AI-powered live chat alternatives to Intercom, Drift, Zendesk

The Zendesk chat tool has most of the necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers, and live chat analytics. You can enable some forms for collecting customer info on the go. Powered by Explore, Zendesk’s reporting capabilities are pretty impressive. Right out of the gate, you’ve got dozens of pre-set report options on everything from satisfaction ratings and time in status to abandoned calls and Answer Bot resolutions. You can even save custom dashboards for a more tailored reporting experience. Triggers should prove especially useful for agents, allowing them to do things like automate notifications for actions like ticket assignments, ticket closing/reopening, or new ticket creation.

Zendesk chat vs Intercom offers similar chat features but still has a couple of differences. In any case, if you choose Zendesk or Intercom, you get wide chatting possibilities. We’re big fans of Zendesk’s dashboard with built-in collaboration tools, but we wish the Agent Workspace came with the Team or Growth plans–not just Professional. The Sell dashboard, different from the Service dashboard, features pre-built widgets that agents can organize however they want, to view the metrics they care most about. Agents can participate in forums and turn forum posts into tickets; they also can turn community-post replies into articles for future customers.

Software

Users can easily connect with their customers through live chat, conversational bots, one-to-one communication, canned responses, etc. Intercom is a popular customer communications platform, but its focus has always been on sales and marketing. After starting life as a simple chat widget, Intercom has added lots of new features to its messaging platform, but catering for customer support seems like more of an afterthought. 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. Intercom’s ticketing system and help desk SaaS is also pretty great, just not as amazing as Zendesk’s.

This is because it comes with a free option, which is ideal for startups on a limited budget. Plus, it’s easy to upgrade to a larger package when your business grows. For a full list of the available apps and integrations, you can check out their app store here.

Best features of Intercom

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. While Zendesk offers a wide array of support features, many more than Intercom, there are a couple of major features it lacks that Intercom has. The first is proactive, in-app messaging, and the second is email marketing capabilities. Both Intercom and Zendesk provide you with their own Operator bot, which immediately suggests relevant material to clients via the chat widget. When it comes to creating an optimum knowledge base experience, both Intercom and Zendesk are excellent choices with similar capabilities for your needs.

• 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.
• This can help support agents to help customers through complex issues that simply don’t translate well via live chat.
• You could technically consider Intercom a CRM, but it’s really more of a customer-focused communication product.
• It can automatically suggest relevant articles to customers reducing the workload for your support agents.
• You get to engage with them further and get to know more about their expectations.
• In general, Zendesk offers a wide range of live chat features such as customizable chat widgets, automatic greetings, offline messaging, and chat triggers.

Just like Intercom, Zendesk can also integrate with multiple messaging platforms and ensure that your business never misses out on a support opportunity. Both Zendesk Messaging and Intercom Messenger offer live chat features and AI-enabled chatbots for 24/7 support to customers. Additionally, you can trigger incoming messages to automatically assign an agent and create dashboards to monitor the team’s performance on live chat. We have already mentioned several times above how chat tools are one of the main ways that customers can reach out to a help desk or support team, but let us delve deeper into advanced chat widget features.

Introduction to Intercom & Zendesk

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. Zendesk also makes it easy to customize your help center, with out-of-the-box tools to design color, theme, and layout–both on mobile and desktop. When a customer asks a question in the Messenger widget, the Operator automatically suggests a handful of relevant articles based on keywords to help customers resolve their own issues.

• For instance, customers and staff alike can channel messages through it.
• Zendesk’s mobile app is also good for ticketing, helping you create new support tickets with macros and updates.
• Factors may include the content in the review, feedback provided by other readers, the age of the review, and other factors that indicate review quality.
• Apart from team conversations, it integrates with the ticketing system.
• Check out our list of unified communications providers for more information.
• Compared to being detailed, Zendesk gives a tough competition to Intercom.

With Appy Pie Connect, you can focus on growing your business while we take care of the rest. Try it out today and experience the benefits of seamless app metadialog.com integration. 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.

Intercom Agent Dashboard

Below, we present the main features, pros, and cons of a popular Zendesk alternative – Intercom. One of the more unique Zendesk alternatives on this list as Gorgias’ customer support software aims to support ecommerce businesses. As an easy and carefully-thought solution, Gorgias offers its users a few unique features. 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.

