Intercom

Avantages

The first thing I love about intercom is it’s easy to set up and use. We can integrate all of the systems we use that can automate a lot of our support needs and can provide our customers with quick access to our internal support.

Inconvénients

It’s a great tool and you can figure it out easily but for some cases we require help and have to wait for support and it’s really difficult to get a customer support or technical support. Average response time for any request will be in days instead of hours which will be annoying.

Avantages

I love how we could integrate chat directly into our application for our customers. The help center is very nice for our customers and the reports really help us understand how our team is doing.

Inconvénients

Some of the functionality is a little difficult to setup especially around the tracking of specific features utilized on our platform. I also can get a little frustrated with the routing of messages, it can override the rules you put in place.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

Easy to manage contacts and customers, create events and automations, etc. Also has strong integrations with a lot of other tools we use. It's great for being able to manage users of our SaaS, and contact them via email or a message within our app. Great for creating automated support, too—this saves our support team a lot of time and means they don't waste time dealing with repetitive and simple queries.

Inconvénients

It gets pretty pricey if you have a lot of active contacts, so would definitely recommend utilizing a different software for managing marketing emails and leads, etc.

Avantages

Intercom is easy to start using to start helping customers and to provide an amazing experience, as well as track basic and initially important information. Great for startups!

Inconvénients

I haven't used the reporting as much as I would like, but I've heard feedback it's not the most robust in terms of identifying and CX issues. Could use more customization.

Avantages

It provides a fully featured Live Chat platform to make your customers to engage with you anytime. Its simple and easy to use interface make it different from other platforms. Anyone can create their own chatbots without having any technical skills.

Inconvénients

Everything is fine but the most difficult thing is its price. It is too much costly than other softwares that new businesses wipp be unable to purchase it. If it redices its cost, it is the best Live Chat software.

Avantages

Easiest support tool to have.
Makes your team very accessible, also makes the support process simple for the end users
Good integrations and useful statistics provided

Inconvénients

Pricing - it is not very cheap. Pricing also often changes
Help center tool - it could really use some help and updates
Also, a lot of Add block tools catch Intercom as an ad and blocks it - thus creating inconvenience for end users having to choose between

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

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 envisagées 

Crisp

Pourquoi passer à Intercom

Cheaper

Avantages

It is a good alternative for communication through messaging, it is a tool that connects with clients from business websites or could even say personal and maintain more direct contacts, helping from completing sales to responding to requests or claims to clients with technological efficiency and innovative

Inconvénients

It is a good tool that, if used correctly, can even deal with customer complaints or requests without major complexities. It is the type of tool that is very complete for medium and large organizations and brings great benefits.

Avantages

Intercom makes it easy for us as a chat bot on our website. It enables our customers and users in general to talk to use live AND to have access to the Q&A as well. We can easily create articles to share not only on intercom but elsewhere as well. As a conversation management, we can search, open, start, close, tag conversations.

Inconvénients

Can be overwhelming of information for a first time user. It really takes time to learn and master the whole tool. Can be achieved only over months and months using it and spending a lot of time using and exploring it.

Avantages

Enjoy the integration with Help Articles, the ability to send targeted campaigns based on app engagement. Love that they offer special pricing for Startups. Lots of room to grow into the Intercom platform.

Inconvénients

Their pricing model does not fit all business models well and can be difficult to understand. It can get costly quickly depending on how many products you choose and your business model.

Avantages

The knowledge center and live chat features were the most used features at our software company. These features were used regularly and automations within intercom helped serve clients efficiently.

Inconvénients

Lacks in reporting and knowledge base customization compared to ZenDesk. Innovation in new features can be slow at times.

Alternatives envisagées 

Zendesk Suite

Pourquoi passer à Intercom

Intercom was easy to implement and integrated into Zoho directly by previous developers so was a hard sell to switch out.

Avantages

Like the way the conversations has taken life, very futuristic. Surely a great easy tool to get the job done. Efficient and easy to use.

Inconvénients

When compared to a tool like Zendesk, have felt sometimes that the tool lacks some depth in features but that has not hampered my user experience as there are workarounds that I can do.

