Intercom Reviews: 4.5/5 — Highly Rated

Product Tours (video + step by step) Intercom articles

Newly rolled out features (such as custom bots) are not always working immediately. The help center is very difficult to maintain.

Reach out to users on product updates

A great avenue for more inbound leads coming through our website

Theres no pre-qualification process so I spend more time talking to irrelevant individuals than qualfiied ones

Just another avenue to get traffic and information from our website

I like that we can use the same tool to send outbound messages, reply to customers, and receive inbound messages from customers.

Intercom is way too expensive. We converted to using Intercom as our ticketing tool from Freshdesk to streamline our work, which is nice, but the cost difference is insane.

ticketing, emailing customers

Clear interface for responding to inbound customer queries - easy to respond, assign to different team members etc.

Intercom prompts etc. not working in sync with other product overlay features, e.g. Chameleon. It can. be difficult to stay on top of exactly what a user segment is seeing when they move through the app and ensure that intercom and Chameleon aren't interfering with each other.

Immediate customer support, hosting help centre documentation, to a lesser extent automated user prompts for new features etc. It enables us to provide a personal service to users

The platform is easy to set up, create permissions, and get campaigns running. The operators and messaging routing makes complete sense and has a great UI to help users get onboarded.

Customer support takes an incredibly long time to respond, especially for a paid platform. Users can not edit their own permissions, even if they are admin. Certain common-sense pieces of the software, like scheduling hours of operation, are put behind a paywall to make users who already pay thousands gain access to 'premium' functionality.

We are currently using the intercom to create another venue for SDRs to interact with warm leads in hopes of setting meetings, answering questions, and ultimately giving our users a better experience with our brand.

I like being able to link in my admin, stripe, etc.

The billing is bonkers! Just go to a standard tiered billing structure, and stop nickel-and-diming us for every new feature and even some normal features that should just be included. Also, we need the ability to tag outbound replies and saved replies.

I am able to target specific cohorts based on my needs for outreach, updates and information.

Chat experience is excellent for both support rep and customer - support for plugins is good. Frequent application updates and releases notes blog keeps me informed of new features. The Series feature and its logic-based messaging flow is easy to use and helps visualise messaging. Market presence means lots of integrations.

The support is fairly unimpressive - often take days to reply, and they make you jump through hoops just to talk to them (ironic, really). The team is good-natured and helpful when you do get through to them though - it is more an issue of their process and philosophy. Given all the app insights Intercom gets from our product, it offers next to zero reporting or analytics. This is not a Customer Success tool; it is a Customer Support tool with some smart messaging bolted on. You cannot use the data Intercom gathers about user activity to identify succeeding / failing customers or to profile your customers, which feels like a huge missed opportunity. They also are incredibly aggressive with locking features behind tiers and using dark patterns to manipulate you to upgrade. E.g. very often a locked feature will be completely accessible to you - you can go and set things up and get it all ready, then when you click submit it says you need to upgrade. I've wasted so much time because of this. Articles and messages let you add emoji ratings to each article/message, but Intercom offers no way of being alerted to negative responses, so unless you are going to manually review all articles and messages on a regular basis this is a frustratingly pointless feature with huge potential.

Being able to provide support to a large number of users, have a help centre, and to automate messaging to users based on their activity.

The outbound messaging is really complete

You can't limit inflow outside operating hours, automated conversation routing is only avalilable in an extremely expensive plan that doesn't offer many other advantages. The agents interface is just not agile enough, it is not thought for real time fast customer service and this mindset reflects in features, interface, reports...

Outbound messaging makes crisis management and new products launching easier

The chatbot feature is perfect for any sort of app that needs to run customer service through chatbot.

The lead generation capabilities are not what they seem and are not the best I have seen.

Generate more leads and service customers.

Easy enough to navigate around and organzie messages

Messaging function has a learning curve for our members trying to reach us. We have had to do a handful of work arounds to get minor things like functional email signatures.

We are trying to add more ways to communicate to our members and it does have some organization benefits

It is a very fluid and user friendly system. I like the casual but business nature of the platform.

There are some customization tools that would significantly improve my day, as I spend a ton of time jumping around to try to isolate a customer or a letter.

We are solving customer issues, mostly with Researchers who do not fully understand the rules/codes of our platform.

Its easy to communicate amonghs coworkers as well it shows How many emails are sitting in the inbox. I can look through my teams email.

It seems like lots of funcitions that we dont use, If theres more on site training or question and answer sessions with Intercom Rep, we could uterlize the system better?

large amount of emails we receive dayly baisis, I can see if my coworkers are busy then I can jump in and help out accordingly.

