Successfully Migrating from Zendesk to Intercom: A Guide from VPS

Zendesk, unlike Intercom, is a more affordable and predictable customer service platform. Also, it’s the pioneer in the support and communication tools market. You can always count on it if you need a reliable customer support platform to process tickets, support users, and get advanced reporting. Intercom is the go-to solution for businesses seeking to elevate customer support and sales processes. With its user-friendly interface and advanced functionalities, Intercom offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed to effectively communicate and engage with customers. Intercom also excels in real-time chat solutions, making it a strong contender for businesses seeking dynamic customer interaction.

Customer support and security are vital aspects to consider when evaluating helpdesk solutions like Zendesk and Intercom. Let’s examine and compare how each platform addresses these crucial areas to ensure effective support operations and data protection. Gain valuable insights with Intercom’s analytics and reporting capabilities.

This includes secure login options like SAML or JWT SSO (single sign-on) and native content redaction for sensitive information. We also adhere to numerous industry standards and regulations, such as HIPAA, SOC2, ISO 27001, HDS, FedRAMP LI-SaaS, ISO 27018, and ISO 27701. The Zendesk Support app gives you zendesk intercom access to live Intercom customer data in Zendesk, and lets you create new tickets in Zendesk directly from Intercom conversations. This gives your team the context they need to provide fast and excellent support. You need a complete customer service platform that’s seamlessly integrated and AI-enhanced.

HubSpot helps seamlessly integrate customer service tools that you and your team already leverage. If money is limited for your business, a help desk that can be a Zendesk alternative or an Intercom alternative is ThriveDesk. They offer straightforward pricing plans designed to meet the diverse needs of businesses, with only 2 options to choose from; it makes it easier for business owners to make a decision regarding pricing. Choose the plan that suits your support requirements and budget, whether you’re a small team or a growing enterprise. Seamlessly integrate Intercom with popular third-party tools and platforms, centralizing customer data and improving workflow efficiency.

Help Desk Migration service fulfills to upmost security principles, providing utmost greatest security for your records. We are compliant with HIPAA, CCPA, PCI DSS Level 1, GDPR, and other key data safety principles. Transfer effortlessly your ticket side conversations while moving from Zendesk. During the data migration, these conversations will be imported as private comments into your new helpdesk. To exclude mess, add extra tags to the imported tickets to identify them from the existing ones.

Say what you will, but Intercom’s design and overall user experience leave all its competitors far behind. To sum things up, one can get really confused trying to make sense of the Zendesk suite pricing, let alone calculate costs. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Just like Zendesk, Intercom also offers its Operator bot, which will automatically suggest relevant articles to clients right in a chat widget.

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Let’s explore how Zendesk and Intercom stack up in terms of basic functionalities required by a helpdesk software. Intercom’s messaging system enables real-time interactions through various channels, including chat, email, and in-app messages. Connect with customers wherever they are for timely assistance and personalized experiences. Designed for all kinds of businesses, from small startups to giant enterprises, it’s the secret weapon that keeps customers happy.

Check out our chart that compares the capabilities of Zendesk vs. Intercom. If you see either of these warnings, wait 60 seconds for your Zendesk rate limit to be reset and try again. If this becomes a persistent issue for your team, we recommend contacting Zendesk. G2 ranks Intercom higher than Zendesk for ease of setup, and support quality—so you can expect a smooth transition, effortless onboarding, and continuous success. Whether you’re starting fresh with Intercom or migrating from Zendesk, set up is quick and easy.

This unpredictability in pricing might lead to higher costs, especially for larger companies. While it offers a range of advanced features, the overall costs and potential inconsistencies in support could be a concern for some businesses​​​​. Zendesk is renowned for its comprehensive toolset that aids in automating customer service workflows and fine-tuning chatbot interactions. Its strengths are prominently seen in multi-channel support, with effective email, social media, and live chat integrations, coupled with a robust internal knowledge base for agent support.

Intercom is more for improving sales cycle and customer relationships, while Zendesk has everything a customer support representative can dream about, but it does lack wide email functionality. On the other hand, it provides call center functionalities, unlike Intercom. Zendesk AI is the intelligence layer that infuses CX intelligence into every step of the customer journey.

