Help Scout vs. Fin by Intercom

Small businesses that want a conversational type of customer support experience. Nothing wrong with support tickets, but it does make you feel like a number. Also, we needed to get up and running quickly so the "inbox" feel of the dashboard was already familiar with the team so they could adopt the new software quickly.

Incentivized

Fin by Intercom is well-suited for handling basic questions, especially for smaller teams that don’t have the time or resources to fully train it. That said, it’s easy to see how much more powerful Fin could be with proper guidance, training, and well-developed content in place.

Incentivized

• Extremely simple to use and understand as a user - treats communications like human beings and provides a much more personal feel to communication (as opposed to making people feel like numbers).
• The email newsletter.
• They are super responsive. They are pretty rad and transparent: if something goes wrong on their end they are not afraid of admitting fault. Which leads me to trust them because I can believe them. I know that tells you very little about the product, but as leadership, that's something that I really need
• Help Scout does exactly what it needs to (facilitate organized, efficient conversations between customers and support people) without getting in the way.

Incentivized

• 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

• Trying to group tickets is a bit unflexible. You can create folders which can be part of a workflow (automatic trigger) but you can't create a folder based on tags. This needs to be improved because there's a need to create smarter segments and mix them.
• Metrics are useful but there needs to be more details about them. You can drill down in some but others are still not very actionable or visible (ok, that number went down, but what was the cause? what's the criteria with what you measure that?)

Incentivized

• Setting up workflows are not easy to do and have some limited scope
• Making repeated suggestions should be easier to contain
• It would be great if it could identify other tickets that may have similar issues or identify Linear or Jira tickets that may be relevant
• Prevent service agents from making duplicate customers of the same name or even close misspelled names - it makes for very dirty data
• Make suggestions for tagging conversations to rely less on the agents to do clean up

Incentivized

We are receiving feedback from the organizational level that they may want us to transition to a different solution to provide consistency across the company.

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

Help Scout is a great solution for support teams. There are many articles and webinars to help you learn how to use Help Scout. There are also many features to help make your workflows easier and more efficient. I would readily recommend Help Scout to any small or medium-growing support teams.

Incentivized

I think Intercom and Fin by Intercom AI is pretty intuitive and user-friendly. I think, touching on already mentioned topics, that Fin by Intercom AI could be a little more intuitive in conversations especially when allowing customers to be routed to a person. Also, have to be honest, the search features (e.g. Inbox searches) and reports could be made more intuitive. Also, while I appreciate how fast Intercom changes, I have found that sometimes options or feature just move or change without warning. This can make things a little confusing if you get used to a particular way of working or using a feature.

Incentivized

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

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

Only have minimal experience with G-Suite for a much smaller company. This worked well for that organization but did not have similar specialization functions that suite our larger organization very well. Help Scout's pricing makes sense, and continues to service our needs well. Minimal usage of other programs, but have no need to explore alternatives at this time.

Incentivized

We initially used Dixa Mim Bot, which is a far inferior chatbot and AI system. It felt like they were behind the curve compared to Intercom, with slow progress and little investment in the future of the Bot. It was very basic in its capabilities and needed more Dev support to manage.

Incentivized

• We are able to retain our customer base due to the outstanding customer service our Customer Experience department provides. Without an organized tool like Help Scout, this would not be possible. We pride ourselves in quick response times to customers and are able to do so by effectively routing tickets to the right agents.

Incentivized

• With Fin, we achieved higher customer satisfaction and faster response times.
• It saves time for our support team, allowing them to focus on more complex questions or issues.
• It provides the opportunity for support staff to work at a more strategic level.

Incentivized