Losing customers to slow support?
When your support team can’t keep up, response times drag. This makes for unhappy customers and a very stressed-out team.
It’s a tough cycle. The longer customers wait for help, the more frustrated they become, and your support queue just keeps growing longer.
According to Zendesk, 65% of customers expect faster response times than they did five years ago. Customer expectations are just higher now, and old tools can’t keep pace.
The right platform can fix this. It empowers your team to resolve issues in record time, turning customer frustration into genuine satisfaction.
That’s why I wrote this guide. I’ll walk you through the very best Intercom software to help you slash response times and manage a growing customer base.
Speaking of managing a growing customer base, you might also be interested in my guide on Best Customer Success Software to master retention.
You’ll find solutions that automate away repetitive tasks and give your team the context needed for faster, more personal support.
Let’s get started.
Quick Summary:
| # | Software | Rating | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | HubSpot → | Large SaaS tech teams | |
| 2 | Zendesk → | Growing SaaS companies | |
| 3 | Drift → | Sales-focused SMBs | |
| 4 | LiveChat → | SaaS companies | |
| 5 | Freshworks → | Scaling customer support |
1. HubSpot
Are you struggling with overwhelming intercom software options?
HubSpot’s AI-powered platform unifies your marketing, sales, and customer service, providing you with a complete customer view. This means you can easily navigate real-time communication demands.
Your teams gain a unified customer view, allowing you to streamline operations and improve customer happiness.
Here’s how HubSpot transforms your support.
The Service Hub, powered by AI, helps your team scale support and drive retention. It includes an omni-channel help desk and Breeze customer agent, which can resolve half of customer inquiries 24/7. This means you can handle more queries without increasing headcount, ensuring customer issues are addressed promptly.
Additionally, the AI-powered Smart CRM unifies your customer data, teams, and tech stacks, allowing you to create more personalized customer experiences. You can also connect over 1,800 apps from their marketplace, enabling seamless API integrations with your existing CRM systems. Plus, features like AI-powered reporting and contact management provide actionable analytics for optimizing support workflows, helping you track performance and continuously improve.
Achieve faster response times and higher resolution rates.
While discussing efficient communication, you might also find our guide on best virtual meeting platform helpful for your team’s collaboration needs.
Key features:
- AI-powered Service Hub: Scales customer support with an omni-channel help desk and AI-driven customer agents that resolve inquiries 24/7.
- Unified Customer Platform: Integrates marketing, sales, and customer service teams on one AI-powered platform for a comprehensive customer view.
- Extensive App Marketplace: Connects with over 1,800 apps to ensure seamless integration with your current tools and workflows.
Learn more about HubSpot features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: HubSpot stands out as a strong contender for the best intercom software due to its AI-powered platform, which offers comprehensive solutions for scaling support and improving ticket closure rates by 37%. Its unified data view and extensive integrations address critical pain points for SaaS tech leads and IT directors.
2. Zendesk
Struggling with slow response times and scaling support?
Zendesk’s complete AI-powered solution aims to resolve customer and employee conversations across any channel. This means you can handle everything from messaging to voice calls.
Your team gains access to unified customer interactions and robust data dashboards, enabling faster, more insightful resolutions.
Here’s how Zendesk delivers.
Zendesk provides AI Agents and Copilot to instantly resolve common requests and automate workflows. This allows your human agents to focus on complex issues.
You can deliver seamless resolutions across any contact center with advanced call routing, intelligent IVR, and automation. Zendesk Voice ensures every call is resolved faster and better. Additionally, the platform integrates with your existing systems, like CRM, and offers workforce management tools, ensuring your team is efficient at scale and future-proofed for growth.
Reduce effort and keep costs low.
While focusing on customer support, understanding how user generated content platforms can boost conversions is also valuable for overall business growth.
Key features:
- AI Agents and Copilot: Automate routine inquiries and assist human agents, reducing effort per ticket by deflecting up to 15% of contacts.
- Omnichannel Support: Resolve conversations across messaging, live chat, and voice, ensuring seamless customer experience with advanced call routing.
- Integrated Platform: Access unified customer data and dashboards, enhance workflows for both customer and employee service, and integrate with existing systems for a comprehensive solution.
