Zendesk vs Intercom: Which is better?

Integrate Intercom and Zendesk in Minutes, not Months

intercom zendesk integration

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. 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.

intercom zendesk integration

Nodes come with global operations and settings, as well as app-specific parameters that can be configured. You can also use the HTTP Request node to query data from any app or service with a REST API. Unito supports dozens of integrations, with more being added monthly.

Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates. Overall, I actually liked Zendesk’s user experience better than Intercom’s in terms of its messaging dashboard. Intercom has a dark mode that I think many people will appreciate, and I wouldn’t say it’s lacking in any way.

It can automatically suggest relevant articles for agents during business hours to share with clients, reducing your support agents’ workload. If you create a new chat with the team, land on a page with no widget, and go back to the browser for some reason, your chat will go puff. 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. With Zapier’s 6,000 integrations, you can unify your tools within a connected system to improve your team’s efficiency and deepen their impact.

Both companies provide a set of services that are intended to simplify communication, support, and the overall customer experience. We are able to develop and maintain integrations without impacting product development. Drop-point technology is powerful as is the ability to develop custom workflow nodes using C#. Support team was very helpful in getting started and answering questions. Intercom is more for improving sales cycle and customer relationships, while Zendesk has everything a customer support representative can dream about, but it does lack wide email functionality. On the other hand, it provides call center functionalities, unlike Intercom.

Zendesk is among the industry’s best ticketing and customer support software, and most of its additional functionality is icing on the proverbial cake. Intercom, on the other hand, is designed to be more of a complete solution for sales, marketing, and customer relationship nurturing. You can use it for customer support, but that’s not its core strength.

But the company’s story isn’t just one of pandemic-induced change—in the first half of the year, Novo’s client base grew from 2,000 to tens of thousands. Check out the research-backed comparison below to better understand how each solution can add value to your organization. Keeping this general theme in mind, I’ll dive deeper into how each software’s features compare, so you can decide which use case might best fit your needs.

Prioritize the agent experience to maximize productivity and customer satisfaction while reducing employee turnover. Their reports are attractive, intercom zendesk integration dynamic, and integrated right out of the box. You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads.

Customer stories: Learn why so many businesses are choosing Zendesk

In fact, the Zendesk Marketplace has 1,300+ apps and integrations, from billing software to marketing automation tools. Apps and integrations are critical to creating a 360 view of the customer across the company and ensuring agents have easy access to key customer context. When agents don’t have to waste time toggling between different systems and tools to access the customer details they need, they can deliver faster, more personalized customer service. Novo has been a Zendesk customer since 2019 but didn’t immediately start taking full advantage of all our features and capabilities.

intercom zendesk integration

Zendesk users, on the other hand, usually say good things about its powerful support system. With this feature, businesses can easily handle and keep track of customer requests, making sure that no issues get lost. Zendesk’s analytics features are also often praised; they help businesses learn a lot about how customers connect with them, how well agents do their jobs, and overall support trends. But keep in mind that Zendesk is viewed more as a support and ticketing solution, while Intercom is CRM functionality-oriented.

Intercom and Zendesk

The extensive automation and robust ticketing operations that Zendesk offers are among the numerous capabilities that the company possesses. 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. 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.

Free trials include unlimited changes, active flows, connected tools, custom fields, and more. Unito supports more fields — like assignees, comments, custom fields, attachments and subtasks. You can also map fields and build flexible rules to perfectly suit your use case. When a conversation is found in Intercom, create a ticket in Zendesk and keep both in sync. We’re happy to demonstrate how Flowgear’s enterprise-grade integration platform can be applied to your CRM and how a single workflow can boost your productivity and profitability. See the Intercom and Zendesk integration in action with our complimentary proof of concept.

Intercom pricing

So you see, it’s okay to feel dizzy when comparing Zendesk vs Intercom platforms. To set up the Zendesk integration in your ReturnLogic account click here. Yes, you can support multiple brands or businesses from a single Help Desk, while ensuring the Messenger is a perfect match for each of your different domains. When you migrate your articles from Zendesk, we’ll retain your organizational structure for you. We’ll even flag any content you need to review and give you advice on how to fix it.

Besides, the prices differ depending on the company’s size and specific needs. We conducted a little study of our own and found that all Intercom users share different amounts of money they pay for the plans, which can reach over $1000/mo. The price levels can even be much higher if we’re talking of a larger company.

Intercom also has an omnichannel customer service solution, but it’s fairly limited, with no native voice capabilities and minimal voice integrations. You could technically consider Intercom a CRM, but it’s really more of a customer-focused communication product. It isn’t as adept at purer sales tasks like lead management, list engagement, advanced reporting, forecasting, and workflow management as you’d expect a more complete CRM to be.

