The 13 Best Intercom Alternatives for Customer Support in 2023

The cherry on top is that Intercom provides free migration to make onboarding as smooth as possible without data loss. The multi-channel integration is an extended arm of this feature. The Advanced & Enterprise is ideal for medium-sized and large organizations due to features like lead routing, Fastlane, multiple languages, and custom RBAC. Businesses have a specific combination of needs, which Intercom alternatives can provide.

While there can be add-ons, such as premium customer support, you can generally anticipate what you’ll be paying for your Zendesk subscription. Beyond this, Intercom does make its pricing publicly available. It calculates the cost of its Pro and Premium plans based on the number of AI resolutions, people reached, and seats (or users). This can make it challenging to estimate the cost yourself during your research and you need to speak with Intercom for more information. Also, this software offers a feature called ‘Business Messenger’ that comes with its own AI chatbot.

What chat service to choose?

Finally, if you want even more advanced features, you can upgrade to their Premium package. However, do take note that this comes with custom pricing, so you will need to contact them to learn more. Pick out the must-have features for your organization and filter out of the software that provides you with those services within your budget. The end-to-end digital marketing campaigns and ability to grow SMBs in challenging markets make it an all-in-one suite of tools for startups and large enterprises. At $29/agent/month, you get premium chat features, unlimited chat buttons, and social networks. Built on its leading and free CRM, HubSpot Service Hub has a suite of inbound tools from sales to marketing.

You can use this support desk to help customers or you can forward potential new users to your sales department. 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. Given that both of these platforms seem aimed at one sort of market or another, it shouldn’t surprise you that we might find a few gaps in the sorts of services they provide. But it’s also a given that many people will approach their reviews to Zendesk and Intercom with some specific missions in mind, and that’s bound to change how they feel about the platforms.

Zendesk is another popular customer service, support, and sales platform that enables clients to connect and engage with their customers in seconds. Just like Intercom, Zendesk can also integrate with multiple messaging platforms and ensure that your business never misses out on a support opportunity. Intercom’s app store has popular integrations for things like WhatsApp, Stripe, Instagram, and Slack. There is a really useful one for Shopify to provide customer support for e-commerce operations.

Intercom Pricing and Plans

This approach not only enhances user understanding but also significantly boosts user engagement. While Zendesk is a widely used and versatile customer support and engagement platform, it’s important to consider whether there might be a better software solution tailored to your specific needs. Both Zendesk and Intercom have AI capabilities that deserve special mention. Zendesk’s AI (Fin) helps with automated responses, ensuring your customers get quick answers. On the other hand, Intercom’s AI-powered chatbots and messaging are designed to enhance your marketing and sales efforts, giving you an edge in the competitive market. Experience the comprehensive power of Intercom for effective customer communication, automation, support tools, integrations, and analytics.

While the pricing can be flexible, it may become more costly as your organization’s requirements and usage increase. If you are looking for a comprehensive customer support solution with a wide range of features, Zendesk is a good option. Zendesk receives positive feedback for its intuitive interface, wide range of integrations, and robust reporting tools.

Intercom’s Customer Onboarding Feature is More Efficient than Zendesk’s Knowledge Base

This site does not include all software companies or all available software companies offers. However, this is somewhat subjective, and depending on your business needs and favorite tools, you may argue we got it all mixed up, and Intercom is truly superior. Some startups and small businesses may prefer one app, while large companies and enterprise operations will have their own requirements.

• The Zendesk marketplace is also where you can get a lot of great add-ons.
• Zendesk boasts an extensive array of integration options, with over 1,500 apps in its ecosystem.
• Right from managing your support tickets to training your employees, you can take your support operations to the next level.
• Moreover, features such as typing indicators, delivery events, and rich message types like emojis, GIFs, etc. can give life to any conversation.
• Many software vendors aren’t upfront about the cost of using their products, maintenance costs, or integration fees.

Formerly known as Insights, Zendesk now uses Explore to provide analytics to help businesses tailor their services to increase customer satisfaction. Opposing Intercom vs. Zendesk inbox tools is a bit complicated. Intercom Inbox has features that vaguely remind Zendesk Support, but the offered package Acquire customer (Messages and Inbox) is more paralleled with Zendesk Support + Chat.

