Intercom Reviews: 4.5/5 — Highly Rated

Intercom is great in that the front end is well organized and has a good visual hierarchy. Of particular value is the way in which it addresses communications for the entire sales funnel from lead through closing and support.

The Intercom feature options are carefully sliced up to force one to pay as much as possible - and the fees for the different features are wholly exorbitant, in many cases ten times the cost of comparable alternatives (that in some cases offer more functionality). In addition, support turnaround is very slow (we've waited up to 8 days for a response) and when one does get a response, it's generally of the obsequiously cheerful and utterly unhelpful variety - typically directing one to a knowledge base page for an unrelated issue. In other words, deflection rather than support.

Intercom enables responsive interaction with a large userbase, and with it we're able to service over 15,000 high-touch customers with a 3-person team. That said, it's ridiculously overpriced for what it offers, and if you need help, you're basically on your own.

Fast access to customer information. Efficiencies as an all-in-one solution.

Sales driven culture has taken over Intercom rank and file. No longer focused on connecting people, but getting customers on larger and larger contracts. Every little feature they launch is an upsell. Not the best solution for support agents compared to others Have 4x'ed the price every 2 years on us with no new value.

Support, pre-sales, drip campaigns. It's provided value, but all things that can be done by better stand-alone tools. It's a generalist solution, not really amazing at any individual one.

We have used intercom for almost 4 years. In the beginning they were responsive and flexible and seemed to genuinely care about helping our business grow.

When COVID hit, we were evaluating our software solutions and inquired about switching from an annual contract to month-to-month. We asked what the changes to our pricing and feature suite would be if we moved forward with that change. We didn't get a response. Instead I received an automated email from their CEO that our contract was cancelled effective September 20. We reached out and for several days, did not get a response. On September 17th, our service was completely halted in the middle of the workday. Our team was unable to respond to any customer tickets for the remainder of the day. When we finally did get a hold of someone, they told us they were switching us to month to month, just as we had asked. We were told that was a completely different business platform and required a transition. None of this was communicated to us prior to the (entirely preventable) service outage, and again, we were just inquiring about the options should we choose to switch. We lost our settings as well as a previously agreed upon pricing discount built into our contract when they made this change. A manager was brought onto the phone and we were told they would get back to us with a concession because of the severe service disruption. We were never contacted again, until today when I was sent an email stating that they will not offer any concessions and they are sad to see us go, but that my Relationship Manager, Kelly McDonough, will no longer be available to me starting next week. I asked about a new point of contact and never heard anything back. This created an incredibly negative experience. We were told their team now takes several days to respond and we were lucky they were getting back to us so quickly. Intercom has become a rigid company that is no longer invested in helping their customers succeed. Run, don't walk.

N/A

Nothing at all, they have the worst product ever. I will move away from them the moment I will implement my new system. Just stay away

Horrible customer support (answer after 7 days) No CSM involvement although I pay them $12,000 a year They don't have any good features. I've paid for a premium subscription and then stopped, and all the features just stayed on my page, but I can't use them. They don't deliver at all. Stay away!

Nothing. I plan to move from them the moment I implement a new system. Just stay away

The chat works, the messages are organized.

We have had two renewals without our consent. Both times we voiced our issues, tried to book calls with our account managers but surprisingly didn't manage to before our renewal date. The issues below: - One of our main challenges is the issue with our help article import from Zendesk. Everytime we want to import a new article we need to either delete the existing articles one by one, or contact your support team to delete them, because the existing ones are not being overwritten, but duplicated. This is what your development team has told us. Obviously this is not how this should be working, but neither your support team, nor your development team have given us a viable solution. - Agents using firefox have reported that the app doesn't behave correctly, it lags a lot. Our experience with the support team has been bad. It takes multiple reminders to get an answer, days between responses and faulty solutions. You are too expensive. - The Intercom chat button doesn't show up to customers many times. - The app is laggy and usually has updates without giving us any notice. Our team might be in the middle of helping a customer, when they are unexpectedly logged out. And that usually happens during high traffic shifts. Our current account manager didn't have time to book a call and emailed us simply sending us the new invoice and introducing us to our new account manager.

Our support team can reply to customer questions.

The user-facing experience is pretty and has a lot of functionality

The backend is super complicated and not very easy to use for long term or quick changes. Many of the features require that you start an entire process fresh each time, even if you just discover you had a typo.

Intercom was brought into our company to allow us to use a knowledge base and marketing software platform.

Easy way to communicate with the right users. It's all about send the right information to the right people at the right time. Intercom allows you to do that.

