “Outbound” and “Operator” that aren’t explained (unless you search for it). The same is true for the chatbot names – they use Task Bot, Custom Bot and Resolution Bot – and you first need to find out which one you need to use. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. Just like Zendesk, Intercom also offers its Operator bot, which will automatically suggest relevant articles to clients right in a chat widget.

• They offer an omnichannel live chat solution that integrates with multiple messaging platforms and marketing channels and even automates incoming support processes with bots.
• If you’re choosing between them, you’re already on the right track.
• If you’re a sales-oriented corporation, use Intercom for its automation options.
• As a result, you’ll be able to see the sender, anyone who replied, and the dates of their interaction.
• Tidio also tags customers and records all chat conversations, so businesses can refer back to them if needed.

For freelancers and enterprises, Zendesk is likely to be a better fit. Your selection of Zendesk vs Intercom may depend on the size of your company.

As well as Intercom, it allows sharing of private notes with other support agents. It’s like having a toolkit for lead generation, customer segmentation, and crafting highly personalized messages. This makes it an excellent choice if you want to engage with support and potential and existing customers in real time. Intercom is the go-to solution for businesses seeking to elevate customer support and sales processes.

Test any of HelpCrunch pricing plans for free for 14 days and see our tools in action right away. 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. A great way to find the correct Customer Support Software product for your organization is to compare the solutions against each other. Here you can compare Intercom Live Chat and Zendesk Chat and see their functions compared in detail to help you select which one is the better product. It allows you to chat with visitors on your website and convert them into customers.

The dashboard provides an overview of website visitors and allows you to trigger engagements. Also, the conversation can be transcribed and sent to both the customer and admin email addresses. When it comes to customer service software, it is difficult to find a one-size-fits-all solution. Intercom is no exception—it is not perfect for every single type of business. Meet our new AI chatbot, which delivers the power of GPT-4, fine-tuned for the support experience that Intercom provides.

Zendesk Message and chat enable users to connect to their customers on a scalable app. This allows agents to work on their own device anytime and anywhere. Olark chat software is the perfect solution for small teams who want to take their customer engagement and support efforts up a notch. It has all the features that make it one of our top Intercom competitors for 2022, but without any extra bells or whistles. FinancesOnline is available for free for all business professionals interested in an efficient way to find top-notch SaaS solutions. We are able to keep our service free of charge thanks to cooperation with some of the vendors, who are willing to pay us for traffic and sales opportunities provided by our website.

According to Wappalyzer, as of February 2022, there are more than 157,000 websites using Intercom. This translates into some 8% of the entire global live chat market. Zendesk offers Chat as an add-on if purchasing support only, but they also come included in the Zendesk Suite. While these are simple automations, they make a big impact on our customer satisfaction. Below I share examples plus true “lessons learned” advice on getting started with bots at your company. Whether you’re starting fresh with Intercom or migrating from Zendesk, set up is quick and easy.

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 chat enables you to send targeted, behavior based Zendesk messages to customers.

Also, you can accept payments by using the Stripe integration of Intercom. The Mobile Carousel of Intercom allows you to send a carousel of images when someone is opening your iOS or Android app. This is one of the best marketing opportunities of Intercom, showing a tour of your product.