Zendesk Support app Help Center

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. As customers come closer to purchasing, they often find themselves weighing the same pros and cons. In our experience, when future clients start thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of Intercom vs. Zendesk, these are the questions they want answers to. The support team faced spiking ticket volumes, numerous new customer accounts, and the need to shift to remote work. 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.

The company’s products include a messaging platform, knowledge base tools, and an analytics dashboard. Many businesses choose to work with Intercom because of its focus on personalization and flexibility, allowing companies to completely customize their customer service experience. The customer support platform starts at just $5 per agent per month, which is a very basic customer support tool. If you want dashboard reporting and integrations, you’ll need to pay $19 per agent per month.

Cost-Friendly Intercom Alternatives in 2024

The top of the agent workspace shows an agent’s open tickets, ticket statistics, and satisfaction statistics, as well as tabs depicting all current tickets. The admin and manager dashboard provides a zoomed-out view of all activity taking place in each inbox, for whole departments and individual agents. Agents can respond in any channel by typing in the text box and have access to deep customer experience history and background in the right-hand column. The dashboard’s left-hand column organizes and sorts all tickets by urgency. When an agent clicks on a conversation, the full conversation history populates the middle screen. Survey responses automatically save as data in users’ profiles, and Intercom provides survey data in analytics and reporting.

There is a conversation routing bot, an operator bot, a lead qualification bot, and an article-suggesting bot, among others. It is also not too difficult to program your own bot rules using Intercon’s system. When comparing the reporting and analytics features of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms offer robust tools, but with distinct focuses and functionalities. The strength of Zendesk’s UI lies in its intercom to zendesk structured and comprehensive environment, adept at managing numerous customer interactions and integrating various channels seamlessly. However, compared to the more contemporary designs like Intercom’s, Zendesk’s UI may appear outdated, particularly in aspects such as chat widget and customization options. This could impact user experience and efficiency for new users grappling with its complexity​​​​​​.

Robust self-service and knowledge management

It was later that they started adding all kinds of other features, like live chat for customer conversations. They bought out the Zopim live chat solution and integrated it with their toolset. 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.

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. Advanced workflows are useful to customer service teams because they automate processes that make it easier for agents to provide great customer service.

Additional apps added in January:

Known for its scalability, Zendesk is suitable for various business sizes, from startups to large corporations. As a customer support specialist, you may need to manage multiple tools to provide excellent support to your customers. If you use both Intercom and Zendesk, you can streamline your workflow and improve customer service by integrating them through Custom Actions. In this article, we will show you step-by-step guidelines on how to create tickets in Zendesk from a conversation in Intercom using Custom Actions.

Other customer service add-ons with Zendesk include custom training and professional services. Zendesk provides limited customer support for its basic plan users, along with costly premium assistance options. On the other hand, Intercom is generally praised for its support features, despite facing challenges with its AI chatbot and the complexity of its help articles. They have a dedicated help section that provides instructions on how to set up and effectively use Intercom. There are many features to help bigger customer service teams collaborate more effectively — like private notes or a real-time view of who’s handling a given ticket at the moment, etc.

Improve Your Intercom to Zendesk Migrate with These Features

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. Zendesk wins the collaboration tools category because of its easy-to-use side conversations feature. Set automatic triggers so that certain events send push notifications to targeted customers, or use them as part of communication campaigns and series, and run A/B testing to compare two notifications. Design and send out mobile push messages–phone pop-ups containing text and images that prompt customers to take action and redirect to a specific app page when clicked. The Agent Workspace highlights tickets based on the issue and urgency, assigning each one a priority–agents can also tag tickets based on recency, hold-vs-open status, and urgency. While both Zendesk and Intercom are great and robust platforms, none of them are able to provide you with the same value Messagely gives you at such an  affordable price.

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. 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. 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.

Sequence all channels–chat, web post, email, chatbot outreach, tour message, banner, push notification, or carousel–mixing and matching modes of outreach to fit campaign goals. If a customer isn’t satisfied with Answer Bot’s response, Answer Bot quickly routes them to an agent best suited to help. For example, you can assign all inbound technical queries to an engineer; or, assign all pricing queries to the sales team. Zendesk wins the omnichannel capabilities category because it offers voice as a service, which we think is absolutely critical.

But note that there are a few complaints about HubSpot not displaying integrated apps, requiring users to leave the hub to access them. ShipInsure (Support) redefines merchant services, transforming hassle and frustration into confidence and ease. Create claims effortlessly on the behalf of customers, ensuring your customers are always protected. Easily identify which orders are covered under ShipInsure’s protection plan directly on Zendesk tickets, ensuring you’re always informed. While Intercom offers unique feature options that weave together well into campaigns and series, it lacks voice calling–a critical feature–and spreads its more advanced features out too much among plans. Intercom has a unique pricing structure, offering three separate solutions, each intended for a distinct use case.

The highlight of Zendesk’s ticketing software is its omnichannel-ality (omnichannality?). Whether agents are facing customers via chat, email, social media, or good old-fashioned phone, they can keep it all confined to a single, easy-to-navigate dashboard. That not only saves them the headache of having to constantly switch between dashboards while streamlining resolution processes—it also leads to better customer and agent experience overall. Intercom built additional tools to aid in marketing and engagement to supplement its customer service solution. But we doubled down and created a truly full-service CX solution capable of handling any support request. However, HubSpot’s customer portal is open only on HubSpot’s Professional and Enterprise plans.

It gives detailed contact profiles enriched by company data, behavioral data, conversation data, and other custom fields. Zendesk wins the major category of help desk and ticketing system software. It lets customers reach out via messaging, a live chat tool, voice, and social media. Zendesk supports teams that can then field these issues from a nice unified dashboard.

• Key offerings include automated support with help center articles, a messenger-first ticketing system, and a powerful inbox to centralize customer queries.
• 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.
• Zendesk also has an Answer Bot, which instantly takes your knowledge base game to the next level.
• To sum things up, one can get really confused trying to make sense of the Zendesk suite pricing, let alone calculate costs.
• You can even save custom dashboards for a more tailored reporting experience.
• As customers come closer to purchasing, they often find themselves weighing the same pros and cons.

Intercom plan prices are determined based on your specific business needs, so interested users must contact them for specific price details. Intercom’s role-based permissions allow administrators full control over each department’s and agent’s capabilities, and access to channels and information. Intercom wins the reporting and analytics category due to its unique visualization and display formats for contact center and article data. Send surveys at key points throughout the customer buying cycle, utilizing multiple types of question formats. Surveys turn customer insights into action, with triggers and campaign response adjustments depending on customer responses.

You can also connect your HubSpot account to email providers such as Gmail and Microsoft 365. However, remember HubSpot’s email send limits, which can hamper high-volume campaigns. For very small companies and startups, Intercom also offers a Starter plan–with a balanced suite of features from each of the above solutions–at $74 monthly per user. Messagely’s live chat platform is smooth, effective, and easy to set up. With Messagely, you can increase your customer satisfaction and solve customers’ issues while they’re still visiting your site. For basic chat and messaging, Intercom charges a flat fee of $39 per month for its basic plan with one user and $99 per month for its team plan with up to 5 users.

Intercom has a dark mode that I think many people will appreciate, and I wouldn’t say it’s lacking in any way. But I like that Zendesk just feels slightly cleaner, has easy online/away toggling, more visual customer journey notes, and a handy widget for exploring the knowledge base on the fly. Zendesk has an app available for both Android and iOS, which makes it easy to stay connected with customers while on the go. The app includes features like push notifications and real-time customer engagement — so businesses can respond quickly to customer inquiries. Check out our list of unified communications providers for more information.