Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM vs. Intercom

Constant Contact is excellent for small businesses wanting a simple email to their customers and leads. We've found that it's not the most robust solution for more complex funnels involved in e-commerce or information publishing. For instance, setting up specific flows based on user behavior, VIP status, and other attributes is lacking.

Incentivized

I would say that the Intercom is best suited for chat services. It can cater to multiple chats at the same time. It can be real-time, or it can be an email ticket. If you're fond of organized reporting, using Intercom or having it integrated into your tools would be best.

Incentivized

• Their Emailers are very easy to construct and user-friendly. It takes your Newsletter and sales emails to the next level, especially with the action groups and trigger functionalities.
• The life of the lead functionality allows you to see when leads get warmer, so you know when to send them what. Helps improve conversions.

• In-app communication: I can deploy tours, banners, checklists, tooltips, posts, and surveys in a matter of minutes.
• Knowledge Hub: I can write and publish a help article that can then be used to train the Fin AI agent to deliver accurate answers to our customers.
• Communicating in context with service/sales agents and customers: the Help Desk makes it simple for sales and service agents to pull me into a conversation with a customer to resolve product-related issues.

Incentivized

• The landing page builder is a bit hard to use. Doesn’t have much flexibility.
• Sometimes confusing between types of workflows to use. Opportunity versus visual.
• If you imported contacts that weren’t formatted correctly. It is hard to delete a bull amount. Need to type DELETE for each one manually. No bull options to make changes.

Incentivized

• Pricing - it is not a cheap product and more features could be included in lower tier packages
• Customer segmentation is not as simple as I would like it to be
• For being a help desk / customer support company, they are not the fastest at responding to any questions we might have

Incentivized

We have been very impressed with all aspects of this software and the potential for it to radically change how we operate is huge! Support has been exceptional and we have discovered many extra uses for the software than originally thought. Not only will it give us benefits for our company's growth, but for our client's growth as well.

Incentivized

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

This rating is coming from an administrative perspective. With so many features, workflows, dashboards, and more, there is certainly a lot going on, and even the most savvy software user can get a little overwhelmed when trying to decide how to best implement and utilize the platform to its full potential. That being said, the SharpSpring platform is well-implemented and well-organized, with most solutions being fairly intuitive, once you have a grasp of the software. It is fairly easy to learn, but difficult to master. Just like any powerful platform, however, the complexity is worth it, and once you are comfortable navigating and problem solving within SharpSpring, it becomes a great marketing and sales tool which can do virtually anything you need it to.

Incentivized

I love their User interface. The intercom is easy to use, easy to maintain, and easy to implement. New users can easily be onboarded. Intercom has a very simple interface that is not simplistic; it does the job in a great way without complicating users' lives. Overall, Intercom is a great app.

Incentivized

always there

Incentivized

works perfect

Incentivized

The support is great which really helps overcome challenges if you become stuck and the training videos are great too. Same-day replies are great and I even got some help with some CSS code on the chat. Not many organizations would do this or even respond.

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

Overall I would say to be patient and bring everyone who will be touching the platform to the onboarding sessions. The Virtual Classroom lets you onboard as quickly or slowly as you want. Sales, marketing, design, account management, get 'em all in on it. For the most part, they will be happy to use this platform. I recommend getting as many people as possible to see the SharpSpring demo.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Pros of SharpSpring:

• Design unlimited custom fields
• Can send content & templates to Sales to send in their reach-outs (Outlook extension)
• Ad retargeting
• Social listening tool
• Social media scheduling
• Email builder: dynamic content
• Landing pages: dynamic content, rebrandable domain name
• Chatbot Platform seems intuitive to use
• Forms auto-complete for known visitors
• Instant 2-way sync with Salesforce
• Trigger automated workflows from social media
• It was easy to receive demo, streamlined sales process

SharpSpring: approx. $13,000 USD per year + $2,000 USD one-time for onboarding Pardot: $32,400 USD per year + $3,000 to $5,000 USD one-time for onboarding HubSpot: $20,381 USD per year + $3,000 USD one-time for onboarding Marketo: $29,015 USD per year + $4,500 USD one-time for onboarding

Incentivized

The product was too focused on "tickets," and we wanted to focus more on "conversations." Intercom shows that thinking across the whole app was a no-brainer for us. Zendesk's pricing is a bit higher for what they deliver, but the ease of integration with our platforms was key, too.

Incentivized

• Streamlined Processes - sales and marketing are now all in the same place.
• Reduced Number of Platforms/Tools - CRM/lead management, email, automation, landing pages, forms, etc are all in the same place rather than using multiple tools.
• Time-saving - sales pipeline is very easy to use for sales. For marketing, we have dozens of workflows that eliminate much of our manual processes from the past.
• Return on Investment - We're more focused on moving the building the business than ever before because SharpSpring has simplified so many of our business operations and we're seeing massive results!
• Lead generation - Up SIGNIFICANTLY (between 3x & 4x) since setting up SharpSpring.

• Faster customer onboarding: When we identified our biggest conversion factors, we were able to set up an onboarding sequence that helped people get started and converted faster.
• Adoption: It's much easier to showcase a new software feature. We build out a post and a tour for any new software features and prompt it to show up the first time they log in, all through Intercom.
• Money: It's saved us money in the long run considering how many softwares we would have needed to use in order to get the same features offered in Intercom.

Incentivized