ClientSuccess vs. Fin by Intercom

Client Success is well suited to both growing and established companies who know what they want and need to track for their clients. With the broad ability to support numerous accounts, have multiple users, and its custom success cycles to map a clients progress, it would be a great solution for any Client Success team. I think that teams that are unaware of what they need to track wouldn't find Client Success as useful, and organizations that require a large number of custom client descriptions and variables would find certain limitations a barrier to successfully using this tool.

Incentivized

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.

• ClientSuccess makes it easy for our customer success managers to manage their workflows and provides excellent visibility into our company's customer activity and engagement. We're able to log into CS and regularly check segments of our customers that need to be engaged with on a daily basis, log customer health, and be aware of approaching subscription renewals in order to pay appropriate attention to the right customers.
• The user interface is easy to use, friendly in design, and quick to learn. They make it look attractive with bright color schemes without overdoing it too much.
• As a customer success manager myself, I am appreciative of how this tool has kickstarted our fairly-new Customer Success department and made us much more organized and knowledgeable as a customer-facing entity.
• Their customer success/support teams are excellent as well - which is to be expected. We've felt very well taken care of since we became customers of ClientSuccess.

Incentivized

• 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).

Incentivized

• The support view takes a few steps to get to the meat and potatoes.
• The success score model can be improved to include smaller one-off campaigns. Success score is good for a campaign that has existed for a while but not for the one-off projects.

Incentivized

• 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

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

Incentivized

always there

Incentivized

works perfect

Incentivized

They are SUPER responsive...even for late night inquiries.

Incentivized

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.

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

HubSpot is excellent as it was an easy expansion from the sales and marketing work we were using it for. It meets our needs but isn't entirely as geared towards customer success like ClientSuccess. ClientSuccess has more bells and whistles that are out of the box vs. HubSpot, where the capabilities may exist but require a little more leg work.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Within the first week, leadership was able to have more visibility into the lifestage and health score of each client
• We needed to become more proactive as an organization and this platform has allowed us to do so with real-time metrics and reporting.
• We needed to find a way to scale our approach, especially as our Client Success organization continues to grow, and this is already helping.

• 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