End Customer Experience is nice. API Support

Backend Side is not great. Buggy product tours, unclear menu structures, no live loading on most occasions

Communication to our customers

Ease of integration. User experience for both operator and end user is great. Consolidated experience across our web applications as well as native iOS and Android is great.

Admin configuration can be a bit complicated. More importantly, It's almost impossible to get customer service or technical support... which is odd from a company built around helping other companies support their users. We have been trying to get information on a new feature and were told we can't get a demo because we aren't on an "annual contract". We pay monthly. The response time on any request you open in chat is easier to measure in days than hours. Another case of great product - poor customer experience.

Providing consistent support experience to our customers across web and native mobile. Making it easier for operators to manage interactions with customers. Primary benefit is that we can connect with users and solve their problems in minutes - leading to high retention and loyalty.

The messenger is good, the templates you suggest are very good.

Settings are always where you don't think they should be, everything is really complicated. I think that's because the setup was not done right, you should really invest in proper implementation and don't let us do it ourselves. it causes a lot of issues along the way. I always need one of our r&d team to solve issues that wouldn't happen if there were a good implementation and onboarding.

The support chat and bots are good. We use the product tours but there are some very big things missing there (such as a "back" button We use the help center, it's really minimal and can't configure it enough, also the design options are not sufficient,

Intercom is a great way to connect with prospects and users. Inbox views make it easy to make sure the right people are handling the right cases. We've been able to add Quick Links to move the conversation to other systems (like HelpScout) with one click, or learn more about the customer (like by logging into their Account or viewing their HubSpot record). Saved Replies are key for us as well, as they help us streamline our efforts and provide more direction to our reps.

After using Intercom for a few years, we're starting to feel like we've just about maxed out our potential with it. It's pretty difficult to store new data within Intercom, and there are limits that make it nearly impossible to continue to use new pieces of data to send targeted messages. Also, Intercom's introduction of Series (and deprecation of Campaigns) was extremely disappointing. Not only did it seriously overcomplicate nurturing campaigns, but I was asked to share our use cases with their engineering team on calls multiple times during the development process and nothing was taken into consideration. Then we were scrambling to move our Campaigns to Series in their set timeline, but the Series functionality didn't work enough to do this. (They eventually moved the deprecation date of Campaigns from March to October.. so clearly this was a big issue). This along with some other less-than-ideal 'improvements' has made it seem like they don't really listen to their customers.

We use Intercom to support, nurture, and engage with our users (both free and paid). Having the ability to chat live has helped us get in front of users when they're in the product and our recommendations can be most impactful.

It makes it easy for users to contact us quickly, and from an operational point of view, it is much quicker to respond and organise support queries or leads than using email. The support team at Intercom are also very helpful, and it has an active community. We're also able to assign different roles within the organisation to allow advisors, marketers and operational staff to work together, without having to worry about features that aren't relevant to them. My favourite tool is the visual pathway for managing when messages go out to leads, and qualifies to whom they are sent.

Integrations often require workarounds or sub-optimal workflows to get them to function. For example, when integrating with Hubspot, it is challenging to transfer Intercom's "tags" to Hubspot's contact features. It's also tricky to set up clean-looking email templates without knowledge of HTML. A block-based editor similar to Hubspot would be an excellent quality of life improvement.

We're able to talk to existing and potential users easily, allowing us to offer a better standard of service. This is important in setting us apart from the competition, as our value proposition is that we make it easier to switch to an electric car than traditional models of ownership. With a small team, it also allows us to respond quickly to incoming questions from leads, without spending too much time monitoring inboxes. Feedback on our support has been positive so far, which has been made possible by Intercom's platform.

Tracking in app events works well most of time, communicating in app on via our website works well

There is no way to get help from them. It can take a week to get a reply or sometimes they'll just close your conversation without replying. When Intercom works, it's great but when it doesn't you're on your own. You can report an issue and tell them it is having a major impact on your customers and they "expect" to get back to you in around 2 days. No guarantees. No promises. And my experience is that it can take a week. Not acceptable for a critical tool.

Tracking in-app events, communicating with customers in app and on our website. When it works, it's great.

Easy to set up and has great features for an early-stage start-up.

Training and support do not seem to be first class. This may be due to my plan but my expectation is that customers should receive the same level of support regardless of how much I pay so that I can become a fan and want to invest more as my use case grows.

Basic trial requests and conversational engagement with web visitors. We are expanding into other use cases, like chat and slack integrations with Hubspot which also seem to be working well for us to measure attribution.

The best part about Intercom is that I am able to help customers with their problems as they are experiencing them. I also appreciate how easy it is to add Help Articles to the help centre.

