Intercom

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

Using Intercom has been an amazing experience. It is well thought out, full featured and continues to improve all the time. It has become an essential tool to communicate with our leads/clients. What is great is we can reach them (and they reach us) wherever they are: our website, in our web app, our mobile apps, email, etc.

Nachteile

While it starts off cheap depending on the features you choose to use and your volume it can start to get expensive quick. I'm not saying the product still doesn't provide value (it absolutely does) just if I had to pick what I liked least I would say cost.

Vorteile

It's so powerful and easy to use! It was effortless to set up, and all our business users (who've never done customer support before), find it very easy to use, and the users love it too.

Nachteile

The pricing adds up if you want your whole team using it. We'd love our engineers to be able to chime in with support conversations, but it's a bit too expensive to have everyone using it as a small business.

Vorteile

The UI allowing to construct auto-messages

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

Easily merges email and live chat on one platform. Integrates loads of other software too. Also has built in reporting and lots of features that come standard

Nachteile

Cannot merge tickets like other platforms do. Some reporting could use deeper drill downs and insights