Best Intercom Integrations in 2023 for Customer Support

Intercom is best for teams that want centralized messaging and connected platforms tailored to each customer-facing team. Drift is ideal for users that sell products with longer sales cycles and plan on using chatbots for multiple use cases–i.e. Zendesk, one of the leading companies in the market, has many features such as CRM, messaging, marketing, and a ticket system. In addition, it also allows businesses to provide customer support through different channels.

• If the answer is “yes”, then that’s where I can vouch for Front, but again, you’re accepting support fragmentation, and good luck roping that back in in the future.
• Plus, it integrates with popular tools like Facebook Messenger and Twitter so you can provide support on those channels as well.
• For freelancers and enterprises, Zendesk is likely to be a better fit.
• This helps prevent customers from receiving duplicate or conflicting information.
• Missive’s team and assignment feature allows you or any team member to assign specific people to specific conversations, so it’s easy to know who is responsible for handling them.
• Are you looking for an alternative to Zendesk to provide excellent customer service?

On the first impression, ProProfs Help Desk feels as simple as using Gmail or just any other email client. You can view customer conversations under multiple inboxes, check pending tickets, set the priority of issues, add labels- all from an intuitive dashboard. With the Team Inbox, your support agents can manage and reply to conversations, wherever they’re happening- Email, live chat, Twitter, Facebook, and more. They also have an integrated capability where you see everything related to the one customer in one spot – all their interactions with you, and can move the customer through your custom stages.

Zendesk vs Intercom vs ProProfs: In-Depth Feature & Price Comparison

LiveAgent is often referred to as the best Zendesk alternative for cost value. This platform acts as a help desk tool capable of receiving and managing client requests from various channels. For example, LiveAgent metadialog.com allows users to communicate via email, social media, telephone, or live chat. Many users agree that LiveAgent strikes a great balance between a simple interface and a feature-rich ticketing system.

Like Zendesk, Intercom has plenty of basic automation and organizational tools like list segmentation, targeted messaging, and the ability to use events to set up triggers to help agents improve their workflows. 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. Whichever solution you choose, mParticle can help integrate your data. MParticle is a Customer Data Platform offering plug-and-play integrations to Zendesk and Intercom, along with over 300 other marketing, analytics, and data warehousing tools.

HubSpot Service Hub tools

Help Scout also offers the ability to send your users microsurveys — short, targeted surveys that allow you to quickly assess customer sentiment. Six types of surveys are possible, including NPS, multi-choice, and free-form text. Although Help Scout chats are always live, Beacon allows for some asynchronous communication.

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. Managers can choose to automatically route tickets and agents can prioritize conversations that need immediate attention. You can create different inboxes for support and sales, add permissions, and use mentions to collaborate on challenging customer questions. In terms of usability, ProProfs Help Desk has been diligently designed to meet the needs of customer service teams of any size, business. Right from small startups to large enterprises, all businesses can manage their ticketing needs and stay available to their customers 24×7. 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.

Platform

HubSpot Service Hub goes beyond the standard features by providing a dedicated customer portal. This portal gives your clients control over their experience by allowing them to view ticket status updates and previous outcomes. By activating the customer portal, you can ensure that ticket discussions between customers and representatives can continue seamlessly, enabling faster issue resolution.

From there, premium plans range from $14.99 to $39.99 per agent, per month. Best Zendesk alternative for organizations prioritizing CRM integration and personalized customer service. Their internal chat lets you discuss issues as well as create group chats with team members, share drafts, mention teammates, and use emojis and reactions. This makes it easy to scale your customer-facing team’s communication without affecting quality or efficiency. Best Zendesk alternative for businesses looking for an all-in-one solution for ticket intake and service provision. Help Scout also makes it easy for organizations to track engagements with specific customers from the moment an internal ticket is open to the moment the issue is resolved.

