Desk.com (discontinued) vs. Fin by Intercom

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Desk.com (discontinued)
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Desk.com was a helpdesk, ticketing, and customer support product offered by Salesforce, and oriented towards the needs of small businesses. It is no longer sold and support has been discontinued. Salesforce recommends its modern Service Cloud as a replacement.N/A
Fin by Intercom
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Fin is Intercom’s AI Agent for customer service, designed to deliver high-quality answers, even for complex queries. It works with any helpdesk, or it can be paired with Intercom’s next-generation Helpdesk to get the full Intercom Customer Service Suite.
$0.99
one-time fee per 1 resolution
Pricing
Desk.com (discontinued)Fin by Intercom
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Fin with your current helpdesk
$0.99
one-time fee per 1 resolution
Copilot add-on
$35
per month per user
The Early Stage program
$65
per month (6 support seats)
Proactive Support Plus add-on
$99
per month
Fin with Intercom’s Helpdesk
from $39 + $0.99 per Fin resolution
per month per seat
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Desk.com (discontinued)Fin by Intercom
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsFin comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. Here's how it works: Use Fin in at least 250 conversations within the first 90 days after trial. If you're not satisfied, you can request a refund of up to $1M. Refund requests must be submitted within 90 days of starting the subscription.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Desk.com (discontinued)Fin by Intercom
Considered Both Products
Desk.com (discontinued)
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
Desk connects directly with Salesforce with many other teams in the business use. This tool did take longer to set up because of all the customization possibilities. There is a good amount of customization that needs to be completed in order to make it function correctly and …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
In my opinion, Intercom is more customer oriented, using chat and real time marketing features. Desk.com is a more old school solution focused on tickets and cases. Desk.com does not have much integration capacities with your platform, Intercom has lots of features around this, …
Fin by Intercom
Chose Fin by Intercom
We used Desk.com for a little while but never really dove into it because the initial set up and learning curve was too much. I wish we would have given it more of a try, but based on our needs, Intercom was just more user friendly and easy to use.
Chose Fin by Intercom
Compared to most of the competitive market, Intercom seems to be the most human/personable approach to customer success, customer service, and technical support. The alternatives are primarily built on an archaic approach - "take a ticket and wait in line" - that we worried …
Best Alternatives
Desk.com (discontinued)Fin by Intercom
Small Businesses
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
LocaliQ
LocaliQ
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Piper the AI SDR by Qualified
Piper the AI SDR by Qualified
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
SysAid
SysAid
Score 8.9 out of 10
Conversica
Conversica
Score 4.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Desk.com (discontinued)Fin by Intercom
Likelihood to Recommend
8.2
(38 ratings)
8.6
(385 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.4
(14 ratings)
10.0
(21 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(19 ratings)
8.7
(294 ratings)
Availability
1.0
(2 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Performance
10.0
(1 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.2
(21 ratings)
5.8
(10 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.4
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(1 ratings)
6.6
(5 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Desk.com (discontinued)Fin by Intercom
Likelihood to Recommend
Discontinued Products
Once I had to search the logs to find cases and data on a particular keyword, but I was not able to do so as there was no search tool available, nor was there a sort or filter tool. I was totally frustrated as I had to skim through the data to complete my task manually.
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Intercom
It's a far superior AI offering compared to other options on the market. The lack of Dev support needed in the setup and management is a huge bonus as well. intercom is clearly investing in Fin, and the constant development and opportunity to be Beta testers keep us ahead in the industry too.
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Pros
Discontinued Products
  • Desk.com automatically tracks analytics on all cases coming in and going out.
  • Desk.com helps prevent multiple people from working on the same case. However, it does allow us to assign the case to someone else if we feel that person is more qualified to address the case.
  • Desk.com has very few bugs or server issues that we've seen. This helps prevent any delays in communicating with our customers.
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Intercom
  • Ability identify the issue from limited information shared by the customer
  • Clearly communicate the resolution leveraging the knowledgebase input
  • The resolution by Fin is very detailed and calls out all the possible solutions to the problem helping the customer identify the right fix
  • Fin is constantly learning from the past instances and leveraging into present and future issue resolution and thereby able to provide a good customer experience
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Cons
Discontinued Products
  • Internal knowledge tools are clunky and annoying to access, outside the regular workflow of everyday staff
  • Arbitrary and confusing limitations in business rules and custom fields
  • Arbitrary and confusing limitations in case handling - for example, if you begin a case as a phone call you CANNOT email the customer from the case. As though no one working at Desk has ever sent a follow-up email...?
  • Not very good for B2B, mid-to-large businesses. Difficult to set business rules based on company information (for example, service level/tier) and nearly impossible to track key stakeholders and get clear insight into the relationship at a high level