They changed their pricind a year ago and it became wayyyy too expensive for the B2C, where the value per user is not the same than in the B2B. They should at least have kept the same pricing for historical customers. Now, it is not worth it anymore. Currently looking for alternatives

Make groups of relevant users, communicate efficiently towards them

The UI allowing to construct auto-messages

Intercom is an overpriced scam. They lure you in with nice looking features and then take advantage of the difficulty to later migrate to another product to extract ridiculous prices. Their new pricing pages are so opaque that it's impractical for you to get a good idea of the insanely high price you will have to pay as you grow. Intercom is a grandmaster in fooling customers into drastically underestimating both the actual costs they'll end up paying as well as the costs of migrating away to another solution. In other words, setting up an expensive, painful trap for you. BE CAREFUL and don't make the mistake that we've done. Even if the new pricing they introduced recently somehow seems reasonable for your use case, keep in mind that they DO NOT GRANDFATHER PLANS. This means they can at any time give you a short notice before jacking up the prices in any way they want -- like they've done for us with a 5x (!!) increase over our previous costs. We had to face the hard choice between spending a lot of engineering resources to migrate to another service, or succumb and enrich an evil company. And this came after a couple years using intercom with numerous billing errors, all of them (surprise..) significant overcharges, and all of them followed by heel dragging by their contemptuous customer support for months (before finally admitting their errors and providing the required refund...) We think it's one of the most unethical companies around, pretending to care about their customers but actually blind to anything but their own revenue. Which isn't that surprising given the pressure of their VCs and their plans to IPO.. but the steep price of such pressure will be paid by YOU. Do not believe any of their marketing gimmicks -- make sure you fully understand their opaque, convoluted pricing structure, and if you're willing to pay the true (extremely high) price, insist that they guarantee you no pricing increases, ever. Alternatively, make sure you fully understand the extreme cost and disruption to your business that will be caused when a year or two down the road you won't want to be their exorbitant prices but will already be deeply integrated with their API etc. Other customer engagement platform are gaining up speed quickly and my recommendation to you, especially in these Covid-19 days when minimizing expenses is vital, is to go with the far lower cost solutions out there, those who don't have such a horrendous record of trickery and contempt for their customers.

Customer engagement

I will give their features 4 out of 5. Excellent

Their Features was good, you pay what you get with Intercom. But this time I feel very disappointed with this company. Here is my story: - On 12th Feb 2019 I apply for Early Stage Program and get approved, I got an email like this: "Congrats Johan, We’ve verified your eligibility and are excited to welcome you to Intercom's Early Stage Program. When your trial ends on Feb 12 2019, as part of the Intercom for Early Stage Program you’ll pay just $49 per month for all of our Pro Products and Custom Bots........." Something look strange? Yes, the date look strange, the email I received is on 13th Feb 2019 but my TRIAL ENDS on 12th Feb 2019?? 14 Days Free Trial Ends in -1 Day. What a joke. But I don't easily judge people, I make a search on my email and found that I ever sign up for their Free Trial on 2nd Dec 2018 (Not Early Stage Trial, I don't know is it the same or not) and I cancelled my free trial on 3rd Dec 2018. I got my CC charged for the first time by Intercom for $32.67 at 12th Feb 2019 (I'm okay with this one because I found that I ever sign up for their free trial in December 2018) I use Intercome for 2 days and I cancelled my subscription on 14th Feb 2019 (I HAVE ALSO REMOVE MY CARDS) and I got email like this: "Hey there, Looks like you've canceled your Intercom subscription for your app, Maksimal Indonesia. As a result, you'll lose access to Messages Pro, Inbox Pro, Articles, and Custom Bots on Feb 26, 2019. If you think this was done by mistake, you can restart your subscription here, in your billing settings. If you have any questions, or just want to send along some feedback, please reply all to this message!" What shocked me is, today (13th March 2019) they are charging my cards again for $32.67 after this I will call my bank for fraud payment (I call this fraud because I make a check on my account and I even didn't found my card on my Intercom Billing Page, cause I have delete it before) This is my first time being overcharged for what I didn't use in a Live Chat Company.

I only use it for a day and I'm not capable to giving the benefit

Intercom was a terrific platform, very easy to implement and very easy to create campaigns. the learning curve was quite short compared to other similar platforms (crisp). It has really solid help files and the UI is quite excellent for how we were using it. I wish we could afford to keep using it.

The pricing, bar none. They fundamentally have it wrong. You pay for every conversation that you have with your customer. So everytime you engage with a customer and "activate" them, you see your costs go up. The more you engage, the more expensive the platform gets. You can never get to any economies of scale. Its counter-intuitive: you want to create great communication, but then you start cutting back to make sure its within your allocated budget. We went from around $400 a month to run the platform to forecasted to pay $1300 a month, and the only suggestion we got from the intercom team was to reduce the number of conversations with our customers. Umm, isn't this what your platform was about? And it was going to be even more expensive to implement bots. It may just very well be that a smaller SaaS business is no longer a desirable customer for Intercom (which is fine, every business needs to make these decisions - we average $7 ARPA monthly).

