Compare Intercom Live Chat vs Zendesk Chat 2024 FinancesOnline

In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the most expensive tools on the market. Its competitor can be more flexible and predictable in this area. It can help you to reach out to customers and help them complete purchases. Intercom integrates with far more applications than Zendesk Chat. They do have a ton of similarities, but recognizing the differences may help you to make the crucial decision about which one to use for your business. It is worthwhile to explore the features of both, prior to making a decision on which one you should use.

It offers a suite of tools to help businesses with inbound marketing, including a website builder, customer management, and marketing automation tools. The best features available in HelpCrunch are its open API, chat widget, and ticketing system. They allow you to connect with your customers, provide customer support, and track customer behavior. HelpCrunch is also easy to set up which makes it one of the best Intercom alternatives. Intercom plays a very important role in the customer experience through messaging platforms, team collaboration products, and a valuable knowledge base solution.

It offers features like knowledge bases, email management, chat, and social media monitoring tools. Regarding live chat software, two popular options that often come up in discussions are Intercom and Zopim. Both platforms offer businesses a way to engage with their website visitors in real-time, but they have unique features and functionality. This article will compare Intercom and Zopim regarding their features, pricing, customer reviews, and more. By the end, you should have a clearer understanding of which platform suits your business needs best.

Resolution Bot has taken on such a large part of our support work that it has become like a teammate in and of itself. Updates to the bot are simply a regular part of our day-to-day work. We’ve talked a lot about how businesses can use chatbots to accelerate sales, marketing and support. You need a complete customer service platform that’s seamlessly integrated and AI-enhanced. But keep in mind that Zendesk is viewed more as a support and ticketing solution, while Intercom is CRM functionality-oriented.

They have an extensive help center, video tutorials, and articles to help your agents use the tool to its full potential. Intercom has been marketing itself as a business messaging platform right from the start. HubSpot is a marketing and sales software company that helps businesses grow by attracting website visitors and converting them into customers.

For example, Intercom itself doesn’t provide a Telegram integration. But, by using an App in their App store, you can create this integration yourself. With Intercom, you can send a broadcast to your users, by using large Posts or Banners. Additionally, you can create your own user segments by filtering on specific custom fields and tags.

It’s time to upgrade your customer service platform

WhatsApp Business Chat and Facebook Live Chat Plugin are among the most frequently installed solutions for business massaging on a budget. Intercom is not among the best-rated WordPress live chat plugins. The integration can be a little bit clunky, and some of the users were surprised by the lack of a free version of Intercom. If you want to check out an Intercom alternative WordPress websites can use without limits, try an option with 100,000+ active installations. Let’s review them one by one to find the best messaging platform or customer database software for your business.

At the same time, Zendesk looks slightly outdated and can’t offer some features. While Intercom does incorporate automated responses via chatbots, it doesn’t exhibit the same level of sophistication and versatility in its automation capabilities as Zendesk. Zendesk’s advanced automation features make it the preferred choice for businesses seeking to optimize their workflow and enhance customer support efficiency. While Zendesk incorporates live chat and messaging functionalities to facilitate proactive customer engagement, it falls short of matching Intercom’s level of personalization.

We think that we’ve got something that’s really good because you get that conversational piece. You get the AI model’s intelligence to get an actual answer from a help center article, but it’s constrained. So it’s not gonna go and start having random conversations with end users.

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. You can create an omnichannel CRM suite with a mix of productivity, collaboration, eCommerce, CRM, analytics, email marketing, social media, and other tools. Both app stores include many popular integrations, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Zapier. Research by Zoho reports that customer relationship management (CRM) systems can help companies triple lead conversion rates. Netomi’s virtual agents sit alongside human agents to supplement and enhance the capacity of support teams, ensuring the seamless resolution of customer queries. Intercom also offers a few features that are unique to its platform – one of these being the ability to segment users based on their behavior.

