8 Zendesk Alternatives for Better Customer Support in 2023

Part of Intercom’s pricing structure is also focused on “people reached”. In other words, if your marketing team decides to launch the Intercom chat on the website, every visitor who interacts with the chat modal will be counted as a person reached. Intercom has created a large supply of resources to help new users self-educate and get ramped up.

To that end, you can import themes or apply your own custom themes to brand your help center the way you want it. 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. 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.

Zoho Desk Pricing

While many customers will be drawn to Intercom for its chatbot functionality, they should know that only task bots are available on the Starter plan. While Help Scout has had a robust email management solution for some time, old-school Intercom users will be relieved to see the improvements in Intercom’s email handling. As recently as 2019, using Intercom to send an email to someone who wasn’t in your user or leads lists or adding a new person to a conversation was a challenge. Now creating a new conversation or ticket only requires a couple of clicks.

It also relieves agents from having to field frequent status requests. Now that we have the general guidance out of the way, it’s time to deep-dive into the details, starting with the topic of tickets. In the current economic environment, it’s never been more important to know exactly what you’re going to be paying for, before you start paying for it. Jetdocs is an internal communication platform where teams can streamline their internal processes. So, depending on your use cases we will have different “best” Zendesk alternatives for you.

Zendesk Chat Pricing

This SaaS leader entered into the competition in 2011, intending to help its clients reach their target audiences and engage them in a conversation right away. 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. 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.

In fact, most companies have this system up and running within just a few hours, and many users have the program mastered within one week. Both platforms share integration features, a knowledge base, a shared inbox, and automation capabilities. The key difference is that Freshdesk focuses on affordability and usability. Organizations can use Freshdesk to set up and handle certain customer inquiries automatically, which saves time and errors. Fullview augments Intercom’s functionality by giving companies the option of adding cobrowsing, session replays, and customer calling to Intercom. For businesses with complex products — especially in SaaS — having these features can go a low way towards making it easier for support agents to resolve support tickets.

Gorgias: The best help desk for online stores

Leave your email below and a member of our team will personally get in touch to show you how Fullview can help you solve support tickets in half the time. Plecto is a dashboard software that allows you to build customizable dashboards using data that you collect in Intercom. Some of the categories of data you can import and organize into dashboards include comments, average customer reply times and events/activities. The dashboards you build using Plecto also sync up with Intercom, meaning they’re updated in real-time, so you’re always working with accurate information. Though these apps didn’t make the cut on our list of the top full-scale intercom integrations, they’re still useful and a great addition to your Intercom setup.

Though the Intercom chat window says that their team typically replies in a few hours, don’t expect to receive any real answer in chat for at least a couple of days. You can see their attention to detail in everything — from tools to the website. And there’s still no way to know how much you’re going to pay for them, since the prices are only revealed after you go through a few sales demos with the Intercom team. If you’d want to test Intercom vs Zendesk before deciding on a tool for good, they both provide free trials for 14 days.

The time savings are astronomical!

8×8 shines in analytics and integrations but stays behind in the amount of productivity features. There’s also a lack of flexibility to consider, and a few feature accessibility restrictions that may be dealbreakers for international companies. Although its VoIP offering is completely manageable, it’s still missing quite a few features. Instead, we create native integrations with WhatsApp, Live chat and all other modern channels. It’s the software of choice for the customer service needs of some of the largest brands in the world (i.e. Decthalon, Bridgestone, Aramex, Pearson, Hamleys, etc).

• We will compare those customer service solutions in terms of functionality and price.
• Intercom stands out here due to its ability  to tailor sales workflows.
• Intercom built additional tools to aid in marketing and engagement to supplement its customer service solution.
• The price of additional tickets goes down as you upgrade to higher plans.
• Our mission is to break apart what CRM is and means.Here we discuss anything that helps create more meaningful lasting work relationships.
• The debate rages between WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce for best ecomm platform — we’ll help you find the best one for you.

In a nutshell, none of the companies provide any decent customer support software. Just like Zendesk, Intercom also offers its own Operator bot, which will automatically suggest relevant articles to customers right in a chat widget. You can create new articles in a simple intuitive WYSIWYG text editor, divide them by categories and sections and customize it with your custom themes. However, it’s obvious that they’re crafted for different use cases.

Supercharge your support team

Want to use similar Zendesk software to completely rethink your customer service strategy and make it more accessible and modern? In this situation, you should definitely choose all-in-one cutting-edge solutions like HelpCrunch or Intercom. In this way, you’ll be able to offer real-time assistance and manage all of your client communications in a single tab.

