11 Powerful Intercom Alternatives in Customer Service

Rather than waiting for a customer to start a conversation with you, you can initiate it if you think the customer needs some help. For example, you can have Zendesk Chat analyze how long someone is on your checkout page, and once it hits a certain limit, start a conversation with them to see if they need assistance. There’s the most basic package, called the Essential, which is $87/month. If you upgrade to the Pro package for $153/month, you get everything in the Essential Package, plus other features like more integrations, automating meetings, and custom lead routing.

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. The helpfulness score predicts the relative value a user receives from a given review based on a number of factors.

Verdict: Operator Bot –

Your selection of Zendesk vs Intercom may depend on the size of your company. Honestly, on the first look, Intercom’s pricing structure is confusing and can leave anyone scratching their heads. It’s a big task predicting what you’re going to pay for Intercom at the end of the day. Intercom and Zendesk are neck to neck in reviews from various sites such as G2, Capterra, Financesonline, and more. We’ve analyzed a dozen of reviews to help you get an average estimate of Zendesk vs Intercom functionality. While Intercom does not offer free trials, they do offer demo versions of each plan.

• Having an knowledge base can dramatically lift your site’s customer experience, so if you’re planning on building one go with LiveAgent.
• Apart from team conversations, it integrates with the ticketing system.
• If you’re a startup, Zendesk may be a better fit because it’s also free for the first six months while Intercom costs $65 per month.
• This is because Zendesk has rate limits on how many records can be accessed or transferred per minute or hour.
• Another great add-on that ClickDesk offers is the ability to integrate your social media tools with live chat, helping to increase followers and engagement from your website.
• You can use this support desk to help customers or you can forward potential new users to your sales department.

Therefore, to gauge if your chosen help desk is effective or not, you use analytics. In this case, each customer service software has a unique way of generating reports such as scheduling, the scope of the analysis, and more. If your business has an app, in-app messaging can be used to send messages to customers. You can use this with the push notification of the app to keep your customers in the loop of possible promos, rewards, and more. FinancesOnline is available for free for all business professionals interested in an efficient way to find top-notch SaaS solutions. We are able to keep our service free of charge thanks to cooperation with some of the vendors, who are willing to pay us for traffic and sales opportunities provided by our website.

Harvest vs. Toggl vs. Timely vs. Rize (Best Time Tracking Software)

You can add individual operator greetings, create canned responses, and engage potential leads by giving them product tours. Once, the ticket is created, customers get a notification that their issue or request has been received and registered. Meanwhile, robust ticketing features such as ticket routing, time tracking, CSAT ratings, service level agreements, etc. ensure your agents are always a step ahead. Intercom has been marketing itself as a business messaging platform right from the start. The years of experience in business messaging have helped Intercom develop features that address nearly all the problems that employees have to face while interacting with customers.

Zendesk also makes it easy to customize your help center, with out-of-the-box tools to design color, theme, and layout–both on mobile and desktop. While Intercom lacks some common customer-service channels like voice calling and video conferencing, it supports other unique features that transfer across channels. Don’t miss out on the latest tips, tools, and tactics at the forefront of customer support.

Why is the knowledge base important?

On the other hand, if you are looking for a feature-rich tool that comes at less than half the cost of Zendesk and Intercom, then ProProfs can be your ideal support partner. It delivers a multi-channel support system with customer service automation. You can set business rules, SLA, and ticket routing based on the agent’s skills, language, and expertise. Each message will have identifiers so that they will be easy to recognize at a glance. As a result, you’ll be able to see the sender, anyone who replied, and the dates of their interaction. As well as Intercom, it allows sharing of private notes with other support agents.

If that sounds good to you, sign up for a free demo to see our software in action and get started. 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. Intercom live chat is modern, smooth, and has so many advanced features that other chat tools don’t have.

Zendesk vs Intercom vs ProProfs: Type of Users

Try out mParticle and see how to integrate and orchestrate customer data the right way for your business. While both Zendesk and Intercom offer ways to track your sales pipeline, each platform handles the process a bit differently. Zendesk and Intercom both have an editor preview feature that makes it easier to add images, videos, call-to-action buttons, and interactive guides to your help articles. Search our comprehensive Knowledge Base to answer any question you might have about our products. HubSpot’s Solution Partner Program is a network of over a thousand agencies to help you resource your marketing strategy with HubSpot.

However, the add-on Customer Lists available for Professional and Enterprise subscriptions does have mass email options. Knowledge Base is one of the self-service sections that includes articles or documents providing technical help to customers and employees. To make a comparison of Zendesk vs Intercom knowledge base features is quite tricky. So, Intercom Articles will be opposed to Zendesk Suite – in that way the contrast is (more or less) fair. We need a solution that allows whoever picks up the chat or phone to quickly see the history of that customer, their request, notes, and the status of their order.

What is the difference between Intercom and Zendesk?

Like with many other apps, Zapier seems to be the best and most simple way to connect Intercom to Zendesk. As for the category of voice and phone features, Zendesk is a clear winner. Zendesk Support has voicemail, text messages, and embedded voice, and it displays the phone number on the widget. Intercom’s dashboards may not be as aesthetically pleasing as Zendesk’s, but they still allow users to navigate their tools with few distractions. Zendesk has more pricing options, and its most affordable plan is likely cheaper than Intercom’s, although without exact Intercom numbers, it is not easy to truly know the cost.

The eligibility requirement for this program is also way easier than Intercom’s. Depending on the complexity of the script and the amount of your data, the transfer process can take anywhere from a few hours to several weeks. You should be prepared for this process to take an extended period of time. We recommend running a small batch of records (say 5%), and using that to project time to completion.

Is there a free Zendesk alternative?

Remember, before you opt for a full-fledged plan, it’s always better to go for a free trial to see how the solution really works. However, with Zendesk, agents can gain relevant context by viewing a customer’s profile and past interactions. Moreover, features such as typing indicators, delivery events, and rich message types like emojis, GIFs, etc. can give life to any conversation. In this section, we will be doing an in-depth analysis of the various help desk, live chat, and knowledge base features of these tools. On the first impression, ProProfs Help Desk feels as simple as using Gmail or just any other email client. You can view customer conversations under multiple inboxes, check pending tickets, set the priority of issues, add labels- all from an intuitive dashboard.

Your account settings can be accessed from the top right of you screen. If you’re looking to customize the interface to match your brand, go with Zendesk. There’s a 14-day free trial that starts directly with the plan and number of people that you need. You will have a chance to confirm your subscription before starting. After your free trial ends, Intercom’s products start at $49/mo, but if you cancel in the first 14 days you won’t be charged. If no payment method is added at the end of the trial period, the account is deleted 90 days after the trial expiration date.

Product Tours by Intercom mentions (

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. This software metadialog.com provides a very personalized experience and is one of the best Zendesk alternatives due to its simple interface and adaptability. Organizations can also use Groove to create customer portals and a knowledge base. The knowledge base and customer portals can be used to depict information via multimedia or text to help customers find the information they need quickly.

• Zendesk offers a basic plan that is affordable and will suit my needs.
• Using Zendesk, you can create community forums where customers can connect, comment, and collaborate, creating a way to harness customers’ expertise and promote feedback.
• Sign up for a trial through a salesperson and then ask if it is possible to get in the class for less money.
• There is a blue chat box in the right-hand corner of our software where customers pop in their queries.
• Among the many challenges facing businesses today is the pressing need to meet their customers where they are.
• This allows agents to work on their own device anytime and anywhere.