Alternatives To Intercom: 8 Customer Communication Platforms CCM solutions

With Freshdesk, organizations can set up automations to handle specific customer inquiries as appropriate. This includes automatic delivery of help desk tickets to the correct department or agent, prioritization of inquiries based on severity, and escalation of urgent issues. Freshdesk also allows users to customize ticket fields and workflows to suit their specific needs and preferences. HubSpot is the superior option if you need sophisticated marketing automation tools. HubSpot offers a variety of features, such as email marketing, social media scheduling, and statistics to assist companies in developing and maintaining strong connections with their customers.

Zendesk chat provides a personal connection with customers who need support. One of these differences is the ability for agents to connect to customers through their own apps versus using a collaboration feature. Each platform offers tools for providing contextual support and can integrate with popular platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot.

The Zendesk alternative: modern customer support with Intercom

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of Zendesk and Intercom’s pricing tiers. Check out the research-backed comparison below to better understand how each solution can add value to your organization. Understanding these fundamental differences should go a long way in helping you pick between the two, but does that mean you can’t use one platform to do what the other does better? These are both still very versatile products, so don’t think you have to get too siloed into a single use case.

Help Scout continues to offer a strong shared inbox product, though Intercom’s user experience has improved. While the agent experience won’t look revolutionary to most support professionals, the customer experience is pretty nice. Polytomic is another integration that allows you to sync data from a variety of sources. It also allows you to automate the data sync process or set up custom sync schedules to make sure that you’re working with current and relevant data that is consistent across all your systems. You can even integrate Statuspage with Intercom to give your customers the ability to report incidents directly from the Intercom dashboard. With this integration, you can add status updates as part of your account management workflow, so you don’t have to worry about keeping track of them separately.

Why Should You Use a Zendesk Alternatives?

This saves you time by not having to answer each question individually. Intercom is usually matched against ZenDesk, a ground-breaking powerhouse among helpdesk platforms. In fact, Intercom’s marketing strategy is based on how it’s different from ZenDesk, which started out as a ticket system for incoming customer queries. Yes, you can replace Zendesk with Intercom as both platforms have a rich set of features and integrations.

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. However, if you are looking for a robust messaging solution with customer support features, go for Intercom. Its intuitive messenger can help your business boost engagement and improve sales and marketing efforts.

The HubSpot CRM Platform

Get to a resolution faster by switching to voice calls and share your screen – without switching to another platform. Missive has lots of the same features as Intercom, but it costs less money. In your search for an alternative, you have likely come across Drift, a great and close Intercom competitor.

• The usable plan for most businesses starts at the price point of $29/month/agent and includes advanced features such as SLAs, event rules, etc.
• This feature is available on all the channels your customers use to get in touch with your brand.
• It’s also good for sending and receiving notifications, as well as for quick filtering through the queue of open tickets.
• That’s where Zendesk Marketplace comes in — a directory of 1183+ third-party apps and plugins that you can integrate with your Zendesk products.
• You can also create your own help center so that customers can come up with solutions to their own issues.
• You can set up email sequences that specify how and when leads and contacts are engaged.

This combo is often used in other software to insert hyperlinks into text. Using the shortcut here might be frustrating for those accustomed to the hyperlink use case. An easy fix would be to place an “add a link” option in the action menu to accommodate those who may try to use the shortcut for linking out of habit.

What content is publishing Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk on Social Media?

You can even improve efficiency and transparency by setting up task sequences, defining sales triggers, and strategizing with advanced forecasting and reporting tools. Starting at $19 per user per month, it’s also on the cheaper end of the spectrum compared to high-end CRMs like ActiveCampaign and HubSpot. Triggers should prove especially useful for agents, allowing them to do things like automate notifications for actions like ticket assignments, ticket closing/reopening, or new ticket creation. 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. Intercom allows visitors to search for and view articles from the messenger widget.

Whether it is about organizing customer issues or communicating with team members, dashboards can make an impactful difference. Intercom can be a good choice for medium to large businesses that wish to go for aesthetics/user experience over pricing as the tool is quite heavily priced. As a leading cloud-based help desk software, Zendesk is home to many popular businesses such as Siemens, Mailchimp, metadialog.com 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.

MOBILE APPS

Zendesk gives users access to customer insights like CSAT ratings, NPS scores, as well as a tool that makes predictions about customer satisfaction. Users also have access to an omnichannel dashboard feature, which provides an overview of channel stats like ticket volume, pending items, active chats, and more. Additionally, users can track key success factors like agent productivity, wait times, and more–tying efforts to satisfaction. Unlike Zendesk and Intercom, Drift is upfront about the fact that the platform isn’t really built for customer support. Instead, they make it very clear that the platform is specifically designed for sales and marketing teams but offer plans that support everyone from individuals to enterprises and early-stage startups. Drift is a cloud-based platform specializing in conversational marketing features that help sales and marketing teams close more deals.

While Intercom does not offer free trials, they do offer demo versions of each plan. Below, we’ve compared the usability of Zendesk’s and Intercom’s agent dashboards and administrator controls. Survey composer allows you to create the question and answer format, also customizing color, rating scales, and greetings. Zendesk Sales Engagement Tools (Reach) uses a credit system to help you find new leads or add information to existing leads. 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.

Intercom details

If you’ve read some of our other posts on selecting customer support tools, you’ll know that we’re not here for the hard sell. We want you to end up with the tool that best suits your team and company, and while we think Help Scout is the best choice for most teams, there are some circumstances where Intercom might be the better pick. Basic service`s feature is a huge number of out-of-the-box integrations. You can integrate Smooch profile with Zendesk, Viber, Slack, Telegram, email and many other services. It`s the solution for communication between your website`s support and customers through many different channels. Intercom calculates the price based on the number of seats (users) you request.

Help Scout has pre-made reports for each communication channel (email, chat, and phone), as well as dashboards that track agent performance, customer happiness (CSAT), and Docs (knowledge base) activity. In addition to these base reports, you can create views based on tags and custom fields to help dial in on what is most important to your team. Intercom’s proactive messaging capabilities are one of its greatest assets, giving companies many ways to engage with current and prospective customers. As mentioned earlier in this section, some of Intercom’s messaging capabilities, such as product tours and checklists, are particularly impressive. The trouble is, most of Intercom’s outbound messaging functionality isn’t part of the base package. Light users can view and follow conversations, leave private notes, view help articles, view customer profiles and reporting data, and even create and send messages in-app or on your website.