Intercom, on the other hand, is designed to be more of a complete solution for sales, marketing, and customer relationship nurturing. You can use it for customer support, but that’s not its core strength. Basically, if you have a complicated customer support process, go with Zendesk for its help desk functionality. If you’re a sales-oriented corporation, go with Intercom for its automation options. Both tools can be quite heavy on your budget, since they’re mainly targeting big enterprises and don’t offer their full toolset at an affordable price.

Drift follows the premium pricing, which might not be the option for small and medium-sized businesses. Because it offers so many different options, this is a great Intercom alternative for large and enterprise companies who need sales and service solutions at scale. One key aspect of good customer support is offering a self-service option, such as a knowledge base or forum.

Zendesk Chat vs Intercom – Consolidated Help vs Convenient Apps

You do not get the advanced team features like Zendesk, although it is not too difficult to do things like work together on a ticket, transfer a ticket, or just seek advice from another member of the support team. For small companies and startups, Intercom offers a Starter plan — with a balanced suite of features from each of the solutions below — at $74 per month per user, billed annually. Intercom stands out here due to its ability  to tailor sales workflows.

You have events, you have user attributes, you identify users, and so on. So really from the visual perspective, all three of them would be very similar, if you look at just integrations, like an app store, or if you go to different tools, Intercom will do much better. The third area we’ll tend to look at is actually the integration portion, that is how hard is it to implement, so let’s quickly do a dive here into the developer’s portal for Intercom. Intercom, I’ll say, has probably one of the most extensive documentations I’ve seen. You have, also the app store component here, where they have a lot of different app integrations. That’s something that Zendesk has a little bit, CustomerIO has a little bit, but Intercom really has the most integrations.

Intercom videos

Previous conversations and progress will all follow them around, making it easier for you to help your customers no matter where they are. There’s the most basic package, called the Essential, which is $87/month. If you upgrade to the Pro package for $153/month, you get everything in the Essential Package, plus other features like more integrations, automating meetings, and custom lead routing. Finally, Intercom’s messenger comes with some great customization options.

• Check new users, flows’ and individual pages’ views and segment your users.
• So once a user became a user, once they give you the email address on sign-up, then you wanna be able to send them messages across the very similar channels that Intercom had.
• This feature ensures that each customer request is handled by the best-suited agent, improving the overall efficiency of the support team.
• Another cheaper alternative for Intercom, Freshdesk is an intuitive customer support solution that helps you intelligently automate your business processes.
• The platform offers 24/7 chat and ticketing, customer satisfaction surveys, tools for knowledge sharing, and email marketing automation for companies on both small and large scales.
• From there, you can include FAQs, announcements, and article guides and then save them into pre-set lists for your customers to explore.

Instead of having to search for an answer or picking up the phone to get support, your customers can receive the answers they need without having to leave the page. Plus, with an upcoming integration with Fullview, customer service teams will quickly be able to use session replays, cobrowsing and console logs to help customers more effectively. Chatbots are becoming increasingly popular as a way to provide customer service and support. They can help businesses save time and money while also providing customers with fast answers to their queries.

The HubSpot CRM Platform

Still on the fence about customer service and sales SaaS solutions? Check out our list of unified communications providers for more information. Companies looking for a more complete customer service product–without niche bells and whistles, but with all the basic channels you want–should look to Zendesk.

They support email, they support push notifications, and of course, they have the in-app portion with the widget. So Twilio is a platform for being able to dial a phone call from SMS, so you have to set that up through them. That will take some implementation work, but if you really want SMS, that’ll be the way to do it.

Connect to your ecosystem of data sources

Like with many other apps, Zapier seems to be the best and most simple way to connect Intercom to Zendesk. You get call recording, muting and holding, conference calling, and call blocking. Zendesk also offers callback requests, call monitoring and call quality notifications, among other telephone tools.

Our team can not only help you choose and set up your live chat software, but our agents can monitor all your channels for you, lessening the load on your team. To learn more about how LTVplus can help you drive engagement and increase conversions through live chat schedule a free consultation with us. When you use Intercom to acquire customers, you’ll get a few helpful tools. It comes with a Business Messenger, Outbound Messaging, comprehensive reports, and chatbots that you can use for sales and marketing.

Intercom (4.4/5 stars on G

Drift requires a small coding process to initiate the automated message, which is challenging for tech-savvy people. Best for teams looking for quick solutions who don’t want to pay for add-ons such as KnowledgeBase, Live Chats, etc. We are helping e-commerce brands to provide an fantastic customer service experience.

This is a pretty common request these days, specifically companies will say, “You know, hey, we wanna improve our onboarding flow after users sign up”. The point is to send those messages at maybe very specific actions or points, and then guide users along a certain path or journey you wanna take them. Founded in 2017 by parent company Freshworks, Inc., Freshchat offers live chat software at a fourth of the cost of Intercom, making it a choice option for those looking for cheaper alternatives to Intercom. According to reviews and ratings captured on G2, LiveAgent is a cheaper alternative to Intercom for those who are looking for a cost-effective customer service platform that is easy to set up and use. It is especially worth considering for those migrating data from Intercom. The platform is fully customizable on the back end, so customers can opt in or out of specific features.

Need a dedicated customer experience team ready to support your brand?

See exactly how visitors use your website in realtime, trigger a notification to the right sales rep when they show buying intent, and start a personalized conversation (chat or video) at the perfect moment. Katherine Manning is an accomplished sales professional and B2B/IT focused writer. Her articles have appeared on Yahoo! Small Business Advisor’s page, Sweet Lemon Magazine, The Iowa City Owl, Seven12 Magazine, Newsiosity, The Purple Cow Agency blog, Personal Finance Hub and Business 2 Community.

• There is a simple email integration tool for whatever email provider you regularly use.
• Whether it’s through automated conversations, one-on-one interactions, or multi-channel messaging, Gist has you covered.
• On the other hand, if your business requires a more holistic approach to customer experience, Intercom is the top choice.
• It enables you to get quality product feedback from the right customers at the right time through the app or by email.
• Like so many others, Monese determined that Zendesk was the best solution to provide seamless, omnichannel support because of its scalability and reliability.
• The Zendesk Workspace provides agents a single workspace with access to all team collaboration and customer communication channels so that an agent can manage all conversations without switching interfaces.

Artificial intelligence chatbots called Freddy AI to allow processes to be automated. In addition, Freshdesk stands out with the various in-app collaborations that make it easy for support teams to work in an organized manner and resolve tickets. The platform offers solutions in many areas like e-commerce, customer relations, CRM, and e-mail marketing. Advanced support tools allow businesses to automate processes and increase customer satisfaction.

Panoply is a cloud data platformbuilt for analysts

We have tried to mention a few general use cases, please let us know if you would like us to add more alternatives for your industry-specific use case. Furthermore, for some addons such as Chatbots, you don’t even know what the costs would look like because you would need to metadialog.com go through the third-party service provider to build it as per your requirements. The important thing is for businesses to decide on the most suitable software for them. In the decision stage, it is necessary to consider the size of the company, its goals, and its needs.