Cresta vs. Fin by Intercom vs. ManyChat

Cresta would best be utilized if your customer service team is large, services a high volume of customers, and the conversations with those customers are very detailed and long. Cresta is less appropriate for small teams, low amounts of customers chatting in, and the conversations are very transactional and simple

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.

I found that ManyChat is a strong tool when receiving incoming messages, being able to create a tree of potential responses based on options given to the initiator. There is also a huge potential for complex automation (as long as the environment required by Facebook in order to send outgoing messages is maintained).

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

• Collect email and phone number easily
• provide 24/7 customer support to your customers
• More than one ways for people to opt into your bot
• great way to provide offers and sales to your subscribers via messenger
• Great to build a relationship with your followers on Instagram

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.

• Honestly, the only thing I don't like about ManyChat is their support. It seems to be almost non existent. However, that concern is negated by having a fantastic user base that helps each other out on Facebook.

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

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

ManyChat is a great tool, provides loads of features, integrations and just saves you a whole load of time once all set up. If you aren't tech-savvy or used to how digital marketing tools work, it can appear complicated. That's how I felt initially 2 years ago, and after watching tutorials online I had a better understanding of it. This is why I rated it a 7, as it's not a tool that you can just play around with and guess how it works. There's definitely a learning curve with it so I recommend doing the free training and watching video tutorials.

Incentivized

always there

Incentivized

works perfect

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

There is room for improvement but frankly, we haven't had the need to request for support. Everything is pretty easy to setup and there are very useful video explanation guides and walkthroughs on ManyChat's YouTube channel. The only challenge we have had was to integrate it with Zapier, it's a bit tricky because you need to do a setup workaround first, but nothing too complicated.

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 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

I've worked in the past with Chatfuel. However, I decided to switch to ManyChat due to a variety of reasons. Overall, ManyChat offers much more functionality out of the box (e.g., Facebook comments tool), sequence builders are much more intuitive. Also, they provide flexible pay as you go pricing plan, which is perfect for a startup like us.

Incentivized

• 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

• For the intended application, we experienced a negative ROI due to the inconsistency in the ability to maintain the automation without incoming responses. Since it is a free service that was meant to lead to paid services organically, the inconsistencies prevented the desired outcome.
• We did experience a higher conversion rate with basic incoming messages with questions about services or products due to the ability to have pre-created responses and direction immediately supporting the prospect.

Incentivized