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’s chatbot feels a little more robust than Zendesk’s (though it’s worth noting that some features are only available at the Engage and Convert tiers). You can set office hours, live chat with logged-in users via their user profiles, and set up a chatbot. Customization is more nuanced than Zendesk’s, but it’s still really straightforward to implement.

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. Sequence all channels–chat, web post, email, chatbot outreach, tour message, banner, push notification, or carousel–mixing and matching modes of outreach to fit campaign goals. Agents can use the desktop chatbox to respond to customers in any outbound channel.

Why should I choose Zendesk over Intercom?

These are both still very versatile products, so don’t think you have to get too siloed into a single use case. Choosing the right platform is much easier once the needs are identified. Businesses can use the trial versions to find the best software and decide on the platform that metadialog.com suits them best. When integrating data, you can fill some Intercom fields that don’t have corresponding Zendesk fields (or vice versa) with constant values. You can use lookup mapping to map target columns to values, gotten from other target objects depending on source data.

• Groove is another Zendesk alternative that streamlines the process of collecting customer inquiries and providing support as needed.
• Intercom has more customization features for features like bots, themes, triggers, and funnels.
• Both options are well designed, easy to use, and share some pretty key functionality like behavioral triggers and omnichannel-ality (omnichannel-centricity?).
• In this case, we’ll see what their similarities and differences are.
• It has similar features to the Intercom and can be considered an affordable Intercom alternative.
• Intercom’s pricing can be divided into basic messaging and messaging with automation.

It provides a full suite of tools to help you manage customer interactions, including ticketing, messaging, and automated workflows. Plus, the intuitive interface makes it easy to set up and use right away. Apart from a live chat, it has a feature called ‘Business Messenger’ that comes with its own AI chatbot.

Incredible user experience

Intercom is a customer support messenger, bot, and live chat service provider that empowers its clients to provide instant support in real-time. 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. In general, Zendesk offers a wide range of live chat features such as customizable chat widgets, automatic greetings, offline messaging, and chat triggers. In addition to these features, Intercom offers messaging automation and real-time visitor insights.

One of Zendesk’s most notable aspects is its robust ticketing system. As Zendesk initially began as a help desk ticketing system, it’s no surprise that the platform makes tracking and managing customer inquiries seamless. Intercom has positioned itself as a messaging platform rather than a comprehensive CRM solution.

Why we built an AI-powered live chat alternative to Intercom and other existing solutions

ProProfs offers incredible live chat features that help you offer 24×7 assistance and close more sales. You can leverage chatbots to handle basic customer queries and reduce the burden on your support team. ProProfs Help Desk is a decade-old SaaS company that offers an array of customer service and learning tools for businesses across the globe. Right from managing your support tickets to training your employees, you can take your support operations to the next level. The bot feeds customers and employees the relevant articles upon making a query. The main difference is its connectivity with the Intercom Team Inbox.

Both tools also allow you to connect your email account and manage it from within the application to track open and click-through rates. In addition, Zendesk and Intercom feature advanced sales reporting and analytics that make it easy for sales teams to understand their prospects and customers more deeply. 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. It is great to have CRM functionality inside your customer service platform because it helps maintain great customer experiences by storing all past customer engagements and conversation histories. This method helps offer more personalized support as well as get faster response and resolution times.

000+ companies delight customers with Front

This is why HubSpot makes sense as an Intercom alternative for large brands who are already familiar with or using other aspects of this tool. It can help you to reach out to customers and help them complete purchases. 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.

Their template triggers are fairly limited with only seven options, but they do enable users to create new custom triggers, which can be a game-changer for agents with more complex workflows. The integrations mentioned above allow you to see and edit order details and process refunds right through the help desk, thus saving you time. Aside from eCommerce integration, Gorgias also integrates well with social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

Pricing Model

When you see pricing plans starting for $79/month, you should get a clear understanding of how expensive other plans can become for your business. What’s worse, Intercom doesn’t offer a free trial to its prospect to help them test the product before onboarding with their services. Instead, they offer a product demo when prospects reach out to learn more about their pricing structure.

You can also analyze customer feedback in real-time, allowing your team to proactively address any issues or concerns before they become major problems. And finally, Crisp provides support for multiple channels including email, live chat, SMS messaging, and more – so you can reach out to customers wherever they are. Hubspot, of course, has quality in its products, the Service Hub is focused on the entire customer experience similar to how Intercom is but with slightly fewer feature sets. The price, similar to everything Hubspot is pretty high starting at $50/mo for 2 agents.