Amazon Alexa for Business vs. Fin by Intercom vs. Xembly

Virtual assistants at work are still new features and have a lot to improve. 
The more features we have, the more we want new features. 
In small environments we have "noise" between virtual assistants, making use inappropriate. 
But in more distributed environments it is very good.
We still have a lot to learn (both, us and our Alexas). 

FIN is great if you need someone to direct the customers based on their problems. You also have the option to use multiple languages if you have a worldwide customer base, so that's great. If you provide enough documentation to feed it, FIN can also solve tickets on its own, which enables your team to focus on other tasks. You can also have him handle conversations in other applications, such as Discord or Slack, and have them create ticket issues in JIRA if your team uses it.

Incentivized

• Communication between people on the team.
• Interactive personal assistant.
• Better workspace management.

• It is very easy to train
• It does a great job of recommending answers when little context is given.
• I love the ability to create a snippet to address issues in the moment or in the long term, based on FAQs.

Incentivized

• Could have a feature for group chats.
• Alexa has some problems hearing nearby voices.
• Website suggestions are irrelevant sometimes (should have user evaluation functionality for the answer, improving accuracy).

• It seems some users really struggle to figure out how to escalate to a human (especially through email).
• Not excited about how "soft" resolutions still count as resolutions and are paid for. Though some abandoned cases appear to be able to be concluded as "the user got the answer they needed", there are others where they clearly didn't, because they just open up another chat (or even more), trying to get more info. This pads the resolution stats and makes it seem more effective than it actually is.
• Cost -- Fin is quite expensive. It helps us with scaling coverage, but we're not really saving money.

We have been and will be continuing our journey with Intercom and nothing too concerning has happened that I have experienced or heard of that has us on the edge yet. If it ever happens it will be something along the lines of "Outgrowing" the use of need of the platform.

Incentivized

The core experience is solid but the key friction across our team is that there are so many new features for improving Fin are being launched. Content improvements, guidance settings, recommendations, trends, and monitors are each useful in isolation, but they sit across separate areas of the platform with no clear starting point. The recurring feedback from my team is that it is hard to know where to focus. A consolidated "Improve Fin" section could really improve the experience, the ideal option would be a training page where our team could improve Fin in one place, ideally by answering questions and Fin would then be able to add those details in the right place, where it's creating new guidance or building procedures. I feel that would make uptake a lot quicker.

Incentivized

always there

Incentivized

works perfect

Incentivized

I can get help by asking Fin questions about itself. It answers accurately, citing its own Help Center resources with visuals. It can reason and dialogue well. But when it comes to getting human support for Fin, it is not as quick. It can sometimes take a few days. They are polite and well-meaning. Some things aren't their fault (product limitations), but there was one occasion where something took a long time to resolve with lots of back and forth but it was I who found out the error in the end that they missed, so they didn't really help resolve it.

Incentivized

Easy to know the learning path

Incentivized

The implementation was surprisingly easy but we are having to adapt from our old process to work well with Intercom.

Incentivized

We looked at two other alternatives: Google Nest and Apple. But Alexa already has popular devices that many people on the team already had in their homes. And it would be easier to integrate into the professional environment. The cost of Amazon products is also much lower, which makes the product more competitive.

Although we have not utilised a specific chat box like Fin before in other websites, we have used ChatGPT and Claude within our general work. Our Product and Engineering team make use of Devin within Azure Dev Ops to support with their work. However, Fin is the most suitable for what our Support Team requires as this can be integrated into our chat with customers.

Incentivized

• Difficulties with technology integration.
• Identify all possible uses.
• We still lost a lot of time making new settings.

• New role opportunities — Using the “Fin-first” approach has reduced the workload for our Tier 1 team, giving them more time to focus on their own career growth. It’s also opened the door to a dedicated, AI-focused role, where a team member regularly reviews Fin’s answers and makes updates to help it perform even better.
• Enabling Fin has also reduced our response time and allowed us to meet SLA's.

Incentivized