Intercom

The Zendesk chat tool has most of the necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers, and live chat analytics. 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 either track your performance on a pre-built dashboard or customize and build one for yourself. This customized dashboard will help you see metrics that you’d like to focus on regularly. Proactive tools help your team solve problems before customers reach out, with minimal effort. However, as Monese grew and eyed a European expansion, it became clear that the company needed to centralize data in a single solution that would scale along with them.

Why Zendesk is a good Intercom alternative

The dashboard’s left-hand column organizes and sorts all tickets by urgency. When an agent clicks on a conversation, the full conversation history populates the middle screen. Send surveys at key points throughout the customer buying cycle, utilizing multiple types of question formats. Surveys turn customer insights into action, with triggers and campaign response adjustments depending on customer responses.

Though most customers consider both Zendesk and Freshdesk to be easy to use, both platforms have some specific features that aid the job of customer service teams. While agents can chat with customers in real time via Intercom’s Messenger, they have set the platform up in a way that encourages and supports asynchronous conversations. Chats via Messenger are more akin to text messages, where each party can respond in their own time. If you’re familiar with customer support terminology, Intercom’s usage of the term “ticket” might seem confusing. Usually, platforms use the term “conversation” in place of the word ticket, but Intercom has set things up a bit differently. Intercom’s customer interactions are still called conversations, but now, when an issue has proven to be too complex for an immediate resolution, agents can convert the conversation to a ticket.

Best Freshdesk Alternatives To Upgrade from a Clunky UI

But what’s interesting is that even though Zendesk completely dominates its market, it got that way without relying on aggressive marketing tactics. When it comes to growth, people at Zendesk know exactly what they’re doing and are known for their clairvoyant growth predictions. Here’s Mikkel Svane, Zendesk’s CEO, thanking his team in 2020 after reaching a $1B revenue run rate which he predicted back in 2016. Competitors App helps marketers monitor their competitors’ marketing moves in one place, with very little time investment. Let’s take a closer look into engagement details and see on which Social Media channel has Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk reached a higher engagement. Of course, each brand has a different approach according to the used channel.

You can try it now to enjoy the free plan or 14-day free trial without inputting your credit card details. Giving support teams easy access to relevant contextual data creates better, more human customer service. Companies can use Messages to provide targeted communications like product announcements and company updates or even to surface relevant knowledge base articles at tricky points in the customer journey.

Top 10 Email Management Software for a Tidy Inbox in 2023

Both tools also allow you to connect your email account and manage it from within the application to track open and click-through rates. In addition, Zendesk and Intercom feature advanced sales reporting and analytics that make it easy for sales teams to understand their prospects and customers more deeply. Fostering cross-functional collaboration can be key to building efficiency within this setup, but it’s not guaranteed. This is a positive for both platforms, as it means you can utilise customer data to provide contextual and relevant information. This means from the perspective of providing a comprehensive all-in-one solution, HubSpot takes the edge over Zendesk, as it’s been specifically designed to provide a seamless end-to-end experience.

One of the recurring topics throughout this post has been Intercom’s pricing structure. 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. They only list pricing for one of their plans, and even that can become convoluted as you dig into what is and isn’t included. Though most of Intercom’s 2,000+ reviews on G2 are positive, there is a recurring theme of lackluster support. Customers mention long wait times and a lack of global business hours. From trial to onboarding and beyond, Help Scout wants its customers to succeed.

• Help Scout provides a more affordable option compared to Intercom, but it doesn’t have all the advanced sales and marketing features offered by Intercom.
• Six types of surveys are possible, including NPS, multi-choice, and free-form text.
• On the other hand, Intercom has all its (fewer) tools and features integrated with each other way better, which makes your experience with the tool as smooth as silk.
• It is great to have CRM functionality inside your customer service platform because it helps maintain great customer experiences by storing all past customer engagements and conversation histories.
• As you can see in the above image, the next plan in line costs $400 more per month.
• The methods that help desks use, however, are meant to cater to possibly thousands to millions of messages.