Intercom is an AI-first customer service platform that enhances the customer experience and improves operational efficiency, built on a single AI system with three major components: AI Agent, AI Copilot and AI Analyst (coming soon) to deliver customer service.
$39
per month per seat
Zoom Contact Center
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Zoom Contact Center helps businesses deliver prompt, accurate, and highly personalized customer experiences that drive loyalty. It includes intelligent self-service and routing, a unified communications and contact center, and video optimized high-touch engagements.
$79
per month per user
Pricing
Intercom
Zoom Contact Center
Editions & Modules
Essential
$39
per month per seat
Advanced
$99
per month per seat
Expert
$139
per month per seat
The Early Stage program
From $65 for 5 support seats
per month
Proactive Support Plus add-on
from $99
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Intercom
Zoom Contact Center
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
AI customer service features included in every plan.
Intercom integrates Help desk, AI Chat bot, and Proactive support.
All Zoom Contact Center pricing is quote-based, starts at $79/user/month, and is only accessible as an add-on to an existing Zoom One Business plan ($199.90/user/year.)
Well suited for real time customer support needs - that's where it really shines. Well suited for proactive outreach and the ability to gather feedback from customers + surveys. Less appropriate for a non techie company to set it up, basically any sort of changes in integration have to be done by an engineer.
Perfect for companies that have agents all over the place, e.g., different offices or WFH. Also good for companies that aren't big enough to have a "phone guy" as this platform allows IT to do the phone work as it doesn't require esoteric knowledge like other phone systems.
Intercom's ability to centralize customer communication is a game-changer.
Intercom's automation features have saved us time and streamlined workflows.
Help desk for users.
Intercom seamlessly integrates with a variety of other tools and platforms, enhancing its functionality and making it a central part of our tech stack.
Fairly simple GUI designer tool to define the Contact Flows. There are only a few elements, but they aren't many Design Widgets types, but just enough to get you started to the majority to the use cases you might encounter. There are plenty of opportunities to improve and enhance, but considering how "young" the product is, I think Zoom did a good job to provide a good Contact Center solution for the entry-to-medium level customers/users without needing to have a dedicated Contact Center resident expert to take care of the solution.
The way the Queues are define, embeds in a fairly simple matter many of Call Handlings Contact Flows design like Timers, Overflow handling, Callback keeping the position in the Queue handling, etc. These things are defined directly into the queue so you don't have to build the logic for it into the Contact Flow design itself. That includes in many cases prompt handling and timers.
Their Low-Code/No-Code motto comes handy when it comes to embed Chat Engagement Channels into Web Pages, where embedding a simple "iframe little piece of XML definition to call a JavaScript Applet" into a Web Page is all that is needed.
Having the "Contact Center App" just embedded into the Existing Zoom Client App is another plus I see: Agents that are force to wear "multiple hats" handling regular phone calls and Contact Center calls, don't have to waste time switching apps, other than the productivity ones so it is one less App the Agents and Supervisor need to worry about.
We have been and will be continuing our journey with Intercom and nothing too concerning has happened that I have experienced or heard of that has us on the edge yet. If it ever happens it will be something along the lines of "Outgrowing" the use of need of the platform.
Everything is very straightforward and easy to see, explore, and use. Intercom provides walkthroughs and helps guides in case something is not apparent to the user and has their agents available to help. I always feel confident when exploring new features or making changes that I can have it accomplished due to the service they provide.
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.
We've used both Drift and Salesforce chat at Owl Labs in the past, and I didn't find them to meet our needs or customer needs the way Intercom has been able to. Intercom ranks higher for us regarding Integrations offered, customization, AI functionality, and user-friendliness. In the past, if chat visitors would click around our website, they'd have to start their chat over again from the start and lose their communication history with us. We also found that Salesforce chat did not have enough customization that we needed. One small example is that in Intercom, you can see when another teammate is looking at a chat and tag them in notes to collaborate. We didn't have access to anything like that when using Salesforce chat. Intercom has made it easy to work alongside one another to be more efficient.
There are options and ways to get to specific feature sets that are similar to what Zoom can offer. Many of the Zoom included features are add-ons for the RingCentral offering. So cost goes up and can also be an add-on difficulties/deployment costs as well. When we reviewed the features needed and the cost comparison, Zoom was less than half the cost with many of the features baked in as opposed to add-ons
We migrated away from a telephony system that was antiquated and almost unusable for what we wanted to do, so Zoom has been a huge improvement for us!
We're continuing to roll out new channels of contact for customers -- Calls, chat, video, email, etc.
We're still getting our sea legs from a reporting perspective, and that could always be better, but so far the biggest improvement was for our staff actually using the software. They really enjoy the simplicity and robustness of the software.
