Intercom creates modern Customer Service software that aims to redefine how businesses support their customers. The platform connects businesses directly to customers using powerful messaging and automation. According to the vendor, Intercom enables teams to scale support without investing more resources - leading to happier customers and more efficient support teams.
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Olark
Score 8.8 out of 10
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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.
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 …
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 …
Customer Support and Service: Intercom excels in customer support scenarios, especially in providing real-time assistance through live chat. It enables support teams to have personalized conversations with customers, resolve issues promptly, and deliver a high level of customer satisfaction. The platform's features like saved replies, conversation assignment, and conversation history make it an ideal choice for managing support inquiries efficiently.
Proactive Customer Engagement: Intercom is highly effective in engaging customers proactively throughout their journey. It allows organizations to send targeted messages based on user behavior, such as onboarding messages to guide new customers, upsell messages to existing customers, or re-engagement messages to inactive users. With Intercom's automation and segmentation capabilities, organizations can deliver relevant and timely messages, driving user engagement and conversion.
Sales and Lead Generation: Intercom can be a valuable tool for sales teams. It enables them to engage with potential customers, answer inquiries, and guide them through the sales process in real-time. Intercom's chat functionality can be integrated into sales pages or product demos, allowing sales representatives to provide personalized assistance, address objections, and close deals more effectively.
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
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.
I am giving Intercom a rating of 10 because we truly use this platform each day. When using the platform, we can have real-time conversations going on with parents, administrators, and even grandparents. They are able to discuss their general support needs and their billing support needs. Having this happen in real-time allows us to move forward with solving the customer issues
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 would love to be able to use it for voice calls. But it is very intuitive and easy to use. I like being able to unassign myself from conversations and assign them to others. I like being alerted if the customer has already contacted us recently so I know to read their past messages to see whats going on.
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.
Intercom sweeps the floor with Drift. Drift feel poorly made, less polished, and barely focused on customer support. Intercom is the exact opposite of this. Freshdesk & Zendesk both offered a better experience for tickets in my opinion. Tickets on Intercom being mixed in with conversations is rough but havent no way to filter tickets from conversation in my assigned inbox is very bothersome and not user friendly. Tickets just feel extremely underdeveloped but it also seems to have so much potential if done right.
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.
Much faster response time and better customer care NPS scores as we no-longer 'drop the ball' on complex enquiries
Back office resource rationalisation - meaning lower staff costs due to smarter working
Brand prestige - I think Intercom elevates our small business to the level of the 'big players' and is a symbol of the importance we place on responsive customer care
