Zendesk was founded in 2007 and as such, is one of the oldest customer service management software offerings available on the market today. Zendesk provides a variety of solutions including customized ticketing automation, self-service solutions, and customizable configurations based on your business needs. This cloud-based customer service software includes tools for sales, marketing, and support teams. Freshdesk offers services in the sectors of eCommerce, healthcare, SMBs, and other businesses looking for a Zendesk competitor. Zendesk doesn’t give you many options to personalize conversations.

Collaboration tools enable agents to work together in resolving customer tickets and making sales. In an omnichannel contact center, agents can manage customer interactions across channels, no matter which channel a customer uses to contact the company. Erika is Groove’s Customer Success Manager, committed to helping you find the right software solution for your business needs. She loves finding innovative ways for your support team to scale and grow, always putting the customer first. She also loves to run marathons and play softball in her spare time. Just like Intercom, Zendesk’s customer service is quite disappointing.

Zendesk Agent Dashboard

Zendesk wins the collaboration tools category because of its easy-to-use side conversations feature. Zendesk’s Admin Center provides tools that automate agent ticket workflows. With Intercom workload management tools, administrators can ensure that incoming conversations, traffic, and workload are evenly distributed among team members. Automatic assignment rules establish criteria that automatically route tickets to the right agent or team, based on message or user data. An inbound customer message through any of these channels becomes a ticket for your support agents, whose reply reaches the customer through the same channel they originally used.

It also contains a customer support self-service system, where users can easily find answers to their questions. Though a tool may contain impressive features, the most important question remains how users view the software in everyday usage. Let’s look at ratings of Zendesk vs. Freshdesk on popular review sites and see some positive and negative opinions.

features typically included in a customer support software

From Intercom to HubSpot Service Hub, there are several high-quality options that can make a huge difference in your customer service experience. In this article, we will explore the best-rated alternatives to Zendesk and discuss what makes each of them unique. Check out the Help Scout Integrations page to see all the integrations we’ve built. You can also use the FAQ tool to provide self-service to your customers to help customers resolve their issues with minimal assistance. There is also integration with project management tools such as Jira, Slack, Mailchimp, etc. You can publish your knowledge base articles and divide them by categories and also integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience.

You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads. You could say something similar for Zendesk’s standard service offering, so it’s at least good to know they have Zendesk Sell, a capable CRM option to supplement it. You can use Zendesk Sell to track tasks, streamline workflows, improve engagement, nurture leads, and much more. Though Zendesk now considers itself to be a «service-first CRM company,» since its founding in 2007, their bread and butter offering has leaned much more heavily toward the «service» part of that equation. Converting or Implementation can be a blocker, luckily we have migration-specific automation tools at low costs. After answering those questions, pick no more than two or three options from your list and try each of them.

Pricing Info

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. Intercom definitely isn’t the most cost effective option out there, although we feel their pricing structure is a bigger challenge than the specific dollar amount.

• Premiere Zendesk plans have 24/7 proactive support with faster response times.
• Although Help Scout chats are always live, Beacon allows for some asynchronous communication.
• In addition, if you’re composing a response and someone else updates the conversation, Help Scout will hold your message until you’ve viewed the updates.
• If you create a new chat with the team, land on a page with no widget, and go back in the browser for some reason, your chat will go puff.
• 8×8 shines in analytics and integrations but stays behind in the amount of productivity features.
• Small businesses who prioritize collaboration will also enjoy Zendesk for Service.

Intercom, of course, allows its customer support team to collaborate and communicate too, but overall, Zendesk wins this group. A customer service department is only as good as its support team members, and these highly-prized employees need to rely on one another. Tools that allow support agents to communicate and collaborate are important aspect of customer service software. 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. You can also add apps to your Intercom Messenger home to help users and visitors get what they need, without having to start a conversation.

— Social media integration

There is a Starter plan for small businesses at $74 per month billed annually, and there are add-ons like a WhatsApp add-on at $9 per user per month or surveys at $49 per month. Your typical Zendesk review will often praise the platform’s simplicity and affordability, as well as its constant updates and rolling out of new features, like Zendesk Sunshine. For example, you can read in many Zendesk Sell reviews how adding sales tools benefits Zendesk Support users. 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. With help centers in place, it’s easier for your customers to reliably find answers, tips, and other important information in a self-service manner. Intercom recently ramped up its features to include helpdesk and ticketing functionality.

The former is one of the oldest and most reliable solutions on the market, while the latter sets the bar high in terms of innovative and out-of-the-box features. Intercom has a wider range of uses out of the box than Zendesk, though by adding Zendesk Sell, you could more than make up for it. metadialog.com Both options are well designed, easy to use, and share some pretty key functionality like behavioral triggers and omnichannel-ality (omnichannel-centricity?). But with perks like more advanced chatbots, automation, and lead management capabilities, Intercom could have an edge for many users.

