Intercom Suite vs. Ruby Virtual Receptionist Services

We started using Intercom five years ago, and it is probably the best decision we made. It is without a doubt the best investment in our startup journey. It is rock solid, with constant innovation and product improvements. We are a fully remote team, and it helps keep all the customer conversations and interactions in one place. So, we can seamlessly collaborate and ensure that nothing drops.

Incentivized

Ruby Virtual Receptionist Services is well suited for a business that needs call screening and message-taking services. The service is expensive but if the user is willing to put a lot of time and effort into planning and scriptwriting, as well as call handling instructions, it may work well. Also, if there is not much information that must be captured by the receptionist, I feel this may be a better fit.

Incentivized

• Great UI - everyone has their own inbox but can still see all incoming messages.
• Fin AI - we love the AI functionality, it saves tons of time of the team.
• Automated emails - we configured Intercom in a way that it uses a lot of information we have about our users (e.g. their subscription, date of upgrade, etc.) so that we can use it to automate communication.

Incentivized

• Call-out request "personal assistant services."
• Ruby Receptionist app.

Incentivized

• There was a report of active chats per hour that helped us a lot to organize the team schedule, understand hours of greatest flow, nowadays there is only this report for new chats, but if we have chats that started at other times but were not closed, it ends up giving a false impression that the service was empty at a certain time.
• Not being able to group users by platform, only by API, we have a small team and having to send a developer to do this all the time is unthinkable.
• Unable to determine what is a lead and a user based on our criteria, today Intercom assumes that just because a user exists on our platform then they are a customer, but this is not true for us, as our platform allows free trials, so this function of separating leads and users is completely useless for us.
• When we create a user manually, I either have to provide an email or manually provide an ID, since nowadays you have integration with WhatsApp, so I often register a user with just a name and phone number. So the tool should allow me to consider the phone number as an ID as well, or at least generate an ID automatically for me, as it does when we receive a conversation via WhatsApp started by a customer who was not previously registered in the tool.
• The attendant can record audio directly through the Intercom, it has been integrated with WhatsApp for some time, and until today we need to use other platforms to record a simple audio that is so common when using WhatsApp.
• Sometimes the attendant is busy and the customer sends an audio message on WhatsApp. It would be nice to be able to transcribe the customer's audio message as an internal note to help the attendant be more agile.
• The AI ​​marks many calls as resolved even though the agent has taken over the conversation, just because the customer hasn't clicked on anything, but that doesn't make sense, most customers don't bother to respond to the AI, sometimes they don't even remember to respond to us, I understand that if there are more than 2 messages sent by our agent after the AI's response, it should already be considered that the AI ​​didn't resolve the service.
• In cases of users with many companies, it should be possible to send via API the information about which company the customer is logged into at the time of the conversation. Nowadays, we have to ask the customer which company they are talking to because all of them appear on the Intercom and we cannot know which one they want support from.
• Being able to place hierarchy in tags, today we use tags to categorize conversations and there is a hierarchical level in this classification, for example: Usability > Fiscal > Rejection, but as there is no way to define hierarchy, we cannot do analysis by tags through the platform, we have to do the part in Excel
• Being able to make calls to other countries like Brazil
• Report of customers and users who call the most by period, today I can even get a list of customers who haven't called for a long time, but customers who call support a lot is also very relevant information and I don't have it on the platform.
• Tinha um relatório de chats ativos por hora que nos ajudava muito a organizar escala de time, entender horas de maior fluxo, hoje em dia só tem esse relatório para novos chats, mas se temos chats que começaram em outros horários mas não foram encerrados, acaba dando uma falsa impressaão que o atendimento estava vazio em determinado momento
• Não poder agrupar usuários pela plataforma, somente por API, temos uma equipe pequena e ter que toda hora passar um desenvolvedor pra fazer isso é impensável
• Não poder determinar o que é lead e usuário mediante nossos critérios, hoje o Intercom assume que só porque um usuário existe na nossa plataforma então é um cliente, mas isso não é verdade pra nós, pois nossa plataforma permite testes gratuitos, sendo assim essa função de separação de lead e usuário pra gente é completamente inútil
• Quando criamos um usuário manualmente ou tenho que informar e-mail ou informar manualmente um ID, sendo que hoje em dia vocês tem integração com o whatsapp então muitas vezes vou cadastrar um usuário só com nome e número de telefone, então a ferramenta deveria me permitir considerar o telefone como ID também ou no mínimo gerar um ID automaticamente pra mim como faz quando recebemos uma conversa pelo whatsapp começada por um cliente que não estava previamente cadastrado na ferramenta
• O atendente poder gravar áudio diretamente pelo Intercom, já tem integração com o whatsapp a tempos, e até hoje precisamos usar outras plataformas pra gravar um simples áudio que é tão corriqueiro no uso do whatsapp
• As vezes o atendente está ocupado e o cliente manda um áudio no whatsapp seria bacana poder transcrever o audio do cliente como uma nota interna pra ajudar o atendente a ter mais agilidade
• A IA marca muitos chamados como resolvidos mesmo o atendente tendo assumido a conversa, só pelo cliente não ter clicado em nada, só que isso não faz sentido, a maior parte dos clientes não se preocupa em responder a IA, as vezes não lembra nem de responder a gente, entendo que se tiver mais de 2 mensagens enviadas pelo nosso agente após o atendimento da IA, já deveria contar que a mesma não resolveu o atendimento.
• Em casos de usuários com muitas empresas, deveria ser possível enviarmos por API a informação de em qual empresa o cliente está logado na hora da conversa, hoje em dia temos que perguntar para o cliente de qual empresa ele está falando pois no Intercom aparecem todas e não conseguimos saber pra qual ele quer atendimento
• Ter como colocar hierarquia nas tags, hoje usamos tegs para categorizar conversas e tem um nivel hierarquico nessa classificação, exemplo: Usabilidade > Fiscal > Rejeição, mas como não tem como definir hierarquia, não temos como fazer analises por tags pela plataforma, temos que fazer a parte no excel
• Ter como fazer ligações por outros países como o Brasil
• Relatório de clientes e usuários que mais chamam por período, hoje até consigo pegar uyma lista de clientes que não chamam a muito tempo, mas clientes que acionam demais o suporte também é uma informação muito relevante e não tenho pela plataforma

