Freshdesk can be considered a powerful Intercom alternative designed for small businesses. LiveAgent is among the most affordable Intercom alternatives for customer communication. Drift is a close alternative to Intercom because it adds weight to sales and marketing. Besides, plans and licenses can be costly for businesses that want to use Zendesk. In addition, thanks to marketplace integrations, it is possible to respond to customer comments and feedback.

As Zendesk initially began as a help desk ticketing system, it’s no surprise that the platform makes tracking and managing customer inquiries seamless. They offer an omnichannel live chat solution that integrates with multiple messaging platforms and marketing channels and even automates incoming support processes with bots. It is quite the all-rounder as it even has a help center and ticketing system that completes its omnichannel support cycle.

Zendesk Chat and Message

Intercom plan prices are determined based on your specific business needs, so interested users must contact them for specific price details. The workspace left-hand column notifies agents of all ticket updates. 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.

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. Some of the links that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation. This site does not include all companies or all available Vendors.

Popular Intercom Zendesk Integration Scenarios

The platform offers Zendesk Talk as its call center solution to keep up with other help desks. This feature is browser-based, so you don’t need additional software or hardware. Zendesk does not provide its customers with email marketing tools for the basic subscriptions at the time of writing. However, the add-on Customer Lists available for Professional and Enterprise subscriptions does have mass email options. What makes it different from other help desk tools is the Answer Bot.

• Moreover, Intercom bots can converse naturally with customers by using conversation starters, and respond with self-help, and knowledge base articles.
• Freshdesk is a product of Freshworks, which focuses on aiding customer support teams solely.
• To be eligible for this program, you must be a new Zendesk customer; this must be your company’s first time using Zendesk.
• In fact, Intercom’s marketing strategy is based on how it’s different from ZenDesk, which started out as a ticket system for incoming customer queries.
• Both Freshdesk and Zendesk offer hundreds of integrations to add the flexibility and convenience businesses need to succeed.
• And in this post, we will analyze two popular names in the SaaS industry – Intercom & Zendesk.

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. Intercom does just enough that smaller businesses could use it as a standalone CRM or supplement it with a simpler CRM at a lower pricing tier, but bigger companies may not be satisfied with Intercom alone.

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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. Email marketing, for example, is a big deal, but less so when it comes to customer service.

The company changed the item’s order on the pricing page, focusing on the “Try for free” CTA button, instead of the price, as it used to be before the change. There’s a specified amount of funding you must have gotten, unlike Zendesk. You have gotten at least $1m funding from investors and your company must be less than 2 years old.

Low Pricing (weighted 11%)

Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk newsletter highlights trending topics in customer support, product management, and startups. Although Intercom’s plans are more expensive than Zendsk’s, the platform is also simple to use and very responsive. Intercom is a better fit if you use a lot of third-party apps for collaboration, marketing, and project management. This plan is designed specifically for small and medium-sized businesses that want a collaboration, help desk service, and project management tool all in one. You can live chat with your web visitors and send welcome messages, just like Zendesk. You can also use the FAQ tool to provide self-service to your customers to help customers resolve their issues with minimal assistance.

While administrators can automatically assign tickets to certain agents or teams, they can also manually assign tickets to members of sales or customer service teams. Team inboxes aggregate tickets applicable to the whole team–or a specific department–that any agent can address. It tends to perform well on the marketing and sales side of things, which is key for a growing company. And considering metadialog.com that its tools (including live chat options) are so easy to use, it’s probably going to be easier for a small business to get integrated and set up. Zendesk, just like its competitor, offers a knowledge base solution that is easy to customize. Their users can create a knowledge repository to create articles or edit existing ones as per the changes in the services or product.

JitBit vs. Zendesk – good desk platform with more self-hosted options and unlimited customizations

Although Zendesk is a great customer service solution, with a lot of features built into it there are some limitations and reasons why one might want to switch away from Zendesk. For one, there are some features that may require add-ons in order to fully take advantage of the platform. These add-ons can be quite expensive and may not always be necessary, so it’s important to consider this when deciding which plan is right for you. Looking for alternatives to Zendesk is important if addon costs are piling up for you in Zendesk. Pricing starts at $9/mo/user and the basic plan is pretty limited. The usable plan for most businesses starts at the price point of $29/month/agent and includes advanced features such as SLAs, event rules, etc.

Unlike existing solutions, with functional data limitations that are more hindrance than help, Talk is built into Ortto’s marketing automation, analytics, and customer data platform. AzureDesk is an excellent Zendesk alternative for businesses looking for an easy-to-use and comprehensive customer service platform. It provides a full suite of tools to help you manage customer interactions, including ticketing, messaging, and automated workflows.

Intercom or Zendesk: Integrations and add-ons

More importantly, it gives customers access to the complete source code that can be completely customized. This is ideal for enterprise customers with very specific feature requirements. Although many standard features are included within Zendesk’s plans, some hidden fees might arise anytime due to its lack of out-of-box features that should’ve been included in the first place. As of 2023, it’s quite possible to say that there are only two words that keep the customers coming, customer experience. According to some reviews, Zendesk makes you wait long before their support team gets back to you.