Many users agree that LiveAgent strikes a great balance between a simple interface and a feature-rich ticketing system. Choosing the right customer service platform for your business is crucial to ensure efficient communication and support for your clients. The decision should be based on your specific use case, team size, budget, and desired features.

As I’ve already mentioned, they started as a help desk/ticketing tool, and honestly, they perfected every bit of it over the years. As it turns, it’s quite difficult to compare Zendesk against Intercom as they serve different purposes and will fit different businesses. So when I realized lots of companies actually prefer Zendesk over Intercom, I was surprised. I mean I stumbled upon this article where people from Outreach.io were telling why they’d switched from Intercom to Zendesk, then I saw this comparison, where Zendesk seemed to beat Intercom at the end. While doing my research for this article, I’ve not only tested both Intercom and Zendesk myself, but also read a pile of different articles, comparisons, guides, showdowns and all this kind of stuff. What really struck me though is that people seemed to like Zendesk more.

FAQ: Zendesk Alternatives

There are pre-built workflows to help with things like ticket sharing, as well as conversation routing based on metrics like agent skill set or availability. There are even automations to help with things like SLAs, or service level agreements, to do things like send out notifications when headlights are due. Because of the app called Intercom Messenger, one can see that their focus is less on the voice and more on the text. This is fine, as not every customer support team wants to be so available on the phone. Zendesk is not far behind Intercom when it comes to email features.

These products are able to integrate with each other, which offers customers more personalized customer experiences. Zendesk also offers tons of APIs to customize the software to the users’ needs. Intercom plays a very important role in the customer experience through messaging platforms, team collaboration products, and a valuable knowledge base solution. Drift’s live chat tool allows businesses to set appointments, answer questions, share help center articles and videos, send pricing information, and more. Crisp is a great tool for startups and small businesses due to its completely free plan and simple interface. Use its desktop or mobile app for your team and easily access a number of their features without having a premium plan.

Top 9 Intercom Alternatives and Competitors To Increase Better Customer Engagement and Product Adoption

Zendesk started in 2007 as a web-based SaaS product for managing incoming customer support requests. Since then, it has evolved into a full-fledged CRM that offers a suite of software applications to its over 160,000 customers like Uber, Siemens, and Tesco. The primary function of Intercom’s mobile app is the business messenger suite, including personalized messaging, real-time support tools, push notifications, in-app messaging and emailing. Intercom also does mobile carousels to help please the eye with fresh designs.

In addition, LiveAgent offers a number of communication channels for customer support and a variety of different integrations. Zoho Desk is a support-focused offering from the Zoho suite of tools. Zoho CRM is a popular sales tool, making its help desk software an ideal solution for sales-centric teams who can benefit from the entire suite of tools.

Support

Additionally, one of the center features that I love using is the customization options that actually offer a rather original journey for the customers. Let it be custom properties, custom surveys, or custom reports; you can shape everything according to your team’s and customers’ needs. Along with customer management, Salesforce Service Cloud presents 2,500+ collaboration tools within its system, making it one of the most advanced tools in terms of integrations. It’s a pretty okay ticketing system starting at the price point of $29/mo for one agent with no collaboration features. The only advantage it has over other Zendesk alternatives in this article is that it can be self-hosted.

• Additionally, Jetdocs’ competitive pricing at 1/5th the cost of Zendesk makes it an attractive option for businesses of all sizes looking to optimize their customer support without breaking the bank.
• Although the Zendesk user interface is not as appealing as Intercom’s, it is much easier to navigate for both new and experienced users.
• Those same tools also increase customer retention by 27% while saving 23% on sales and marketing costs.
• When an agent clicks on a conversation, the full conversation history populates the middle screen.
• Your sales team can also collaborate with this plan, manage ongoing projects and assign tasks with the Smart List feature.
• That means all you have to do is add the code to your website and enable it right away.

