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The live chat and help desk for growing SaaS teams. Recommended only if you have a full-time support person.
Intercom is great, but is quite expensive for what you get, and it's super live chat focused.
Something I'm regularly reminding small businesses of is that having a live chat has a huge (hidden) cost associated with it, especially as a small team.
It brings with it anxiety of responding (had one client that wouldn't use the restroom out of fear they weren't there to respond to a customer shortly after implementing Intercom into their business.
Yep, it's safe to say that it didn't last very long for their small team, they are no longer using Intercom.
They also charge based on number of contacts and the various components (features) and it gets wildly expensive very quickly.
They are great though and the industry standard for live chat (if you can justify having a few full-time employees to manage your live chat).
For large enterprise teams who need a highly scaleable help desk. Less user-friendly than the rest.
Think of Zendesk as the "Salesforce" of the help desk world. They "integrate" with almost everything (what that even means is many things... does that mean it'll do what you want it to do? questionable), they have help docs, an included community platform even. But what's it like to actually use? Well, painful.
There's zero joy in using it. It feels like you're using archaic and unintuitive software, I've still yet to meet a customer success rep that has had even one positive thing to say about it, or rather, I've yet to meet someone that hasn't "hated it" to be more specific.
In Zendesk, you are a ticket number, not a person. And yes, customers feel this, it's incredibly apparent and frustrating to experience:
But what about the community component? We want a community!
Well, good luck building one with Zendesk, another area I'm obsessed with, community software (love Discourse + Insided), and I have still yet to see even ONE Zendesk "Community" implementation that isn't just filled with customers complaining about said SaaS that the community was built for, with it all fallen on deaf ears by the company. That's a different story all-together though.
If you're an enterprise team, check out Zendesk, otherwise, stay away, and check out another option like Help Scout.
Curious how this app compares to others?