Best Live Chat Software: 10 Tools to Offer Real-Time Support

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. Learn about all the pros and cons of using respond.io and which respond.io alternatives might be better for your situation. These 5 inspiring Facebook messenger ads examples will help you run creative and conversational ads and stand out from your competitors. After researching the top 3 best Intercom alternatives, I would say the most important outcome is that you should know what you are looking for. Just like Intercom, Drift used to charge companies extra for every additional 1000 contacts.

• With Crisp, you’ll be able to engage with customers in meaningful ways – from automated conversations to one-on-one interactions.
• Plecto is a dashboard software that allows you to build customizable dashboards using data that you collect in Intercom.
• This means that you don’t have to rely solely on the features and functions that Intercom provides — you can add new features, functions, and integrations to the platform as well.
• Near the end of 2015, the marketing team at Zendesk noticed a rise in Google searches for “zendesk alternative”.
• If you’re looking for a tool to improve your customer service workflow, there are solutions that can offer the same benefits without costing an arm and a leg.
• However, Zoho’s case is an exception because it’s a bargain for the functions it offers.

Zendesk has 3360 PPC keywords spread over 2001 ads that lead to 26 landing pages. So in exchange for brand awareness, Zendesk helped CXM generate email leads by lending them content. Besides strategic collaborations and partnerships, I’ve never seen a deal like this anywhere else. Clicking on the picture takes you to a landing page where you can download Zendesk’s CX report in exchange for joining the CXM’s email marketing list. And Zendesk has over 244 case studies on companies like Riot Games, Vodafone, DollarShaveClub, Uber, and Airbnb, and more. In case you didn’t click on any of the two buttons and scroll down, you are (again) met with product recommendations and some additional benchmarks similar to the ones at the start of this funnel.

Self-service saves time for you and your customers

Zendesk offers a basic plan that is affordable and will suit my needs. However, I do recommend Intercom for eCommerce stores that may need to integrate the features with their store. It enables you to get quality product feedback from the right customers at the right time through the app or by email. Intercom assists with the onboarding and retention of customers through targeted email and in-app messages triggered by time or behavior.

It lets customers reach out via messaging, a live chat tool, voice, and social media. Zendesk supports teams that can then field these issues from a nice unified dashboard. Zendesk has great intelligent routing and escalation protocols as well. Similar to Zendesk, Zoho Desk is a universal customer support tool with great integration capabilities and excellent value for money.

Best features of Intercom

Further, if companies plan to create multi-channel campaigns, Intercom makes a great fit. However, customers should keep in mind that Intercom does not offer voice. However, customers can purchase multiple Intercom plans to use together, or purchase add-ons to select just the features they want. In an omnichannel contact center, agents can manage customer interactions across channels, no matter which channel a customer uses to contact the company.

As you can imagine, banking from anywhere requires a flexible, robust customer service experience. Brian Kale, the head of customer success at Bank Novo, describes how Zendesk helped Bank Novo boost productivity and streamline service. The support team faced spiking metadialog.com ticket volumes, numerous new customer accounts, and the need to shift to remote work. If a customer starts an interaction by talking to a chatbot and can’t find a solution, our chatbot can open a ticket and intelligently route it to the most qualified agent.

Ticketing on the Intercom platform

Zendesk also makes it easy to customize your help center, with out-of-the-box tools to design color, theme, and layout–both on mobile and desktop. Intercom’s help center allows you to draft and organize collections of articles, accessible to customers via a search bar in the Messenger widget. Zendesk’s Admin Center provides tools that automate agent ticket workflows. Operator, Intercom’s automation engine, empowers Intercom chatbots to gather key information from each website visitor to qualify leads and route customers to the right destination.

On the other hand, if your team is more focused on customer support, it’s probably better to stick to Intercom or pick another alternative. There are some key features that you would need for some decent customer support that just are not present in Drift. You would likely regret your choice for Drift, and even the people at Drift would advise against it. However, if you have enough budget to spend and want a customer communication tool that is made especially for sales teams, you won’t find a tool with more great features. The built-in sales calendar, recording sales videos, and the live view are some fine examples of this. At the same time, Harvard Business Review estimates that it’s up to 25 times more expensive to acquire new customers than retain existing ones.

Comprehensive reporting and analytics

They can get the context of the customer’s questions and transfer questions from Chatbox into Message. They do have a ton of similarities, but recognizing the differences may help you to make the crucial decision about which one to use for your business. The trigger feature reduces cart abandonment and increases conversions.

Intercom is a popular messaging platform that can be used to connect your customers and team members.It’s used by a lot companies as their primary customer support tool. To begin with, putting help desk platforms “side by side” is a thankless job as software differs in functionality, price, and purposes. The compared vendors share a strategy of delivering their services as either separate add-ons or all-in-one tools. Intercom also offers a few features that are unique to its platform – one of these being the ability to segment users based on their behavior. This means that you can send targeted messages to different groups of users based on how they interact with your product.

