Fin by Intercom vs. Intuit Mailchimp vs. Spotler Marketing Cloud

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.

Incentivized

For any E-commerce related needs, like you need to see a list of customers who have added products to cart but did not purchase, this can be done really easily, but if your e-commerce provider provides integration, then it is best suited. Most of the systems in the Market provide out-of-the-box integration. Their API is also very easy it can be integrated to any language. You can integrate it into your custom developed system and use the features, like adding customers to specific lists. Also, if your lists become really big, then their system can get a bit slow to respond via API, so you might need a strategy for how you are gonna fetch the data using API.

Incentivized

• It is very easy to train
• It does a great job of recommending answers when little context is given.
• I love the ability to create a snippet to address issues in the moment or in the long term, based on FAQs.

Incentivized

• Mailchimp allows you to manage your mailing list really well. You can subscribe people, unsubscribe people manage the mailing list directly into segments, and what not.
• Mailchimp has features where you can create campaigns based on your mailing lists and send out newsletters to your subscribers based on a multitude of parameters that you can setup. Such as send email daily, weekly, monthly and they also have event based mails that you can send out.
• Mailchimp also has a feature where you can design your emails. The look and aesthetics are very important when sending emails to your subscribers and all those needs are addressed here.

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.

• The pricing tiers do scale quickly so if you have a free newsletter it may get expensive
• The pricing is based on total emails so if you have users who you only email rarely it might not make sense to use Intuit Mailchimp
• Customer support can be a bit lacking at times and their docs aren't always the best

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

We've had Mailchimp for about ten years, I want to say. I started with the company about four years ago, and I don't see us ever diverting to another source. It's easy for us to use, and we have all our clients already built into the database. I imagine we'll use them for as long as we have the company.

Incentivized

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.

The interface is a bit complicated, and I need to spend some time to learn new functions and understanding how it works. I don't like working with email templates because of the limited customization options. However, functions like AI for generating emails, segmentation, and analytics still work well and are very useful.

Incentivized

always there

Incentivized

I have, in the 4+ years that I've used Mailchimp, never seen an issue that restricted the use of their software/tools. I don't know of a single time when they're system crashed or went down. I could be wrong, but I honestly haven't experienced any issues with outages, errors or unplanned downtime

Incentivized

works perfect

Incentivized

I haven't noticed any slow speeds from Mailchimp or their tools. I think the landing pages load quickly and look nice. The email reports and editing operates smoothly and doesn't take time to load. Additionally, when I use Mailchimp in conjunction with Zapier + Hubspot I don't notice any drag between any of these tools

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Website tools were easy to use and understand so a novice can easily meet or exceed their client's expectations! Loved that we were able to totally customize so that the e-mail we created conveyed our client's overall messaging consistent with their branding! Client love that we can provide turnkey services to support their sales and marketing teams!

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

It's pretty easy to get up and running! There's a slight learning curve on a few things, but once you find where everything is located, you can import your list and send your first email. It really makes our clients feel great to see how quickly they can get that first email out.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I don't think they are comparable; we use Google Ads to put our website at the top of the list when someone googles certain words. We use meta business to manage our social media. Google aims to gain customers, while Mailchimp is used to interact with both existing and new customers.

Incentivized

Mailchimp over the years I've used it has grown in leaps and bounds. They have added so many additional features than were previously available. They are truly an all-in-one marketing platform now. If you're a small operation and just want to add email to your marketing efforts, they're there for you. If you're a larger operation and want to start sending postcard advertisements, they can do that. If you'd good with that and want to kick up your marketing by going social, you can do that on their platform. They are truly able to be as small as you need, but also get quite large in whatever it is you'd like to do through their system.

Incentivized

• 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

• One of my retail web store clients was sending out email specials and notices about once a month. After clicking the send button, we would watch Google Analytics and the current site users would light up immediately. Often, the current site visitors would pop up to 20, 30 or more after the email was sent. On a normal day, seeing 1 or 2 online users would be OK.
• Pretty much in all cases, we could see an uptick in positive activity after sending out a Intuit Mailchimp email to a list.

Incentivized