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

If you’re considering switching from Zendesk to Service Hub, we can help. We have a dedicated onboarding team that can ensure you get migrated and set up for optimum success. Learn more about our onboarding services or book in a call to get going straight away. We cut the outsourced support agents by half and saved $100K in salaries.

Although the Zendesk user interface is not as appealing as Intercom’s, it is much easier to navigate for both new and experienced users. Our goal is to be objective,

simple and your first stop when researching for a new service to help you grow your business. We will help you find alternatives and reviews of the products you already use. Intercom’s help center allows you to create and publish engaging articles around help topics. You can use its editor to effortlessly add images, videos, and call-to-action-buttons, wherever necessary.

Zendesk Chat vs Intercom – Pricing

Though, if you compare Zendesk chat vs Intercom, the plugin is a bit hard to use as reviewed by customers. Installing it might take some technical skill and even when installed, could malfunction a bit. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to assist customers through self-help options or access to the relevant articles before connecting them to your team. And this, undoubtedly, leaves your customer support agents free to solve urgent matters. Advanced AI powers Ortto’s next-generation live chat tool, Talk, which lets businesses leverage insights from their customer data platform to provide truly personalized conversations at scale.

• Their help desk is a single inbox to handle customer requests, where your customer support agents can leave private notes for each other and automatically assign requests to the right people.
• There is a conversation routing bot, an operator bot, a lead qualification bot, and an article-suggesting bot, among others.
• E.g., when a customer asks where their order is then send a link to shipping tracking information.
• 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.
• You can use Zendesk Sell to track tasks, streamline workflows, improve engagement, nurture leads, and much more.
• 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.

Zendesk’s customer support is also very fast, though their live chat is only available for registered users. Based on the number of customer service agents you need to accommodate, you could be paying thousands of dollars every single month for the right customer support platform. Therefore, it becomes all the more important to review your options carefully. However, if you look at Zendesk’s high pricing and complicated features, the tool doesn’t work well for small businesses that have limited needs.

MOBILE APPS

With industry-leading automation, your team can cut resolution time by 44%. Our integration with Intercom enables bi-directional contact and case synchronization, so you can continue using Intercom as your front-end digital experience and use Zendesk for case management. Sendcloud adopted these solutions to replace siloed systems like Intercom and a local voice support provider in favor of unified, omnichannel support. Businesses should always consider a tool’s TCO before committing to a purchase. Many software vendors aren’t upfront about the cost of using their products, maintenance costs, or integration fees.

If compared to Intercom’s chatbot, Zendesk offers a relatively latest platform that makes support automation possible. So far, the chatbot can transfer chats to agents or resolve less complex queries in seconds. That means all you have to do is add the code to your website and enable it right away. Intercom stands out here due to its ability  to tailor sales workflows. You can also set up interactive product tours to highlight new features in-product and explain how they work. Save your team time and provide more consistent support by establishing customer service workflows that enable you to automate repetitive tasks and route tickets to the right team member more efficiently.

Zendesk Guide

In addition to all of the above, you can create separate inboxes for different teams and set user roles & permissions on both Gorgias and Intercom. If you run an ecommerce store, choosing a random customer support tool is counterintuitive. You need a tool that is designed with the needs of ecommerce businesses in mind. Gorgias has the tightest integration with Shopify, but some users found the order editing capability within the platform challenging.

• On the other hand, for plans that offer necessary help desk features, Zendesk costs a fortune.
• For their part, Intercom has good basic reporting capabilities.
• Here’s the catch, intercom’s startup program qualifications are a bit difficult.
• Gorgias is built for ecommerce and integrates deeply with Shopify.
• For instance, customers and staff alike can channel messages through it.
• Users can use the information you are providing or turn to a community forum for answers.

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. Though Zendesk now considers itself to be a “service-first CRM company,” since its founding in 2007, their bread and butter offering has leaned much more heavily toward the “service” part of that equation. Keeping this general theme in mind, I’ll dive deeper into how each software’s features compare, so you can decide which use case might best fit your needs. Of course, each brand has a different approach according to the used channel. On Facebook and Instagram, the brands are delivering more relaxed and personal posts, as on Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn, a more informal type of content. On the other hand, as already mentioned above, Intercom has created an authentic visual image around the brand, a graphic, and a colorful way of showing the story of each post.

INTEGRATIONS

Intercom built additional tools to aid in marketing and engagement to supplement its customer service solution. But we doubled down and created a truly full-service CX solution capable of handling any support request. Novo has been a Zendesk customer since 2019 but didn’t immediately start taking full advantage of all our features and capabilities. Zendesk offers robust, pre-built reports for sales and support teams. Here are our top reporting and analytics features and an overview of where Intercom’s reporting limitations lie.

Existing live chat platforms make poor use of AI, forcing customers to interact with a bot that has limited information and provides a  limited set of predetermined options. Integrating your existing CRM, customer data platform (CDP), and other data sources with most live chat platforms is a time-consuming and difficult process. Regarding customer support, both systems have a range of features, including a customer-facing knowledge base, a community forum, and live chat. Both platforms allow you to contact their support team via email or phone.

Zendesk

Moreover, internal collaboration feels a bit more engaging and effortless with notes and mentions. As a leading cloud-based help desk software, Zendesk is home to many popular businesses such as Siemens, Mailchimp, Tesco, GrubHub, and more. The tool is extremely scalable and can be used to match your growing business needs. Help desk tools come in different shapes and sizes- while one may offer a great user interface, the other may lead the way in affordability. Therefore, in order to carry a fair comparison, it is important to first figure out the criteria on which we can weigh the different tools. The bar for customer service keeps rising, and with Front, you’ll always stay ahead.

Intercom, on the other hand, was built for business messaging, so communication is one of their strong suits. Combine that with their prowess in automation and sales solutions, and you’ve got a really strong product that can handle myriad customer relationship needs. metadialog.com You pay a monthly fee for a product, and then there is – sorry – there’s a monthly fee for the product which is tied to actual people. For inbox, we have seats, so the idea of how many people can respond to the messages, or how many people can be on the chat.

Zendesk vs Intercom: Help Desk Software Comparison

Read through the article to understand their strengths and shortcomings and find the tool best suited for your needs. If you want to deliver better customer service, live chat is the key. However, live chat can also take up a lot of time and resources, which you may not have.