Gist is a unified marketing, sales, and support platform. It includes live chat, a help desk, knowledge base, email marketing, marketing automation, opt-in forms, and more.
$29
per month
Intercom
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Intercom creates modern Customer Service software that aims to redefine how businesses support their customers. The platform connects businesses directly to customers using powerful messaging and automation. According to the vendor, Intercom enables teams to scale support without investing more resources - leading to happier customers and more efficient support teams.
To begin with, the attitude in all these well-established brands is absolutely horrendous as they think they run the world. Gist is so friendly and every time I have spoken to anyone of them they all take it personally and help you to the end. I have even been helped many times …
If your marketing model is selling products, services, or SAAS where you are doing inbound marketing and your website will do most of the lead generation and conversion, this is a great product. From live chat, support, event tracking, and automation, you could almost put your entire business on autopilot. If your marketing model is mostly outreach to cold leads and conversion, this software currently does not have any type of sales stages or task generation. I would still use Gist for website inbound but use another software for outreach and cold leads then when they become a lead put them into Gist for marketing automation.
The intercom works great if you chat with your clients. It is easy to keep an eye on previous conversations as well as have data on clients in one space. However, Intercom is not suitable for ticketing purposes. If you are looking for a system that would allow creating tickets - Intercom is not the right fit.
Customer service via a unified inbox so you dont have to separately monitor your twitter, Facebook or IG account for consumer communication there. Gist unified all into one inbox, better than anyone else I've seen in the market. They archive all communications and tie them back to a single user so you get unified customer history / data.
Marketing segmentation and automation: they track user history and behavior across the site and have super detailed segmenting capability, on par with ActiveCampaign's, but better I'd say. Better UI for the marketing admin person, and more unified data than in AC.
Live chat and chatbot. Usually it's either one or the other but with Gist you can do both seamlessly.
Plan limits can be confusing. For example, there is a monthly charge for support and a monthly charge for "growth," plus there's a separate charge depending on how many contacts and seats you have. Perhaps this is normal in the industry, but it can make it a little challenging to understand the bill every month.
The vast amount of features means development will never be as fast as you'd like it to be (even though they release updates all the time). This may not actually be a valid concern, and it certainly isn't unique to Gist (who doesn't have a wishlist they're waiting on their favorite SaaS to get to?), but I do believe the likelihood of being stuck without your desired feature being developed goes up a lot as the product gets bigger and bigger.
Email deliverability has been less than perfect in the past, but it has improved drastically in the last year.
Gist is a quite reliable service with a lot of added values. We don't need to pay for different Saas for these important features. If I had an issue the team was super responsive and helpful, that is essential for every business. The email delivery is great, so virtually no email has landed into spam folder
I am giving Intercom a rating of 10 because we truly use this platform each day. When using the platform, we can have real-time conversations going on with parents, administrators, and even grandparents. They are able to discuss their general support needs and their billing support needs. Having this happen in real-time allows us to move forward with solving the customer issues
It’s pretty simple, but it does a lot so there are more complicated features which depend on an individuals ability for software implementation. I am not an IT expert and I’ve managed to implement everything myself, others that are more tech-minded may find everything easier.
The interface and usability are impressive; even if you want to use a new function you have never tried before, it is just so evident and easy to find. The names of the menus and options are logical and make sense, plus the minimized logos again is natural. They must have done a lot of UX research and testing, as despite being a drab blue and grey inside their platform, it's smooth and inoffensive.
Fantastic support. Ask a question, get an answer within 24 hours every time. And sometimes within a few minutes. They've always come through for me, helpful and, even when it's an issue on my end, they point me in the right direction.
One of the great features about using Intercom is their support is going to be very similar to the support that you will be using with your customers. The chatbot is identical to your chatbot. So not only is user support easy to use and available, but it's a way to also learn how to use this feature.
Gist combines all our previous products into one application and adds many more features that would require more apps. Gist is excellent and a no-brainer all-in-one application when compared to having to manage multiple applications at higher cost. The support from the whole Gist team has been extremely responsive.
We used Zendesk at my last company and don't use ZD at all at my current company. Our customers love love love our fast, bot-fee cs/help. You can set up bots in Intercom, but we only use automated routing. We like to give a human touch. We haven't yet exploited the ability to serve customers relevant articles, but that might be useful to you as your scale your CS ops.
They are perfect for me as a someone who needs a lot of bang for the buck. The chat messenger device on my website alone has brought me new prospects that I did not have to spend money recruiting.
I am able to save hours of time with the automated emails that are GDPR compliant.
I don't have to pay for a designer to have excellent looking emails either.
