We use Fin for customer support. Fin is excellent at answering simple questions that can also be found in our help center. Previously, we used workflows to guide customers to the right help article, but now we let FIN answer. Overall, very good for the easy questions. We sell hardware and software, and it is challenging for FIN to provide information about specific devices from a customer, a particular subscription, or an invoice. I am not an engineer, and we don't have the resources to develop more complicated actions with FIN. So we use FIN to answer customer questions. The sources are the help center and snippets.
Pros
Answer easy/general questions.
Great to be able to improve answers.
Nice you can set the tone of FIN.
Cons
Connecting with Backoffice tools.
Would like to see where we can improve our help center/FIN's knowledge.
Sometimes it connects the questions with wrong content.
Likelihood to Recommend
Great to answer simple questions, based on help articles. For example, we had FIN answering in a short form and then asking if the customer wanted to be connected to a human. The customer said, 'No, give me the whole process.' It's great to read that customers are happy with the explanation. Less appropriate is where the question is not straightforward. Customers sometimes use different words, and then FIN can provide incorrect answers. It would be nice if it could ask to elaborate.
VU
Verified User
Contributor in Customer Service (Business Supplies & Equipment company, 51-200 employees)
We use Intercom primarily for customer support and communication. It allows us to efficiently manage customer inquiries, provide real-time assistance through chat, and offer self-service options via automated responses and a knowledge base. The platform helps address common business challenges such as reducing response times, improving customer engagement, and streamlining support workflows. Our use case includes handling technical support requests, troubleshooting issues, and guiding users through our platform to enhance their overall experience.
Pros
Realtime Chat
Phone integration
Chat bots to answer simple questions
Chat routing
Cons
Better routing options
Better bot understanding
Easier AI integration
Likelihood to Recommend
It is better than most other ticketing programs i have used
VU
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (Medical Device company, 201-500 employees)
I set up rules, create macros for my colleagues to use, I use them myself too. Basic customer service inquiries like where is my order, questions about products etc. Assigning messages to inboxes and teammates, as well as creating new inboxes to better sort the workload between our colleagues is made easy.
Pros
Rules to sort messages automatically
Clean UI
Macros and saved replies
Adding gifs is made easy and makes customer service more fun
Cons
AI translation, this could be added. We serve customers whose language noone at this company speaks, machine translation would be nice to have.
Suggested replies from earlier messages
Better user/lead handling (as in merging etc.)
Likelihood to Recommend
It is amazing to answer multiple channels coming from whatsapp, email live chat or even facebook and instagram. Sorting messages between teams is also very great and efficient.
Language support and editable hotkeys would be great. Some nations have separate keyboards and different layouts, hotkeys do not work as well on these.
VU
Verified User
Representative in Customer Service (Consumer Goods company, 11-50 employees)
We use Intercom phone, chat and email as an all in one support strategy for our Customer Experience team. Having all channels in one tool allows our agents to easily manage their workload and means we can keep track of conversations that are handled between more than one channel. It's incredibly useful that you can make a phone call and then send an email in the same thread so they are always connected!
Intercom's powerful workflows also allow us to utilise Fin Ai Chatbot to resolve over 30% of our inbound chats and workflows also allow us to route emails smartly to teams and individuals within the workspace.
Pros
Workflows and automation. Very simply and intuitive to use with powerful results.
Data and reporting. Intercom allows you to look at a host of metrics and has a clever build your own charts feature.
Integrates phones, emails and chats in one tool.
Cons
outbound call recording messages are only supported in English while you can purchase numbers for us in a large range of countries.
Phone balanced assignment takes into account when a user was last assigned a call or a conversation. When you have a team working through emails asynchronously while providing phone support this can lead to some members not receiving any calls while other receive the bulk. A phone-specific assignment option would be beneficial.
Likelihood to Recommend
Intercom is a great choice for a simple to use but powerful and effective CRM tool. Within one platform you can write and receive emails, offer phone support and create a chat workflow using a chat bot trained on your Intercom Help Centre! We have found it works well for a small to medium sized team but I'm sure it would work well at a larger scale as well.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Customer Service (Consumer Electronics company, 201-500 employees)
We use intercomm to support clients that use our software
Pros
The chatbot is working very well, allowing use to gain a lot of time.
The chat service is easy to use and clear
Cons
It would be great to have a sleep mode for tickets, allowing us to put a chat on hold waiting for the solution.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is very weel suited to answer regular question on a daily basis but it seems less suited to follow a request throughout the week and to share it with coworkers.
Intercom is a great platform for managing customer conversations and campaigns, as it allows us to unify our email, chat, and social media messages from customers. Unfortunately, the platform does not currently support SMS and calls in our region. Nevertheless, the interface is very user-friendly and navigation is quite easy.
