We used it to send newsletters, automated emails, help articles, and a chatbot for support. Intercom helps us drive more subscribers to our paid content and stay in touch with donors, supporters, and users.
Pros
Easy interface for creating help articles.
Simple to answer support messages.
Many rules options for customization of audiences.
Cons
The rules can sometimes be confusing.
Our email template still contains default design from the original settings.
Description length in help articles doesn't sync with the industry standard for SEO.
Likelihood to Recommend
It's great for a large website with many moving parts, but it's overkill for a small business. It's important if the site gets a lot of support requests, especially if the users and the admin are not located in the same time zone. It's also very useful for a website with multiple target markets, which must address each with slightly different messages and times.
VU
Verified User
Consultant in Marketing (E-Learning company, 1-10 employees)
We use Intercom as our complete customer experience tool, most prominently as a support inbox management and live chat tool. But its workflows and proactive messaging features allow us to share really specialised messages with our users whilst on the platform, facilitating higher engagement, retention and upsell potential. It also means we're not having to compete with all of the other emails that they have on their inbox; we're able to reach our users really specifically whilst in-platform.
Pros
Workflows
AI agent
Proactive messaging
Userbase segmentation
UI
Tertiary features and integrations
Cons
The reporting is broadly quite good, but there are a few additional metrics I wish it had, such as better theme and sentiment analysis
It is slightly difficult to remember where some things are, like having macros within settings. It would make more sense to me if they were within knowledge instead
There are some things that you can only do via their API, like deleting contacts in bulk and there is some info that can't be pulled into Zapier which is a pain
Likelihood to Recommend
On the whole I think it's really great. My team love it and find it super easy to use, and it makes it much much easier to manage our workload than any other support tool we've used before
I wouldn't necessarily say it is easy to set up their AI agent, as there's a lot of process changes that you need to do internally, but it is about as easy to implement as you can get I think. Defo able to do it without any real knowledge of setting up AI tools
VU
Verified User
Manager in Customer Service (Education Management company, 11-50 employees)
We use Intercom as the leading platform to deliver first-class customer support and keep our clients informed about the latest updates to our products and features. Its powerful capabilities enable us to engage effectively with our customers, ensuring they always have access to the necessary resources and information. Beyond support, we leverage Intercom's outbound communication features to enhance our client outreach. This includes sending newsletters to share key updates, one-off emails to announce new functionalities or services, and scheduling targeted pop-ups, banners, and in-app product tours to guide users through their journey. These capabilities allow us to deliver personalized and timely communications, helping our customers discover value, maximize their platform use, and stay engaged with our offerings.
Pros
Customer Support.
Intuitive User Experience.
Outbound Functionalities.
Modern Design.
Cons
Stronger analytics.
More customisable dashboards for reporting.
Less buggy product tours.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well Suited Scenarios: - Intercom excels in delivering personalised customer support, making it an excellent choice for companies looking to provide timely, contextual help. - Its tools also are great in enhancing customer product knowledge, equipping users with the insights they need to maximise product value - For customer training and product awareness, Intercom's features like banners, pop-ups, and in-app tours are highly effective. Additionally, it serves as a reliable platform for overall product marketing, enabling targeted campaigns, newsletters, and announcements. Not Suited Scenarios: - Intercom is less ideal for internal team training, such as hosting detailed knowledge guides or managing team-specific learning pathways. - For creating interactive product tours, while Intercom offers basic functionality, dedicated tools like Navattic or Storylane provide a more dynamic and user-friendly experience. However, if convenience is a priority—especially when avoiding redirection users outside of our platform—Intercom remains a practical option.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Marketing (E-Learning company, 51-200 employees)
I use Intercom in my capacity as a product manager. I rely on the Proactive messaging features to deliver timely feature announcements, product guidance and feature updates. I also use their survey feature to conduct rapid sentiment analysis. I write help center articles from the Knowledge hub and communicate directly with our sales team or customers via Help Desk to address product-related issues. Intercom makes it easy to stay close to the customer, an essential function for a PM.
Pros
In-app communication: I can deploy tours, banners, checklists, tooltips, posts, and surveys in a matter of minutes.
Knowledge Hub: I can write and publish a help article that can then be used to train the Fin AI agent to deliver accurate answers to our customers.
Communicating in context with service/sales agents and customers: the Help Desk makes it simple for sales and service agents to pull me into a conversation with a customer to resolve product-related issues.
Cons
I'd love to have A/B testing options on all of the Proactive Support message types, not just some.
Knowledge and Help Center - these could work better together or be collapsed into one thing.
I'd love to be able to instrument event triggers in Proactive Support without engineering support. We aren't using them now because of scant engineering resources, but these could be so powerful.
Likelihood to Recommend
Intercom is phenomenal for connecting with customers quickly and elegantly. It is also highly effective at leveraging AI to "learn" from help articles to provide precise answers to customers who chat it. This saves me, a product manager, a lot of time answering individual questions from sales and service team members.