In addition to being pre-trained on billions of real support interactions, our AI powers bots, agent and admin assist, and intelligent workflows that lead to 83 percent lower administrative costs. Customers have also noted that they can implement Zendesk AI five times faster than other solutions. Intercom offers just over 450 integrations, which can make it less cost-effective and more complex to customize the software and adapt to new use cases as you scale.

Zendesk is angled more for managing customer support, while Intercom is better for managing customer relationships

Let’s explore these unique offerings and see how they can benefit your business. Intercom’s solution aims to streamline high-volume ticket influx and provide personalized, conversational support. It also includes extensive integrations with over 350 CRM, email, ticketing, and reporting tools.

These features can add significant value for businesses aiming to implement more sophisticated support capabilities as they scale. On the other hand, Intercom brings a dynamic approach to customer support. Its suite of tools goes beyond traditional ticketing and focuses on customer engagement and messaging automation.

However, some users find customization challenging, and the platform is considered expensive, requiring careful cost evaluation. Experience the comprehensive power of Intercom for effective customer communication, automation, support tools, integrations, and analytics. Streamline support processes with Intercom’s ticketing system and knowledge base. Efficiently manage customer inquiries and empower customers to find answers independently. So, get ready for an insightful journey through the landscapes of Zendesk and Intercom, where support excellence converges with AI innovation. Hivers offers round-the-clock proactive support across all its plans, ensuring that no matter the time or issue, expert assistance is always available.

Meanwhile, our WFM software enables businesses to analyze employee metrics and performance, helping them identify improvements, implement strategies, and set long-term goals. The strength of Zendesk’s UI lies in its structured and comprehensive environment, adept at managing numerous customer interactions and integrating various channels seamlessly. However, compared to the more contemporary designs like Intercom’s, Zendesk’s UI may appear outdated, particularly in aspects such as chat widget and customization options.

This is because Zendesk has rate limits on how many records can be accessed or transferred per minute or hour. The rate limits also depend on what type of licensing plan you have with Zendesk. For example, an Enterprise plan will allow you to transfer your data at a faster rate than a Professional plan. With Zapier, you can integrate everything from basic data entry to end-to-end processes. Here are some of the business-critical workflows that people automate with Zapier. So, whether you’re a startup or a global giant, Zendesk’s got your back for top-notch customer support.

Why don’t you try something equally powerful yet more affordable, like HelpCrunch? As a result, customers can implement the help desk software quickly—without the need for developers—and see a faster return on investment. Plus, our transparent pricing doesn’t have hidden fees or endless add-ons, so customers know exactly what they’re paying for and can calculate the total cost of ownership ahead of time. In comparison, Intercom’s confusing pricing structure that features multiple add-ons may be unsuitable for small businesses. You may need support service call recordings for teaching your customer service reps. Our tool allows you import or export them to the expected support service platform as attachments. If you are currently using Zendesk as your customer support platform, you might be wondering how to switch to Intercom and transfer your existing historical customer data.

Experience targeted communication with Intercom’s automation and segmentation features. Create personalized messages for specific customer segments, driving engagement and satisfaction. You get a dashboard that makes creating, tracking, and organizing tickets easy. Choose Zendesk for a scalable, team-size-based pricing model and Intercom for initial low-cost access with flexibility in adding advanced features. For small companies and startups, Intercom offers a Starter plan — with a balanced suite of features from each of the solutions below — at $74 per month per user, billed annually. With both tools, you can also use support bots to automatically suggest specific articles, track customers’ ratings, and localize help center content to serve your customers in their native language.

Their reports are attractive, dynamic, and integrated right out of the box. You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads. You could say something similar for Zendesk’s standard service offering, so it’s at least good to know they have Zendesk Sell, a capable CRM option to supplement it. You can use Zendesk Sell to track tasks, streamline workflows, improve engagement, nurture leads, and much more. Yes, you can integrate the Intercom solution into your Zendesk account.

You can even moderate user content to leverage your customer community. Zendesk also packs some pretty potent tools into their platform, so you can empower your agents to do what they do with less repetition. Agents can use basic automation (like auto-closing tickets or setting auto-responses), apply list organization to stay on top of their tasks, or set up triggers to keep tickets moving automatically. In a nutshell, none of the customer support software companies provide decent assistance for users.

