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. Building your own knowledge base is not supported at the moment. This is a bit of a letdown as you’ll have to use third party apps to create a self help section.

Zendesk makes support, sales, and customer engagement software for everyone with a quick to implement, easy to use, platform. It delivers a multi-channel support system with customer service automation. 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.

Zendesk Agent Dashboard

Many software companies like to say that their tool is ‘plug and play’, but Gorgias is one where that’s actually true. Zendesk offers a built-in chat option (paid separately), a mobile app (both for iOS and Android) integrated apps so that you can offer fully scalable customer support. Enchant is a full featured solution that covers shared inboxes, live chat and knowledge bases. It easily scales to handle teams

from 1 to 300 people spread across multiple brands, languages and departments.

What makes Intercom stand out from the crowd are their chatbots and lots of chat automation features that can be very helpful for your team. You can integrate different apps (like Google Meet or Stripe among others) with your messenger and make it a high end point for your customers. On one hand, Zendesk offers a great many features, way more than Intercom, but it lacks in-app messenger and email marketing tools. On the other hand, Intercom has all its (fewer) tools and features integrated with each other way better, which makes your experience with the tool as smooth as silk. It’s hard to give premium customer support manually, that’s what customer support software like Zendesk or Intercom does for you.

Categories where Zendesk and Intercom compete

Depending on your business needs you will need appropriate live chat software. Intercom and Zendesk are two popular options that we wanted to compare and help you decide which one works for you. In a recent study, 97% of global consumers said customer service is an important factor in their choice of brand. There are several ways you can improve your customer service capabilities, but customers are increasingly looking for and expecting live chat. Next is the Reporting section, where you will get detailed snapshots of ticketing, agents, customers, self-service, and more. Last button on the bottom left corner will take you to your settings where you’ll find all the fine-grained controls for your account.

The platform is gradually transforming from a platform for communicating with customers to the tool that helps you automate every single aspect of your routine. 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.

Zendesk vs. Freshdesk: Pricing

You can probably find ten, twenty, thirty options that will all do very similar things. Yes, both Gorgias & Intercom have got extensive documentation for the complicated stuff (if any). Some plans also come with a dedicated account manager who’ll help set it up for you. Plus, there are enough tutorials on YouTube that help you set up either of the software for your ecommerce store. If you run more than one ecommerce business, it’s quite challenging to manage support for all of them.

Altogether, this can significantly impact affordability in the long term. Though the Intercom chat window says that their team typically replies in a few hours, don’t expect to receive any real answer in chat for at least a couple of days. You can see their attention to detail in everything — from tools to the website.

Best Zendesk Alternatives to Give Your Support a Boost in 2023

If you’re a small business, you may want to consider Intercom as it offers a nice set of features in its most basic package—without breaking the bank. Beyond this, Zendesk Chat also offers analytics so you can study your efforts and make better decisions going forward. You can learn about customer satisfaction, some common issues, questions customers ask, or how well your agents are doing. When you use Intercom to acquire customers, you’ll get a few helpful tools. It comes with a Business Messenger, Outbound Messaging, comprehensive reports, and chatbots that you can use for sales and marketing. Without a doubt Zendesk is the most popular help desk sofware out there, this doesn’t mean that there is no competition.

The difference between the two is that the Professional subscription lacks some things like chat widget unbranding, custom agent roles, multiple help centers, etc. Basically, you can create new articles, divide them by categories and sections — make it a high end destination for customers when they have questions or issues. Although Intercom’s plans are more expensive than Zendsk’s, the platform is also simple to use and very responsive.

Intercom Pricing and Plans

According to its website, Drift’s main goal is revenue acceleration. Its sales, marketing, and support tools all back that endeavor. With Drift, your live chat isn’t limited to support, making this your tool of choice if flexibility is something you’re looking for. Drift is the closest alternative to Intercom in that it also focuses heavily on sales and marketing.

Though, you can sum up the price together with the Intercom sales team accurately if you contact them. 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. One study found that 67% of customers prefer calling an agent to help solve their query. Some help desk software provides call center tools as one of customer communication channels. With Zendesk’s Answer Bot, relevant articles are automatically suggested to your customers, saving them time while they look for solutions.

Intercom focuses on its free trial offer

Help desk SaaS is how you manage general customer communication and for handling customer questions. In the category of customer support, Zendesk appears to be just slightly better than Intercom based on the availability of regular service and response times. However, it is possible Intercom’s support is superior at the premium level. Intercom’s solution offers several use cases, metadialog.com meaning the product’s investments and success resources have a broad focus. 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. Intercom also has an omnichannel customer service solution, but it’s fairly limited, with no native voice capabilities and minimal voice integrations.

• It was later when they started adding all kinds of other tools like when they bought out Zopim live chat and just integrated it with their toolset.
• Okay, now that we’ve lost all those who don’t care about CX let’s dive in.
• Therefore, a helpdesk with a good inbox can make your team efficient in solving problems.
• Gorgias is at a loss here as it doesn’t have this feature, but you can integrate Gorgias with Helpdocs, a knowledge base software.
• However, the Zendesk support itself leaves much to be desired.
• Zendesk also has the Z Bot, which will take your knowledge base game to the next level instantly.

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