Link Intercom to Zendesk

I have experience with multiple integration and workflow providers in very large enterprises. Our implementation and use of Flowgear has far exceeded our initial expectations, and we continue to derive value. 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.

Though the Intercom chat window says that their customer success team typically replies in a few hours, don’t expect to receive any real answer in chat for at least a couple of days. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. If you’d want to test Intercom vs Zendesk before deciding on a tool for good, they both provide free trials for 14 days. But sooner or later, you’ll have to decide on the subscription plan, and here’s what you’ll have to pay.

If I had to describe Intercom’s helpdesk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools. Just like Zendesk, Intercom also offers its Operator bot, which will automatically suggest relevant articles to clients right in a chat widget. Zapier lets you build automated workflows between two or more apps—no code necessary. This article explains how concepts from Zendesk work in Intercom, how you can easily get started with imports, and what to set up first. Before you start, you’ll need to retrieve your Zendesk credentials and create a Zendesk API key. You can do this by going to your settings within Zendesk (click on the cog on the left hand side), and navigating to API in the ‘Channels’ section.

Zendesk, on the other hand, may not stress the same conversation-driven method, even though it has powerful team management tools. Its strength is that it offers a wide range of tools for organising teams, such as booking systems, knowledge bases, and customer service features. These tools are great for keeping track of tasks and making sure workflows run smoothly, but they might not put as much emphasis on real-time conversations for teams as Intercom does. On the contrary, Intercom is far less predictable when it comes to pricing and can cost hundreds/thousands of dollars per month.

Understanding these fundamental differences should go a long way in helping you pick between the two, but does that mean you can’t use one platform to do what the other does better? These are both still very versatile products, so don’t think you have to get too siloed into a single use case. 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. © 2023 ICP | Integration Centre Prague, o.p.s., is a public service organization operating in the field of integration of migrants in Prague. I’m attending the ICP Czech language courses, the teachers are the best. They’re not just people with knowledge of the language, but they’re professionals who know how to teach, how to make students understand, and how to make each lesson interesting.

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. With Skyvia you can easily perform bi-directional data synchronization between Intercom and Zendesk. When performing the synchronization periodically, Skyvia does not load all the data each time.

And they’re all two-way by default, meaning information can flow back and forth in real-time. The Help Center software by Intercom is also a very efficient tool. You can publish your self-service resources, divide them by categories, and integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience. So when it comes to chatting features, the choice is not really Intercom vs Zendesk. The latter offers a chat widget that is simple, outdated, and limited in customization options, while the former puts all of its resources into its messenger.

This allows importing data without creating duplicates for existing target records. Zendesk is a cloud customer support ticketing system with customer satisfaction prediction. Flowgear enables Businesses of All Sizes to shed the workload & complexity of App-to-App integration quickly & affordably. Build powerful Application, Data & API Integrations from a single interface in minutes, not months, using our no-to-low code, .NET iPaaS Platform. 200+ pre-built application & technology connectors provide instant integration to hundreds of SaaS & on-premise applications, as well as reusable workflows & APIs. Zendesk also has an Answer Bot, which instantly takes your knowledge base game to the next level.

Altogether, this can significantly impact affordability in the long term. Intercom does have a ticketing dashboard that has omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk. Whether you’re starting fresh with Intercom or migrating from Zendesk, set up is quick and easy. Intercom puts a lot of effort into making a sleek and easy-to-use interface. They want to make a space that makes it easy for people to find their way around and quickly adopt the app.

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. 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’s helpdesk application allows merchants to provide cross-channel support to their shoppers. With simple setup, and handy importers you’ll be up and running in no time, ready to unlock the Support Funnel and deliver fast and personal customer support. Advanced workflows are useful to customer service teams because they automate processes that make it easier for agents to provide great customer service. One place Intercom really shines as a standalone CRM is its data utility.

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Like so many others, Monese determined that Zendesk was the best solution to provide seamless, omnichannel support because of its scalability and reliability. Brian Kale, the head of customer success at Bank Novo, describes how Zendesk helped Bank Novo boost productivity and streamline service. Sendcloud is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that allows users to generate packing slips and labels to help online retailers streamline their shipping process.

You can create dozens of articles in a simple, intuitive WYSIWYG text editor, divide them by categories and sections, and customize with your custom themes. Email us at or use the live chat inside the platform with any questions or feedback. With Zapier, you can integrate everything from basic data entry to end-to-end processes. Here are some of the business-critical workflows that people automate with Zapier. Sendcloud adopted these solutions to replace siloed systems like Intercom and a local voice support provider in favor of unified, omnichannel support. Yes, both Intercom and Zendesk let you try out some of their tools for free before you decide to pay for the full version.