Zendesk wins the major category of help desk and ticketing system software. It lets customers reach out via messaging, a live chat tool, voice, and social media. Zendesk supports teams that can then field these issues from a nice unified dashboard. Zendesk has great intelligent routing and escalation protocols as well.

Can I use Intercom on the front end and Zendesk on the back?

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. Best Zendesk alternative for businesses looking for an all-in-one customer service solution with a powerful CRM, marketing automation, and sales tools. With Freshdesk, organizations can set up automations to handle specific customer inquiries as appropriate. This includes automatic delivery of help desk tickets to the correct department or agent, prioritization of inquiries based on severity, and escalation of urgent issues. Freshdesk also allows users to customize ticket fields and workflows to suit their specific needs and preferences.

It will really help you get up faster and understand the product deeper, and not waste time. ActiveCampaign is difficult to learn on your own since it is so full featured. Sign up for a trial through a salesperson and then ask if it is possible to get in the class for less money.

Advanced features of Zendesk and Intercom integration on Appy Pie Connect

In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the most expensive tools on the market. You can see their attention to detail in everything — from tools to the website. And there’s still no way to know how much you’re going to pay for them, since the prices are only revealed after you go through a few sales demos with the Intercom team. To sum things up, one can get really confused trying to make sense of the Zendesk suite pricing, let alone to calculate costs. Intercom does have a ticketing dashboard that has omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk. Their reports are attractive, dynamic, and integrated right out of the box.

Our team is experienced in consolidating Zendesk instances and merging instances of other help desk and service desk systems. Don’t miss out on the latest tips, tools, and tactics at the forefront of customer support. Zendesk has more pricing options, which means you’re free to choose your tier from the get-go. With Intercom, you’ll have more customizable options with the enterprise versions of the software, but you’ll have fewer lower-tier choices.

Why Zendesk is the best alternative to Intercom

By integrating Intercom and Pipedrive, you can easily manage your sales pipeline. You can quickly create new deals without leaving your Intercom inbox, giving you the ability to efficiently handle customer requests and keep your sales process running smoothly. Integrating Zendesk and Intercom using Appy Pie Connect is a smart choice for any business looking to streamline their workflow and increase productivity. With Appy Pie Connect, an AI-driven integration platform, you can easily connect your favorite apps and automate your workflows in just a few clicks. The advanced features offered by Appy Pie Connect, including real-time data syncing and custom field mapping, make it stand out from other integration tools.

If you’re looking for a dedicated support tool, Crisp may not be your best option. Best Intercom alternative for large businesses who are already HubSpot users. Easily find customer profiles to ensure you’re providing them with the best possible service every single time. With an easy-to-use interface and a number of support-centric features that can help with all kinds of use cases, Help Scout is an affordable option that your growing team can quickly get up and running. Skyvia offers powerful visual editors which allow precise mapping configuration to quickly configure your data migration or synchronization between Intercom and Zendesk. Skyvia offers you a convenient and easy way to connect Intercom and Zendesk with no coding.

IOS and Android apps will help you view, manage, and respond to customer conversations from your mobile device. With Intercom pricing is based on the total number of people you track and communicate with, not the number of agent seats your support team has. Be careful, pricing will automatically adjust as your business grows and you track more people. If you’d want to test Zendesk and Intercom before deciding on a tool for good, they both provide free trials.

This allows all internal teams to remain on the same page when working through a specific customer’s problem. Going along with this, many users report that Zendesk seems to have already “done it all” in terms of features and functionality. According to one Capterra review from earlier this year, “Zendesk seems to have done all of its innovation years ago as the product has achieved a plateau of functionality of features.” If you’ve been looking for a tool to help you manage customer inquiries and service requests for any period of time, you’ve probably heard of Zendesk.

• This SaaS leader entered into the competition in 2011, intending to help its clients reach their target audiences and engage them in a conversation right away.
• Another great Intercom feature is that it allows users to create comprehensive knowledge bases.
• Plecto is a dashboard software that allows you to build customizable dashboards using data that you collect in Intercom.
• And, thanks to the internet, a few taps will lead them right to your competitor!
• Zendesk Message and chat enable users to connect to their customers on a scalable app.
• When he isn’t writing content, poetry, or creative nonfiction, he enjoys traveling, baking, playing music, reliving his barista days in his own kitchen, camping, and being bad at carpentry.