Customer.io vs. Intercom

This tool is well-suited for companies looking to run email marketing campaigns or send out newsletters regularly to their users/customers. The workflow setup is especially useful for companies who want to send specific emails based on user behavior - i.e. they've not logged in recently, have bought a specific product, haven't opened any emails, etc. This could also be useful for freelancers like me since you can create different workspaces within Customer.io. I have configured it this way to handle email marketing for a few of my clients, and the software keeps everything organized and separate. This might not be the best tool for small businesses, considering the price. It may be better to start out with a cheaper email marketing tool, and then if/when necessary, scale-up with a tool like Customer.io.

Intercom will help you achieve your goals in managing a large customer base with room to grow, where you need to add further processes and personalization to the customer support activities of your business. If you are starting, looking for customers and product-market fit, then you are better off starting with WhatsApp, which you can later load off into Intercom when the time comes.

Incentivized

• Managing users, attributes and events. You are easily able to modify any user, based on their ID, and add or remove attributes, assign events to them. That makes it very easy to segment later and to assign them to several campaigns based on behavior. Just a warning: this integration isn't so easy (at least it wasn't for us).
• Creating workflows of campaigns is very easy. You can quickly create behavioral campaigns based on attributes, segments and add elements to the workflow. You can send an email, then wait, then send another, then exit the campaign if they converted, etc. The workflow is easy to configure and very powerful for automation.
• We don't use many email templates (we make them in MJML) but it's very easy to add senders, to change templates and in general to test designs.
• Deliverability works very well, at least for us. It sends emails pretty fast and without issues.
• Exporting is very quick and easy. Importing wasn't a feature until recently, but it works well too.
• Seeing activity it's also useful. In general, logs are awesome (be it of a customer, of activity on the site, email sends, etc.).
• We don't use environments, but it might be very useful for a bigger company.

Incentivized

• 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

• Push notifications are very rudimentary. Everything has to be done by hand unless you're sending an extremely simple message.
• A bit too email centric.
• Lacks an ability to schedule messages on a daily, weekly, etc. basis.

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 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

The Intercom interface has incredible usability; I love how it links everything you need when you need it. I would love for them to improve the CRM tools for journey tracking and add KanBan visualization to the tickets. That would be the icing on the cake—really great job.

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

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

Customer.io was really the first pure, full-featured drip email program on the market and as far as I know, it's still the simplest and best overall for that specific function. SendGrid has also added drip campaign features, but I would seriously evaluate Customer.io against any other drip email provider because they really have all the key elements you need to make it work.

Incentivized

All of the apps I mentioned above are not even close to how Intercom is using its full power to show that it's very easy to use. I will never change my opinion about Intercom since I've been using it for over half a year and I'm used to it because of how simple it gets.

Incentivized

• Fast testing for new products to specific groups. It saves a lot of time and money.
• Removed workload from marketing = more time to make it better.
• Better contact with specific groups, seeing a increase in sales because of this.

Incentivized

• 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