Fin by Intercom vs. Zendesk Suite

While Fin is an awesome investment, the setup and tuning of responses to meet brand alignment and delivery have taken some time. If you prioritize not just resolution rate and accuracy, but style and delivery, it's a bigger lift. However, for the vast majority of businesses, the step and its impact on resource management are a worthy investment.

Incentivized

Benefits of Zendesk Suite:
Support across channels In the case of a retail company with chat, email, WhatsApp and social DMs all piling up together, agents do not have to change tabs - everything comes into one screen in the Suite.
An example could be a representative for this e-commerce company on a sale weekend when they have live chat up, and also must deal with emails and complaints on social. Zendesk Suite handled all of this interaction seamlessly.
Knowledge base + self service: A SaaS platform receiving constant flow of "how do I reset my password" questions. You set up a help centre once, and are able to deflect hundreds of tickets for months and years.
Even better when combining with Answer Bot, where the bot begins suggesting articles without even a human interacting with the tickets.
Scaling customer service teams: A startup that has just expanded from 5 customer service representatives to 50 customer service representatives. Zendesk Suite automates routing, SLAs, macros, and analytics, when it could never work with Google Workspace + sticky notes.
This is especially helpful when managers want to be able to report or analyze ticketing conversations to see trends in perhaps their backlog, or a customer service representative is running into consistent workflows.
Globalization: A company with support teams that are spread across time zones and languages. Zendesk Suite enables for business hours, language packs, and localized help centers. It even comes with routing either by skill or region

Incentivized

• Great UI - everyone has their own inbox but can still see all incoming messages.
• Fin AI - we love the AI functionality, it saves tons of time of the team.
• Automated emails - we configured Intercom in a way that it uses a lot of information we have about our users (e.g. their subscription, date of upgrade, etc.) so that we can use it to automate communication.

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• UI/UX; mature macros and automations, slick and well thought out UI.
• Reporting, reporting, reporting. With user, org, and ticket level tags, we can track every aspect of our ticket flow.
• Extensibility; the app marketplace is a great resource for expanding functionality from the baseline offering.

Incentivized

• Some things are repetitive. Ex: If you provide guidance to ask a follow-up question, it'll ask that follow-up question each time.
• It'd be cool to have a "vibe" check for auto-sorting. Ex: We have responses to our outreach feed into Intercom. It'd be cool to have a way to auto-sort based on if they ask a detailed question or just a plain "interested" response.
• It'd be cool if Fin by Intercom flagged conversations, like it a customer seemed agitated, for the team to review.

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• The development of messaging out of the earlier Chat module is clunky and still has limitations for multi language flows.
• When creating queries in Explore, you can't search for 'or' conditions, only 'And', meaning you have to build multiple queries and manually add them.
• You can't download the charts in the reports, they come down as tables and then you have to make your own charts.

Incentivized

It's currently a perfect fit for our needs, and we are customer-focused and small. When we grow, we may need to re-evaluate, but our current team finds it easy. Reviewing conversations is simple and allows for great training. The canned replies make service fast and easy. Smart suggestions remove the need to re-write technical walkthroughs and explanations for our FAQ

Incentivized

Zendesk is super easy to use and navigate. I really enjoy the sleek layout, the ability to tailor tickets, the macro option, and the quick key guide they have to make your use of time even more effective. My whole team loves working with Zendesk and rarely ever has problems.

Incentivized

It takes a bit of getting used to. It's easy to start off with simple pieces of answering queries, etc. The real part is when one tries to use workflows with triggers and automation. Then, it can be a whole different experience. I would love to see it being much simpler in terms of usability there.

Incentivized

I used to work without a ticketing service, and everything was handled on an email provider, this made it very difficult to track, no integrations to the software complicating the use of internal tools or other software like Guru, Zendesk Suite wasn't hard to learn, in fact it was very easy, very straightforward, and I was an admin learning to use several tools at the same time.

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always there

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In the past year, I'd say I have only noticed maybe two hours total of downtime in my own usage. Very minimal.

works perfect

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There has been minor performance degradation on a very few days out of the two years I have been using the product.

Intercom is the premier customer support/engagement model and it definitely has one of the top tier customer support teams as well. I don't think I have ever waited more than 5 minutes to get the information I need or get help with an issue. They are incredible and I aim to model our customer service department after them.

Incentivized

We rarely need to contact their support team, but when we do they are responsive. However there have been notable times when communication between myself and the support rep was challenging despite me providing clear explanation of the issue, screenshots, and a thorough explanation of the goal we hope to achieve. It took several back and forth attempt, on a few occasions, to get resolution on an otherwise simple request

Easy to know the learning path

Incentivized

Zendesk has tons of available material for training - videos, webinars, articles, etc. The only reason this is not a 10 is because it can be hard to figure out how to navigate to these things and find what you are looking for.

The implementation was surprisingly easy but we are having to adapt from our old process to work well with Intercom.

Incentivized

There is not a lot of implementation, it's all setup and you just start using it. We did do some email to ticket setup and that worked really well. The only thing that didn't work for us was the Salesforce integration, maybe your mileage will vary.

In my experience, what Intercom has done with Fin by Intercom is far more innovative and forward thinking than other tools I've used. It's intuitive, easy, and they are always releasing new things to make Fin by Intercom even more powerful.

Incentivized

Even these two have a ticketing system but that I also used previously but Zendesk Suite has a very clear ticketing system - it does not take much time to understand and use it, the interface is easy and the automation system also works up to the expectation, it is not just easy for the users but for us from the backed support as well, it is so user-friendly.

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WHY we will use Zendesk in HR and PD internally

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• I like how I don't feel like I need to constantly be monitoring support, especially on weekends
• It's great that the user will get some response right away, I just need to hope that the response they do get is good enough if I'm awk

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• Customer Success looks at ticket resolution surveys as part of their CSAT scores and either thanks their customer for a positive review or reaches out if it's a negative review.
• Sales uses Zendesk to make sure their new prospects are getting POCs properly set up quickly and fix any issues while they do a trial of our tool.
• Onboarding uses Zendesk to quickly make sure new customers implementations and user access are set up to help them start implementation faster.

Incentivized