Alternatives envisagées 

Zendesk Suite

Avantages

We use Intercom to generate leads for our business by engaging with website visitors through live chat.

Inconvénients

The ability to ask visitors key information such as name and email address disappeared overnight and Intercom never told their customers this feature had stopped working.
We had to discover it for ourselves, only to be told that they knew there was an issue and it was not a priority to fix. Basically, it was tough luck!
This is after they took ages to get back to our support ticket.
Customer service is terrible and they just don't give two hoots about their customers.
Constantly introducing new features but not actually fixing the main feature that someone would need!
We're looking for an alternative to Intercom and as soon as we find it we will be leaving

Avantages

Admin interface is visually appealing. Widget is not.

Inconvénients

Lacks basic/rudimentary functionality. Simple things like auto triggering a message at the company level when specific criteria is met is not possible. Tagging system is not easy to use and lacks basic features. Can't customize inboxes as needed. I felt like you product blog was so delightful that your product would be the same but it felt like you weren't living your word. Nothing was easy on this product.

Alternatives envisagées 

Zendesk Suite

Pourquoi choisir Intercom 

My CEO didn't like how outdated some of their UI was. However, functionality wise it was far superior to intercom and I regret switching.

Pourquoi passer à Intercom

Your product blog made it seem like you had solid product principles and thus a solid product. I found that not to be true once I started using it.

Avantages

The interface of this software is extremely clean and easy to use. It's very easy to keep track of all of the different chats you're currently handling and to see who is waiting in the queue.

Inconvénients

Honestly there isn't much that I didn't like. The reporting wasn't quite as robust as it could have been, but that was my only qualm.

Avantages

The inbox is easy to navigate and works well
Quick links and customer sidebar provides easy access to info

Inconvénients

Complexity of pricing
Features are not keeping up with the market
Poor automation

Avantages

I love the fact that I can use Intercom to manage every interface with leads and my customers. From collecting their data, to monitoring sessions and getting some insights on actions with event-triggered email marketing. I also love the easy integration with Slack and the multiple integrations I can implement with other software like Calendly, Google Calendar etc. It's one robust software!

Inconvénients

It could feel like a handful when setting up and you are going to need an engineer to help with some stuff. Other than that, Intercom is bliss for managing, nurturing and supercharging your customer interactions.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

-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

Inconvénients

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

Alternatives envisagées 

HubSpot Marketing Hub et LiveChat

Pourquoi choisir Intercom 

We were on a free plan with LiveChat for a year because we were part of an Incubator. When the year ended, we wanted to consider other options. Intercom gave us a startup plan, so it ended up being cheaper than LiveChat.

Logiciel antérieur 

LiveChat

Pourquoi passer à Intercom

Intercom was recommended to us from other entrepreneurs.

Avantages

-Provide great support (would be super ironic if they didn't)
-Make it really easy to train other people on the platform
-Reporting options since we moved to Inbox Pro have really improved
-Now that we've figured out the tags, we're getting super great data.

Inconvénients

-The way they set up how you pick your hours of availability really annoys me
-While not common, we have experienced issues that we're pretty sure aren't user error (ie. need to refresh your page after turning on your beeping sound)
-A lot of the integrations require you to share out the emails of all of your clients which is annoying

Avantages

Intercom is lightweight, easy to deploy, and intuitive for the end user. We use it every day to provide timely customer support to our users, as well as to communicate with our customers.

Inconvénients

Intercom's Articles offering is a bit neglected and lacks basic features that other help center products have. It also lacks some features around managing end user privacy (e.g. not inferring user location) that are troublesome with regard to international privacy law.

Avantages

The ability to send email campaigns, set up notification/chat campaigns and live chat with customers.

Inconvénients

The one MAJOR negative aspect to this product is that once someone qualifies for a campaign, even if the campaign is deactivated, the person will continue to get the contents of the campaign until it is finished, or the campaign is deleted. *Note, if the campaign is deleted, all reporting and data tied to it will be deleted as well.