Pros
User friendly interface
Packed with great features
Communicate updates frequently
Cons
SMS and Calling support for our region
Pricing is a bit dodgy
Support responses can be improved
Likelihood to Recommend
- Great CRM software - Intercom reporting is easy to use but not easily customizable - Calling feature is promising but unable to use it fully as our region is not supported - Switch is also a great feature, but then again not supported in our region - Series and Workflows work well with our needs
We use Intercom in four key areas: as a first line of customer support, as our primary way to interact with customers and users and receive feature requests and discuss roadmap, and as a shortcut to providing help documentation and as the technology stack to help us do product onboarding tours
Pros
Very easy for our customers to understand and get started with
Very easy for us to add help articles to and keep them updated
Solid set of functionality to help users understand the response time from our team that they can expect
Cons
A bit more flexibility in the chat functionality. Users expect emoji reactions and replies because they have been trained by Slack and WhatsApp
Clearer structure and information about what falls under each price plan
Likelihood to Recommend
Very well suited for small teams hoping to be extremely customer focused and manually reply to all inbound queries in a personalised manner. Also extremely well suited to teams where the engineering resource is busy building features but the Customer Success function would like to be able to self serve improvements to help, documentation and onboarding workflows
We use Intercom in 2 ways, support and marketing. In our app we are entirely chat based and self help encouraged. We were struggling to easily communicate with users until recently, we moved Intercom into the app greatly reducing our response times during office hours. For the web version, it is mostly used for marketing and answering common questions. As we launch, this has been key to learning about our leads and tagging them to better notice trends to adjust for. We are now focused on building bots out and expanding our android article library.
Pros
Chat
Easy tagging and reporting
Easy team collaboration
Simple and fluid design
User friendly bot designer
Cons
Intercom Tickets need a serious revamp, the do not feel like a core feature but a complimenting one.
DESKTOP APP
Ability to have custom answers trigger other custom bots
Toggle for an internal note to keep a ticket closed
Likelihood to Recommend
I think Intercom is fantastic. It feels like the best parts of all the help desk apps i have used in the past. Working at drift, comparing Intercom to it, Intercom is significantly better from a support PoV. That being said, we are finding tickets to be too clunky for us to reliably use to support our customers. We need these flushed out more to encourage our teams to use them. Intercom has been fantastic for customer support communication and self help but a bit lack luster for our marketing style needs. We understand why it is this way but it does make it hard for us to push for the product (aka a better payment plan for more features)
Intercom helps us manage all of our in-bound and out-bound customer service enquiries including sales and after-sales issues. It allows our team to properly case-manage customers' enquiries and has helpful features that ensure we never lose an enquiry, forget to follow-up, or take too long to reply. It helps us remain incredibly responsive to enquiries and means we achieve high net promoter scores as a result. The platform also allows us to manage enquiries received from two separate websites/brands, which each have their own branded messenger but allows a single team to manage enquiries all in one place.
The on-website messenger is slick and very functional and really makes it easy for our customers to contact and engage with us.
Pros
Case management - allowing other teams (dispatch, accounts) to all contribute
Snoozing - allowing us to come back to enquiries and ensure they're never forgotten
Simply on-site contact with our team with live response times that build confidence
Canned replies - allowing us to introduce consistency and high standards in all our comms
Outbound email - incredinly powerful, ensuring all our comms are in one place
Multi-branded messengers on two different sites - allowing us to centralised responses behind the scenes but maintain brand separation
Cons
Exporting conversations - we need to do this for things like customer disputes and chargebacks, however the export is a simple unformatted text file, which is not an acceptable capture of the threads as it can be simply edited. A clean and neat PDF export would be fantastic.
Better/simpler spam and abusive user blocking, maybe based on IP address or sender domain
A lower cost - there are many free/low cost platforms now, and I feel your costs are high
Likelihood to Recommend
It works perfectly for us as a small team managing a large variety of sales and aftersales enquiries. It is far superior to email, which doesn't allow for case tracking and internal noting. It also allows us to deploy multiple websites/apps, each with their own brands and style, but is an interacted 'single view' behind the scenes. It's great also now that Intercom links to our social media accounts, ensuring that all DMs on Facebook and Instagram are captured.
I work in an E-commerce company. We mainly use Intercom to assist customers in setting up their order, providing updates, and also supporting them if they had issues with the product they received, etc. We also built channels to it since we have lots of 'lines of businesses' which made our intercom workspace organized. And speaking of channels, we took advantage of them as well as a way of our own organization's communication in terms of legalities or finances. It helped us a lot to avoid bulky emails.
Pros
I love the Note feature, which helps us organize folks to share our ideas in resolving a problem.
Macro, this helps us to save our message templates. We also use this when we have seasonal offers that we send out to the customers through the convo. And for outages as well this is helpful.
Integration. Our intercom is integrated with Slack, Airtable etc.
Can provide us the data analytics we need.
Cons
I think the new GUI, needs improvement. It has fewer borders or lines. But I believe this can be improved.
I hope there will going to be some thumbnails one some file formats.
Their support should improve their response rate since taking long for them to reply.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well, Intercom is what most companies all want. The simplicity of a communication channel where we can interact with customers and a comms channel for us organization employees. The setup is really something that is appropriate for us, especially for customer service, it's really convenient to have a convo with non-bulky emails. To be honest, I don't see any inappropriate aspects of Intercom.
