Customer.io vs. Fin by Intercom vs. LivePerson Conversational Cloud

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.

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It's excellent when users often have trouble understanding certain aspects of your product, so you don't have to manually share the same information every time. It's less appropriate if your user problems are user-specific, as then you probably don't have every expected case covered in your documentation, which then requires Fin to have access to your codebase, at which point you might want to consider building your own agent.

Liveperson LiveEngage is good for larger deployments with lots of agents, and where the rollout plan is broad with respect to the visitors who you will be targeting. It allows you to manipulate more of the data for reporting than many other platforms. The premium cost and some drawbacks with configuring smaller groups might make it lose some appeal for smaller companies or deployments.

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• 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.

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• It is very easy to train
• It does a great job of recommending answers when little context is given.
• I love the ability to create a snippet to address issues in the moment or in the long term, based on FAQs.

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• Integrates very well with Salesforce, our CRM software. As we disposition calls, the notes automatically generate on my customer's accounts, saving me valuable steps in documentation.
• Call metrics gathered in Tenfold are used for measuring productivity across all of the sales team. Reporting is done through Salesforce, once again speaking volumes of the integration capabilities.
• The clarity and consistency of quality of calls are outstanding! Very little delay, static or feedback.

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• 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.

• 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.

• There is no ability to customize the popup. It is stuck in one place (bottom right) and can't be moved. Just adding something as simple as being able to move it up and down would make a world of a difference. I don't know how many times the popup got in the way of other information I was trying to look at.
• It would, of course, be a much better product if the popup were it's own app that could be docked anywhere on the screen. Tying the popup to Chrome really keeps this software from being the best it could be.
• There are no skins, color options, customize options, or anything like that for the popup window. There is nothing you can do to affect how it looks, what information is on it, and where it is docked. Solve those three issues, and you have an amazing tool that is flexible and personable.

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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.

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LivePerson has been a great tool for our company and everything is customized. We can customize everything from the canned responses, operator surveys, and customer surveys. We receive a lot of positive information from our customers; and to be able to provide technical support of the website as well as status information for already placed orders is awesome

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Super intuitive and easy interface to start off with. There are not a lot of guides and the documentation is helpful but not super extensive, but even if you're a little technical, you can easily figure most of the things out by yourself. Everything is super easy to start with and the platform does not overwhelm you with a lot of options, or data.

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FIN is easy to set up and pretty quick to get everything the way you need (some things could be handled better), and you can preview how it's going to work before it's available to everyone. Since you can use FIN on multiple channels, you can save a lot of time by not having your team work on multiple chat platforms as well.

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always there

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works perfect

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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

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I can get help by asking Fin questions about itself. It answers accurately, citing its own Help Center resources with visuals. It can reason and dialogue well. But when it comes to getting human support for Fin, it is not as quick. It can sometimes take a few days. They are polite and well-meaning. Some things aren't their fault (product limitations), but there was one occasion where something took a long time to resolve with lots of back and forth but it was I who found out the error in the end that they missed, so they didn't really help resolve it.

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Easy to know the learning path

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

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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.

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There are so many AI platforms available, and you could theoretically build a system using the available AI API's from any of the big platforms. However, I dont think it's as easy as this. Intercom is deliberately built for customer service, the features they are releasing a based on providing the best customer experience. If we were to build this ourselves or to use another platform we would be taking on the upkeep, using Fin is just much simpler as it's also our chosen ticketing platform so anything that Fin is not able to answer yet and escalated directly to our team with no extra effort required from our side.

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I find the ease of use of Tenfold to be advantageous to all other platforms. It also appears that as future needs change, Tenfold will allow me to continue to structure my workday around Tenfold but use it in different ways that would scale to any changes in my process.

• 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.

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• 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.

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• This has definitely helped me monitor my own call volumes and helped me learn the best times to connect.
• Tenfold has also saved me significant time using the 'click-to-dial' feature.
• I still remain frustrated that some of the integration with Salesforce isn't as seamless as it could (or imi should) be; however overall it's still a valuable addition to my business tools.

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