For deeper analysis of customer behavior, Intercom is not my preferred tool.
We use Intercom to centralize all customer contacts and create workflows for our different contact numbers. Finally, we can analyze all of our qualifiers through the graphs Intercom offers. Intercom has experienced a drastic change in terms of governance and customer service.
Pros
Centralize customer contacts.
Workflows
Metrics reports.
Cons
improve AI.
Have the possibility of more than one email signature.
Possibility of merging conversations.
Likelihood to Recommend
As I said, Intercom changed the level of customer service in my company and our governance.
Intercom is our primary support platform, and users can contact us whenever they have questions, comments, concerns, etc. We integrate it within our applications so users can access us whenever they are logged in, and it is tied to our support email, so we are always reachable. We also conduct feedback surveys, announcements, and marketing releases via Intercom.
Pros
User friendly interface for support agents and customers.
Ability to integrate with outside applications (Salesforce, JIRA, etc.).
Communication of new features being added all the time.
Cons
Pricing can be a bit expensive depending on organizational size and adoption.
Reporting leaves a lot to be desired unless you opt for the most expensive plan.
AI Initiatives require a bit more fine tuning and training before they can be reliably deployed.
Likelihood to Recommend
Intercom provides an excellent platform to build that support if your users require immediate access to support rather than filing email tickets or filling out forms. If your business works on a slower communications or support model, chat functionality may not be right for you, given the expectations of a live support chat.
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Customer Service (E-Learning company, 201-500 employees)
We use Intercom to chat with our customers and assist in trouble shooting products, explaining in detail about products and create quotes. This is our main instrument for communication and it is used daily. We use the side conversations email, snooze and creates cases functions.
Pros
organizes multiple chats
provides extensive details of account information
provides great shortcut options
Cons
give better alert options when customer is responding in chat
add different color options for backgrounds to separate menus
add pop up chats to separate chat window
Likelihood to Recommend
Intercom is a great tool to provide quick and productive chat support. It provides an easy to use platform to communicate with customers. It does provide an email option but this option can be time delayed and not as efficient as the chat option.
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Customer Service (Education Management company, 1001-5000 employees)
We use it to handle all incoming correspondence from customers, including some social media integrations, and we also use it to handle all published articles for our help center. This is especially helpful as customers have access to help themselves before needing further assistance from us, which is a win win for everyone.
Pros
Respond to any issues in a very quick manner.
The organization of the platform is very clear and things aren't hard to find.
There are rarely any technical issues so everything always goes smoothly.
Cons
Grouping conversations together in the inbox if they're from the same email address would be nice. We have several customers who like to send multiple messages so if they could automatically group, that would be awesome.
Have the ability to add an integration to link to the most recent order associated with their account would be awesome.
Along the same line, have a link to access their account in our customer database software.
The ability to delay sending the email. So say up to 60 seconds, so we can undo the message and edit anything if we notice a typo or something right after we hit send.
Likelihood to Recommend
It has been so great because all of the customer's inquiries come in through one platform. So, we have our contact form, direct emails, social media etc and it makes everything so easy to get back to people quickly. I haven't come across an area where it's less appropriate as it does exactly what it intends to do.
VU
Verified User
Representative in Customer Service (E-Learning company, 11-50 employees)
I use Intercom to handle conversations related to app subscription issues. Refunds, malfunctions, suggestions, problems with log in. I need to help customers to solve their issues so they can use the app the best way possible. We also use Intercom to understand who are the non renewal customers and communicate with them.
Pros
Macros
Data organization
The possibility to work with other teammates in the same conversations
snooze the conversations
Cons
when I email a user, and I make a mistake, if I cancel the mail the user receives it anyway
sometimes the information regarding the user is not reliable
when I snooze a conversation and after a few days this conversation appears again on my inbox, should appear with a different look, so I can differentiate it from the others
Likelihood to Recommend
I think Intercom it's suited to handle a large amount of conversations with different users Also easy to work contemporary with different teammates. It's also suitable to work with a subscription based business. The only thing that I find complicated it's when it duplicates an user that has the same email address, so the conversations split into two users that are the same.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Customer Service (E-Learning company, 11-50 employees)
We use Intercom to support the onboarding and communications with all new trialists and paid plan customers, as well as send out our NPS survey and general marketing emails.
Pros
Series that incorporate both product tours, in-product posts and tooltips with emails.
Personalised content for different user segments.
Campaigns that can use both emails and in-product notifications, plus target users based on actions they take.
Cons
More customisation options with email templates
Additional branding and content option for product tours
More custom report options
Likelihood to Recommend
I would recommend it for SaaS products looking for user onboarding and user support. It would also be a great tool for most e-commerce sites or any business where the customers are interacting with a website/digital platform. It's probably not appropriate for service-based businesses who only want to share their services and basic contact details.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Product Management (E-Learning company, 201-500 employees)