Incentivized

• Clarity in billing.
• Shortened hold times.
• Less transfer time from call to receptionist (between English and Spanish).
• Better training of receptionists to prevent certain things from being said to clients - decreases client confidence.

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

I'm giving it an eight since certain items are self-explanatory and intuitive, depending on where you are in the suite. In contrast, other features, such as copying/duplicating workflows, are not prominent (nor available). I have worked with different platforms, such as Sprinklr, Engagor, and Zendesk, and given my experience, I know my way around these quite well. I love Intercom, but there is room for improvement.

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

Odoo was, in my opinion, terrible - a jack of all trades and master of none, which is why all teams in the business moved away to bespoke software. Freshdesk - an easier and more organisable way of creating and managing tickets. Although Intercom now has tickets, we're still using Freshdesk due to ease of use after 5 years, and our development team is also using it, so more cross-team collaboration happens there.

Incentivized

We switched over from Answer First to Ruby Receptionist because we wanted a more full-service answering service. We wanted to be able to call out using our business number as well as text in and out. We also really liked the "call-out request" feature as it freed up our time and allowed Ruby to handle minor client communications, etc.

Incentivized

• Intercom has allowed Frayt to improve customer satisfaction by ensuring any active issues are addressed immediately to ensure effective service for their needs.
• Has decreased the time for response when addressing contractors due to the ability to reach out through various means to individuals.
• Has increased visibility for specific issues to multiple team members for things to be addressed appropriately.

Incentivized

• Increased efficiency.
• NEGATIVE ROI.

Incentivized