Avantages

- Plug & play : Intercom is really easy to set-up
- User friendly : Intercom is has a nice UI and is very intuitive. There's no need to spend hours in training each time we have a new recruit in our team.
- Always moving forward : I used to use Intercom in my last company in 2016 and I started using it again in 2018 and I was very glad to see they have added several new features (Operator and the newest Answer bot)

Inconvénients

- Reports : their reports are very poor and some of their statistics are not very reliable (for instance the conversations participated in in the "summary" section for a team and in the "performance" section is not the same! For a data-driven company like ours, this is very frustrating.

Avantages

Intercom is great for tracking user engagement, support, and marketing. I love that you can see what a user is doing on your site and send messages (email or chat) based on specific criteria. Realtime and asyncronous commications are easy to deploy and manage. Analytics provided detailed information on user engagement.

Inconvénients

It can take some time to gain a working knowledge of Intercom. Setup can be complicated and require a developer if advanced or deep site integration is desired. Once you get over the learning curve, the tool is well worth the time invested in learning to use it to it's full capability.

Avantages

+ Beautiful design, with many useful details.
+ Good iOS and Android app with slightly limited operation.
+ An easy to understand messenger for the customer.
+ Customisable messenger with colours, text and details.

Inconvénients

- High price and only monthly plans.
- Platform only in English.
- Minimal help center, but large but confusing Academy pages.
- Tedious setup help, although the setup itself is not complex.
- Support replies take up to two days, in English only.

Alternatives envisagées 

Help Scout

Pourquoi passer à Intercom

In the plans up to Pro, the customer also figures as an advertising slingshot, since an advertising line for intercom is always included in every e-mail.

Avantages

Intercom is really easy to use as a user but also as an admin. Easy to configure the queue and manage it, using different SLAs for each one!

Inconvénients

It does lack a way to tag the tickets so we can have better metrics! Also, a way to improve chatbots and also better reports on SLA e user metrics. It also misses a way to categorize tickets (question, bug, information, etc) on the basic plan

Alternatives envisagées 

Zendesk Suite

Pourquoi passer à Intercom

Price

Avantages

- Best live website chat software in the industry.
- Great at following a visitor whether through chat, email or support desk.
- Allows you to use bots when a agent is not available.
- Great UI/UX.

Inconvénients

They need to work on the pricing model. It can really begin to hurt startups or small companies when they are ready to scale up. Apart from that their documentation can be improved a bit.

Avantages

Intercom was fairly simple to administer. Most features can easily be toggled on/off with a simple button and no complicated logic strings are required to set up permissions, workflow automation or campaigns.

Inconvénients

Our company used the Pro version of the software and, for the price, there were several basic Support features that were lacking. There is no ability to merge or split tickets for example, and the Reporting is not very robust. One example is "Median Time to First Response" - Average Tfir was only available on the top tier version.
The "Inbox" system for sorting tickets can be cumbersome, and the ability to leverage bots was also limited by the subscription tier.
Also, tagging tickets as recommended by Intercom makes the task challenging for a Support team - the hierarchical structures are overly complex and can be created by anyone (there is no ability to restrict tag creation in the user permissions) which can result in many duplicates and poor tracking of customer sentiment data.

Avantages

The live chat! It's working perfectly, it's easy to set up, and easy to use by both the customer and the support agent - one of the best options on the market for me.

Inconvénients

Everything besides the live chat - the knowledge base management has so little features and possibilities it hurt my soul everytime I needed to write an article :( Also, sending or receiving email is also quite a mess, it needs a little bit more work from Intercome.

Alternatives envisagées 

Zendesk Suite

Logiciel antérieur 

Help Scout

Avantages

I really love how you can customize the chat widget as it appears on your website. I also love the ability to create "teams" to assign certain types of inquiries or conversations to. This helps manage who gets notified of a conversation, so that people only see the conversations they need to be a part of. If you need to bring in another team member, you can tag them using common symbols like "@JohnDoe." Plus, you can keep a cheerful, personable tone by using emoticons and gifs inside of chats.