Chatbot elements

Check out the research-backed comparison below to better understand how each solution can add value to your organization. Compare Zendesk versus Intercom to determine who will be the best partner for your business at every phase of the customer journey. And there’s still no way to know how much you’ll pay for them since the prices are only revealed after you go through a few sale demos with the Intercom team. If you’re really just focused on the email, maybe say SMS was an easy integration here, CustomerIO could be a good fit, just purely from the messages component. Now let’s go to pricing to understand what it would cost to send different things. They support email, they support, just jump here into the messages product.

Unlike Zendesk, the prices for Intercom are based on the number of seats and contacts, with each plan tailored to each customer, meaning that the pricing can be quite flexible. This is especially helpful for smaller businesses that may not need a lot of features. Intercom stands out here due to its ability  to tailor sales workflows. You can also set up interactive product tours to highlight new features in-product and explain how they work. Intercom offers an easy way to nurture your qualified leads (prospects) into customers with Intercom Series.

We could just never get it to know when it doesn’t know something. But recently we’ve got access to a new beta from OpenAI of their new GPT-4 model. ’ And we spun up an effort to kind of, to look at this and to put this through some of our our test beds to check and examine for hallucinations. And when we started playing with it, we thought, wow, this seems a lot better. It can still hallucinate sometimes, but it hallucinates a lot less, maybe 10 times less, something like that.

Thus, it leaves your team to solve more important customer requests. 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.

Also, what happens with the price if we want more than 10 live chat agents? You can create dozens of articles in a simple, intuitive WYSIWYG text editor, divide them by categories and sections, and customize with your custom themes. If you create a new chat with the team, land on a page with no widget, and go back to the browser for some reason, your chat will go puff.

In this paragraph, let’s explain some common issues that users usually ask about when choosing between Zendesk and Intercom platforms. Say what you will, but Intercom’s design and overall user experience leave all its competitors far behind. You can see their attention to detail — from tools to the website. They’ve been marketing themselves as a messaging platform right from the beginning. Intercom Live Chat is a software platform you can use to track and engage your visitors, and convert them into your customers. As a freelancer, I don’t need all the integrations and support that Intercom provides.

VedSphere prides itself on its commitment to excellence, ensuring that every client and student receives top-notch service and education. Both Zendesk Chat and Intercom will integrate with Salesforce Sales Cloud, Zendesk, and WordPress. Zendesk Chat will also integrate with Zoho CRM, which Intercom does not.

Intercom

But, it could be the case that Intercom is too expensive, for example, when you don’t have enough users on your website or current customers. At the same time, the vendor offers powerful reporting capabilities to help you grow and improve your business. 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. Zendesk has tons of products that are similar to Intercom’s including Zendesk chatbot software, messaging, team collaboration, knowledge base, analytics and reporting.

Tawk.to’s business model is slightly different than other Intercom alternatives on our list. It also offers automated bots that can help you with various tasks, such as answering questions or providing customer support. You can integrate Drift with your website and other apps in order to offer personalized customer service and improve conversions. Very quickly, this new bot, if the content’s in your help center, it’ll be able to answer using your content. There are a lot of people who are able to write help center articles who would’ve gotten stuck trying to curate bots or intents in the past.

They can get the context of the customer’s questions and transfer questions from Chatbox into Message. Zendesk also has solutions for small to mid-sized companies as well. The trigger feature reduces cart abandonment and increases conversions. It plans on using this funding to research machine learning technology instead of just lining their own pockets. It will also depend on the size of your business, how many features you’ll need to use, your budget, and how much support you need. And if you’re running a small business, then you know that every penny counts.

If you’re looking for an Intercom alternative specifically designed for ecommerce platforms such as Magento or Shopify, Gorgias is among the best Shopify chat apps. With Gorgias, you can connect with customers in real-time on your site or over social media. In terms of pricing, both Intercom and Zopim offer different plans to cater to businesses of various sizes and needs. Intercom’s pricing is based on the number of active users and starts at $39 per month for their basic plan. Zopim, on the other hand, offers a more straightforward pricing model, starting at $0 per month for their Lite plan and going up to $49 per agent per month for their Advanced plan. It is essential to consider your business requirements and the features of each plan before deciding.

