How to Integrate Zendesk with Intercom: 1-Min Guide

These include ticketing, chatbots, and automation capabilities, to name just a few.Here’s a side-by-side comparison to help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of each platform. Zendesk offers its users consistently high ROI due to its comprehensive product features, firm support, and advanced customer support, automation, and reporting features. It allows businesses to streamline operations and workflows, improving customer satisfaction and eventually leading to increased revenues, which justifies the continuous high ROI. Intercom is also a customer service software that integrates entirely with third-party vendors, especially those offering messaging services. Using any plan, this integration is available to all customers, making the customer support experience and onboarding smooth.

It also provides mid-sized businesses with comprehensive customer relationship management software, as they require more advanced features to handle customer support. Similarly, the ability of Zendesk to scale also makes it the best fit for enterprise-level organizations. Intercom’s AI capabilities extend beyond the traditional chatbots; Fin is renowned for solving complex problems and providing safer, accurate answers.

• Companies might assume that using Intercom increases costs, potentially impacting businesses’ ROI.
• This plan includes a shared inbox, unlimited articles, proactive support, and basic automation.
• This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks.

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 Chat GPT a high end point for your customers. Zendesk also has the Answer Bot, which can take your knowledge base game to the next level instantly. It can automatically suggest your customer relevant articles reducing the workload for your support agents.

Intercom vs Zendesk: overall impression

Not to mention marketing and sales tools, like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Google Analytics. One of Zendesk’s other key strengths has also been its massive library of integrations. It works seamlessly with over 1,000 business tools, like Salesforce, Slack, and Shopify. With its features and pricing, Zendesk is geared toward businesses that full in the range from mid-sized to enterprise-level. Zendesk provides comprehensive security and compliance features, ensuring customer data privacy. This includes secure login options like SAML or JWT SSO (single sign-on) and native content redaction for sensitive information.

Fin is priced at $0.99 per resolution, so companies handling large volumes of queries might find it costly. In comparison, Zendesk customers pay a fixed price of $50 per agent—and only Zendesk AI is modeled on the world’s largest CX-specific dataset. Zendesk AI is the intelligence layer that infuses CX intelligence into every step of the customer journey. In addition to being pre-trained on billions of real support interactions, our AI powers bots, agent and admin assist, and intelligent workflows that lead to 83 percent lower administrative costs. Customers have also noted that they can implement Zendesk AI five times faster than other solutions. As a result, customers can implement the help desk software quickly—without the need for developers—and see a faster return on investment.

The result is that Zendesk generally wins on ratings when it comes to support capacity. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the hardest on your pocket. Zendesk can be more flexible and predictable in this area as you can buy different tools separately (or even use their limited versions for free).

Admins will also like the fact that they can see the progress of all their teams and who all are actively answering a customer’s query in real-time. Although many people tout it as the solution for large businesses, its bottom pricing tier is a nice entry for any small business looking to add customer service to its front page. There are four different subscription packages you can choose from, all of which also have Essential, Pro, and Premium options for businesses of different sizes. You’d need to chat with Intercom sales team for get the costs for the Premium subscription, though.

It allows businesses to organize and share helpful documentation or answer customers’ common questions. Self-service resources always relieve the burden on customer support teams, and both of our subjects have this tool in their packages. Zendesk for sales makes integrating with the tools you already use easy. Additionally, the Zendesk sales CRM seamlessly integrates with the Zendesk Support Suite, allowing your customer service and sales teams to share information in a centralized place. On top of that, you can use drag-and-drop widgets to create custom CRM reports with the data most important to your goals. With Pipedrive, users have access to visual reporting dashboards, but adding custom fields is limited to their Professional, Power, and Enterprise plans.

Has a bot that suggests relevant articles to customers who have questions. ProProfs Live Chat Editorial Team is a passionate group of customer service experts dedicated to empowering your live chat experiences with top-notch content. We stay ahead of the curve on trends, tackle technical hurdles, and provide practical tips to boost your business.

To do this, input a Test value such as Message Body, Email, Full_name or Conversation ID and click Test to verify that the Custom Action is properly configured. Refer to How to create an authentication with Zendesk for Custom Actions for more details. Yes, you can integrate Pipedrive with Zendesk to access information between the two services organized in one place. At the end of the day, the best sales CRM delivers on the features that matter most to you and your business. To determine which one takes the cake, let’s dive into a feature comparison of Pipedrive vs. Zendesk. If a title has been set for a conversation it will use this to populate the resulting Zendesk ticket title.

Synced articles and their content will be retrievable from the Public API similar to Intercom articles. However, you won’t be able to edit or manipulate synced articles via API calls. Now enter your Zendesk subdomain and choose the option to “Sync content” then go ahead and click Sync.