Learn more about Zendesk features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Zendesk stands out as a powerful candidate for the best intercom software, particularly for growing SaaS companies. Its AI capabilities, comprehensive omnichannel support, and proven 286% ROI over three years make it ideal for reducing response times and efficiently scaling support operations.
3. Drift
Struggling to convert website visitors into qualified leads?
Drift’s AI Chat agent engages your website visitors with real-time, personalized conversations, improving buyer experience and delivering more qualified leads. This means you can provide instant answers, reducing drop-off and accelerating sales cycles.
Drift’s capabilities help you by instantly qualifying leads and letting buyers book meetings or chat live with a rep, directly addressing the challenge of lengthy and disconnected sales cycles. You’ll gain deeper insights into your web traffic.
Discover who your website visitors are.
Drift de-anonymizes site visitors by identifying high-intent buyers and surfacing relevant account data like company name, location, and account history. This allows you to score their engagement in real-time, delivering the right chat experience to convert them. The system routes qualified buyers to your sellers’ workflow as a prioritized action, ensuring your team has clear next steps and context for timely, personalized communication. Plus, you can track engagement metrics and attribute success to pipeline and revenue, continuously refining your approach for better performance.
This leads to optimized chat strategies and faster revenue growth.
If you’re deploying new business software, understanding API security testing is essential for robust integrations and data protection.
Key features:
- Live Chat with Target Accounts: Skip forms and engage high-value buyers in real-time conversations, moving them through your sales funnel faster with personalized interactions.
- ROI Reporting for Optimization: Track critical engagement metrics, identify high-converting conversations, and attribute success to pipeline and revenue to refine your chat strategy.
- Fastlane for Instant Qualification: Use your existing tech stack data to identify and qualify high-value buyers in real-time, allowing them to bypass forms and connect immediately.
Learn more about Drift features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Drift is an excellent choice for best intercom software, helping your team improve buyer experience and accelerate sales cycles. Its AI-powered chat agents provide instant answers, qualify leads efficiently, and integrate with existing sales tools, making it ideal for reducing response times and scaling support.
4. LiveChat
Struggling to reduce support response times?
LiveChat helps you automate customer service with AI chatbots and boost sales through real-time engagement. It’s designed for increasing online sales and improving satisfaction.
This means you can handle inquiries automatically and focus your team on complex issues, significantly reducing your support backlog. It’s truly a go-to choice.
Ready to improve customer support?
LiveChat is intuitive customer service software that’s quick to set up and easy for your team to use. This empowers your agents to deliver top-notch service by giving them instant access to customer information within the live chat app.
You can streamline communication by managing all customer messages in one place, which means you’ll deliver the premium support your customers deserve. Additionally, features like Copilot assist agents with real-time insights, text enhancement, and chat summaries, allowing them to respond faster and with confidence. This seamless AI customer service backing helps your agents work more efficiently and deliver a better experience.
The result is increased sales and improved customer satisfaction.
Key features:
- Sales Boosting Tools: Engage visitors with pre-set messages, recommend products, and guide them to purchase, leading to a 25% increase in average order value.
- Efficient Support Features: Handle all customer messages in one live chat app with instant access to customer info, increasing customer conversion by 30%.
- AI Customer Service Chatbots: Automate routine inquiries and repetitive tasks with chatbots, boosting your team’s performance and allowing focus on complex interactions.
Learn more about LiveChat features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: LiveChat stands out as best intercom software for SaaS companies because it reduces response times and scales support through AI automation, comprehensive sales tools, and robust integration capabilities. With 35,000+ companies already benefiting, it offers clear insights into sales performance and customer interactions.
5. Freshworks
Is your current intercom solution slowing you down?
Freshworks helps you deliver excellent customer service and accelerate your sales with intelligent solutions.
You can build stronger relationships and deliver delight across every customer touchpoint by unifying your customer data.
This means putting your customer first.
Freshworks unifies your sales, marketing, and support teams on a single platform. This helps you break down silos and empower your teams to resolve issues faster and boost customer satisfaction, whether you’re handling inbound queries or proactively reaching out.