When comparing the reporting and analytics features of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms offer robust tools, but with distinct focuses and functionalities. Key offerings include automated support with help center articles, a messenger-first ticketing system, and a powerful inbox to centralize customer queries. Zendesk and Intercom are robust tools with a wide range of customer service and CRM features. Intercom offers an easy way to nurture your qualified leads (prospects) into customers with Intercom Series. One place Intercom really shines as a standalone CRM is its data utility. You can create articles, share them internally, group them for users, and assign them as responses for bots—all pretty standard fare.

What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. You can create dozens of articles in a simple, intuitive WYSIWYG text editor, divide them by categories and sections, and customize with your custom themes. All customer questions, be it via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel, are landing in one dashboard, where your agents can solve them quickly and efficiently.

You can use the Intercom Articles feature to automatically import all of your published articles from Zendesk and organize them into collections that match your existing knowledge base structure. Just browse to Articles within your Intercom dashboard, and click “Migrate from Zendesk”. There will be no sync between Zendesk and Intercom, so changes in Zendesk won’t be reflected in Intercom. Zendesk’s per-agent pricing structure makes it a budget-friendly option for smaller teams, allowing costs to scale with team growth.

The Intercom versus Zendesk conundrum is probably the greatest problem in the customer service software world. They both offer some state-of-the-art core functionality and numerous unusual features. Whether you’ve just started searching for a customer support tool or have been using one for a while, chances are you know about Zendesk and Intercom. The former is one of the oldest and most reliable solutions on the market, while the latter sets the bar high in terms of innovative and out-of-the-box features. Zendesk provides comprehensive security and compliance features, ensuring customer data privacy.

Whether you’re migrating from Zendesk to Intercom, use our automated migration solution. It will permit you to migrate all your data to a future platform in just a couple of clicks. Thus, you will be able to have your import or export done in a timely fashion without putting pivotal tasks on the shelf. Picking customer service software to run your business is not a decision you make lightly. Depending on the complexity of the script and the amount of your data, the transfer process can take anywhere from a few hours to several weeks.

But that’s not it, if you want to resolve customer common questions with the help of the vendor’s new tool – Fin bot, you will have to pay $0.99 per resolution per month. Intercom live chat is modern, smooth, and has many advanced features that other chat tools don’t. It’s highly customizable, too, so you can adjust it according to your website or product’s style. Basically, if you have a complicated support process, go with Zendesk, an excellent Intercom alternative, for its help desk functionality. If you’re a sales-oriented corporation, use Intercom for its automation options.

Known for its scalability, Zendesk is suitable for various business sizes, from startups to large corporations. ThriveDesk empowers small businesses to manage real-time customer communications. Zendesk’s pricing structure provides increasing levels of features and capabilities as businesses move up the tiers. This scalability allows organizations to adapt their support operations to their expanding customer base. Higher-tier plans in Zendesk come packed with advanced functionalities such as chatbots, customizable knowledge bases, and performance dashboards.

Update Zendesk users when new Intercom conversations occur

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. Their chat widget looks and works great, and they invest a lot of effort to make it a modern, convenient customer communication tool. So when it comes to chatting features, the choice is not really Intercom vs Zendesk. The latter offers a chat widget that is simple, outdated, and limited in customization options, while the former puts all of its resources into its messenger. The Zendesk chat tool has most of the necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers, and live chat analytics.

From in-app chat to personalized autoresponders, Intercom provides a unified experience across multiple channels, creating a support ecosystem that nurtures and converts leads. Intercom’s UI excels in modern design and intuitive functionality, particularly noted for its real-time messaging Chat PG and advanced features. It is tailored for automation and quick access to insights, offering a user-friendly experience. Nevertheless, the platform’s support consistency can be a concern, and the unpredictable pricing structure might lead to increased costs for larger organizations.

The script will also need to be monitored and adjusted as needed during the transfer process. Zendesk, less user-friendly and with higher costs for quality vendor support, might not suit budget-conscious or smaller businesses. When comparing the automation and AI features of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms come with unique strengths and weaknesses. Zendesk has over 1,300 integrations, compared to Intercom’s 300+ apps, making it the leader in this category. However, you can browse their respective sites to find which tools each platform supports.