Access to 24×7 Support for Free

All important data on inbound calls and agent productivity is always at your disposal, always up-to-date. Jitbit is quite special in itself, as it allows you to host both self-hosted and cloud-based versions of your help desk software. The Intercom live chat is familiar to those entrepreneurs who have recently decided to go online and raise their own loyal client base by individually working with each one of them. In 2013, Intercom was featured on Product Hunt, where it collected a number of reviews from appreciative partners and garnered the reputation of the most efficient tool of its kind. To maintain his competitive edge, Steve also hosts the top-rated twice-weekly podcast eCommerce Fastlane. Besides, premium plans give you access to robust features like dynamic ticket forms, custom roles, and dashboards.

Help Scout, a help desk ticketing system and customer service software solution, is one of the more popular Zendesk alternatives due to the fact that it provides a variety of services to its users. 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.

Cost-Friendly Intercom Alternatives in 2023

Help Scout’s simple and user-friendly platform can be a great Zendesk alternative for small and medium businesses. It offers features like shared inboxes, chat support, and a knowledge base, among others. It has fewer features and integrations than Zendesk and may not be suitable for larger or enterprise-level businesses that need more customization and scalability. If your team primarily focuses on ticketing solutions to manage both internal and external issues, Jetdocs is an excellent choice. It offers a comprehensive set of B2B features, such as SLAs, priority levels, and approval workflows, which can streamline your support process and improve response times.

The platform is popular because it offers many options for companies of all sizes and budgets, making it appealing to enterprises and startups. The software is versatile and allows agents to connect with clients via chat, email, phone, or social media. If you are looking to deflect support requests to self-service options, then Kustomer has no-code chatbots available to help. The only downside to this Zendesk alternative is that it is a bit costly, and pricing can be confusing. Moreover, companies that have customer-centric teams may not like that Kustomer offers so many deflecting requests.

Intercom vs Zendesk Plans and Pricing

Here are the top 15 Zendesk competitors that will improve your company’s customer service. CloudTalk is a 200+ person global tech company transforming customer experience by enabling businesses to build lasting relationships with their customers. The 8×8’s reporting system centralizes all data in a single place, so managers can make their teams more organized and speed up their workflow. The most advanced plan requires prospective customers to contact one of their agents for pricing information.

Both Gorgias and Intercom let you automate your team’s workflows for optimum efficiency and to ensure your customers get the best experience possible. So we recommend identifying the plan with the features you need and requesting a demo to find out exactly how much it’ll cost you. Whereas on Intercom, you can manage support on live chat, email, Facebook & Twitter.

• Consolidate every part of the conversation —  including live chat, email, and SMS — in a single inbox.
• If your team is looking for a centralized customer support solution then Front is a great alternative to Zendesk.
• Truly omnichannel customer experiences are impossible to provide if every conversation is confined to a single platform.
• Your support agents can quickly see customer bugs and issues in context — even before a user reaches out to them with a problem.
• There’s a specified amount of funding you must have gotten, unlike Zendesk.
• No matter how a customer contacts your business, your agents will have access to the tools and information they need to continue and close conversations on any channel.

The main purpose of a support tool is to allow the entire support team to log in and respond to customer conversations across channels simultaneously. Both the tools also work well to make internal communication possible with the help of Slack integration. Intercom is a software company that offers a help desk software for customer conversations to take place within a comprehensive platform with very innovative features that happen at lightning speed. Freshdesk is a product of Freshworks, which focuses on aiding customer support teams solely. But before signing up for their free trial, keep in mind that Zendesk is like creating a complicated LEGO set. You and your team will be required to invest a lot of time, patience, and money to build it to your liking.While it’s a popular solution, it may not be the most viable option for your business.

Basic service`s feature is a huge number of out-of-the-box integrations. 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. Freshdesk has three core tools, i.e., email ticketing, Twitter and Facebook integration, and knowledge base. The more you pay, the more advanced features of these tools you can get.

• Zendesk chat vs Intercom offers similar chat features but still has a couple of differences.
• Intercom calculates the price based on the number of seats (users) you request.
• CheckMarket integrates with Intercom to enable businesses to send surveys directly from Intercom conversations.
• HubSpot is a CRM software that is similar to Zendesk and offers features for marketing, sales, and support.
• So far, the chatbot can transfer chats to agents or resolve less complex queries in seconds.
• If you’re looking for an automated help desk solution that’s easy to use and affordable, look no further than Jitbit.

Intercom on the other hand lacks many ticketing functionality that can be essential for big companies with a huge customer support load. Zendesk’s customer support is also very fast, though their live chat is only available for registered users. All interactions with customers be it via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel are landing in one dashboard, where your agents can solve them fast and efficiently. There’s a plethora of features to help bigger teams collaborate more effectively — like private notes or real-time view of who’s handling a given ticket at the moment, etc. Intercom is better designed for smaller companies and teams, while Zendesk is suitable for large companies to skyrocket customer support. In addition, Intercom offers omnichannel inbox, robust reporting, and automated workflows.