Expand your business toolstack with a business calling software that canbe easily integrated into your existing CRMs, ecommerce or helpdesk tools,like Salesforce, Freshdesk, Help Scout, and dozens more. CloudTalk offers 50+ complex tools to save your time, money, and energy.Here are examples of features from various categories that may interest you. Trengo allows us to centralize all communication, both internally and with clients, across channels. metadialog.com From WhatsApp to email, and Facebook Messenges to live chat messages, there is now a single place to manage everything. Gorgias has the tightest integration with Shopify, but some users found the order editing capability within the platform challenging. It’s easy to modify the Shopify order directly from the Gorgias platform, but when this is done, the changes to the order show up in the Shopify Order timeline as ‘Gorgias API’ changes.

Top Salesforce Service Cloud features:

But, if this platform isn’t Zendesk, the best alternatives are right above, waiting for you to try them. If you’re out there looking for a simple yet robust tool with cool features, such as collision detection, try Help Scout as soon as possible. What makes Help Scout a good alternative to Zendesk is the ease that comes with a unified dashboard that boosts team collaboration, thanks to its modern interface. I mean that this product fully operates on your IT system essentials, such as handling tickets, managing assets, and eliminating all the manual work. “I like how HubSpot Service Hub helps a company from every perspective.

With Groove, you can easily manage multiple channels such as email, live chat, and social media in one central hub. HubSpot Service Hub is a comprehensive customer service platform designed to help you provide exceptional customer experiences. It offers features such as automated ticketing, knowledge base management, and self-service portals which make it easy to respond quickly to customer inquiries. With HubSpot Service Hub, you can also customize the look and feel of your customer support page to match your brand for a professional touch.

Pricing plans: Zendesk vs. Intercom

Zendesk Chat shows up as a chat bar docked at the bottom of your site. Intercom features phone support, online support, and a knowledge base. One of these differences is the ability for agents to connect to customers through their own apps versus using a collaboration feature.

• When it comes to budgeting, Intercom is one tool that’s better to overestimate than underestimate.
• That doesn’t necessarily mean that Zendesk chat is right for your business.
• This can be a bummer for many as they can always stumble upon an issue.
• Now that we have looked at some of the most popular helpdesk solutions for Zendesk, here’s a summary of their pricing and ratings.
• Since Gorgias is built specifically for ecommerce, all their integrations will be extremely relevant to your business.
• They can get the context of the customer’s questions and transfer questions from Chatbox into Message.

Finally, I wish they had some out-of-the-box workforce management tools. Their reporting is a good start for someone that’s just getting familiar with the app. Still, when you need to do some forecasting, it would be great to get some essential reporting/forecasting that coincides with the data they’re already capturing.”

Leveraging AI-powered chatbots, Zoho Desk employs Zia, an intelligent assistant, to share relevant knowledge base solutions with customers and agents. Zendesk chatbot software is a suite of support app that helps transform your customer service into actionable customer retention and lead source via agent deployment. It has one of the most flexible plan structures, making it ideal for businesses of any size. It consists of support, chats, calls center solution, and knowledge base modules that you can upgrade separately. Zendesk makes support, sales, and customer engagement software for everyone with a quick to implement, easy to use, platform.

With CheckMarket, you can easily design surveys with drag-and-drop tools and customize them with various options such as images, videos, and more. The platform also provides powerful analytics to help you make sense of the data collected. CheckMarket integrates with Intercom to enable businesses to send surveys directly from Intercom conversations.

• The Zendesk SMB pricing plan is 3x times the price of Trengo’s best value plan.
• Intercom wins the reporting and analytics category due to its unique visualization and display formats for contact center and article data.
• However, I do recommend Intercom for eCommerce stores that may need to integrate the features with their store.
• With that in mind, take another look through this guide as you begin to narrow down your choices.
• According to one Capterra review from earlier this year, „Zendesk seems to have done all of its innovation years ago as the product has achieved a plateau of functionality of features.”
• Like when they bought out the Zopim live chat and integrated it with their toolset.

In summary, the best alternative to Zendesk depends on your unique business requirements and use case. Jetdocs is the top choice for teams focusing on ticketing solutions, while Intercom excels in offering a comprehensive customer experience platform. Gist presents an affordable option with unlimited seats, JitBit caters to businesses seeking a self-hosted solution, and Crisp.Chat provides an amazing free live chat service.