Intercom Reviews

BEST APP FOR LIVE CHAT

Pros:

INTERCOM IS EASY APP TO MAKE SURE THAT YOU STAY KEEP IN TOUCHWITH MY TEAMWORKER!

Cons:

THERE IS NO PROBLEM WHEN I USED IT AND INTERCOM RUNS WELL

Not Much Competition

Comments: Everything has been fantastic from the Customer Success-led implementation process to it being deployed to our users. Multiple compliments on the feasibility of use since purchasing.

Pros:

From both the administrative and user perspective, the ease of use and just overall depth of what you can create with the product is very impressive. It allows a great amount of customer support to be automated and simplify it's delivery via articles and a knowledge base that'll continually grow. Although it's not the biggest feature, as a user, I love that it's focused on getting you an answer/resolution the quickest way possible given the same entry method. Type "adding users" in an application with Intercom support will quickly both deliver you articles that can potentially solve your problem or will also quickly deploy a CSM to you to answer it directly in case it was a bit more complex. Best part though is the feedback cycle, you're typing exactly what you want to know into the application and if no articles return: New Content Topic.

Cons:

Theres really not much. I've run into situations where it was wrongly applied within other organizations and not properly resourced, giving a less than average experience. But that's not as much specific to Intercom themselves. Given they are the industry leader, it can come at a premium for a larger organizations.

Alternatives Considered: Olark, Confluence and Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Choosing Intercom: Overall compatibility with scaling of the company and support infrastructure. Not enough functionality to grow out an effective customer knowledge base that's as simple to approach for customers and internal content builders alike.

Switched From: Confluence

Reasons for Switching to Intercom: The overall growth of the company and product over the past few years and the speed in which they've been able to push out updates and new features shows a lot of promise over their competitors. Honestly, the user experience that we had been encountering when coming upon sites and companies that were using Intercom was so positive that it was hard to not want to give that same experience to our users.

Great product if you don't mind the pay per hit pricing structure.

Comments: Support was very responsive and helpful. The platform itself was great. Unfortunately it just didn't make sense to continue paying a premium for a platform that was so challenging to actually deploy (specifically communication features) due to the pricing structure.

Pros:

Great design and easy to use editor in their article creation feature.

Cons:

Pricing structure is very challenging to understand. You were charged extra based on the communication feature used, in some cases based on "all users", and in other cases based on "logged in users". Basically "per hit", but they had two different definitions of what constituted a "hit". Also, they have 3 different "products" of features that are packaged together. In some cases we were permitted to do a "light" version of a package and only get the specific features we wanted while another very desirable feature was packaged into a "product" we didn't need so it became cost prohibitive to add that feature.

Alternatives Considered: Product Fruits, Helpjuice, Document360 and Kustomer

Reasons for Switching to Intercom: There were a few key features that Intercom had that the others did not. Intercom was the most built out from a "no code" perspective whereas several of the others required some experience in HTML/CSS to really maximize their platforms.

Intercom is great for Startups

Comments: I've loved using Intercom so far - it has been essential in our customer success focused strategy.

Pros:

I love the help center and live chat. The help center is super easy to customize and make good-looking docs.

Cons:

Pricing and ticketing. Unfortunately, these are starting to become non-starters for us, as we're scaling up and hitting some pretty insane pricing tiers. Additionally, the ticketing solution seems like an afterthought.

Intercom is a great support system tool

Comments: Quickly and simply, I can access the Macros and write/update the articles in the assistance center. Streamlining the process of submitting tickets to the correct division for handling user concerns. It's a time saver for all teams because they can deal with it themselves.

Pros:

Streamlining the process of submitting and responding to tickets, and developing automated tools to streamline and simplify our daily lives. I appreciate how simple it is to locate articles and macros to distribute to my clientele. The addition of emoticons and gifs to the discourse is a nice touch, as well.

Cons:

Previous software allowed us to see the customer's input before he sent it. This allowed us to quickly respond to his query by reading it as he was writing it. If only I could keep seeing it.

Intercom for Startups is Awesome

Pros:

We were fortunate to be accepted into the Startups program so we are receiving a great discount to leverage all the product has to offer. We originally found Intercom for live chat but it offers so many features that we implemented. We love the tooltips and pop-ups. We love the ability to trigger the chat box when certain events occur. There are so many features that we haven’t had a chance to implement them all, each one that we use had helped our users have a better experience on our platform.

Cons:

Get started was a little difficult and I have had to reach out to Support on a pretty regular basis because I cannot find the answer to my questions in their support center. Their support team is awesome but it can take a day or two to hear from them which is frustrating when you need to get something released quickly.