  • Reporting tools are clunky, slow, and just all-around pretty useless
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Intercom
  • I would like to see a report of the difference between chat and email reactions.
  • When using Fin for email support, it can sometimes overrespond in email threads that involve multiple people. It may react to replies from other participants and send unnecessary responses. This also happens when colleagues are included in the email thread, causing Fin to keep replying to their messages as well.
  • It’s not possible to remove Fin’s replies in individual email threads, which makes it difficult to stop the bot from responding when it’s no longer needed (unless you manually reply again).
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Likelihood to Renew
Discontinued Products
We will be very likely to renew our contract with Desk.com. It is easy to use, and provides us with everything we need to keep our customers and employees happy. They have also been very helpful in catering the application to our specific and unique needs, including working across brands and adding specific content for our products
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Intercom
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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Usability
Discontinued Products
Desk.com and Salesforce Service Cloud's usability is seamless to get up and running, administer, and scale across the organization. It allows us to get up and running in days rather than weeks and has transformed our customer support teams globally into efficient, world-class teams. The best practices that the Salesforce and Desk.com teams provide are also very valuable, as we have the right case studies and tips to implement right away in our organization.
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Intercom
It's pretty simple to implement. Naturally, there are some processes that are complex, but it's a naturally complex task that it's trying to tackle, so that is understandable. Occasionally it's not clear if one should create a new snippet for a nuanced question vs a custom answer - and then the custom answers can be tough to train.
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Reliability and Availability
Discontinued Products
We've never had a problem with Desk.com's availability.
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Intercom
always there
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Performance
Discontinued Products
Fast, responsive, gorgeous, and fun. It's always run like a thoroughbred for me.
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Intercom
works perfect
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Support Rating
Discontinued Products
Their support leaves much to be desired. They do not respond quickly and do not follow up with feature requests. There is also a lack of on-demand or live training available for the teams to use as they learn a new tool. Because there is so much customization, a lot of questions do come up regularly.
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Intercom
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.
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Online Training
Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Intercom
Easy to know the learning path
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Implementation Rating
Discontinued Products
As I stated earlier, implementation of Desk.com went more smoothly than most. The resources in the "Support Center" are fantastic, and I never ran into anything that left me stumped, angry, or disappointed.
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Intercom
The implementation was surprisingly easy but we are having to adapt from our old process to work well with Intercom.
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Alternatives Considered
Discontinued Products
Overall, it performs a lot better than all three combined, with a lot fewer glitches and a lot more user-friendly and user experience efficiency. Any new link that needs to be done, takes a lot less time to execute on desk compared to the three others. Simply advanced when it comes to execution this platform is.
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Intercom
FIN/Intercom has a much better UI and feels more integrated than Zendesk. The reporting is also much more straight forward - using something like Zendesk Explore is painful and feels like I'm using something 10 old. FIN also integrates better with other products, and we've been able to create custom apps/widgets using the Intercom Canvas app far quicker than we could with Zendesk.
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Return on Investment
Discontinued Products
  • Better customer service and employee efficiency when dealing with cases
  • It's so universal, meaning that everyone can use it and it's easy to understand.
  • The only negative impact is that our IT department who is assigned tickets has responded to customers instead of to the local reps and we have to ensure they know to change the email if it's assigned to them.
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Intercom
  • We've achieved around a 50% resolution rate (and growing) with Fin by Intercom
  • Our customers have a near instant response time when chatting with Fin by Intercom
  • We've been able to use Fin by Intercom for a 100% AI driven approach for a subset of our users
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ScreenShots

Desk.com (discontinued) Screenshots

Screenshot of Desk.com ConsoleScreenshot of Desk.com Issue ScreenScreenshot of Desk.com Reporting and Analytics

Fin by Intercom Screenshots

Screenshot of Fin, delivering conversational support experience to customers.Screenshot of where to monitor, analyze, and optimize Fin by spotting trends, filling content gaps, and fixing quality issues topic by topic.Screenshot of where to customize Fin's tone of voice, teach it support knowledge and policies, and configure how it handles complex tasks in over 45 languages.Screenshot of where to test answers, review the sources and settings that shape them, and get tailored recommendations to optimize performance.Screenshot of Fin, as it appears across email and live chat to phone, SMS, and social. Fin can answer any question, across any channel, any time.