Epsilon PeopleCloud (formerly the Agility platform with Agility Harmony) is an enterprise-level email marketing and cross-channel campaign management platform competing with Responsys, Cheetah Mail, ExactTarget, etc. The vendor has a strong international presence with staff in 14 countries.
N/A
Fin by Intercom
Score 8.7 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 outcome
Olark
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Olark is a website live chat tool for engaging website visitors while they browse. It can be used to to track leads, drive sales, provide support.
$15
per month
Pricing
Epsilon PeopleCloud
Fin by Intercom
Olark
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Fin with your current helpdesk
$0.99
one-time fee per outcome
Copilot add-on
$35
per month per user
Pro
$99
per month For analysis of 1,000 conversations
Fin with Intercom’s Helpdesk
from $39 + $0.99 per Fin outcome
per month per seat
Self Service
$19.00
Per Agent Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Epsilon PeopleCloud
Fin by Intercom
Olark
Free Trial
No
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Fin comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. Here's how it works:
Intercom states that users who sign up for the Fin Guarantee Success Program and do not achieve at least a resolution rate of 65% will be paid $1M. This program is designed for high volume customers.
Eligibility criteria:
High volume customers (over 250k monthly conversions) in North America and Europe. Intercom states that phase one of this program will admit customers on Intercom Helpdesk or Zendesk.
Totango: great segmentation and tracking. Very difficult learning curve. Literally over a year to build.
Salesforce: Garbage. I have always stood by this. Idiots love Salesforce because they think it's smart. It's not. It's just confusing. There is nothing Salesforce does that …
Intercom was easier to use and more seamless with their features. There was a lot more we could do with Intercom right out of the gate so we chose it over the other software we were trying. We've been with Intercom for around 7 years now and are still happy with it.
We evaluated a number of products before choosing to move forward with Intercom. No contest, Intercom provided us with the level of tools and support we needed to serve our own customers well. We've been with the company for 3 years now and are sticking around for the …
Founder and Growth Hacker at Big Red's Equipment Sales
Chose Fin by Intercom
Intercom and Drift have a lot of similarities- beautiful UI, engaging customer experience with bot functionality, but Intercom has been priced more reasonably, and has better integrations. Intercom support has also been fantastic to work with.
Intercom was selected before I started, and I'm so glad it was. It's a clear leader in customer communication with an effortless interface. It has the same key features as LiveChat (tagging, canned responses or templates) but it's easier to use and is less stressful for …
Appropriate for large organizations who want customization in their emails. The tool - while intuitive if you have previous background - is hefty and large in scope of capabilities. It's great for organizations who have multiple users and shows the name of person who last made changes. The reporting is really good - but may be a bit overwhelming for organizations who don't need a lot of detailed information
A prospect lands on my site to ask about building profile sizes, wind/snow ratings, installation timelines, or warranty coverage. What Fin does well is deliver instant, consistent answers, pull from approved specs and positioning, and keep the conversation moving without human involvement.
Olark chat is easy to set up and use. You can have more than one user logged in to monitor the chat on different computers. This makes a fast response time more likely. Although you have to be sure to keep your volume up on the computer so you hear the sound letting you know there's a chat waiting. I like that you can see the customers path through the website and you can put clickable links while you are in a chat to guide the customer to a product or a help page. Plus you can see if they actually went there. This makes it easier to upsell
Olark is user friendly for both sides of the CHAT conversation. If you are initiating the chat, or the one receiving the chat, it is extremely easy to follow and use. There are many different levels of computer use comprehension and Olark is for every level.
Olark has reporting features to allow you to check the quality of your employees chat abilities as well as their productivity. It provides feedback for the employee themselves to also see how they are doing and take any suggestions the customer may leave for them regarding their chat experience.
Olark is very affordable and offers you the option, at a low cost, to look bigger and more professional that you even are. We were a smaller company and has the chat option with Olark and now have grown tremendously and STILL have the Olark chat option. Olark allowed us to grow and provide professionalism to our customers .
The Olark program allows you to set up quick responses to keep your customer from waiting, and to allow your employees to not have to retype the same response over and over. It is a great program that the employees really enjoy as well. It reminds you if you forgot to log out when you left your desk and provides your customer a quick note giving them the option to send the chat as an email inquiry instead, so you don't miss a thing.
The tool could be improved to "remember" where you last left off (specific user). Having to constantly retrace steps if you get logged out is annoying.
Hitting the "back" arrow sends you back to a main section, when it should send you back to where you previously were.
It would be nice to see performance reports available within the campaign itself, as well as within the reporting section.
Ability to NOT be able to change anything in a campaign after it has launched. This has happened multiple times. We usually copy a previous campaign to start a new one but often, we end up changing content on the version we are copying from -- this is very annoying and dangerous.
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.
Not really an area of improvement for Olark specifically, but I will offer that it is incredibly important to keep in mind your company's "shopping hours" or peak traffic times (there is a Reports feature on the software that allows you to analyze peak traffic times).
Transcript history can be a little tricky - if you're searching for a specific past conversation, sometimes you may get multiple search results and have to sift through them until you find exactly what you're looking for.
I'd also offer that you will occasionally come across folks that are on your site to cyberbully or say nonsensical things. While there isn't an absolute fullproof way to deal with this, Olark does offer a nice "block" feature to disregard any unwanted conversations.
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.
To be honest, renewal decisions are not currently within my power. Hypothetically speaking, I'm very comfortable with the platform, have used it daily for nearly a year, and would see no reason to switch to anything else. The small criticisms I had are not significant enough to deter me from using Olark. It's a user friendly, effective tool for our department.
The platform is overall clear and intuitive. As with any new platform, there's a learning curve, but that wasn't an issue for our team (and it shouldn't be an issue for others). Fin options are scattered across several submenus, and I'd like them grouped together, but I also like having all those training-related tabs open at all times, so it's not much of a real issue for me.
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.
Our organization does not have any complaints about Olark's Support. Anytime we reached out to them for assistance, we received a prompt, helpful reply! As mentioned previously, we used Olark fairly basically so we didn't have too much need to work with their support team other than a few general questions here and there. They were always pleasant to work with.
While both Epsilon Agility Harmony and Oracle Responsys are great for larger organizations that send a lot of emails, I think Epsilon Agility Harmony is more robust than Responsys and is easier to use. It is significantly more complex than HubSpot and requires previous knowledge of using an email tool that has content blocks and or dynamic content.
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.
Olark has an easier implementation process and has better functionality such as the ability to send commands through the platform to either create a ticket in your CRM or push an opportunity to salesforce; you're even able to 'push' the end user to a web page. Implementing their SDK is a snap as well.
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.