You can streamline your workflows and personalize customer interactions, leading to more efficient operations and a better overall experience. Your team can leverage AI-powered insights to anticipate needs and offer relevant solutions, improving your customer interactions. Freshworks’ customizable features also adapt to your unique business requirements, ensuring the platform scales as your customer base grows.
Ultimately, this helps you grow your business.
Key features:
- Unified Customer Platform: Break down silos between sales, marketing, and support teams to create a cohesive customer experience and improve collaboration.
- AI-Powered Insights: Leverage artificial intelligence to automate responses, analyze customer behavior, and provide personalized support, reducing response times.
- Customizable Workflows: Tailor the platform to your specific business needs, ensuring seamless integration with existing systems and future-proofing your support operations.
Learn more about Freshworks features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: If you’re seeking the best intercom software to unify teams and accelerate growth, Freshworks offers a comprehensive platform designed to streamline customer interactions and boost satisfaction. Its AI-powered insights and customizable workflows make it ideal for scaling support operations while enhancing customer relationships.
6. Tidio
Struggling with slow customer response times?
Tidio’s Lyro AI Agent automates 67% of conversations across chat, email, and social media. This means your team can handle 1,000 to 10,000 customer conversations daily, improving efficiency.
You can streamline your workflows with smart help desk tools and self-service options, ensuring that your customer service is exceptional and scalable.
Here’s how you can empower your support teams.
Tidio offers one platform to improve your customer support, whether you’re handling a few hundred or thousands of customer interactions daily. You can automate common requests, manage complex tasks, and distribute work to human agents using Lyro AI, live chat, and a multichannel inbox. Additionally, Lyro AI uses your existing support content, like FAQs and knowledge bases, to deliver fast, human-like support across various channels. Plus, if Lyro AI can’t answer a question, it immediately transfers the conversation to your team via Tidio or your existing help desk, preserving context for a smooth handoff. The result? You can track Lyro AI’s performance, identify user trends, and make data-driven decisions to optimize workflows and boost loyalty.
Tidio helps your team offer personalized service at scale.
Key features:
- Lyro AI Agent automates up to 67% of support requests across multiple channels in 12 languages, significantly reducing your response times.
- Multichannel Inbox centralizes communication from live chat, email, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, giving your agents a unified view for faster resolution.
- Detailed Analytics provide insights into Lyro AI’s performance and user trends, enabling your team to optimize workflows and make data-driven decisions.
Learn more about Tidio features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Tidio’s robust Lyro AI agent and multichannel support capabilities make it a strong contender for best intercom software, particularly for growing SaaS companies. Its ability to automate a high percentage of inquiries and integrate with existing tech stacks directly addresses your pain points around scaling support and improving efficiency.
7. Crisp
Struggling with slow support response times?
Crisp offers an AI-powered unified inbox for all your customer messages. This means you can centralize conversations from live chat, email, and phone calls.
This unified approach helps your team reply faster, automate workflows, and measure your customers’ success comprehensively. You can effectively reduce response times.
Here’s how Crisp transforms your customer support.
Crisp centralizes all your inbound conversations into one collaborative inbox. This allows your multiple team members to access, manage, and respond to messages efficiently.
Additionally, with AI-native automated workflows, you can streamline internal tasks and respond to users automatically, enhancing efficiency and reducing your team’s workload by 50%. Plus, Crisp’s CRM synchronizes customer data, ensuring personalized conversations every time. This robust system helps you build amazing connections with website visitors, whether you are online or offline, and guides them throughout their buying experience.
Improve customer experience and scale support with Crisp.
Key features:
- Unified Inbox: Centralizes all customer messages from various channels like email, website chat, WhatsApp, and phone into one collaborative interface, enhancing team efficiency and response times.
- AI-Powered Automations: Allows you to build powerful workflows that streamline internal tasks and automatically respond to user queries, reducing your team’s workload by up to 50%.
- Integrated CRM & Knowledge Base: Synchronizes customer data for personalized interactions and enables creation of comprehensive help articles, making customers more autonomous.
Learn more about Crisp features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: If you’re seeking the best intercom software to scale support and improve resolution rates, Crisp offers a compelling solution. Its AI-powered unified inbox, automated workflows, and comprehensive CRM capabilities help reduce response times and empower your team, as demonstrated by the 600,000 companies already using it.
