Customer.io vs. Fin by Intercom

Talking from the perspective of a marketer at a SaaS with average. 50K email subscribers, Customer IO has been an excellent tool for us. Our requirements include sending users newsletters, marketing emails, and transactional emails, running lead-nurturing campaigns, and more. For a comprehensive use case like ours, CustomerIO is great. While it also has a learning curve, when you have such requirements, it’s worth it. I don’t think CustomerIO is the best fit if you have basic requirements like only weekly newsletter emails.

Incentivized

Fin works best for handling routine questions like account issues, billing inquiries, onboarding guidance, and linking users to relevant help center articles, providing fast, consistent support without human intervention. It’s less suited for super complex troubleshooting, more sensitive complaints centered around billing, or highly personalized requests and product feedback that require human judgment and deeper product knowledge.

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

• 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

• Price is quite expensive for Premium or once you get into high volumes of contacts.
• Depending on how you'll use it, it may require some help from developers to set up.
• Despite the support being great, you have to email them, there's not chat feature.

• Sometimes Fin can provide incorrect information when using previous conversations as a source; this is one of the few downsides, as teammates can sometimes make mistakes.
• We also sometimes see that Fin does not pass to a human as quickly as we would like, but this could also be a training improvement our business needs to implement.

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

Everything was pretty intuitive to use if you've used an ESP before. The only thing that was confusing is Campaigns vs Newsletters - some of their naming conventions aren't straightforward. But their docs, support and AI agents are all super solid.

Incentivized

The Intercom plattform is amazingly well and this allows us to use FIN to its fullest potential. You have various ways of customizing your agent (from name, voice, guidance, escalation rules) and you have various built-in ways of understanding your performance and where you can improve (optimizer, topic explorer, etc.). And of course you can use FIN to ask questions about FIN! And FIN from Intercom is very well trained on itself, helping with most setup questions easily.

Incentivized

always there

Incentivized

works perfect

Incentivized

My experience with their support team has always been great. Very quick to respond, have an online chat, and are very helpful. They helped me resolve any issues I've had every time in a professional and knowledgeable manner. We've now switched to another tool, and I can't even compare the service level we get there to customer.io

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

We used it a few years ago, and it was not as feature-rich for our needs. It lacked true AI capabilities, was hard for users to understand, and created workaround issues. The internal ticket system was difficult to use and led to many missed issues and calls.

Incentivized

• Positive impact on the sales side. I'm not sure about the specific ROI (you have to include the designer and the time it takes to set up) but you certainly get back the investment in a few months, once you are able to scale your email marketing.
• Customer experience is way better by having more segmented, contextual and accurate messages sent to them.
• Integration is costly and it will take several days or weeks to be fully achieved. Expect to invest some money on this.

Incentivized

• Greater customer satisfaction: Implementing Fin by Intercom AI and Intercom in general has definitely improved our CSATs from our customers. We are now consistently getting high 90s (in percentage) from our CSATs, both for Fin by Intercom and teammates. So yes, our customers are really happy with how Intercom is working.
• Reduced speed and responses: Since implementing Fin by Intercom AI and Intercom, our speed and resolution has increased massively. Resolution times have gone from days to hours with Fin by Intercom AI included. And now, with AI, customers are getting instant answers around the clock, rather than having to wait for a person.
• New role opportunities: Fin by Intercom AI have lead to many new roles created, including mine. Which has expanded overtime.

Incentivized