In my experience, if the internal employee on the Intercom chat escalates the issue to Zendesk via their integration, the setup treats it as though the initial employee has no further need or relationship with the customer.

To the Zendesk agent, the ticket is created ‘from’ the customer, not the employee that initiated the ticket.

The agent has to manually add the employee back to the ticket, so they can also be in the loop.

Not to mention the ticket is mostly just the chat transcript.

Not good.

I would assume one either uses Zendesk as a suite for a larger setup or just Intercom for a smaller setup?

But, also, Zendesk pricing is per agent, whereas Intercom is tiered for a number of users.

Then, to upgrade to the Talk, not the full Suite, is an additional per agent cost.

So, basically, sales can function as Tier 1 support, since they should have basic knowledge of the product they are selling.

We don’t need a Zendesk agent license for each salesperson, only each support person.

Zendesk is pretty powerful between its well documented API and native ‘triggers’, and also its new reporting and dashboard tool, but it is pricey for enabling extras.

I was attempting to write an integration with our phone system, basically having a screen pop-up with the call info inside Zendesk, and could show all prior and open tickets if their is a caller ID match.

I need to pay for Talk just to access the pop-up API.

Also, having multiple forms for a ticket, that costs extra, too.

In Chatwoot the channels like email, twitter, Whatsapp etc are also considered primary conversation channels. So its helpful even when your primary support channel isn't chat.

Now we've switched to chatra.io, and this does the same and the price seems fair.