Easily track your service team’s performance and unlock coaching opportunities with AI-powered insights. Zapier lets you build automated workflows between two or more apps—no code necessary. Rated 5 stars out of 5 on G2, ThriveDesk is highly regarded by users. Currently based in Albuquerque, NM, Bryce Emley holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NC State and nearly a decade of writing and editing experience. When he isn’t writing content, poetry, or creative nonfiction, he enjoys traveling, baking, playing music, reliving his barista days in his own kitchen, camping, and being bad at carpentry.

If you’re exploring popular chat support tools Zendesk and Intercom, you may be trying to understand which solution is right for you. In this detailed comparison, we’ll explore the features and characteristics of Intercom and Zendesk, highlighting each of their unique capabilities, so you can identify the right solution for your needs. Intercom has more customization features for features like bots, themes, triggers, and funnels. Using this, agents can chat across teams within a ticket via email, Slack, or Zendesk’s ticketing system. This packs all resolution information into a single ticket, so there’s no extra searching or backtracking needed to bring a ticket through to resolution, even if it involves multiple agents.

You can carry out records migration in a few simple actions, using our automated migration app. However, if you have special demands or a non-standard data structure, feel free to go with a custom route. The amount of data you have for each object in Zendesk will affect the duration of the transfer process. The more data you have, the longer it will take to transfer it from Zendesk to Intercom.

Zendesk, with its extensive toolkit, is often preferred by businesses seeking an all-encompassing customer support solution. Choosing the right customer service platform is pivotal for enhancing business-client interactions. https://chat.openai.com/ In this context, Zendesk and Intercom emerge as key contenders, each offering distinct features tailored to dynamic customer service environments. Whichever solution you choose, mParticle can help integrate your data.

Customers won’t need to leave your app or website to find the help they need.Zendesk, on the other hand, will redirect the customer to a new web page. You can also add apps to your Intercom Messenger home to help users and visitors get what they need, without having to start a conversation. Intercom recently ramped up its features to include helpdesk and ticketing functionality. Zendesk, on the other hand, started as a ticketing tool, and therefore has one of the market’s best help desk and ticket management features.

The platform is recognized for its ability to resolve a significant portion of common questions automatically, ensuring faster response times. This exploration aims to provide a detailed comparison, aiding businesses in making an informed decision that aligns with their customer service goals. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer robust solutions, but the choice ultimately depends on specific business needs. While both platforms have a significant presence in the industry, they cater to varying business requirements.

On the contrary, Intercom is far less predictable when it comes to pricing and can cost hundreds/thousands of dollars per month. But this solution is great because it’s an all-in-one tool with a modern live chat widget, allowing you to easily improve your customer experiences. At the same time, Zendesk looks slightly outdated and can’t offer some features.

There may be other aspects that are specific to your business or industry that need to be considered as well. Zapier helps you create workflows that connect your apps to automate repetitive tasks. A trigger is an event that starts a workflow, and an action is an event a Zap performs. With Zapier’s 6,000 integrations, you can unify your tools within a connected system to improve your team’s efficiency and deepen their impact.

Is it as simple as knowing whether you want software strictly for customer support (like Zendesk) or for some blend of customer relationship management and sales support (like Intercom)? 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.

Zendesk and Intercom also both offer analytics and reporting capabilities that allow businesses to analyze and monitor customer agents’ productivity. As a result, companies can identify trends and areas for improvement, allowing them to continuously improve their support processes and provide better service to their customers. Founded in 2007, Zendesk started as a ticketing tool for customer success teams. It was later that they started adding all kinds of other features, like live chat for customer conversations. They bought out the Zopim live chat solution and integrated it with their toolset.

The Migration Wizard will includes measure for ensuring your data security during all phases of the migration process. To confirm the maximal protection of your data whether they are in import or at rest, we use tried runthrough. These contain conducting constant security analysis, retaining our servers safe, complying with different regulations, and more.

