Customer messaging platform for sales, marketing and support
4.5/5 (554 reviews)Intercom is a customer communication platform with a suite of integrated products for every team—including sales, marketing, product, and support. Our products enable targeted communication with customers on your website, inside your web and mobile apps, and by email.
This contrasts with the old way where a business uses a tangle of point solutions, like marketing automation or helpdesk products, with every team operating in a silo. This makes it hard for teams to work together and be on the same page, resulting in a disjointed and very impersonal experience for the customer.
Intercom has 17,000 paying customers all over the globe, ranging from startups like General Assembly, ZenPayroll and Invision, to public companies like Ancestry.com, New Relic and Shopify.
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.
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.
We have been able to resolve customer questions in a much quicker time simply because we can access help articles quicker, get other team members in on the conversation more easily, and use integrations like co-browsing and attaching help articles to resolve a problem more quickly. Overall, Intercom has been a great experience compared to our past customer support apps and we are happy to be using this to improve our customer's experience in our app.
Pros
It is great to have the ability to do so many things within one app: chat with our customers, write help articles, link help articles to our customers, send out messages to groups of people, easily find previous conversations, and create reports to monitor our progress. Intercom has really made our support workflow simple and much less confusing than other software tools we have used. They also integrate with a number of different tools (GitHub, ZenDesk, Upscope co-browsing, etc.) so anything that Intercom can't directly do, we can find a way to do through an integration.
Cons
The Customer Support response times from Intercom are a bit long, but the team is always helpful and resolves any questions we have. I also wish the Articles were a little more built out - they just have some simple feature there, and it would be nice to have a more robust help center with the flexibility to format our articles the way we want and organize the collections differently.
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.
It is a tool that was built by its users, meaning the people who build it also use it. I can begin to describe how important this is.
They have not limited themselves to what others are doing and have rethought the entire process f customer support to build what everyone wanted. A useful, effective tool which makes customer support fun to do as a job as well as receive. We often get asked by our customers what support tool we use. We love intercom!!
Pros
It's a tool that gives you what you need and it does it well.
They are ahead of the game in all ways.
It makes customer success seamless and proactive.
It's a multi-tool.
It's changed the way people perceive customer support because it makes it fast, effective and fun.
They write their own books (Awesome!) and they host seminars to help use the tools better.
Cons
They take a while to release new features, this is no surprise as companies will need different things.
It does not have a merging tool to link conversations to the person already in the system. Sometimes you get duplicate leads/users.
They can take a while to respond to support inquiries.
They changed their pricing structure which, when it was priced per lead and not per agent, made intercom stand out
Intercom Respond: from $53/month
Intercom Engage: from $53/month
Intercom Educate: from $49/month
Intercom Live Chat for Sales: from $66/month* or $106/month
Intercom Customer Engagement: from $53/month
Intercom Customer Support: from $102/month
A bundle of Respond, Engage & Educate is available from $99/month*
*new customers only
Below are some frequently asked questions for Intercom.
Intercom offers the following pricing plans:
Starting from: US$49,00/month
Pricing model: Free, Subscription
Free Trial: Available
Intercom Respond: from $53/month
Intercom Engage: from $53/month
Intercom Educate: from $49/month
Intercom Live Chat for Sales: from $66/month* or $106/month
Intercom Customer Engagement: from $53/month
Intercom Customer Support: from $102/month
A bundle of Respond, Engage & Educate is available from $99/month*
*new customers only
Intercom offers the following features:
Intercom has the following typical customers:
Mid Size Business, Small Business
Intercom supports the following languages:
English
Intercom has the following pricing plans:
Free, Subscription
Intercom supports the following devices:
Android, iPhone, iPad
Intercom integrates with the following applications:
Bitium, Campaign Monitor, ChurnSpotter, Driftrock Flow, Klipfolio, PARIM, Slack, Stripe, Zapier, Zendesk
Intercom offers the following support options:
FAQs, Forum, Knowledge Base, Online Support, Phone Support
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.