By following the tips outlined in this guide, you can easily integrate these two platforms and start reaping the benefits. If you’re not ready to make the full switch to Intercom just yet, you can integrate Intercom with your Zendesk account. This will provide live data on who your users are and what they do in your app. Conversations allow you to chat to your customers in a personal way. Use them to quickly resolve customer question on, for example, how to use your product. You can then create linked tickets for any bug reports or issues that require further troubleshooting by technical teams.

If you see either of these warnings, wait 60 seconds for your Zendesk rate limit to be reset and try again. If this becomes a persistent issue for your team, we recommend contacting Zendesk. Click the ‘Connect with Intercom’ button and authorize your account. Yes, you can find the Intercom integration in the Zendesk Marketplace—and it’s free to install. Fintech startup Novo had to pivot to new ways of working in 2020, just like everyone else.

intercom zendesk integration

Yes, you can localize the Messenger to work with multiple languages, resolve conversations automatically in multiple languages and support multiple languages in your Help Center. Just visit Articles in Intercom, click Get started with articles and then Migrate from Zendesk. When you switch from Zendesk, you can also create dynamic macros to speed up your response time to common queries, like feature requests and bug reports. If you’ve already set up macros in Zendesk just copy and paste them over.

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Plain is a new customer support tool with a focus on API integrations.

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Track customer service metrics to gain valuable insights and improve customer service processes and agent performance. Sales teams can also view outbound communications, and any support agent can access resources from the Intercom workspace. The internal notes tool makes working together even better by giving team members a place to add context, share insights, or talk about specifics within the platform. This feature is great for keeping communication clear and organised because it lets team members work together on jobs, projects, or interactions with clients without any problems. Skyvia offers powerful visual editors which allow precise mapping configuration to quickly configure your data migration or synchronization between Intercom and Zendesk.

Both Intercom and Zendesk are widely recognised as leaders in their respective industries. Intercom is a complete customer communications platform with bots, apps, product tours, etc. In a nutshell, none of the customer support software companies provide decent assistance for users. Their chat widget looks and works great, and they invest a lot of effort to make it a modern, convenient customer communication tool. 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.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. But it’s designed so well that you really enjoy staying in their inbox and communicating with clients. 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 enables customers to self-serve through its messaging platform.

You need a complete customer service platform that’s seamlessly integrated and AI-enhanced. To begin, both platforms have large knowledge bases that cover a lot of different topics and commonly asked questions. These tools are like self-help books; they let people solve common problems on their own. The knowledge bases are usually well-organized and changed on a regular basis, so users can always find the most up-to-date and useful information.

  • When integrating data, you can fill some Intercom fields that don’t have corresponding Zendesk fields (or vice versa) with constant values.
  • The price levels can even be much higher if we’re talking of a larger company.
  • Use ticketing systems to manage the influx and provide your customers with timely responses.

The Zendesk chat tool has most of the necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers, and live chat analytics. As a Zendesk user, you’re familiar with tickets – you’ll be able to continue using these in Intercom. Use ticketing systems to manage the influx and provide your customers with timely responses. Zendesk offers robust, pre-built reports for sales and support teams. Here are our top reporting and analytics features and an overview of where Intercom’s reporting limitations lie.

Top +30: The best chat, chatbot, and customer support tools for eCommerce – Marketing 4 eCommerce

Top +30: The best chat, chatbot, and customer support tools for eCommerce.

Posted: Wed, 19 Jul 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Register for our free trial and the Flowgear integration experts will build a free proof of concept workflow based on your own integration requirements, using data that’s already in your CRM. Test any of HelpCrunch pricing plans for free for 14 days and see our tools in action right away. At the same time, they both provide great and easy user onboarding. Say what you will, but Intercom’s design and overall user experience leave all its competitors far behind.

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. In 2023, conversational messaging will play an essential role in customer service. Customers increasingly expect to receive fast, convenient, and personalized support. Provide self-service alternatives so customers can resolve their own issues. This serves the dual benefit of adding convenience to the customer experience and lightening agents’ workloads.

Intercom is great at making it easy for businesses and their customers to talk to each other instantly and back and forth. With live chat, in-app messaging, and targeted messaging, among other features, the tool lets businesses talk to customers right away. People who work in fields like e-commerce or SaaS, where quick responses and personalised exchanges are very important, may benefit the most from this. Zendesk, on the other hand, is another top customer service platform that uses strong security steps to keep customer data safe.

But they also add features like automatic meeting booking (in the Convert package), and their custom inbox rules and workflows just feel a little more, well, custom. I’ll dive into their chatbots more later, but their bot automation features are also stronger. Businesses of all sizes can rely on the Zendesk customer service platform and benefit from workflow management, powerful AI tools, robust insights, and more.

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