• I also assist our executive team in developing our go-to-market strategy for our services team and solutions, developed in collaboration with our technology partners Appian, Twilio, Intercom, and AWS.
• There will be no sync between Zendesk and Intercom, so changes in Zendesk won’t be reflected in Intercom.
• Whether you’ve just started searching for a customer support tool or have been using one for a while, chances are you know about Zendesk and Intercom.
• Whether you’re migrating from Zendesk to Intercom, use our automated migration solution.
• Those same tools also increase customer retention by 27% while saving 23% on sales and marketing costs.

There are many features to help bigger customer service teams collaborate more effectively — like private notes or a real-time view of who’s handling a given ticket at the moment, etc. At the same time, the vendor offers powerful reporting capabilities to help you grow and improve your business. With industry-leading AI that infuses intelligence into every interaction, robust integrations, and exceptional data security and compliance, it’s no wonder why Zendesk is a trusted leader in CX. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer customer service software with AI capabilities—however, they are not created equal. With Zendesk, you get next-level AI-powered support software that’s intuitively designed, scalable, and cost-effective.

I also assist our executive team in developing our go-to-market strategy for our services team and solutions, developed in collaboration with our technology partners Appian, Twilio, Intercom, and AWS. Every Zendesk installation is set up differently to match each organization’s own process for managing companies, contacts, tickets and related data. Some objects are easier to transfer than others, depending on how similar they are between Zendesk and Intercom. For example, transferring companies is relatively easy, as both platforms have a similar concept of a company object with similar fields. Tickets have dependencies on other objects and chronological items like ticket comments that need to be preserved during the transfer. Migrating your Zendesk help content to Intercom Articles is a simple and fast process that does not require any custom development.

Migrating from one platform to another can be a complicated and time-consuming process, especially if you have a lot of data and customizations in your Zendesk account. In summary, choosing Zendesk and Intercom hinges on your business’s unique requirements and priorities. If you seek a comprehensive customer support solution with a strong emphasis on traditional ticketing, Zendesk is a solid choice, particularly for smaller to mid-sized businesses. As you dive deeper into the world of customer support and engagement, you’ll discover that Zendesk and Intercom offer some distinctive features that set them apart.

It guarantees continuous omnichannel support that meets customer expectations. To prepare your Zendesk account for migration, take the time to assess and refine your data. Once ready, schedule the migration, create a checklist for configuring settings, disable the source tool, and set up Intercom to match your requirements.

We regularly check all servers and make advancements, so that your business data is safe according to the fresh standards. Pick the most appropriate time to initiate the help desk migration workflow. Start by migrating historical records and then set up the Delta migration option to move your most recently changed tickets.

This scalability ensures businesses can align their support infrastructure with their evolving requirements, ensuring a seamless customer experience. Zendesk is a customer service software offering a comprehensive solution for managing customer interactions. It integrates customer support, sales, and marketing communications, aiming to improve client relationships.

Rescue yourself from the challenging task of adding wanted record types or data entities throughout Zendesk to Intercom migration. Our service greenlights you map fields and modify your data import and export. With thousands of outstanding data imports done by our service, Help Desk migration service has earned plenty of service-connected awards and inspiring feedback. We proceed to get better our solution and move forward novel capacity to cover we’re involving most of your import and export inquirements.

You can use it for customer support, but that’s not its core strength. Intercom also uses AI and features a chatbot called Fin, but negative reviews note basic reporting and a lack of customization. Fin is priced at $0.99 per resolution, so companies handling large volumes of queries might find it costly. In comparison, Zendesk customers pay a fixed price of $50 per agent—and only Zendesk AI is modeled on the world’s largest CX-specific dataset. Intercom offers reporting and analytics tools with limited capabilities for custom reporting, user behavior metrics, and advanced visualization. It also lacks advanced features like collaboration reporting, custom metrics, metric correlation, and drill-in attribution.

It’s known for its unified agent workspace which combines different communication methods like email, social media messaging, live chat, and SMS, all in one place. This makes it easier for support teams to handle customer interactions without switching between different systems. Plus, Zendesk’s integration with various channels ensures customers can always find a convenient way to reach out. Zendesk is more robust in terms of its ticket management capabilities, it offers more customization options and advanced features like a virtual call center app. On the other hand, Intercom is more focused on conversational customer support, and has more help desk features suited for live chat and messaging.