On the other hand, if your primary focus is on having user-friendly live chat software that is easy to integrate and use, Zopim could be the right fit for your business. Carefully assess your requirements, consider your budget, and consider customer feedback before making a decision. Zopim, on the other hand, is a live chat software owned by Zendesk. It focuses primarily on providing businesses with an easy-to-use chat widget that can be integrated into their websites.

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So it is unclear what it would cost you to have all the features of the platform. So in general, the interface is really easy to use, but it is a bit hard in the beginning to set up your chatbot. If you’d want to test Intercom vs Zendesk before deciding on a tool for good, they both provide free trials for 14 days. But sooner or later, you’ll have to decide on the subscription plan, and here’s what you’ll have to pay.

Zopim’s web chat software offers users with a huge advantage over their competition through its live chat support service. We’ve engineered prompts where you have special purpose applications with the technology to do each task in the conversation. So we’ve one prompt to get you to ask a question; another one to disambiguate a question; another one to check to see if a question was fully answered for you. And so we start off with this very powerful language model, but we really just want to use it as a building block. We achieve that control by breaking it up into special purpose modules that do each thing separately.

CX leader Camille Acey on the evolving dynamics in customer service

At the same time, they both provide great and easy user onboarding. Yes, you can integrate the Intercom solution into your Zendesk account. It will allow you to leverage some Intercom capabilities while keeping your account at the time-tested platform.

The big goal, though, was creating a GPT-powered chatbot that could answer customer queries directly. To do this, it needed to be able to harness the power of large language models but without the drawbacks posed by “hallucinations”. Intercom provides many features and many marketing possibilities, which make it totally worth it to buy this chatbot builder.

On the other hand, it provides call center functionalities, unlike Intercom. No Customer Support Software will manate to cover all the requirements of a business. Though key functionalities of Zendesk Chat and Intercom are obviously a priority you should also thoroughly study the integrations supported by each software. Dogfooding our own bots is not just a way for us to gain product knowledge or test new functionality. We use our bots to automate everything from workflows to conversations. With the release of Custom Bots and Resolution Bot last year, our bots are helping us grow our business – just like our customers.

Intercom assists with the onboarding and retention of customers through targeted email and in-app messages triggered by time or behavior. Intercom gives you the ability to see who your customers are and what they do in your web and mobile apps in real time. It allows you to anticipate intercom vs zopim customers questions and offer help when and where they need it. Both Zendesk Chat and Intercom have a free trial available and a freemium model to test out which chat service will work best for your company. Zendesk, on the other hand, only has online support and a knowledge base.

But we think there’s new tooling to build here, to make it dramatically easier to write that help center article content. For example, taking your support conversations and using this next-generation AI to bootstrap that process. Why don’t you try something equally powerful yet more affordable, like HelpCrunch? The bot also ensures that the customer or employee will find the right article before contacting an agent.

Compare Intercom Live Chat vs Zendesk Chat

Today, we’re delighted to introduce Fin, our new chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Intercom’s proprietary machine learning technology. Because of the various marketing opportunities they provide and the many features, I was clueless about where I needed to start. So don’t be surprised if it takes you some time to fully understand Intercom. Besides, the prices differ depending on the company’s size and specific needs.

If you need a powerful support platform that can help you provide world-class customer service, LiveAgent is a good choice. With over 190 integrations and 175 features, this all-in-one help desk solution has everything you need to provide personalized support to your customers. LiveAgent is a very popular alternative to Intercom that works great with smaller support teams.

• Both Zendesk Chat and Intercom have a free trial available and a freemium model to test out which chat service will work best for your company.
• Carefully assess your requirements, consider your budget, and consider customer feedback before making a decision.
• Therefore, if you happen to have Zoho CRM and want to integrate your chat feature with it, you should go with Zendesk.
• It’s clear you must understand your specific needs to realize which solution matches those needs.
• Now that we’ve discussed the customer service-focused features of Zendesk and Intercom, let’s turn our attention to how these platforms can support sales and marketing efforts.

