The 13 Best Intercom Alternatives for Customer Support in 2023

At the end of the day, customers have to have access to apps that are catered specifically to their needs, which gives Zendesk the upper hand. Intercom’s features list contains a lot of great features for businesses to take advantage of. Articles is clearly designed for support teams to make changes on the fly in order to ensure customers can constantly use it as a valuable self-service solution. Intercom describes itself as a customer messaging platform. Based on the three products they offer , they can also be seen as a helpdesk software solution.

Try it free for 14-days and take advantage of +100 LiveChat integrations to grow your business with the best customer service out there. Zendesk Chat offers basic customization options, including colors and custom chat badge avatar. To unbrand the Zendesk Chat’s logo, you’d need the highest Enterprise plan, starting at $59 per agent per month. You can use this support desk to help customers or you can forward potential new users to your sales department. You can create a help platform to assist users in guiding themselves, or you can use AI-enabled responses to create a more “human” like effect. Exporting and quickly digging through old conversations would be an easy way for people to get up to speed with their customers, the user said.

Customer Support: How Zendesk and Intercom Stack up

Suite Team is more affordable than Intercom’s $79/month tier; Suite Professional is more expensive. Overall, Zendesk wins out on plan flexibility, especially given that it has a lower price plan for dipping your toes in the water. We give the edge to Zendesk here, as it’s typically aimed for more complex environments. It’s also more exclusively focused on providing help support, whereas Intercom sometimes moonlights as being part-time sales.

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. This article will compare Intercom vs Zendesk, outlining each tool’s features, ease-of-use, pricing and plans, pros and cons, and user-support options. Again, Zendesk has surpassed the number of reviewers when compared to Intercom. On G2, it has a rating of 4.3 out of 5 from 3,374 reviewers. Some of the highly-rated features include ticket creation user experience, email to case, and live chat reporting.

Zendesk VS Intercom

We’ll email you twice a month with our actionable tips, and industry trends fueling business growth, so feel free to sign up. While Intercom does not offer free trials, they do offer demo versions of each plan. Send surveys at key points throughout the customer buying cycle, utilizing multiple types of question formats.

• Behavior-based messaging allows you to customize every last detail of triggers and rules including–which channel sends the message, when it sends, where it sends, and who gets targeted.
• After looking at all three products by Intercom and Zendesk, we’ve determined that Intercom is the best bet for small businesses interested in helpdesk and customer messaging software.
• Zendesk has another vast resources tab for its users who wish to learn more about how to best use Zendesk.
• The cost would be significantly higher for SMBs interested in giving their entire teams access to the helpdesk CRM software, but that isn’t necessary either.
• 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.
• Whether it’s getting set up or figuring out the best way to customize meetings for your needs, there are over 85,000 community members willing to help.

This is absolutely huge from an SMB manager’s point of view because businesses don’t have the initial funding needed to purchase helpdesk CRM software solutions like Zendesk. Zendesk is a much bigger company than Intercom in terms of products offered, so they need to be accessible in order to practice what they preach. Although Intercom has a powerful mobile app that works seamlessly between each of its products, the edge goes to Zendesk for being able to offer customers a mobile app for each individual product. Themes for the knowledge base are pre-designed and mobile-friendly, which means users will have the same visually-appealing experience across all platforms.

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What makes it different from other help desk tools is the Answer Bot. This is an AI assistant that will help anyone navigate Guide by providing results as you type your query. The bot also ensures that the customer or employee will find the right article before contacting an agent. Thus, it leaves your team to solve more important customer requests. Intercom has Articles as a knowledge base solution for self-support, as well as internal support.

The right side of the screen displays all customer contact information and company interaction history, and the agent can contact the customer via any channel with just a few clicks. Intercom offers admin full visibility and control over all company inboxes, as well as agent access controls and role management. Zendesk wins the self-service tools category because it provides extensive help center customization options.

Intercom vs Zendesk: Pricing and Plans

Within the Premium plan, you can take advantage of Salesforce, Clearbit Reveal & Marketo integrations, test messages on performance using control groups, and view message history. This price tier adds to the Enterprise 99.9% Uptime SLA, a disaster recovery program, and has only monthly billing. We’ve written abundantly about top software tools for small businesses. Let’s look one more time at the main features Intercom and Zendesk offer, so we can leave you with the product that ultimately fits your business’ needs the best. However, Zendesk breaks down all their information in an extremely accessible way so anyone can find exactly what they’re looking for. Blog – Latest articles on sales, marketing, product management, startups, and more.

To start sending multiple automated messages to your visitors, you’d need to add additional product to your Intercom – Intercom Messages, starting at $53 per month. For Zendesk, you’d need to increase your Zendesk Chat plan to $29 per month. Both Intercom VS Zendesk of the solutions would offer automated triggered messages, depending on the actions your users take on your website. It’s an opportunity for Zendesk to differentiate itself, but unfortunately it didn’t get very high marks from users, either.

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Reset Password mail sent, please check your inbox for further processing. Intercom and Zendesk are primarily classified as “Engagement/Lifecycle Marketing” and “Help Desk” tools respectively. Another cons is their technical support is very poor, it’s not that often you’ll need it but when you do, it’s hard to get it. I like how easy anyone can be trained to use this, making sure clients are taken care of is a huge priority so this is a wonderful platform for that. Used this at one of my old jobs and it was so easy to use and amazing for functionality.