The 13 Best Intercom Alternatives for Customer Support in 2023

Intercom, on the other hand, was built for business messaging, so communication is one of their strong suits. Combine that with their prowess in automation and sales solutions, and you’ve got a really strong product that can handle myriad customer relationship needs. Zendesk also packs some pretty potent tools into their platform, so you can empower your agents to do what they do with less repetition. Agents can use basic automation (like auto-closing tickets or setting auto-responses), apply list organization to stay on top of their tasks, or set up triggers to keep tickets moving automatically. There are those that are ticket-oriented still, and there are alternatives that are all-in-one solutions.

It also provides detailed reports on how each self-help article performs in your knowledge base and helps you identify how each piece can be improved further. Intercom offers an integrated knowledge base functionality to its user base. Using the existing knowledge base functionality, they can display self-help articles in the chat window before the customer approaches your team for support. You can create these knowledge base articles in your target audience’s native language as their software is multilingual. Both tools also allow you to connect your email account and manage it from within the application to track open and click-through rates.

Which offers more customization, Intercom or Zendesk?

This can make it more difficult to import CRM data and obtain complete context from customer data. For example, Intercom’s Salesforce integration doesn’t create a view of cases in Salesforce. Their help desk is a single inbox to handle customer requests, where your customer support agents can leave private notes for each other and automatically assign requests to the right people. But it’s designed so well that you really enjoy staying in their inbox and communicating with customers. What makes Intercom stand out from Zendesk are its chatbots and product tours.

But to provide a more robust customer experience, businesses may need to consider integrating Intercom’s AI tool with a third-party customer service platform, as it falls short of a full-stack offering. Intercom has a wider range of uses out of the box than Zendesk, though by adding Zendesk Sell, you could more than make up for it. Both options are well designed, easy to use, and share some pretty key functionality like behavioral triggers and omnichannel-ality (omnichannel-centricity?). But with perks like more advanced chatbots, automation, and lead management capabilities, Intercom could have an edge for many users.

Comprehensive reporting and analytics

Moreover, you can view in-depth information about who you’re chatting with right alongside conversations. With Zendesk, you can easily sort or filter your tickets using parameters such as date, ticket priority, tags, source, and more. Now, when it comes to customizing your dashboard and making it suitable for your unique needs, Zendesk does a good job. The tool can be integrated with 500+ business apps including Zendesk Explore, which offers you relevant omnichannel analytics and customer engagement metrics.

Agents can use the desktop chatbox to respond to customers in any outbound channel. Zendesk for Sales, or Zendesk Sell, is Zendesk’s sales pipeline and CRM tool with its own dashboard for lead generation and conversion. With so many solutions to choose from, finding the right option for your business can feel like an uphill battle. Zendesk has over 160,000 customers, including some well-known brands like Siemens, Uber and Instacart. Zendesk identifies itself as a growth-enabling, all-in-one solution. “Favorable” and “Critical” user reviews are selected using the review helpfulness score.

Knowledge Base Solutions

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!

There is a really useful one for Shopify to provide customer support for e-commerce operations. HubSpot and Salesforce are also available when support needs to work with marketing and sales teams. Chatbots are automated customer support tools that can assist with low-level ticket triage and ticket routing in real-time.

Transparent, straightforward pricing

Intercom also offers a suite of tools for customer support, including a knowledge base, a help center, and a community forum. Zendesk directly competes with Intercom when it comes to integrations. This live chat service provider offers 200+ integrations to its user base. With a mix of productivity, collaboration, eCommerce, CRM, analytics, email marketing, social media, and other tools, you get the option to create an omnichannel suite. Selecting the best customer service management software for your business is critical for the success of your customers and agents. On this page, we compare two customer service options directly, Zendesk and Intercom, to help in your evaluation of potential customer service solutions.

• You can leverage chatbots to handle basic customer queries and reduce the burden on your support team.
• They both have this program to help companies in their early stage acquire customers and serve these customers effectively.
• Our integration with Intercom enables bi-directional contact and case synchronization, so you can continue using Intercom as your front-end digital experience and use Zendesk for case management.
• Zendesk for Sales offers three plans, ranging from $19 to $99 monthly per user, with free trials available for each plan.
• This can make it more difficult to import CRM data and obtain complete context from customer data.
• It provides you with all of the tools you need to develop a trusting relationship with your customers and resolve their issues with personalized support.

Zendesk also has solutions for small to mid-sized companies as well. It will also depend on the size of your business, how many features you’ll need to use, your budget, and how much support you need. 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.

Intercom or Zendesk – Support

Intercom features phone support, online support, and a knowledge base. When you sign up for your trial of Zendesk Suite, you will get access to all features of the Zendesk Suite Professional plan. As discussed above, Zendesk started as a ticketing tool and, therefore, has one of the best ticket management workflows in place. For any help desk software to succeed, the dashboard interface is extremely crucial. Whether it is about organizing customer issues or communicating with team members, dashboards can make an impactful difference. Intercom can be a good choice for medium to large businesses that wish to go for aesthetics/user experience over pricing as the tool is quite heavily priced.

• It delivers a multi-channel support system with customer service automation.
• The Sell dashboard, different from the Service dashboard, features pre-built widgets that agents can organize however they want, to view the metrics they care most about.
• To transfer your data from Zendesk to Intercom, a script will need to be created by an API developer to use the Zendesk and Intercom APIs to fetch and transfer the data.
• A frictionless, simple, and easy-to-use sales and marketing support IT solution.
• That is, while some may be looking for an all-in-one customer support tool, others may be looking for a more simple and straightforward option to accomplish a specific task.
• You can acquire new customers, retain existing customers, and provide quality customer support with Enterprise Plan with Zendesk or Intercom.

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Intercom vs Zendesk: intro

What really struck me though is that people seemed to like Zendesk more. Struck not in a bad way, more like in a very neutral ‘huh, this may be interesting’ way. metadialog.com This list of Freshdesk alternatives will help you find a tool that’s right for you. You can do all this and more with Help Scout’s live chat functionality.