After switching to Intercom, you can start training Custom Answers for Fin AI Agent right away by importing your historic data from Zendesk. Fin AI Agent will use your history to recognize and suggest common questions to create answers for.

Zendesk, like Intercom, offers multilingual language functionality. It also provides detailed reports on how each self-help article performs in your knowledge base and helps you identify how each piece can be improved further. Intercom offers an integrated knowledge base functionality to its user base. Using the existing knowledge base functionality, they can display self-help articles in the chat window before the customer approaches your team for support. You can create these knowledge base articles in your target audience’s native language as their software is multilingual.

At the same time, Fin AI Copilot background support to agents, acting as a personal, real-time AI assistant for dealing with inquiries. That being said, it sometimes lacks the advanced customization and automation offered by other AI-powered chatbots, like Intercom’s. While most of Intercom’s ticketing features come with all plans, it’s most important AI features come at a higher cost, including its automated workflows.

Zendesk has a low TCO because it has no hidden costs and can be easily set up without needing developers or third-party help, saving you time and money. Alternatively, Pipedrive users should prepare to pay more for even simple CRM features like email tracking, whereas email tracking is available for all Zendesk Sell plans. Whether you’re looking for a CRM for small businesses or an enterprise, the Zendesk sales CRM has the flexibility to grow with you, supporting up to 2 million deals across all of our plans. On the other hand, entry-level Pipedrive users are limited to only 3,000 open deals per company, making it an insufficient CRM for enterprises and growing companies.

Intercom also provides fast time to value for smaller and mid-sized businesses with limitations for large-scale companies. It may have limited abilities regarding the scalability or support of an enterprise-level company. Thus, due to its limited agility, businesses with complex business models may not find it appropriate.

Zendesk’s Answer Bot is capable of helping customers with common queries by providing canned responses and links to relevant help articles. It relies on fairly basic automation while routing more complex issues to live agents. While both Zendesk and Intercom offer strong ticketing systems, they differ in the depth of automation capabilities. However, after patting yourself on the back, you now realize you’re faced with the daunting task of choosing between the two.

We are going to overview only their helpdesk/communication features to make the two systems comparable. When you start an import, Intercom will import your data as it is at that exact time. If any changes are made in Zendesk after that time, they won’t be reflected in Intercom. Alongside tickets, you can also import notes, attachments and inline images.

From there, you can include FAQs, announcements, and article guides and then save them into pre-set lists for your customers to explore. You can even moderate user content to leverage your customer community. Using this, agents can chat across teams within a ticket via email, Slack, or Zendesk’s ticketing system. This packs all resolution information into a single ticket, so there’s no extra searching or backtracking needed to bring a ticket through to resolution, even if it involves multiple agents.

Overall impression (aka very subjective take on user experience):

Intercom can even integrate with Zendesk and other sources to import past help center content. I just found Zendesk’s help center to be slightly better integrated into their workflows and more customizable. You need a complete customer service platform that’s seamlessly integrated and AI-enhanced.

Its messaging also has real-time notifications and automated responses, enhancing customer communication. 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. Intercom bills itself first and foremost as a platform to make the business of customer service more personalized, among other things.

This gives your team the context they need to provide fast and excellent support. Zendesk also offers proactive chat functionality to its user base. It enables them to engage with visitors who are genuinely interested in their services.

This may take some time depending on the options you selected and your conversation volume. You can contact our Support team if you have any questions or need us to import older data. As time passes by, the line between Intercom and Zendesk becomes more blurred as they try to keep up with one another and implement new features, services, and pricing policies. At the end of the day, there is not a universally better option, just one that suits your needs and preferences the most.

Zendesk’s help center tools are slightly better, but Intercom’s chatbot is more robust

Pipedrive also has security measures baked into its solution, offering SSO for its users. Pipedrive also includes lead management features like automatic lead nurturing, labeling, and bulk imports. However, Pipedrive does https://chat.openai.com/ not include native desktop text messaging features. One user noted that, in some cases, it can take Pipedrive at least eight hours to populate saved leads, making it difficult to quickly communicate with hot leads.

Intercom does not have a dedicated workforce management solution, either. Zendesk boasts robust reporting and analytics tools, plus a dedicated workforce management system. With custom correlation and attribution, you can dive deep into the root cause behind your metrics. We also provide real-time and historical reporting dashboards so you can take action at the moment and learn from past trends. Meanwhile, our WFM software enables businesses to analyze employee metrics and performance, helping them identify improvements, implement strategies, and set long-term goals.