Both Zendesk Chat and Intercom have similar features, but Intercom is more suited for small to mid-sized companies. Tailored to help you identify your customer support needs, this guide will help you find the right solution, simplify your purchase decision, and get leadership buy-in. Best Intercom alternative for large businesses who are already HubSpot users. One important part of creating an amazing customer experience is remembering your customers, what they’ve bought from you, and any previous issues they’ve had.

Best Zendesk Alternative for Startups

Reporting and analytics provide metrics, trends, and key performance indicators (KPIs) that offer insights to agents and administrators. Agents can participate in forums and turn forum posts into tickets; they also can turn community-post replies into articles for future customers. Community forums enable customers to assist each other by asking questions and sharing tips, experiences, and best practices–creating a unique, user-based, searchable information hub. Zendesk’s chatbot, Answer Bot, automatically answers customer questions asynchronously in up to 40 languages–via any text-based channel.

With Zoho Desk, you can reduce response times and provide better customer support with features like automated ticketing, knowledge base management, self-service portals, and more. As a conversational relationship platform, Zendesk gives you the option of live chatting with customers via your website, mobile, and messaging. Though, if you compare Zendesk chat vs Intercom, the plugin is a bit hard to use as reviewed by customers. Installing it might take some technical skill and even when installed, could malfunction a bit. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to assist customers through self-help options or access to the relevant articles before connecting them to your team.

Live chat support

The software also helps support staff reach customers where they want to be contacted. Many people like HappyFox because it makes the process easy for everyone. Many businesses find Help Scout to be a complete customer service software that takes both the agent and customer experience into consideration. Another thing that makes Help Scout so attractive is that there is a refined feature set and intuitive interface that make the system simple to use. In fact, most companies have this system up and running within just a few hours, and many users have the program mastered within one week.

You can create these knowledge base articles in your target audience’s native language as their software is multilingual. Zendesk is another popular customer service, support, and sales platform that enables clients to connect and engage with their customers in seconds. Just like Intercom, Zendesk can also integrate with multiple messaging platforms and ensure that your business never misses out on a support opportunity. Zendesk and Intercom also both offer analytics and reporting capabilities that allow businesses to analyze and monitor customer agents’ productivity. As a result, companies can identify trends and areas for improvement, allowing them to continuously improve their support processes and provide better service to their customers. Zendesk also offers digital support during business hours, and their website has a chatbot.

Zendesk Pricing and Plans

Help desk software creates a sort of “virtual front desk” for your business. That means automating customer service and sales processes so the people visiting your website don’t actually have to interact with anyone before they take action. With Zendesk’s Answer Bot, relevant articles are automatically suggested to your customers, saving them time while they look for solutions. In navigating this conundrum, several digital tools can come in handy, and two of the most popular options are Intercom and Zendesk. As both platforms have their pros and cons, it can be difficult to decide which one is right for your business. To guide your decision-making, we explain the key features and qualities of each, and the role that a omnichannel conversational AI platform (Netomi!) can play, for the ultimate CX strategy.

• This platform acts as a help desk tool capable of receiving and managing client requests from various channels.
• However, we will say that Intercom just edges past Zendesk when it comes to self-service resources.
• After seeing some top examples of how Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk differentiate their websites, let’s focus on their Social Media channels and have a look at their content.
• Migrating your Zendesk help content to Intercom Articles is a simple and fast process that does not require any custom development.
• For example, transferring companies is relatively easy, as both platforms have a similar concept of a company object with similar fields.
• You can create articles, share them internally, group them for users, and assign them as responses for bots—all pretty standard fare.

You can integrate Smooch profile with Zendesk, Viber, Slack, Telegram, email and many other services. It`s the solution for communication between your website`s support and customers through many different channels. Pricing starts at $25/mo and has a pretty good free plan as well. Price goes up as you metadialog.com add more agents and seek more integrations with the platform. The primary platform comes with live chat and is a great external support system. On top of that, AzureDesk integrates with popular third-party applications like Slack and Salesforce so you can provide even better service to your customers.