Successfully Migrating from Zendesk to Intercom: A Guide from VPS

If you’re a small business, you may want to consider Intercom as it offers a nice set of features in its most basic package—without breaking the bank. Depending on your business needs you will need appropriate live chat software. Intercom and Zendesk are two popular options that we wanted to compare and help you decide which one works for you. In a recent study, 97% of global consumers said customer service is an important factor in their choice of brand. There are several ways you can improve your customer service capabilities, but customers are increasingly looking for and expecting live chat.

While Intercom offers a “Starter Plan” for very small businesses, the price for larger companies is scaled upward, too. If you only need the services Intercom offers, then you’ll only spend around $75 a month for two seats. Zendesk is around the same price for its smallest suite offering. Another feature Intercom offers that Zendesk doesn’t is email marketing tools. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to communicate with your customers. Both Intercom and Zendesk provide you with their own Operator bot, which immediately suggests relevant material to clients via the chat widget.

Product Tours by Intercom videos

The tool is great for both small and large teams because it is customizable to fit the needs of most businesses. When it comes to budgeting, Intercom is one tool that’s better to overestimate than underestimate. This makes it easier to get a more accurate sense of the total cost of ownership, which will increase if you want to leverage the full range of features. If Intercom is still cost prohibitive, we recommend looking at alternative solutions like Freshdesk or Zoho Desk.

• While Intercom offers a “Starter Plan” for very small businesses, the price for larger companies is scaled upward, too.
• If a customer is signed in to your app or website and has the left a live chat, Intercom will email them the conversation.
• Rather, go with the tool that will help you solve your most pressing issues now, while keeping the door open for other options in the future.
• Basic service`s feature is a huge number of out-of-the-box integrations.
• Use standard (data Intercom already has) or custom attributes (data that you send to Intercom) to build segments and track activity.
• 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.

You can create a help platform to assist users in guiding themselves, or you can use AI-enabled responses to create a more “human” like effect. Any business knows that the front desk is where everything happens. It’s where customers ask the questions that may result in the largest sales in your company’s history. Help desk software creates a sort of “virtual front desk” for your business.

Zendesk has more all-in-one potential with additional CRM, but Intercom comes closer to being a standalone CRM out of the box

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 is worthwhile to explore the features of both, prior to making a decision on which one you should use.

However, customers can purchase multiple Intercom plans to use together, or purchase add-ons to select just the features they want. Intercom has a unique pricing structure, offering three separate solutions, each intended for a distinct use case. We wish some of their great features were offered in multiple plans, but none features overlap among plans. Intercom wins the sales pipeline tools category because its campaigning and sequencing tools integrate all channels and unique services, like carousels and product tours. Create a help center combining knowledge base articles and a customer contact request form, embeddable into any webpage or mobile app. Customers can search the help center by query keywords and sort through articles in 40 languages.

Which offers more customization, Intercom or Zendesk?

Intercom offers a simplistic dashboard with a detailed view of all customer details in one place. Operators will find its dashboard quite beneficial as it will take them seconds to find necessary features during an ongoing chat with the customers. Admins will also like the fact that metadialog.com they can see the progress of all their teams and who all are actively answering a customer’s query in real-time. Zendesk’s Help Center and Intercom’s Articles both offer features to easily embed help centers into your website or product using their web widgets, SDKs, and APIs.

Use simple routing rules and SLA warnings to get every conversation to the right rep right away. With a shared view of email, Facebook, SMS, calendars, live chat, CRMs, and 80+ apps in one space, you’ll have all the context you need to deliver a personalized touch. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk, though is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. The cheapest (aka Essential) ‘All of Intercom’ package will cost you $136 per month, but if you only need their essential chat tools only, you can get them for $49 per month. Intercom doesn’t really provide free stuff, but they have a tool called Platform, which is free.

New Intercom User to Zendesk Ticket Status to Send Sendgrid Transactional Email

Intercom also has a community forum where users can help one another with questions and solutions. Monese is another fintech company that provides a banking app, account, and debit card to make settling in a new country easier. By providing banking without boundaries, the company aims to provide users with quick access to their finances, wherever they happen to be. If a customer starts an interaction by talking to a chatbot and can’t find a solution, our chatbot can open a ticket and intelligently route it to the most qualified agent.

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. Zendesk has over 1,300 integrations, compared to Intercom’s 300+ apps, making it the leader in this category. However, you can browse their respective sites to find which tools each platform supports.

Complex and confusing pricing

After this live chat software comparison, you’ll get a better picture of what’s better for your business. For small companies and startups, Zendesk offers a six-month free trial of up to 50 agents redeemable for any combination of Zendesk Support and Sell products. Zendesk also offers a sales pipeline feature through its Zendesk Sell product. You can set up email sequences that specify how and when leads and contacts are engaged. With Zendesk Sell, you can also customize how deals move through your pipeline by setting pipeline stages that reflect your sales cycle. Using Zendesk, you can create community forums where customers can connect, comment, and collaborate, creating a way to harness customers’ expertise and promote feedback.

• Both Zendesk Messaging and Intercom Messenger offer live chat features and AI-enabled chatbots for 24/7 support to customers.
• Zendesk Chat will also integrate with Zoho CRM, which Intercom does not.
• That said, Gorgias is not a well-rounded tool like Zendesk, and if not within their narrowed target audience, it might not be the right fit for your business needs.
• Finally, with Zendesk Chat you can interact with your customers through multiple channels.
• As customers come closer to purchasing, they often find themselves weighing the same pros and cons.
• So, if you want to use social media or other channels, then you will need to upgrade your plan.