8. HelpCrunch
Is your team struggling with overwhelming intercom options?
HelpCrunch offers a multichannel chat widget and a shared inbox, designed to unify all your customer communication under one roof.
This means you can provide assistance via live chat, email, and popular messengers like WhatsApp, ensuring your team is always connected with customers wherever they are.
The result is customer service software that covers all your business needs.
HelpCrunch solves the pain point of scattered communication by bringing everything into one dashboard.
You can engage with clients using their preferred channel, and the platform includes a knowledge base for self-service and email marketing for targeted campaigns. Additionally, mobile apps and SDKs allow your team to reply to users on the go.
This comprehensive suite empowers your customer service team with AI tools, including an AI editor to save time when writing messages and creating help articles, while also offering chatbots to qualify leads and deliver instant answers 24/7.
Reduce response times and scale support.
Key features:
- Multichannel Communication: Unify live chat, email, and popular messengers like WhatsApp into a single dashboard for comprehensive customer assistance.
- Knowledge Base & Self-Service: Create helpful articles with a WYSIWYG editor for SEO-optimized help centers, enabling 24/7 self-service for your customers.
- AI-Powered Tools & Automation: Leverage AI for faster message writing and content creation, along with chatbots for lead qualification and instant customer support.
Learn more about HelpCrunch features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: HelpCrunch simplifies complex communication by uniting channels, making it a strong contender for best intercom software. Its unified shared inbox, mobile apps, and robust API integrations for developers streamline operations, helping your team provide assistance via live chat, email, and messengers like WhatsApp, improving customer satisfaction and closing over 1.5K chats monthly.
9. GoSquared
Struggling with complex, slow web analytics?
GoSquared offers a fresh, simple alternative to traditional web analytics tools. This means you can finally get key website metrics without the confusion or steep learning curve.
It removes the hassle of complicated setups, letting your team focus on actionable insights rather than data interpretation. The result is a clear path to understanding your website’s performance.
Is your data truly private?
GoSquared introduces a real-time analytics platform built for privacy and speed. Here’s how it works: it anonymizes visitor data by default, ensuring it’s only used for your insights.
This commitment to privacy means your organization can gain valuable insights without compromising user trust. The system is fully GDPR compliant and doesn’t rely on advertising revenue, ensuring your data isn’t resold or used for other purposes. Additionally, GoSquared is engineered for real-time data, eliminating frustrating waiting times for reports, with everything loading instantly. Plus, its lightest JavaScript snippet ensures your site never slows down, and you can add unlimited team members without extra “seat” charges, fostering team-wide collaboration.
The result is fast, reliable, and private data you can trust.
While we’re discussing real-time insights, you might find my article on best IoT software helpful for device management.
Key features:
- Simple, intuitive dashboards: Designed for all devices and team members, making web analytics accessible and engaging for everyone, not just analysts.
- Real-time data and reports: Provides instant updates on all metrics, eliminating waiting periods and ensuring you always see the latest information.
- Privacy-first design: Anonymizes visitor data by default, is fully GDPR compliant, and never uses your data for advertising, offering unparalleled privacy.
Learn more about GoSquared features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: GoSquared stands out as a strong contender for your best intercom software stack, especially if you prioritize privacy, real-time data, and ease of use. Its simple setup, intuitive dashboards, and commitment to data privacy make it ideal for tech leads and IT directors looking to reduce response times and scale support without complex integrations or privacy trade-offs.
Conclusion
Slow support is costing you customers.
Choosing the right tool from so many options is overwhelming, especially when integration and scalability are on the line for your growing SaaS company.
The good news is that research shows a 37% drop in first response times for companies using AI. This is a huge leap forward, boosting customer satisfaction and freeing up your team.
So, what’s my top recommendation?
From everything I’ve reviewed, HubSpot stands out as the clear winner. Its AI-powered platform unifies your teams and streamlines communication to slash response times.
I’ve seen its Service Hub resolve half of all customer inquiries 24/7. Implementing the best intercom software like this truly helps you scale support without scaling headcount.
I highly recommend you book a free demo of HubSpot to see how it can transform your workflows.
You’ll resolve issues in record time.