Since I do write a lot of help articles, I've experienced some frustrations around the text editor. The main frustration used to be about resizing images, though that might have gotten better. My other frustration is with some of the analytics. I don't quite understand why the customer facing "the team typically replies in" is different than the number in the analytics section. I also don't know if median is the best measure of this I used to be very annoyed with the notification sound (it was very jarring) - but I have now customized the notifications so that they are less irritating.

Use Intercom for current email drip campaign, product communications, and regular in-app communication. I have grown to really appreciate the filters that I can apply to messages - especially when I can tag in bulk using the API.

The best part of working with Intercom was that it was a quick and easy solution to implement. It worked well in our digital learning platforms.

We ran into a lot of glitches working with Intercom, probably because of the very specialized back end site design and development we were using. The team member implementing the program had a hard time with the set up, so for a long time, all of us were getting copied on every single request that came through, and it was a nightmare trying to figure out when or if something had been taken care of.

Due to limited availability of live person seating at our events, we had to create a digital version that could accommodate our students and allow us to answer one on one questions during the training. It was helpful for this, but eventually we had to develop an in-house customized solution that would work with greater ease and gave us greater control over the process of customer service.

Their live chat platform is solid that offers lots of useful functions and their customer support response time is good.

We’ve been using Intercom for 5 years now and a few things which we disliked about the tool are: Poor Quality of Customer Support Even though the response time is good, their ability to resolve issues isn’t the best. As there have been instances where the support couldn’t resolve an issue or ended up providing workarounds that were sub-optimal. Plus, we have faced issues with integrating Intercom with other tools in our stack, and one such issue wasn’t resolved for MONTHS, not weeks. Product Lacks Depth For instance, we used their “chatbot” feature which was positioned as an AI-driven conversational marketing alternative (much like how Drift and GoSquared position themselves) However, it only works as an auto-responder with pre-existing conditions, nothing more. Also, the tool offers simple metrics and has little to no room for carrying out deeper analysis around revenue, conversions, adoption rates, etc. Plus, we have requested several feature requests in the past years which haven’t seen the light of the day, yet. Poor Value For Money Most fundamental features like white-labeling, multi-domain styling, and performance reports are missing in their pro plan, which charges thousands of dollars/month. Also, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic where banking systems are crippled, we too weren’t able to pay them on time. However, instead of being patient and understanding our situation, they blocked our account without informing us. This broke our existing configuration and made the chat system go hardwired. When we reached out to them, they said they will only unblock services after the payment is received. The worst thing was that the chat window continued to appear on our website and prospects/customers were interacting with it, but our support agents were not able to login or reply. Quite embarrassing and pathetic experience to offer to half a decade old customer.

a) On-site and in-app messaging with prospects and customers: Helps in addressing queries and concerns in a jiffy. b) Marketing promotion: Sharing product updates and setting behavior-based workflows

Market penetration -- users know how to use it -- familiarity is good here.

The UI I think is pretty bad. I really struggle finding where certain features are (or even what certain features are) -- I've reached out to support far often that I'd really like to! Often if feels limiting from a configuration perspective as well -- We use the bot functionality a lot, and have been frustrated by some of the limitations & quirks.

Intercom provides us a consistent source of leads where most of our inbound Sales have originated from.

Intercom is great because it can integrate and help with so many different parts of your workflow

I can be a little complex to navigate initially because it is so robust, however, the functionality of Intercom is great!

Intercom has been crucial in communicating with users of our platform and for allowing a solid support chat for users

I really like the capability between the sales side of our intercom and the customer success side of Intercom. I also like how easy it is to manage the inboxes and quickly assign a particular conversation to another representative. Also, the integration with Slack is a plus!

I don't like how limited it is in features. For example, if you have offices in multiple time zones, Intercom doesn't seem to recognize working hours for each office, but rather the account as a whole. So if your team in Europe is working, but someone from the USA comes on intercom, it will show that the USA office is still online and vice-versa.

We are solving our online webchat and our customer support chat. I haven't realized many benefits on the sales side as I think there might be a better fit out there for us at the moment, which isn't a knock on Intercom.

That it can be linked to Slack so the team gets notified there but I think that has something to do with Slack and not Intercom

It's not easy to navigate. You have to look hard to be able to find specific functions you're looking for.

Intercom allows us to effectively communicate with users with speed

Outbound messaging, the chat pop up and now the bots!

Its not built for a real Support environment. Its getting better, but works well for small CS teams.

Live chat, outbound communication to replace SMS.

great platform for talkback or doorphone . It lets lets businesses track and filter customer data.

its a great product

chat

Intercom is helpful for us to communicate with our clients.

The reporting capabilities are limited.

We have been able to provide quick assistance to our clients while they use our platform.

Easy to use, easy to keep track of new / closed threads

Can be buggy and slow to load; notifications are loud and annoying

It's a way to interact with clients