Intercom is a customer communication platform with integrated products for every team—sales, marketing, product, and support. It aids in developing relationships through conversational experiences throughout the customer journey. 

You can create message-based conversations that feel personal, friendly, and convenient by learning more about your customers and how to communicate with them. This makes it easier to address pain points through targeted content, behavior-driven email, and in-app/in-web messages. 

Used by over 25,000 companies worldwide, Intercom aspires to be your all-encompassing business tool. But how does it compare to other similar business tools?  Here are the top five intercom alternatives for your business:  

1. Customerly 

Specifically designed to assist in client relationships, Customerly is a lifecycle management platform enabling you to send the right message to your target audience at the right time. This is one of the Intercom alternatives that allows you to centralize all of your customer-related campaigns. 

It offers the following:  

• Shared Inbox: You can have a single, shared inbox to allocate chats to any of your teammates, filter messages, schedule messages for later, and quickly create prefabricated responses. Customerly also has an extensive library of ready-to-use templates for chats, surveys, automated responses, and emails. Without coding knowledge, you can drag and drop text blocks, images, gifs, buttons, and other elements.  
   
• Help Center: Customerly assists you in creating a comprehensive knowledge base that people can access through the chat widget. They don’t need to switch tabs to read articles; they can read everything they need in one place.  
   
• Marketing Funnel: The sales marketing funnel builder helps maintain customer relationships to manage businesses and the whole customer lifecycle. The customer intelligence, marketing survey, and CRM models offered by this all-in-one software are fully integrated to provide faster customer management workflows.  

2. HubSpot 

Hubspot is an all-in-one marketing software that provides all you need to attract, convert, close leads, and delight customers. Its marketing tools are for those looking for an integrated inbound marketing platform.  

Hubspot best fits the “marketing automation” category, while Intercom can be grouped under “engagement and lifecycle marketing.”  

Benefits of Hubspot include: 

• Helpdesk: Hubspot Service Hub supports transparency and collaboration, encourages self-service, and aids teams in prioritizing their workload. Additionally, because their helpdesk is completely connected with the HubSpot CRM, you already have access to much of the information you need to offer first-rate service. 
   
• Chat Tools: HubSpot centralizes all your customer communication channels, such as email, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and live chat. Conversations Inbox is HubSpot’s shared inbox feature; from here, you can loop in other team members, prioritize issues, and leave private comments.  

• Customer Portal: This feature gives your customers control over their experience. Customers can view ticket status changes and previous resolutions here. When you link the customer portal to your shared inbox, ticket conversations between customers and reps continue.  
   

3. Tidio  

Tidio Chat is a web-based live chat platform that merges messages from Facebook Messenger, emails, and website chat widgets into a single agent interface. This allows agents to handle all customer communications simultaneously and with the same resources, regardless of the channel they arrive from. 

Tidio’s features include: 

• Chatbot: Use automation to kickstart your sales process immediately; recommend products, provide exclusive discounts, and resolve issues 24/7. The intelligent self-learning AI Response Bots can handle most of your customer queries without requiring you to create a single ticket. 
   
• Live Chat: Users of Tidio Chat can choose from a range of live chat alternatives, including chat widgets, sidebars, and specific chat pages, all of which can be customized. Users can personalize the popup with multiple colors, button placements, and editable status messages.  

• Automation: Configure a variety of automation to launch predefined actions when a specific circumstance is met. There are several possible triggers, such as when a user opens a new page on the website and time spent on a particular page.  

4. Freshdesk 

Freshdesk’s customer care solution comes in two products: Support Desk and Omnichannel. Support Desk provides self-service, reporting, and ticketing tools; Omnichannel combines these with messaging and telephone services. 

Features include: 

• Automated Workflow: Automatically assign tickets to agents and groups depending on their workloads and skills, among other factors. For increased productivity, automatically transfer emails, calls, and chats to agents based on keywords and available bandwidth. 

• Reports and Analysis: Set up regular reports to analyze and improve agent performance using various help desk metrics. To improve services, measure customer satisfaction based on satisfaction reports. 

• Track Tickets: Improve collaboration between departments for faster resolution of customer issues, with linked tickets to keep track of urgent matters and team huddles for expert discussions. 
   

5.Zendesk 

Zendesk was founded in 2007 as a support ticket tool for customer service teams. It has since evolved into a full-fledged customer relationship management (CRM) solution aimed at streamlining and improving communication. 

Zendesk offers: 

• Helpdesk: The Zendesk dashboard collects customer interactions from all channels – email, chat, social media, or phone calls – so agents can solve requests quickly and efficiently. They also provide advanced features to help larger teams collaborate, such as private notes and seeing who handles a specific ticket in real-time. 

• Knowledge Base: Zendesk’s user-friendly text editor makes adding new articles simple, grouping them into categories, and branding your knowledge base. The ‘Answer Bot’ tool automatically suggests pertinent articles while integrating smoothly with your knowledge base.  
   
• Virtual Call Center: Zendesk offers Zendesk Talk, a virtual call center solution built inside its ticketing platform, which is its call center software. Through VoIP (voice over internet protocol) technology, agents can deliver individualized help from anywhere. 

In Conclusion 

There are, no doubt, several Intercom alternatives worth exploring. They are all very advantageous to both people and corporations. Yet among them, Customerly comes out on top for several reasons. In addition to its centralized interface, it includes several features to support business growth and increase sales.