Azure AI Bot Service vs. Freshchat vs. Fin by Intercom

From personal experience, I can recommend the Azure AI service to reduce the burden on your customer service team, as we did. We created a customer service bot and automated our Frequently Asked Questions section, as well as an interactive platform for registering other complaints that the bot cannot handle, which are later addressed by our customer service team.

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It is best suited for having 24-hour support, where customers can interact easily, even using their phones, to raise concerns or inquire about information. This makes it easier than going through the documents portal as a source of knowledge or sending emails for worries. However, it can be less appropriate for scenarios when you need more formal communication, like emails, and when proper documentation is necessary.

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Fin is great for using for first line support. We use Fin for conversations where customers have a standard question, and Fin is able to pull from our content to answer this accurately and go above and beyond to include some basic problem solving. This really helps us free up our Support Team's time for more complex queries. Fin isn't appropriate for us on technical issues or conversations which require human support. We've had to remove Fin from interacting on these conversations as customers were becoming frustrated with speaking to AI, or having Fin be unable to problem solve. However, this was easy to set up through Intercom, and now customers with complex questions/situations or bugs/technical issues do not engage with Fin and Fin only handles suitable conversations.

• Assembles conversational AI encounters for our clients
• Adds regular language, discourse, and vision
• Sends to well known channels with insignificant code changes

• Real time customer support. During busy times all our available agents can jump on and handle large volume of customer interactions.
• Automations and canned response features. With automation we can greet our customers the moment a chat gets assigned to an agent letting customers know they are being attended to similarly canned response helps us use templates for generic and commonly asked questions.
• Dashboards and analytics. Freshchat's ability to build customized dashboards and analyze performance in a granular level helps us monitor workload and manage performance effectively.

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• Serves as the first point of interaction.
• Answers questions based on the knowledge base.
• Tries to suggest a solution for reported issues (in some cases).
• Gives the option to improve its answer.
• Learns from other conversations and replies by humans.
• Understands other languages.
• Interprets images (somewhat).

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• Limited Natural Language Understanding, especially in entertainment contexts where slang, humor
• Works only with Azure platform only not compatible with other platforms
• Complex customization as per organization need

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• Freshchat is one of the best platforms, but still there are certain areas that require further improvement in order for the platform to become flawless.
• I feel that the automated system in Freshchat is comparatively slow and due to this, it does not respond well according to all the requirements.
• There are certain features in Freshchat which are not available for everyone and they can only be accessed by those who are paying the highest pricing tier.

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• 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.

Freshchat has met all our expectations and more. It has allowed our team to be more efficient with their time, field questions quickly, and escalate issues up the chain. We highly recommend freshchat as the perfect addition to anyone already using freshdesk or simply looking for a good solution for in app messaging.

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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.

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Azure AI Bot Service comes with an Integrated Development Environment and Bot Framework SDK that simplifies development. Having a single codebase for multiple channels, such as MS Teams, Facebook, and Slack, makes it easier to target multiple platforms without requiring redevelopment. LUIS and OpenAI can be easily integrated with your Chatbot to provide a seammless chat bot expereince to customers.

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I give it an 8 due to its usability. Yes, I had a few issues to begin with and needed some assistance from Freshchat agents, but considering this is something that is completely new to me, to set up what feels like a professional chat handling system complete with autobot within a day is really saying something I feel.

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From an administration standpoint, Fin is very easy to set up, train, and test. Having the ability to impersonate a user in our system to see how Fin responds is huge. It lets you test several situations and throw curveballs at it (as customers will) without the risk of setting Fin live and wondering what will happen. It's also easy to fine-tune. Some chatbots you can never quite get right without spending hours on, but Fin usually takes a few minutes to dial it in. From a customer standpoint, Fin couldn't be easier to engage with. We tell customers up front it's an AI bot and they're wow'd with the experience

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Freshchat has always been available when I needed to use it.

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always there

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Freshchat always loads quickly and communication is quickly sent and received.

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works perfect

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Microsoft's customer service staff is friendly and extremely knowledgeable. They are always available to assist you with bot framework-related issues that you may be experiencing. They provide training sessions, manuals, and support personnel, among other things. Bugs were easily spotted and patched, which was one of my pet peeves about patching.

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The experience we had in past for lets say 4-5 months with the support team and our TAM was really helpful. The changes in the bot flow has helped our bot to ensure we connect with customer easily.

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Intercom is the premier customer support/engagement model and it definitely has one of the top tier customer support teams as well. I don't think I have ever waited more than 5 minutes to get the information I need or get help with an issue. They are incredible and I aim to model our customer service department after them.

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Easy to know the learning path

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I hope to show new users data because this can save a lot of time

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

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Microsoft Bot Framework is much better and well more established without a lot of proprietary software/coding language. Lex is very limited with integration with standard hardware and network configurations. Lex has performance issues and was too slow to meet near real-time collaboration requirements. Bot Framework complements many other Microsoft communication products and this was key to implementing without a lot of new training required.

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Messaging across mediums - Freshchat integrates with majority of mainstream instant messaging apps. Like Facebook messenger, Telegram and WhatsApp . This makes it convenient for us to have a presence on the above-mentioned platforms and respond to messages from these platforms from a single Freshchat dashboard.its good app Freshdesk Messaging help me to contact the customer and contact the customer to inform my problem to solve it and is a good app and help full app and its easy to use uncomplicated and Freshdesk Helps me provide good quality to the customer and make customer feedback good for a company

We only used the free live chat version from HubSpot, so Intercom is yards better! If I were just comparing an actual live chat between the two tools, HubSpot was often clunky and delayed, and it was hard to find past conversation information

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Did not help with the purchase

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We only implemented the product in 1 way so I cant speak to this.

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Did not use

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• Azure Bot will only deliver according to the granularity of the FAQ it is feed. Otherwise, it has been a cost optimization tool for our organization.

• From the positive effect of working on it, it helps employees to speed up their thinking and writing.
• One of the positive effects of our clients is that their problems are solved easily and quickly.
• Each employee knows how many of his chats have been resolved.
• There is no negative effect in general.

• 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.

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