14 Best Zendesk Alternatives & Competitors

Zendesk has many amazing team collaboration and communication features, like whisper mode, which lets multiple agents chime in to help each other without the customer knowing. There is also something called warm transfers, which let one rep add contextual notes to a ticket before transferring it to another rep. You also get a side conversation tool. Chatbots are automated customer support tools that can assist with low-level ticket triage and ticket routing in real-time. How easy it is to program a chatbot and how effective a chatbot is at assisting human reps is an important factor for this category. Businesses of all sizes can rely on the Zendesk customer service platform and benefit from workflow management, powerful AI tools, robust insights, and more.

In this article, we’ll look at Drift vs. Intercom vs. Zendesk to help you get a sense of how customer success platforms can help you deliver better experiences to your audience. The point is, customer success tools allow you to build better relationships with your audience by customizing content and serving up the right message at the right time. Our new Scores feature allows you to set up points-based metadialog.com scoring models for customers, product engagement, and leads using any attributes or activities you choose. Ask for feedback from your customers as soon as the conversation ends to get a better understanding of how your interactions are influencing the entire customer experience, and make adjustments ASAP. Keep the conversation going across a range of channels without missing a beat.

Do you need Intercom or Zendesk?

Both Zendesk Chat and Intercom have similar features, but Intercom is more suited for small to mid-sized companies. You can try any plan free for 15 days and get the look and feel of the tool before making any commitments. Considering its affordable pricing, ProProfs can be a great option for small to medium-scale businesses. Moreover, you can tailor your content to different audiences such as visitors or paid customers. Customization options for color, logo, header, domain, etc. can also come in handy. With the Intercom Messenger widget on every article, your customers can instantly connect with an agent if they need further help.

Users can build teams, assign tasks to colleagues, and save replies to FAQs. Our team can not only help you choose and set up your live chat software, but our agents can monitor all your channels for you, lessening the load on your team. To learn more about how LTVplus can help you drive engagement and increase conversions through live chat schedule a free consultation with us. Beyond this, Zendesk Chat also offers analytics so you can study your efforts and make better decisions going forward.

Intercom Agent Dashboard

Another great Intercom feature is that it allows users to create comprehensive knowledge bases. Thus, clients can easily and quickly find the answer to complex and simple questions without needing to speak with a customer service representative. Of course, Intercom’s messaging capabilities also make it easy for clients to connect with agents when necessary.

Intercom’s Inbox organizes all of an agent’s core functions into one interface. Below, we’ve compared the usability of Zendesk’s and Intercom’s agent dashboards and administrator controls. Send surveys at key points throughout the customer buying cycle, utilizing multiple types of question formats.

Zendesk Pros and Cons

Let’s compare Intercom and Zendesk using the help desk features they have. In this case, we’ll see what their similarities and differences are. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. Access to this page has been denied because we believe you are using automation tools to browse the website.

• Zendesk has many amazing team collaboration and communication features, like whisper mode, which lets multiple agents chime in to help each other without the customer knowing.
• Unify Customer Queries from multiple platforms in one and never miss out on any customers.
• According to one Capterra review from earlier this year, “Zendesk seems to have done all of its innovation years ago as the product has achieved a plateau of functionality of features.”
• Intercom’s dashboards may not be as aesthetically pleasing as Zendesk’s, but they still allow users to navigate their tools with few distractions.
• Those same tools also increase customer retention by 27% while saving 23% on sales and marketing costs.
• HappyFox also enables organizations to create a knowledge base, which integrates with the tool’s self-service functionality.

Hiver’s automations, including smart assignment rules, workflows, and Harvey, the AI bot, help automate repetitive tasks. The platform also offers SLA and escalation setups to ensure timely responses. Advanced reporting and analytics capabilities allow you to measure and optimize customer service performance, while the CSAT surveys help collect valuable customer feedback.

Intercom – Intercom w

Users can access basic chat for free, though the more sophisticated tools will cost you. Team plans that come with sales enablement tools, custom bots, and CRM routing will run businesses $400/month. In all, Intercom is a well-rounded tool, designed to deliver customer success from all angles be it sales, marketing, customer service, or all three. 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.

