Fin is Intercom’s AI Agent for customer service, designed to deliver high-quality answers, even for complex queries. It works with any helpdesk, or it can be paired with Intercom’s next-generation Helpdesk to get the full Intercom Customer Service Suite.
$0.99
one-time fee per outcome
Olark
Score 10.0 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
Smith.ai
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Smith.ai is a call answering platform for businesses of all sizes. The AI Receptionist from Smith.ai handles call scenarios, such as qualifying leads, answering questions, and scheduling appointments 24/7. Smith.ai Virtual Receptionists aim to maximize meaningful interactions, with the goal of moving a business forward with a professional human touch. With its integration ecosystem of over 7,000 platforms — like HouseCall Pro, ServiceTitan, MyCase, and HubSpot— call data flows directly into a…
$95
per month
Pricing
Fin by Intercom
Olark
Smith.ai
Editions & Modules
Fin with your current helpdesk
$0.99
one-time fee per outcome
Copilot add-on
$35
per month per user
Pro
$99
per month For analysis of 1,000 conversations
Fin with Intercom’s Helpdesk
from $39 + $0.99 per Fin outcome
per month per seat
Self Service
$19.00
Per Agent Per Month
Starter
$95
per month
Basic
$270
per month
Pro
$800
per month
Enterprise
Custom
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Fin by Intercom
Olark
Smith.ai
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Fin comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. Here's how it works:
Intercom states that users who sign up for the Fin Guarantee Success Program and do not achieve at least a resolution rate of 65% will be paid $1M. This program is designed for high volume customers.
Eligibility criteria:
High volume customers (over 250k monthly conversions) in North America and Europe. Intercom states that phase one of this program will admit customers on Intercom Helpdesk or Zendesk.
—
All plans include:
- Lead screening
- Lead qualification
- Appointment booking
- Intake
- Call transfers & routing
- Live agents on standby 24/7
- Instant call summaries
- Bilingual English/Spanish call handling
- Comprehensive dashboard with rich business insights
- Dedicated phone number
- Phone and e-mail support
Additional features available:
- Integration with CRM software - including ServiceTitan, HubSpot, and Clio), Zapier, Slack and others
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 Fin by 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 …
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.
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
Smith.ai Website Chat is an excellent solution for law firm owners that want a cost-effective strategy to capture lead information from website visitors. Our website generates hundreds of visitors each day and over 7,000 visitors per month. I strategically have placed the online chat feature on the contact page on our website to engage with only those potential clients that are serious about retaining our services and making a purchasing decision. I have priced this type of online chat service with several other providers (Ngage, Apex Chat). Some of these providers charge as much as $35 or hire per qualified lead. Smith.ai comes in at approximately $8-$15 per chat session with a potential lead and even offers some flat rate options. There can be further cost savings if only the chatbot feature is used without live agent support. In this option, a website visitor can engage with a chatbot using Automated questions and answers without the need for live agent support. My firm beta tested this product in of it itself and it generated several thousands of dollars in revenue. The customer support has also been exceptional. All the representatives at Smith.ai have been responsive to customer service questions and implementation of the product. Capturing leads with the chatbot feature and the live agent support has even been more profitable. Based on our CRM data, website chat leads generated over $127,500 of revenue for our firm and engaged with 230 potential clients in just the past 12 months.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Smith.ai Live Website Chat allows you to provide a script for when they answer prospective clients. The script is customizable as your needs change. However, the script only goes so far, as they do not know your business personally. Once they do go through that script, they send you an email with the caller's contact information so you can reach out personally if they seem interested. They do so with efficiency.
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.
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.
Smith.ai pays for itself if we can help one site visitor move down our lead funnel to being a client. We have averaged over 50+ new leads each month since implementing the chat and with a close rate for becoming new clients that is double what our advertising PPC new client closing rate has been.
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.
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.
Came down to pricing. Smith.ai Live Website Chat did not have the same level of customization and support as other alternatives but there are enough customization and tools that it was clear it would solve the problems and at a good price.
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.
Positive - Smith.ai has easily saved me $25k+ in receptionist costs. They probably helped me land another $50k in new business I would otherwise not have brought in the door because they immediately grabbed the client on our website so they didn't get away or have to wait 2 days for a call back. Great ROI (100 to 1 ROI is probably not an exaggeration for my law firm).