It was a great way to have a conversational relationship with our existing customers and improved our retention and helped encourage upgrades with free users (we are a freemium SaaS app). But it got way too expensive and found the same benefits from crisp.com (although crisp isn't as easy to implement, so we did benefit from learning about conversational customer support from intercom so we could get through the tougher parts of replacing intercom with crisp).

It captures web visitors' contact data for follow up.

Getting an account was a pain and Intercom reps were vague in their directions, causing confusion. I needed to integrate Intercom data with our marketing automation platform via Zapier. Zapier was very responsive and helpful, even though the issue was not on their side. I had numerous back and forth with Intercom's reps in which they were unable to translate error messages generated by the Intercom platform, unable to provide alternatives or reasons. Currently, I am in a chat with an Intercom rep from within Intercom. The widget shows him as active and as having seen my messages, but without an acknowledgment from the rep. Pretty disappointing.

Solves the web visitor to contact creation problem. Creates a data integrity problem because the data is locked into Intercom

Snooze feature for messages are helpful.

The lack of intuitive user interface, confusing settings. Unprofessional look and setup of support center.

It helps with customer communication.

The fact that you can manage your customer service and email marketing all in one platform.

Intercom. Please just acquire another email automation platform. Your developers have no idea what they're doing. With great email automation, you could have the most powerful marketing platform on the planet. - Takes about 5 hours to send an email to one million users. - It's extremely expensive. - A/B testing is an absolute nightmare (you can't A, B, C, D, E) test - You can't archive emails - You can't even preview your html emails before sending them - You can't customize your merge tags (e.g. with title case) - You cannot use AND + OR logic together. It's either all OR or all AND. Pathetic. - Customer service usually takes a couple hours to get back to you. - You can't trigger an email, say, 20 mins after an action occurs. You have to wait a FULL day. Or have it happen immediately.

To increase our businesses conversion rate. To get someone to purchase a logo package after they've signed up for an account with us.

The interface of the "Respond" page is simple and straightforward to use.

Quite often we have found that if an agent takes or responds to a chat, there is a delay in showing it, so another agent has sometimes replied as well and the customer gets two responses. Response time from Intercom's customer support isn't great and more often than not they have not been able to provide us with an answer to our questions. Sometimes a prompt appears asking for the customer's email address, and other times it doesn't. There doesn't seem to be any consistency.

We are using it as a chat support for potential clients.

It has a nice friendly icon that people see on your website. It does seem to encourage people to click it.

Inflexible development team that aren't interested in any suggestions. Marketing team pretends they are the vanguards of support standards (see their blog posts) but their team can't meet those expectations. Slow support responses and they have no access to people who can actually implement or recommend customer suggestions. Another company trying to be like Apple - "we'll tell the customer what they want". Basic search is just awful. It only searches tags...very hard to track nearly anything.

It's supposed to help us channel sales leads, but it mostly channels support requests and it is not good software as a support solution.

At first we like the chat widget, but customers think it is a live chat and not getting immediate responses turn out to be a downsize.

Rude customer care, never any help, they dont care about their customers and their answer to anything is a canned response!

Customer care and web chat, we moved on to Drift and Help Scout which is SOOO much better.

The promise of a single app for customer messaging is powerful. We love the idea of being able to deliver highly targeted messages across multiple channels, all based on application usage.

We've found that problems in almost all areas of the product have repeatedly forced us to back off of our planned usage. Over and over, we've put together an implementation plan for one part of the product, began to roll it out and found that a series of functional problems prevented us from successfully implementing it. Three examples: - we'd set up an automation campaign that would show new messages when the user completed certain things in the app. We assumed that the "triggers" for new messages would be processed in near real-time, but this isn't the case. Instead they're placed in a queue and the queue size can be long during intercom's busy times. So we couldn't be sure that Intercom would present the user with the right message and we had to turn the campaign off. - if you send multiple manual messages to a user and they haven't seen them, intercom automatically shows only the snippet and they show the oldest messages at the top. In many cases, we found that intercom wasn't even showing the most recent message, so there was no way for the user to even know we'd sent the message. Even if we selected a "Post" type of message (which is supposed to overlay the entire screen), the message wouldn't show up. There's no way to change the order of the messages or to deactivate the older messages. The only way to ensure that your message will show up is to delete old messages, which means that you lose all of the data associated with these messages (i.e., you can't see any of the replies and you can't see any of the open/click stats). - you can't import 'Company' data, which means you have to integrate via the API to use data about the company to trigger messages. Instrumenting every feature isn't realistic, so there are a ton of times where you'd like to message the people in a company that use a feature, but you can't. We've tried to workaround this in a number of ways, but every potential workaround ends up in a brick wall.

- Increase retention by engaging customers at the point of need and by communicating enhancements to targeted groups - Increase conversion by engaging with customers during the trial and getting them the support resources they need to succeed.