The best feature of all is the ability to have a public-facing chat widget (on our public site), and a client-facing chat widget (for our clients to use when logged in). This allows us to track prospects or clients and all of their activity so that we can quickly help them with the page they're on, see past conversation histories, or jump into our CRM profile for them immediately.

Inconvénients

Intercom has a very clunky internal site that makes it difficult to manage settings and respond to chats quickly. Even worse, there seems to be a 15-45 second delay from when a chat is submitted on your site to when it pops up in a browser notification or phone notification. That may seem a short amount of time, but feels like an eternity to someone looking for a quick answer to their question. It makes our response time appear delayed.

Avantages

I like how easy it is to use and how customized you can make it!

Inconvénients

Its a bit overwhelming at first since there are so many tools and different places to to enhance the system

Avantages

I particularly like Intercom's Inbox module. It supplies our support team with most of the tools they need to help our clients quickly, and share context with other team members.

The chat experience is top notch both internally for our team and for our clients.

Intercom's reporting is informative, specifically for tracking response times segmented by chat or email, or both.

Intercom's Articles feature for help docs helps us consolidate tools even more and makes it really easy to forward relevant articles to our clients quickly, while maintaining a consistent brand feel.

Inconvénients

Intercom's campaigns (now Series) feature can be tricky to set up. Specifically, the sending logic can be confusing and is prone to accidents in our experience (i.e. accidentally sending to the wrong audience).

Messages inside of campaigns/series don't always seem to get sent out when they should. This means that some of our clients don't get messages at the right time (i.e. they get a welcome email 2 days after they sign up instead of immediately after signing up).

For new team members, Intercom has proven to be a little difficult to learn fully.

Avantages

Intercom’s initial purpose was to support on-site chat. They do this exceptionally well. They’ve branched from there into other things in the customer engagement and marketing automation worlds, and do most of what they offer very well. All their tools are also well designed and mostly intuitive which is a big plus for me. They’ve also recently launched support articles paired with an on-site chatbot that I haven’t used. But if it works as well as their marketing claims, could be really cool.

Inconvénients

Being that most of their tools were things they initially added on to their core offering, sometimes feel like a patchwork. They would say that they’re good at marketing email automation and blasts, but they’re not REALLY built for that, at least compared to other tools they’re competing against. They have a pretty standard set of list segmenting tools, which unfortunately always leave me wishing they could do more. It also falls short as a CRM, but they probably wouldn’t claim to be that.

Avantages

Highly recommended for systems and tools integration. If you use other platforms that need lead and sales generation, this might be the one you are looking for.

Inconvénients

A little pricy compared to other solutions.

Avantages

Aplicativo extremamente útil para o meu negócio.

Inconvénients

Em alguns momentos senti que estava mais lento em alguns recursos mas nada que atrapalhe o dia a dia.

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

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

Avantages

I love that Intercom offers my organization more possibilities beyond acting as a medium to offer support to customers(helpdesk), it also serves as a marketing tool.It is accessible both as a web and mobile based app and offers a good experience to web visitors on every smart device.
With Intercom, we have been able to segment our users ,which makes it easy to focus on users who are more likely to make a purchase from us. Also Intercom has a large integration capability with multiple softwares.

Inconvénients

Intercom just doesn't offer the full deal either as a livechat solution or a marketing tool.Therefore we still have a primary marketing tool despite the marketing features present on Intercom.

Avantages

Intercom is very user friendly .and provides our helpdesk department with prompt timely support whenever it has been needed.It integrates well with Slack ,allowing us receive Intercom messages via the Slack interface.
Intercom provides us with more than just Live chat features , thus I see it as a marketing necessity for the modern day organization.Intercom provides helpdesk teams with bots and messenger apps to gather and analyze sales leads.

Inconvénients

As much as I have talked about Intercom addressing more than Live chat needs, I will also say "trying to do too much " is the major bane of Intercom. It does address a little bit of problems in helpdesk solutions , email marketing and customer relationship management ; therefore making Intercom a jack of every trade ,but master of none.

