Intercom

Vorteile

The ability to converse with our customers quickly and seamlessly between email and the messenger app is great. They've thought through this feature set very well and it brings us very close to our customers and we are able to convert leads very well through this service too.

Other similar apps function the same, but their UI/UX is lacking compared to Intercom. The actual feel of the app is clean and friendly and dare I say...even fun to use.

Customer success at Intercom is also excellent, they've got our backs and I appreciate it (although getting paired with someone in a vastly different time zone can hold up ticket times on our end).

Nachteile

There are some gaps in the help center and email features. It would be ideal to create/edit documents in a manner closer to Microsoft Word or Google doc, as those are the standard for editing documents these days. Little things like not being able to create a list inside of a document the way I would in other apps can be frustrating, but there is usually a workaround of some sort that will suffice (I'm just picky).

It would also be nice to only be paired with their team members in our time zone. Working in the US and then being helped by a team member from Australia means our ticket times take much longer and conversation is hard to do in real time.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

-Capturing emails and names
-Integrating to Hubspot and other software for easy lead closure
-Creating chat flows allows us to communicate to customers faster and saves us time

Nachteile

-Would like to combine actions on Intercom
-Hubspot Integration is not perfect; would like to have specific field matching
-Chat flow capabilities are limited

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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).