Great live chat and marketing tool

Comments: Intercom is vital for our sales and customer service teams, we use it to communicate with our customers in real time and through email campaigns.

Pros:

It is easy to use, and honestly one of the best tools out there. Intercom has a ton of features that go from a simple chat bubble to interact with your users, to email marketing tools and AI bots. They have a ton of integrations with other services.

Cons:

Many features can be found behind a paywall and their tiers of service and bundles are not very clear.

Alternatives Considered: Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Switching to Intercom: The original developers, decided it was a cost effective and easy to set-up and deploy tool, they were not wrong.

Intercom review

Comments: Intercom is our customer support tool for support and internal communication

Pros:

I like the AI FIN module which is faster in processing resolutions to customers and also the pricing of intercom is easier

Cons:

Intercom requires a lot of time to deploy the solution fully and does not offer free WhatsApp integrations like other solutions in the market

Intercom experience

Comments: intercom has been awesome especially in the way of closing the business communication gap.

Pros:

provision of software that specializes in business messaging

Cons:

I can't really because intercom has helped business in the area of communication

Communicate with your audience and improve their engagement with Intercom platform.

Pros:

Intercom allows real-time communication and multichannel messaging: email, app, social networks, in-app messages, all in one platform.

Cons:

On basic plans, automation and segmentation capabilities are limited. It requires time and effort to learn how to use all of its features effectively.

Adds Much More Value Than You Realise

Comments: While the price tag for Intercom is not small, especially for startups launching their first mobile app versions, it has consistently proven to be one of the most valuable assets for teams in terms of user support, communication & out-of-the-box development readiness.

Pros:

The in-app chat feature (with its cross-platform support for React Native and Ionic) is absolutely the biggest differentiator for Intercom. It is a critical part of our day-to-day operations & every client that has gone the route of implementing it with us has been hugely surprised by the large amount of value it adds to end users.

Cons:

We are facing ongoing complications differentiating identified and unidentified users. The experimental API available for Android seemed to be heading in the right direction to solve this, but we haven't seen updates on the stub implementation for iOS in over a year (https://github.com/intercom/intercom-ios/blob/master/Intercom.framework/Headers/Intercom%2BExperimental.h).

Alternatives Considered: Airship, JIRA Service Management and Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Switching to Intercom: The depth of features, native mobile experience for users, easy to implement push notifications & powerful management console trumped our experiences with the others available & unified several different but related requirements.

Intercom is helping customers success, support, marketing and sales

Comments: It is a perfect solution for a B2B SaaS business.

Pros:

We started using Intercom in 2018. The platform has changed over the years drastically. Many new features have been delivered that you can call Intercom a proper all-in-one solution.

Cons:

The worst part is the buying process—many calls with sales guys who you have to tell the same story again. If you are a startup, try to go with a fast-to-implement and easy solution.

Alternatives Considered: LiveChat and Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Choosing Intercom: We needed a better platform to serve everything from one place.

Switched From: Smartsupp and Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Switching to Intercom: We researched many different solutions. But Intercom was top notch

Industry leader in category of customer communication

Comments: Intercom has grown to become an (almost) 1-stop-shop for all things customer communication related. Both sales, customer support, product etc. can benefit from directly using Intercom to communicate with your applications customers.

Pros:

A powerful platform that allows to view your customers session and meta data, instantly send targeted messages and set up email/in-app messaging campaigns, create help desk articles for self-service, automate workflows with bots and rules, onboard your application

Cons:

The increase of features and modules have brought the complexity of the software up. It's easy to get up and running (require 1 line of code), but the road to fully adopting the suite of tools is long.

Lots of Features but Frustrating When Messages Get Lost

Comments: Our team used intercom to support a large team of contractors that would frequently visit our website and work with us on a regular basis. We frequently use the "segment" feature to learn more about our population and to send out messages to certain segments. We also used a variety of integrations. For example, we used upscope.io so that we could immediately screenshare with any user who was on our website if they sent us a message on intercom that they needed help. The user would get a popup asing if they want to let the administrator view their screen and they just need to click "ok." That's it. It's that easy. Upscope.io integrates directly with intercom. You can also add Google Calendar to intercom so that intercom users can schedule a call with a teammate directly.

Pros:

Intercom allows for various quasi-queries, integrations, and outound messasges to your users. This is very helpful and is not available in all of the other customer support platforms that I have used. You can find out information about your customer population. You can send messages to only CERTAIN "segments" of your customer population. You can also integrate with a WIDE variety of other softwares to really up your customer support game.

