Intercom is an AI-first customer service platform that enhances the customer experience and improves operational efficiency, built on a single AI system with three major components: AI Agent, AI Copilot and AI Analyst (coming soon) to deliver customer service.
$39
per month per seat
Olark
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
Olark is a website live chat tool for engaging website visitors while they browse. It can be used to to track leads, drive sales, provide support.
$15
per month
Pricing
Intercom
Olark
Editions & Modules
Essential
$39
per month per seat
Advanced
$99
per month per seat
Expert
$139
per month per seat
The Early Stage program
From $65 for 5 support seats
per month
Proactive Support Plus add-on
from $99
per month
Self Service
$19.00
Per Agent Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Intercom
Olark
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
AI customer service features included in every plan.
Intercom integrates Help desk, AI Chat bot, and Proactive support.
Totango: great segmentation and tracking. Very difficult learning curve. Literally over a year to build.
Salesforce: Garbage. I have always stood by this. Idiots love Salesforce because they think it's smart. It's not. It's just confusing. There is nothing Salesforce does that …
Intercom was easier to use and more seamless with their features. There was a lot more we could do with Intercom right out of the gate so we chose it over the other software we were trying. We've been with Intercom for around 7 years now and are still happy with it.
We evaluated a number of products before choosing to move forward with Intercom. No contest, Intercom provided us with the level of tools and support we needed to serve our own customers well. We've been with the company for 3 years now and are sticking around for the …
Founder and Growth Hacker at Big Red's Equipment Sales
Chose Intercom
Intercom and Drift have a lot of similarities- beautiful UI, engaging customer experience with bot functionality, but Intercom has been priced more reasonably, and has better integrations. Intercom support has also been fantastic to work with.
Intercom was selected before I started, and I'm so glad it was. It's a clear leader in customer communication with an effortless interface. It has the same key features as LiveChat (tagging, canned responses or templates) but it's easier to use and is less stressful for …
Well Suited Scenarios: - Intercom excels in delivering personalised customer support, making it an excellent choice for companies looking to provide timely, contextual help. - Its tools also are great in enhancing customer product knowledge, equipping users with the insights they need to maximise product value - For customer training and product awareness, Intercom's features like banners, pop-ups, and in-app tours are highly effective. Additionally, it serves as a reliable platform for overall product marketing, enabling targeted campaigns, newsletters, and announcements. Not Suited Scenarios: - Intercom is less ideal for internal team training, such as hosting detailed knowledge guides or managing team-specific learning pathways. - For creating interactive product tours, while Intercom offers basic functionality, dedicated tools like Navattic or Storylane provide a more dynamic and user-friendly experience. However, if convenience is a priority—especially when avoiding redirection users outside of our platform—Intercom remains a practical option.
Olark chat is easy to set up and use. You can have more than one user logged in to monitor the chat on different computers. This makes a fast response time more likely. Although you have to be sure to keep your volume up on the computer so you hear the sound letting you know there's a chat waiting. I like that you can see the customers path through the website and you can put clickable links while you are in a chat to guide the customer to a product or a help page. Plus you can see if they actually went there. This makes it easier to upsell
In-app communication: I can deploy tours, banners, checklists, tooltips, posts, and surveys in a matter of minutes.
Knowledge Hub: I can write and publish a help article that can then be used to train the Fin AI agent to deliver accurate answers to our customers.
Communicating in context with service/sales agents and customers: the Help Desk makes it simple for sales and service agents to pull me into a conversation with a customer to resolve product-related issues.
Olark is user friendly for both sides of the CHAT conversation. If you are initiating the chat, or the one receiving the chat, it is extremely easy to follow and use. There are many different levels of computer use comprehension and Olark is for every level.
Olark has reporting features to allow you to check the quality of your employees chat abilities as well as their productivity. It provides feedback for the employee themselves to also see how they are doing and take any suggestions the customer may leave for them regarding their chat experience.
Olark is very affordable and offers you the option, at a low cost, to look bigger and more professional that you even are. We were a smaller company and has the chat option with Olark and now have grown tremendously and STILL have the Olark chat option. Olark allowed us to grow and provide professionalism to our customers .
The Olark program allows you to set up quick responses to keep your customer from waiting, and to allow your employees to not have to retype the same response over and over. It is a great program that the employees really enjoy as well. It reminds you if you forgot to log out when you left your desk and provides your customer a quick note giving them the option to send the chat as an email inquiry instead, so you don't miss a thing.
Not really an area of improvement for Olark specifically, but I will offer that it is incredibly important to keep in mind your company's "shopping hours" or peak traffic times (there is a Reports feature on the software that allows you to analyze peak traffic times).
Transcript history can be a little tricky - if you're searching for a specific past conversation, sometimes you may get multiple search results and have to sift through them until you find exactly what you're looking for.
I'd also offer that you will occasionally come across folks that are on your site to cyberbully or say nonsensical things. While there isn't an absolute fullproof way to deal with this, Olark does offer a nice "block" feature to disregard any unwanted conversations.
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.
To be honest, renewal decisions are not currently within my power. Hypothetically speaking, I'm very comfortable with the platform, have used it daily for nearly a year, and would see no reason to switch to anything else. The small criticisms I had are not significant enough to deter me from using Olark. It's a user friendly, effective tool for our department.
I love their User interface. The intercom is easy to use, easy to maintain, and easy to implement. New users can easily be onboarded. Intercom has a very simple interface that is not simplistic; it does the job in a great way without complicating users' lives. Overall, Intercom is a great app.
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.
Our organization does not have any complaints about Olark's Support. Anytime we reached out to them for assistance, we received a prompt, helpful reply! As mentioned previously, we used Olark fairly basically so we didn't have too much need to work with their support team other than a few general questions here and there. They were always pleasant to work with.
The product was too focused on "tickets," and we wanted to focus more on "conversations." Intercom shows that thinking across the whole app was a no-brainer for us. Zendesk's pricing is a bit higher for what they deliver, but the ease of integration with our platforms was key, too.
Olark has an easier implementation process and has better functionality such as the ability to send commands through the platform to either create a ticket in your CRM or push an opportunity to salesforce; you're even able to 'push' the end user to a web page. Implementing their SDK is a snap as well.
Faster customer onboarding: When we identified our biggest conversion factors, we were able to set up an onboarding sequence that helped people get started and converted faster.
Adoption: It's much easier to showcase a new software feature. We build out a post and a tour for any new software features and prompt it to show up the first time they log in, all through Intercom.
Money: It's saved us money in the long run considering how many softwares we would have needed to use in order to get the same features offered in Intercom.