It is an affordable alternative to Intercom that offers a very similar set of features. Businesses can install Tidio on their websites in minutes for free. They can use live chat and chatbots to respond to customer inquiries and complaints quickly, which can help to improve customer satisfaction. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Tidio also offers a variety of features that can be used to help website visitors and provide automated self-service tools around the clock.

It’s really important for us that this kind of next-generation bot is able to do all those things as well. So initially it’ll be like, ‘Hey, answer informational questions from your knowledge base.’ Zero setup day one – get it live, it’s great. But eventually – and we’ve seen this in every piece of research we’ve done – you want to get to the next level. After that, people will want the ability to use that technology and capability we already have to take actions to resolve queries. And we’re excited that we might see that a lot more built on this next-generation, language-based platform.

• You can definitely get more bang for your buck with some cheaper alternatives to Intercom.
• Intercom is a comprehensive customer messaging platform that goes beyond live chat.
• Zendesk’s advanced automation features make it the preferred choice for businesses seeking to optimize their workflow and enhance customer support efficiency.
• If you create a new chat with the team, land on a page with no widget, and go back to the browser for some reason, your chat will go puff.

Intercom provides lots of tutorials explaining their platform and they have a huge documentation. Intercom provides even so much analytics that I hardly can cover them all in this review, but they provide a lot. If that’s not enough, you can use Zapier or Make (formerly Integromat) to integrate with almost any software application on earth. With Intercom, you can just ask a question to the user and store the answer in a custom field or assign a tag. Intercom describes itself as a Conversational Relationship Platform that gives you the opportunity to create better customer relationships.

Zendesk Chat allows you to reach out to your customers in real-time. Rather than waiting for a customer to start a conversation with you, you can initiate it if you think the customer needs some help. Zendesk chat provides a personal connection with customers who need support. In 2014, they acquired Zopim, a Singapore based live chat company. The tool was later integrated with Zendesk, making it more robust. You can add unlimited agents and monitor their performance from the admin page.

While these could work as a good temporary solution, it is better to consider an independent platform. Out of the more advanced ones—with CRM and bot automation features—Tidio is the most popular option for small businesses and online stores. SMBs, especially from the ecommerce sector, should focus on features that allow for fast and convenient communication with customers. It should also be easy to track and manage all customer interactions in one app. From the customer’s perspective, functionalities that help with order tracking and self-service are also essential. Intercom was founded in 2011 and, over the years, they have earned a loyal base of users.

But that’s not it, you can also only show the greeting if the user has been on the page for a certain amount of seconds or when the last contact was. Moreover, you can also get or send data from other systems by creating an API call and you can receive webhooks when an event is happening inside Intercom. Unfortunately, you cannot create a sequence of messages, but it is possible to create Series, which we will cover later (in the Marketing section). Zendesk is a ticketing system before anything else, and its ticketing functionality is overwhelming in the best possible way.

Intercom is a user intelligence and behavioral targeting platform to better understand, improve, and benefit from your customer communication. Organizing and facilitating a design workshop can be challenging. But by stringing together the right people and plan, product design workshops will become an important part of your team’s process.

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. LiveChat is one of the most popular help desk apps and, obviously, live chat solutions. Some features of LiveChat include advanced reporting and analytics, interactive pop-up chats that prompt user interactions, and conversation management features. If we consider all Intercom alternatives on our list, LiveChat is one of the best substitutes. As a live chat app messaging solution, is Freshdesk a good alternative to Intercom?

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. Both Gorgias and Intercom rival in features, and both have thousands of customers worldwide using the tool to manage their customer service. If you’re choosing between them, you’re already on the right track. HelpCrunch is a customer engagement platform that helps businesses to keep track of customer interactions, chat with customers, and measure customer engagement. It also offers a suite of tools to help businesses create and manage customer support tickets. Founded in 2007, Zendesk started as a ticketing tool for customer success teams.