Call Center Tools

Pre-selected assignment rules customize each ticket’s destination, assigning routing paths to agents or departments based on customer priority status, query type, or issue details. Zendesk has over 160,000 customers, including some well-known brands like Siemens, Uber and Instacart. Many use cases call for different approaches, and Zendesk and Intercom are but two software solutions for each case. However, this is somewhat subjective, and depending on your business needs and favorite tools, you may argue we got it all mixed up, and Intercom is truly superior. Some startups and small businesses may prefer one app, while large companies and enterprise operations will have their own requirements. You get call recording, muting and holding, conference calling, and call blocking.

• From trial to onboarding and beyond, Help Scout wants its customers to succeed.
• This makes things much easier for all parties involved and keeps all your customer communication is one place so everyone has access to it.
• Unlike Help Scout, which has a clear, direct pricing table on its website, Intercom’s pricing plan can be a bit more challenging to get your arms around.
• It will really help you get up faster and understand the product deeper, and not waste time.
• It enables you to get quality product feedback from the right customers at the right time through the app or by email.
• So if an agent needs to switch from chat to phone to email (or vice versa) with a customer, it’s all on the same ticketing page.

A team inbox is a collaborative tool that allows teams to work together to offer customer support, without getting in each other’s way. The inbox is easy to scan—allowing teams to track bugs and see who is waiting for a reply. Users can build teams, assign tasks to colleagues, and save replies to FAQs.

Join 10,000+ teams creating better experiences

In short, if you run a big company with a huge sales operation, it’s worth considering Drift. As I already mentioned in the introduction of this article, one of Intercom’s biggest downside is the high costs that come with the software. Depending on which features you need, there is a good chance Drift may even be more expensive. If you run a large enterprise that needs a tool with all the features you can think of and you are not on a budget, Intercom may still be the better option for you.

• If you’re considering switching from Zendesk to Service Hub, we can help.
• If your business has an app, in-app messaging can be used to send messages to customers.
• Intercom is a customer support messenger, bot, and live chat service provider that empowers its clients to provide instant support in real-time.
• Kustomer is one of the best Zendesk alternatives for teams that need CRM capabilities.
• Intercom has been marketing itself as a business messaging platform right from the start.
• Additionally, Jetdocs’ competitive pricing at 1/5th the cost of Zendesk makes it an attractive option for businesses of all sizes looking to optimize their customer support without breaking the bank.

Again, Zendesk has surpassed the number of reviewers when compared to Intercom. Some of the highly-rated features include ticket creation user experience, email to case, and live chat reporting. If compared to Intercom’s chatbot, Zendesk offers a relatively latest platform that makes support automation possible.

Why Trengo is a great Intercom alternative

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. Customers can view their tickets in the “Messages” section of Intercom’s Messenger, along with any other conversations the customer has had with the company. When a customer views a ticket in Messenger, they will find a status bar that gives a visual cue to the current state of the request. The system also sends email updates for those who don’t want to check up on their issue in-app.

Suite Team is more affordable than Intercom’s $79/month tier; Suite Professional is more expensive. Overall, Zendesk wins out on plan flexibility, especially given that it has a lower price plan for dipping your toes in the water. And considering how appropriate Zendesk is for larger companies, there’s a good chance you may need to take them up on that. With industry-leading automation, your team can cut resolution time by 44%. We have numerous customers that do this and benefit greatly from our out-of-the-box integration with Intercom.

They can also see console information (like network, device and user journey info) on a side panel within a session replay and easily filter by errors, warnings and logs. Another drawback is that you can’t call users directly through Intercom. You have to go to their customer details page, locate their phone number (if you have it), and then call them some other way. This can be inconvenient if you’re having an issue with a customer and need to talk about it right away — especially if you want to call them and cobrowse with them in your app. Fortunately, there are integrations that can add this functionality to Intercom. DMs allow you to send messages to users directly from Intercom’s interface, rather than having to switch over to another app like Messenger or WhatsApp for communication purposes.

However, we will say that Intercom just edges past Zendesk when it comes to self-service resources. The debate rages between WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce for best ecomm platform — we’ll help you find the best one for you. Please reload the page and try again, or you can contact Zendesk for support. Customer stories are another big part of the equation when comparing Intercom vs. Zendesk. Here, we’ll dig into three different companies that chose Zendesk in the Intercom vs. Zendesk debate.

If you thought that Zendesk prices were confusing, let me introduce you to the Intercom charges. It’s virtually impossible to predict what you’re going to pay for Intercom at the end of the day. They charge for agent seats and people reached, don’t reveal their prices, and offer tons of add-ons at additional cost. If I had to describe Intercom’s helpdesk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools. If you create a new chat with the team, land on a page with no widget, and go back in the browser for some reason, your chat will go puff. Intercom has more customization features for features like bots, themes, triggers, and funnels.