Brand Embassy (discontinued) vs. Fin by Intercom

Though the strengths I listed in the prior question are really hopeful, the negatives outweigh the positives so much that at this time I could not in good conscience recommend this product. I really hope those issues improve - if they do, this would be a really strong tool for a customer service-based company like ours. Particularly one with so many people working remotely. For now, I'm honestly thankful I was able to take a different position here in which I never plan to touch NICE again.

Incentivized

A prospect lands on my site to ask about building profile sizes, wind/snow ratings, installation timelines, or warranty coverage.
What Fin does well is deliver instant, consistent answers, pull from approved specs and positioning, and keep the conversation moving without human involvement.

Incentivized

• Easy to understand and use interface with detailed perks for responding, evaluating and tracking user feedback.
• Excellent and easy to generate reports with lots of relevant data for day-to-day operations.
• Agent performance and team management.
• Easily measurable KPIs thanks to detailed reporting.
• Use of tags and sentiment help make analysis of customer behavior easier.

• 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

• In terms of reports that we get from Brand Embassy, it would be great to have information about the number of cases, or conversations that we have with our customers. At the moment, we have just info about number of interactions and the total workload.
• There are options to tag every conversation, in order to track why our customers contact us. Their tag menu is a bit too small, it would be great if it was larger.

• 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.

I still use the platform: - its use is customer friendly - improves and speed up customer care on SM - improves speed and quality of internal processes/communication - monitor/measure all valuable metrics

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

Please see all other details from previous answers in this survey.

Incentivized

The platform is overall clear and intuitive. As with any new platform, there's a learning curve, but that wasn't an issue for our team (and it shouldn't be an issue for others). Fin options are scattered across several submenus, and I'd like them grouped together, but I also like having all those training-related tabs open at all times, so it's not much of a real issue for me.

always there

Incentivized

works perfect

Incentivized

It is difficult to describe just how awesome the support guys and gals at Brand Embassy are. Ever-present and eager to help, with kind and helpful attitude and you can really feel they are doing this to help you make results

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

Generally I don't see huge differences between social CRM tools - it's mainly in the details of how well it's implemented and connected to your channels. For example other tools cannot easily process non-standard channels like custom made forums or have a e-mail based ticketing for private follow ups. Brand Embassy shines in this area.

There are so many AI platforms available, and you could theoretically build a system using the available AI API's from any of the big platforms. However, I dont think it's as easy as this. Intercom is deliberately built for customer service, the features they are releasing a based on providing the best customer experience. If we were to build this ourselves or to use another platform we would be taking on the upkeep, using Fin is just much simpler as it's also our chosen ticketing platform so anything that Fin is not able to answer yet and escalated directly to our team with no extra effort required from our side.

Incentivized

• The first year when we started to focus on social care, we received 736 mentions. 4 years later we are dealing with 725, 942 mentions per year without the necessity to hire more people into our social care team. The seven of them are still able to respond to our customers very quickly and with high quality. And we believe that Brand Embassy is the key to our success in social care. Thanks to this tool we can simply manage such a big amount of mentions and questions.

• 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