Like Zendesk, Intercom offers its Operator bot, which automatically suggests relevant articles to clients right in a chat widget. Chat features are integral to modern business communication, enabling real-time customer interaction and team collaboration. All customer questions, whether via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel, are landed in one dashboard, where your agents can solve them quickly and efficiently. This guarantees continuous omnichannel support that meets customer expectations. If you’re not ready to make the full switch to Intercom just yet, you can integrate Intercom with your Zendesk account.

Zendesk also offers digital support during business hours, and their website has a chatbot. Premiere Zendesk plans have 24/7 proactive support with faster response times. Other customer service add-ons with Zendesk include custom training and professional services. 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. 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.

Because of this, you’ll want to make sure you’re selecting a cloud-based CRM, like Zendesk, with strong security features. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Zendesk meets global security and privacy compliance standards and includes zendesk to intercom features like single sign-on (SSO) to help provide protection against cyberattacks and keep your data safe. A sales CRM should also provide you with the benefits of pipeline management software.

Right off the bat, Intercom’s Chatbot is more advanced and customizable. If you prioritize seamless, personalized customer interactions, it’s arguably the better option of the two. Having only appeared in 2011, Intercom lacks a few years of experience on Zendesk. It also made its name as a messaging-first platform for fostering personalized conversational experiences for customers.

As mentioned before, the bot builder is a visual drag-and-drop system that requires no coding knowledge; this is also how other basic workflows are designed. The more expensive Intercom plans offer AI-powered content cues, triage, and conversation insights. Is it as simple as knowing whether you want software strictly for customer support (like Zendesk) or for some blend of customer relationship management and sales support (like Intercom)?

It allows businesses to automate repetitive tasks, such as ticket routing and in-built responses, freeing up time for support agents to deal with more crucial cases requiring more agent attention. This automation enhances support teams’ productivity as they do not have to spend too much responding to similar complaints they have already dealt with. Considering that Zendesk and Intercom are leading the market for customer service software, it becomes difficult for businesses to choose the right tool. Sometimes, businesses do not even realize the importance of various aspects you must consider while making this choice. Chatbots are automated customer support tools that can assist with low-level ticket triage and ticket routing in real-time. How easy it is to program a chatbot and how effective a chatbot is at assisting human reps is an important factor for this category.

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. Zendesk’s help center tools should also come in handy for helping customers help themselves—something Zendesk claims eight out of 10 customers would rather do than contact support. To that end, you can import themes or apply your own custom themes to brand your help center the way you want it.

They offer an advanced feature for customer data management that goes beyond basic CRM stuff. It gives detailed contact profiles enriched by company data, behavioral data, conversation data, and other custom fields. One place Intercom really shines as a standalone CRM is its data utility. Overall, I actually liked Zendesk’s user experience better than Intercom’s in terms of its messaging dashboard. Intercom has a dark mode that I think many people will appreciate, and I wouldn’t say it’s lacking in any way.

Using synced articles via the Public API

But they also add features like automatic meeting booking (in the Convert package), and their custom inbox rules and workflows just feel a little more, well, custom. I’ll dive into their chatbots more later, but their bot automation features are also stronger. Zendesk is built to grow alongside your business, resulting in less downtime, better cost savings, and the stability needed to provide exceptional customer support. Many customers start using Zendesk as small or mid-sized businesses (SMBs) and continue to use our software as they scale their operations, hire more staff, and serve more customers. Our robust, no-code integrations enable you to adapt our software to new and growing use cases.

The price levels can even be much higher if we talk of a larger company. To sum up, one can get really confused trying to understand the Zendesk pricing, let alone calculate costs. Yes, you can support multiple brands or businesses from a single Help Desk, while ensuring the Messenger is a perfect match for each of your different domains. Yes, you can localize the Messenger to work with multiple languages, resolve conversations automatically in multiple languages and support multiple languages in your Help Center.

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. If your goal is to deliver outstanding customer support to your audience, then Zendesk is a good option. It comes with a unified omnichannel dashboard, custom reports, and an advanced ticketing system.

Security features

Discover the blueprint for exceptional customer experiences and unlock new pathways for business success. Zendesk is suitable for startups, mainly due to its transparent pricing. Startups usually have low budgets for such investments, making it easier for these small businesses to choose the right plan. The features in Zendesk can scale with growing companies, so Startups can easily customize their plan to changing needs.

If you’ve already set up macros in Zendesk just copy and paste them over. Check out this tutorial to import ticket types and tickets data into your Intercom workspace. You’ll see a green confirmation banner indicating the removal has been successful and synced articles will be deleted from the Knowledge Hub in Intercom.

We also adhere to numerous industry standards and regulations, such as HIPAA, SOC2, ISO 27001, HDS, FedRAMP LI-SaaS, ISO 27018, and ISO 27701. Zendesk lacks in-app messages and email marketing tools, which are essential for big companies with heavy client support loads. Conversely, Intercom lacks ticketing functionality, which can also be essential for big companies. Intercom live chat is modern, smooth, and has many advanced features that other chat tools lack.