Cons:

Intercom does not show all of the user messages together unless you open their profile OR they send their message as a response. So, for example, if a customer sends you a message, then 10 minutes later they create a new chat and send a new message, those messages are not linked togather unless you open their profile. I have had the experience of different agents answering the two messages or of answering one message only to see that the same user had sent a correction to their message. This is very frustrating. It can also be difficult for users to locate the knowledge base which leads to more inbound messages. Intercom is trying to solve this by bot responses, but this is something you may have to pay for.

Horrendous company, be careful of getting locked in

Comments: Absolutely horrible in every possible way.

Pros:

The UI allowing to construct auto-messages

Cons:

They lure companies in to integrating intercom into the workflows and take advantage of the difficulty of later migrating to another product, in order to jack up the prices to ridiculous levels. We've had to complain multiple times each year for drastic overcharges (think 3x) and fight with them for months until they would process some refund (after numerous lies and diversion attempts by their reps). Unethical company, unethical staff, can't be trusted one bit as a business partner. Also be aware that they do not grandfather plans, and you are at their mercy, they can at any time give you a short notice before "updating" the pricing structure. The most recent "update" would have caused a ~5x in price, getting us to flee to another provider at a great internal cost.

Mostly great, with some glaring issues

Comments: Mostly positive, but even so we are in the process of switching to another tool that has more straightforward pricing and complete features.

Pros:

Generally Intercom is easy to use and their documentation is quite good, so it's usually easy to find the answer to any question we might have. Anytime a new feature or change is rolled out, they offer pretty solid onboarding and walk you through how to get the most out of it. In terms of capabilities, I'd say Intercom offers more than most. Many options for integrations. We use it for lead generation, email marketing, customer engagement, and tickets. In all cases it is pretty quick and easy to use and easy to collaborate with team members.

Cons:

We've been using Intercom for years without any significant issues, but over the past 2-3 years it has grown and evolved in ways that haven't always been positive. Their customer support is much slower and less responsive than they once were. As they've added new features and capabilities they've also increased fees and now you have to pay separately for every tiny thing. It seems like every single feature in the platform requires a paid upgrade and this rapidly and significantly increases the cost. Reporting is very weak and only goes back a few months (it's so bad that we don't use any of it... all of our reporting is done externally with integrations).Finally, and perhaps most significantly, many of their features don't really work the way they are marketed or the way that you'd expect. This has led to continuous disappointments when we learn that certain features don't really do what they claim to do. They are must more limited than they appear, and when you speak to their customer support about it they are always scrambling to offer you some sort of a workaround. Workarounds can be fine, but they shouldn't be required so frequently, especially for such an expensive tool.

A pricey but extremely competent choice of chat

Comments: Very well! everything from sales calls, onboarding, setup and support have worked very well.

Pros:

Integration was easy with webhooks easy accessible. It is also very easy to customize chatflows with many different response options, making it a breeze to set up multiple scenarios. I do also enjoy the customization possible to for example have different chat prompts depending on the webpage a visitor goes to. On the other hand this is sometimes a bit overwhelming - I want to explore more and a customer success manager would be nice to have for this.

Cons:

The price. Honestly, it seems like they try to raise and raise to squeeze a lot of money out of small businesses. Also, their pricing model is pretty difficult to understand, so be aware of all the choices you make during your sales call/order.

Alternatives Considered: HubSpot CRM

Reasons for Choosing Intercom: Needed more customization

Switched From: HubSpot CRM

Reasons for Switching to Intercom: See above

Fairly unreliable tool

Comments: When it works it is great, but the support team often avoids helping with issues and isn't available during a major outage.

Pros:

It has great features, when they are working correctly.

Cons:

There is no live support. During major outages, which are far from uncommon, it is impossible to reach anyone. Their support is only available via chat, with 1-5 business day response times. Since the support team uses the same chat platform they offer to customers, it isn't possible to reach someone during a major outage. The support is very low quality during emergency situations, so it is not a dependable tool for teams offering live customer support.

A lot of features but overpriced for startups

Comments: Intercom solutions solve real problems however if you are a startup I don't recommend using it since you really feel that they try to lock you. They attract you with their startup package and then it will take some effort if you want to switch to another supplier.

Pros:

Intercom is a combination of tools providing different values and solving different problems. We use chat, article, product tour and several other tools. Overall they all solve a specific problem.

Cons:

Every tool we use has some limitations and we often need to find workarounds to reach our goals. However the worst point about intercom is their pricelist Even if you own a PhD you will have a hard time understanding how much to pay if you add an option. Every tool is an option that keeps adding to your bill plus they have triggers to increase the bill according to the number of users. Overall you don't really know where you're going with the way they charge you.