• Intercom is a popular customer communications platform, but its focus has always been on sales and marketing.
• However, you can connect Intercom with over 40 compatible phone and video integrations.
• However, while Zendesk may be a great fit for some companies, it’s not for everyone.
• This Zendesk alternative is best for small businesses looking for a simple yet powerful help desk software with email-based support.
• In-app messages are notifications sent to users while they’re engaged with an app on mobile or PC.
• There are also saved responses that provide customers with answers that should resolve their issues.

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. Lots of users complain that Intercom support is not available most of the time, so you’re forced to repeat your question over and over again to a bot. And when they do answer, they’re usually not even helpful or will try to transfer you to the sales department right away. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously.

Looking for a Zendesk Alternative? Check Out Intercom + LTVplus

Customer service plans come with an Answerbot designed to answer support questions, while sales plans use bots to collect data and ask qualifying questions to identify hot leads. You can group your users together based on who they are and what they do in your product. Use standard (data Intercom already has) or custom attributes (data that you send to Intercom) to build segments and track activity. Or, track users based on events (actions they take on your site or app). Data can be used to track customer success, identify qualified leads, and more. Talk is built into the Ortto marketing and customer data platform, so your team has all the data they need at their fingertips to provide personalized, relevant responses, faster than ever before.

The more expensive Intercom plans offer AI-powered content cues, triage, and conversation insights. The best help desks are also ticketing systems, which lets support reps create a support ticket out of issues that can then be tracked. Ticket routing helps to send the ticket to the best support team agent.

Zendesk vs Intercom: the ultimate comparison

Increasingly, however, businesses are finding that current live chat platforms such as Intercom are falling flat due to a frustrating lack of functionality. Ultimately, this results in a poor customer experience, putting off prospective customers, disappointing existing ones, and negatively impacting your bottom line. Zendesk Service offers the right platform for tracking, prioritizing, and solving customer support tickets.

For small companies and startups, Zendesk offers a six-month free trial of up to 50 agents redeemable for any combination of Zendesk Support and Sell products. Zendesk has over 1,300 integrations, compared to Intercom’s 300+ apps, making it the leader in this category. However, you can browse their respective sites to find which tools each platform supports.

Differences in features:

In the beginning, Intercom, used as a simple chat tool, has been added to many features over time. These powerful features soon increased the popularity of the vehicle. On the other hand, these features have also made it easier for businesses to manage processes professionally. 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.

Discovering the answer, he built Freshwork in 2010 to tailor the experience to meet every brand’s needs to accelerate team productivity through efficient modern automation and collaboration tools. Leveraging AI-powered chatbots, Zoho Desk employs Zia, an intelligent assistant, to share relevant knowledge base solutions with customers and agents. Finally, for startups or small businesses looking for a cost-effective live chat solution, Crisp.Chat is the best option. As your business grows, you can upgrade to their paid plans to unlock advanced features like chatbots and integrations. HubSpot Service Hub is a comprehensive customer service platform designed to help you provide exceptional customer experiences.

Launched in 2011, Intercom is a leading software that helps teams improve customer engagement and provide active support to customers. Intercom is a complete customer communications platform with bots, apps, product tours, etc. 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. Top Zendesk alternative for businesses looking to deliver top-notch customer support with efficiency and ease. Additionally, agents can tag and categorize documents as appropriate, allowing their customers to easily find the answers they’re looking for.

Hubspot Services Hub is one of the best alternatives for large businesses that already use Hubspot. Skyvia offers you a convenient and easy way to connect Intercom and Zendesk with no coding. Similarly to LiveAgent, HappyFox is an all-in-one solution for an organization’s help desk software needs. LiveAgent is primarily a help desk software that focuses on helping organizations streamline the processes of ticket intake and service provision. Best Zendesk competitor for companies looking to build authentic relationships with their customers. Jetdocs is an internal communication platform where teams can streamline their internal processes.

• For instance, it can be challenging when customers communicate through multiple channels.
• Additionally, its reporting tools make it easy to measure key performance metrics like response time and customer satisfaction ratings.
• There is also integration with project management tools such as Jira, Slack, Mailchimp, etc.
• Here is a short overview of how these tools started, where they stand today, and what they can bring to your business.
• This way companies can offer a faster and more personal customer experience.
• For small companies and startups, Intercom offers a Starter plan — with a balanced suite of features from each of the solutions below — at $74 per month per user, billed annually.