Avantages

We have been using Intercom on our website for more than 4 years now. And we don't plan on changing. It's a great software, allowing you to be present for your website's visitor during their journey. You can customize messages per pages they will go through. You can activate CTa for them to leave you their contact details if they want direct contact or if they are interested by your services/products. Intercom itself as a tool is very easy to use, and the UX/UI is great. They always have webinars etc for you to improve your use of it.

Inconvénients

It can be very overwhelming if you have a big company. It's amazing when you have one person dedicated to it.

Avantages

We use it since the start. It's not the cheapest, but it's the best. The combination of chat and knowledge based is great, and if you get automated with "outbound" there's no way back.

Inconvénients

The company uses their own chatbots a bit too much & the knowledge of the support rep varies.

Avantages

Intercom has helped me improve communication with my customers through its easy-to-use platform. The messaging features have allowed me to easily respond to inquiries and provide support, and the chatbots have helped me automate some of my customer service tasks. One of the biggest advantages of Intercom is the ability to personalize messaging and support. I can easily see previous customer interactions, which helps me provide more targeted and effective support. Additionally, the automation features have helped me save time and improve efficiency.

Inconvénients

While Intercom has many benefits, there have been some limitations. The platform can be overwhelming at first, and it can take some time to fully understand how to use all of the features. Additionally, the pricing can be somewhat high for small businesses.

Avantages

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!

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

I tried a lot of other sales software before I found intercom. I chose to invest in intercom because it is really one of the only ones I found that went beyond the sales stage. intercom is both a marketing software and an intuitive CRM that supports both customers and employees. It allows me to create personalized marketing campaigns, track leads and manage messages. Feedback to customers is automated and personalized. If you're a small business owner, you need intercom.

Inconvénients

for the moment I haven't found anything that bothers me, it happens to have some bugs but nothing serious

Avantages

The customer support features that it offers that allow us to communicate with our users directly in our app.

Inconvénients

The pricing keeps changing and is not transparent. The software is slow in several parts of it. Many things that can be done in bulk need to be done one by one (e.g. changing a variable in a user/lead information). Lack of support: for a company that is within the customer support category Intercom's support is quite disappointing.

Avantages

Intercom with its easy to use interface and powerful features is easily one the of the best tools for customer nurturing. It has set a new standard for all the software makers in terms of functionality and also marketing. Intercom offers great integrations but sometimes it gets a little overwhelming with a lot of features. They are always in touch with their customers updating them about the releases and new features which are being updated very frequently. Intercom is a great product and I believe that when choosing a customer nurturing platform, Intercom has to be a choice.

Inconvénients

Intercom is great if but it gets costly as you keep adding users. If there is no proper integration with the product, all the data will be garbage and it would not be very useful. Since there are a lot of features that get added very often, sometime it becomes a little confusing as to what the tool actually is capable of.

Avantages

We love that all messages that come in from site visitors and users of our software come in to one central place with Intercom, ensuring we never miss a message. We can also report on our average response time per user, snooze tickets if it's something we need to come back to, but don't want in our queue, and assign messages to other people's queues if it relates to them.

Inconvénients

I find the search functionality is a bit limited, and can sometimes find it difficult to search for specific conversations with users within companies.

Avantages

Intercom is essential for my work as a customer success manager. We integrate intercom in our app and on our web and it brings us so much closer to the end user and their needs. Intercom has helped us understand customer service quality and efficacy with metrics and connectivity.

Inconvénients

My concern is that Intercom has shown to focus a lot more on leads and customer acquisition rather than customer service and success, I would like to see more features on customer retention since this is what we are using the service for to begin with.

Avantages

Intercom is simple to use and set up, it is very user-friendly and uncomplicated. It provides and quick, easy and fairly affordable option to provide customer communication, service and sales communications.

Inconvénients

When scaling a business and moving into the realm of a more powerful CRM it didn't make sense to use Intercom anymore. There is syncing and integrations available for most platforms but software like Hubspot has the same capabilities as Intercom, in some cases more, and you get a full sync with a contact record.

Avantages

Easy to use both for users and for agents

Inconvénients

WORST CUSTOMER SUPPORT EVER!!! 7 days without a first response.
They barely have any features, and if they do - they expect you to pay thousands of dollars to get them.