Terrible customer service and onboarding

Comments: Onboarding was absolutely horrific. We even complained during onboarding about our rep. Basically our onboarding meeting comprised of --> Please log in and share your screen with us...now, what questions do you have for us? Excuse me? This is your product, what do you mean what questions we have? Everything, including how to set up and use your products. But the answers we got was basically the same, to look up the help center and let them know if any questions. It was terrible. The sales process was more informative than the actual onboarding. Awful response time from customer service. Can only chat, no calls. You're basically on your own once you pay them.

Pros:

The product once you get past the setting up and figure out everything on your own, is great and meets our needs. It's easy to chat with leads and customer and easy to install on any websites.

Cons:

Onboarding was a nightmare. Their help center is not all that helpful. You can only chat with customer service via the chatbot. It takes them 8 hours to over a day to respond back, if you're lucky (which is quite ironic for selling a chatbot product but they have zero urgency on their own). Everything costs extra, every feature is priced separately.

Extremely expensive and they make it extremely hard to move away

Comments: Poor startup support

Pros:

All in one system, with email, lite CRM and small analytics.

Cons:

Everything about intercom is built to keep you in the ecosystem. And the more you integrate the harder it is to move away. But they actively make it hard to move away. For example, by not allowing you to export your help articles and by creating random URL conventions to make it hard to redirect your help articles once you have built them elsewhere.

Alternatives Considered: Crisp

Reasons for Switching to Intercom: Cheaper

Small SAS Use

Comments: Our main use for intercom is tier 1 chat support. Our users know that this is the fastest way to get ahold of us. In lieu of using a chatbot we've gone in and created a bunch of quick responses that we can go in and edit. This has cut down on the amount of time we spend chatting with a customer and it allows us to control the message that we are sending out across the board. We've also used campaigns to let our users know of new product releases and have sent out Net Promoter Score Survey's out in a campaign. I'd like to note that we do not use Intercom as a CRM for leads on enterprise accounts.

Pros:

Intercom is really easy to set up and importing users into the software is really simple. It's nice to be able to create an online library of help articles and have it available for our users to find. The chat feature is what we use most and our users definitely enjoy how easy it is to reach out to us.

Cons:

Our customers have a difficult time closing out of conversations or seeing actions on our screen that need to be taken on the right hand of the screen. The chat box will often times cause them to become more frustrated as they need to open and close the chat as we give instructions. The close button is in a circle under the chat, which is a spot that most people don't usually look for. There are a few customizable things that we'd like to see. Like the ability to create custom out of office messages or include holiday messages to let our users know we're either out of office or responding slowly.

All our support team is using it

Pros:

Ease of use is really great. We have hundrets of conversations with our clients every day using this tool.

Cons:

Their pricing. Not only is it expensive, they have changed their pricing plan about 4x in 2 years. Furthermore it's very complex to understand.

Alternatives Considered: Front

Reasons for Choosing Intercom: Better UI and livechat.

Switched From: Groove

Best software for proving support

Comments: Coundn't be better. Today I cannot imagine our daily support activies without this software.

Pros:

Its hard to say what I like the most, since are so many great features. Still, I believe the Inbox module is by far the great thing about it, since it allows a direct communication with clients.

Cons:

A couple of months ago articles sharing was changed on the inbox feature. Now, when you share an article via conversation the client cannot open it on a separate page. This is terrible for most clients, a source of great complain.

Intercom Is (mostly) Great!

Comments: We use Intercom daily to help diagnose and solve a multitude of customer issues. As an admin, I have the ability to monitor chats, provide internal notes within the chat in real time for trainees, and make sure everyone is offline at the end of the day. There are a few flaws and Intercom WILL send you far too many emails, but overall this is a great chat tool for any customer service business.

Pros:

Using Intercom as our ECOM site's chat service has been very helpful! On the customer service team, we are immediately given the contact information needed to properly help a customer. Using Intercom alongside Zendesk has also been a huge improvement over our old chat/ticketing software as they work very well together. Our team also utilizes custom and team macro responses to give fast, accurate answers and assistance. Also, giphy integration!

Cons:

The default setting on Intercom has keyboard shortcuts turned on. It seems like most of them immediately close the chat. This can be easily solved by turning them off, but it is not made obvious on how to do so. Once they're off, it's smooth sailing! We have two customer service teams, and we often have agents going back and forth between the two. We use Intercom for both. The other downside is that it is impossible to be available on one and away/reassign on the other. You can keep it open in two tabs, but that's more of a workaround than a solution.