Every CRM software comes with some limitations along with the features it offers. This weaknesses analysis will also help you make the right choice. You can analyze if that weakness is something that concerns your business model.

Our platform also supports dynamic list building, enabling you to run targeted surveys, send newsletters, and automate marketing actions, all from one place. Customerly’s reporting tools are built on the principle that you can’t improve what you can’t measure. What’s more, we support live video support for moments when your customers need in-depth guidance. While clutter-free and straightforward, it does lack some of the more advanced features and capabilities that Zendesk has. According to G2, Intercom has a slight edge over Zendesk with a 4.5-star rating, but from just half the number of users.

Some software only works best for startups, while others have offerings only for large enterprises. Let us look at the type and size of business for which Zednesk and Intercom are suitable. While some of these functionalities related to AI are included in the Zendesk suite, others are part of advanced AI add-ons. If agents want to offer their customers a great experience, they can spend an additional $50 to have the AI add-on. The best thing about this plan is that it is eligible for an advanced AI add-on, has integrated community forums, side conversations, skill-based routing, and is HIPAA-enabled.

Agents can use this to anticipate and proactively address issues before the escalate, or even arise in the first place. It goes without saying that you can generate custom reports to hone in on particular areas of interest. Whether you’re into traditional bar charts, pie charts, treemaps, word clouds, or any other type of visualization, Zendesk is a data “nerd’s” dream. It makes sure that you don’t miss a single inquiry by queuing tickets for agent handling. You can configure it to assign tickets using various methods, such as skills, load balancing, and round-robin to ensure efficient handling. Yes, Zendesk has an Intercom integration that you can find in the Zendesk Marketplace—it’s free to install.

If you’re here, it’s safe to assume that you’re looking for a new customer service solution to support your teams and delight your audience. As two of the giants of the industry, it’s only natural that you’d reach a point where you’re comparing Zendesk vs Intercom. The Zendesk Marketplace offers over 1,500 no-code apps and integrations.

Once the sync is complete, you’ll receive an email to your registered Intercom email address which confirms how many articles were synchronized. In the Response section, you can map data from the Zendesk API response to Conversation or People attributes. After setting up the Request, it is important to test it to ensure it creates the correct data in the connected third-party system.

Compare Zendesk vs. Intercom and future-proof your business with reliable, easy-to-use software. Pipedrive offers access to app integrations built by Pipedrive and third-party vendors, including Zendesk. But unlike the Zendesk sales CRM, Pipedrive does not seamlessly integrate with native customer service software and relies on third-party alternatives.

Visit either of their app marketplaces and look up the Intercom Zendesk integration. Like with many other apps, Zapier seems to be the best and most simple way to connect Intercom to Zendesk. The Zendesk marketplace is also where you can get a lot of great add-ons.

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. Zendesk also packs some pretty potent tools into their platform, so you can empower your agents to do what they do with less repetition. You’ll still be able to get your eyes on basic support metrics, like response times and bot performance, that will help you improve your service quality. However, Intercom’s real strength lies in generating insights into areas like customer journey mapping, product performance, and retention.

Zendesk is designed with the agent in mind, delivering a modern, intuitive experience. The customizable Zendesk Agent Workspace enables reps to work within a single browser tab with one-click navigation across any channel. Intercom, on the other hand, can be a complicated system, creating a steep learning curve for new users.

In a nutshell, both these companies provide great customer support. I tested both of their live chats and their support agents were answering in very quickly and right to the point. Zendesk team can be just a little bit faster depending on the time of the day. Overall, Zendesk has a slight edge over Intercom when it comes to ticketing capabilities. It provides a variety of customer service automation features like auto-closing tickets, setting auto-responses, and creating chat triggers to keep tickets moving automatically.

Basically, you can create new articles, divide them by categories and sections — make it a high end destination for customers when they have questions or issues. It has very limited customization options in comparison to its competitors. Hit the ground running – Master Tidio quickly with our extensive resource library. Learn about features, customize your experience, and find out how to set up integrations and use our apps.

Zendesk also prioritizes operational metrics, while Intercom focuses on behavior and engagement. Furthermore, Intercom offers advanced automation features such as custom inbox rules, targeted messaging, and dynamic triggers based on customer segments. Traditional ticketing systems are one of the major customer service bottlenecks companies want to solve with automation. Intelligent automated ticketing helps streamline customer service management and handling inquiries while reducing manual work. Intercom offers just over 450 integrations, which can make it less cost-effective and more complex to customize the software and adapt to new use cases as you scale. The platform also lacks transparency in displaying reviews, install counts, and purpose-built customer service integrations.