App Marketplace

It’s nice and convenient but not nearly as advanced as Zendesk. All customer questions, be it via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel, are landing in one dashboard, where your agents can solve them quickly and efficiently. It guarantees continuous omnichannel support that meets customer expectations. For standard reporting like response times, leads generated by source, bot performance, messages sent, and email deliverability, you’ll easily find all the metrics you need. Beyond that, you can create custom reports that combine all of the stats listed above (and many more) and present them as counts, columns, lines, or tables. Support conversations contain qualitative data about the most pressing areas of friction.

If your team is familar with Gmail, Enchant

Inbox will feel like Gmail on steroids. Even more advanced multi-brand or multi-language setups are simple enough

that you’ll be able manage them without external consultants. Enchant, on the other hand, is made for small and medium businesses.

All your data, where you need it

Pro plan is rather a team plan that costs $395/mo and includes 5 seats. For each additional seat, you would have to pay another $79/mo. But that’s not it, if you want to resolve customer common questions with the help of the vendor’s new tool – Fin bot, you will have to pay $0.99 per resolution per month.

Intercom costs can go even higher with custom add-ons such as Product Tours (from $199/month, Advanced lead generation (from $499/month), Advanced customer engagement (from $499/month), etc. With Zendesk, you can easily sort or filter your tickets using parameters such as date, ticket priority, tags, source, and more. Now, when it comes to customizing your dashboard and making it suitable for your unique needs, Zendesk does a good job. The tool can be integrated with 500+ business apps including Zendesk Explore, which offers you relevant omnichannel analytics and customer engagement metrics. To cater to the needs of different businesses and teams, Zendesk offers multiple integration options. To customize your Zendesk experience, you can integrate the tool with third-party business applications such as Trello, Salesforce, Shopify, Aircall, etc.

So yeah, two essential things that Zendesk lacks in comparison to Intercom are in-app messages and email marketing tools. 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. What makes Intercom stand out from the crowd are their chatbots and lots of chat automation features that can be very helpful for your team. You can integrate different apps (like Google Meet or Stripe among others) with your messenger and make it a high end point for your customers.

• Pre-selected assignment rules customize each ticket’s destination, assigning routing paths to agents or departments based on customer priority status, query type, or issue details.
• Zendesk chat allows businesses to reach out and connect to customers before they ask a question.
• This enables you to capture deep customer insights without laborious manual coding.
• I think we can call agree, we wish we can just be treated like a human.
• Zendesk, just like its competitor, offers a knowledge base solution that is easy to customize.

While Zendesk’s emphasis is entirely on customer support, Intercom’s features extend into marketing and sales. Zendesk started as a customer support request SaaS, a legacy that continues today with its robust ticketing and customer messaging solutions. In contrast, Intercom aims to provide an all-in-one business communication platform to support, engage, and convert customers with sales and marketing of the platforms’ different focus is that Intercom includes an email marketing feature, whereas Zendesk doesn’t. Another critical difference between Zendesk and Intercom is their approach to CRM.

Collaboration tools enable agents to work together in resolving customer tickets and making sales. Automatic assignment rules establish criteria that automatically route tickets to the right agent or team, based on message or user data. In an omnichannel contact center, agents can manage customer interactions across channels, no matter which channel a customer uses to contact the company. Intercom and Zendesk are two of the most popular customer service platforms, each with its own set of distinct advantages and drawbacks.

However, it is possible Intercom’s support is superior at the premium level. There are 3 Basic support plans at $19, $49 and $99 per user per month billed annually, and 5 Suite plans at $49, $79, $99, $150, and $215 per user per month billed annually. Research by Zoho reports that customer relationship management (CRM) systems can help companies triple lead conversion rates. Those same tools also increase customer retention by 27% while saving 23% on sales and marketing costs. Intercom also has an omnichannel customer service solution, but it’s fairly limited, with no native voice capabilities and minimal voice integrations.

With Intercom, businesses can engage in real-time chats, schedule meetings, and strategically deploy chat boxes to specific customer segments. What truly sets Intercom apart is its data-driven approach to customer engagement. It actively collects and utilizes customer data to facilitate highly personalized conversations.

Read more about https://www.metadialog.com/ here.