Fin by Intercom vs. Groove by OptimizeCX

Fin is great for using for first line support. We use Fin for conversations where customers have a standard question, and Fin is able to pull from our content to answer this accurately and go above and beyond to include some basic problem solving. This really helps us free up our Support Team's time for more complex queries. Fin isn't appropriate for us on technical issues or conversations which require human support. We've had to remove Fin from interacting on these conversations as customers were becoming frustrated with speaking to AI, or having Fin be unable to problem solve. However, this was easy to set up through Intercom, and now customers with complex questions/situations or bugs/technical issues do not engage with Fin and Fin only handles suitable conversations.

Groove is great for people who are wanting to provide accountability and organization for teams across your business. It is suited well for an organization that has many email requests coming in every day, because you can assign tickets to specific team members. It would not be suited for an organization that utilizes more phone support, than email support

• 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

• Creates Tickets when someone emails in or you can create a ticket within the groove system.
• They have great reports on response times and the average amount of time it took for a ticket to close. You can even see individuals average response times as well as specific teams.
• We use their Knowledge Base which is a great tool for creating FAQ and sending people to that.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Better Follow-up by customer success team
• More customization within their major features to fit both, large and small sales teams, alike
• Their site goes down fairly often

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

From an administration standpoint, Fin is very easy to set up, train, and test. Having the ability to impersonate a user in our system to see how Fin responds is huge. It lets you test several situations and throw curveballs at it (as customers will) without the risk of setting Fin live and wondering what will happen. It's also easy to fine-tune. Some chatbots you can never quite get right without spending hours on, but Fin usually takes a few minutes to dial it in. From a customer standpoint, Fin couldn't be easier to engage with. We tell customers up front it's an AI bot and they're wow'd with the experience

Incentivized

It's well organized, but slow.

always there

Incentivized

works perfect

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

I'm giving them a 3 for the really great support they gave for general questions. They also have a good knowledge base. I'm giving them only a 3 though because of my last customer service when I need a billing resolution. I was very disappointed in how they handled that. I also find it very bad practice to send out ONE email notice that they were raising my rate three times as much at the end of the month. When I was with Desk.com, I had numerous emails over months letting me know their billing plans were changing. Even worse than refusing to refund me the difference was that they just stopped responding to me.

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

We only used the free live chat version from HubSpot, so Intercom is yards better! If I were just comparing an actual live chat between the two tools, HubSpot was often clunky and delayed, and it was hard to find past conversation information

Incentivized

We also use Trello for project management. I have used both systems and we like Groove because it allows for our clients to contact us via email. They do not have to go to a ticket submission page, they can just email us directly and it will create a ticket. Groove also provides analytics on how long it takes to respond to tickets

• 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.

Incentivized

• We wasted a lot of time setting up the product before we discovered a lot of features listed on the website aren't ready for public use