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 1 resolution
Parature (Discontinued)
Score 5.0 out of 10
N/A
Parature was a self-service customer support platform providing a self-service knowledge base to connect with customers across multiple channels. The company was acquired by Microsoft in January 2014 and reached EOL in 2017.
N/A
Pricing
Fin by Intercom
Parature (Discontinued)
Editions & Modules
Fin with your current helpdesk
$0.99
one-time fee per 1 resolution
Copilot add-on
$35
per month per user
The Early Stage program
$65
per month (6 support seats)
Proactive Support Plus add-on
$99
per month
Fin with Intercom’s Helpdesk
from $39 + $0.99 per Fin resolution
per month per seat
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Fin by Intercom
Parature (Discontinued)
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Fin comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. Here's how it works:
Use Fin in at least 250 conversations within the first 90 days after trial. If you're not satisfied, you can request a refund of up to $1M. Refund requests must be submitted within 90 days of starting the subscription.
Keep in mind that my day-to-day focuses mainly on Help Center/article content. That's all I'm comparing/evaluating in this specific response. Intercom has come a long way in the two years or so that I've been using it. They've made major strides toward feature parity for …
It's a far superior AI offering compared to other options on the market. The lack of Dev support needed in the setup and management is a huge bonus as well. intercom is clearly investing in Fin, and the constant development and opportunity to be Beta testers keep us ahead in the industry too.
The single element of Parature I've not seen in any other system of this kind is the Download Module. You can post files in the open, or protect them by any number of entitlement methods. The solution is also appealing to those who don't want to manage the back-end/IT needs as it is a hosted solution and has proven to be very reliable.
Ability identify the issue from limited information shared by the customer
Clearly communicate the resolution leveraging the knowledgebase input
The resolution by Fin is very detailed and calls out all the possible solutions to the problem helping the customer identify the right fix
Fin is constantly learning from the past instances and leveraging into present and future issue resolution and thereby able to provide a good customer experience
Clean/Friendly UI. It was extremely easy to navigate around Parature's menus at a high level, and you could take advantage of the more robust features as you became more comfortable and familiar with how Parature operates!
Strong Knowledge Base. Writing KB articles or ticket summaries and making use of the search function within Parature allows for expedient recovery of past ticket information. Being able to search for a fix action, or at least a troubleshooting article that can guide you towards a resolution is extremely valuable.
Enhanced Notation Capability. Being able to send/post internal or external updates to a ticket is great! You can leave the wordy technical details for other employees while making sure to communicate the high-points and fix action to the end-user.
I would like to see a report of the difference between chat and email reactions.
When using Fin for email support, it can sometimes overrespond in email threads that involve multiple people. It may react to replies from other participants and send unnecessary responses. This also happens when colleagues are included in the email thread, causing Fin to keep replying to their messages as well.
It’s not possible to remove Fin’s replies in individual email threads, which makes it difficult to stop the bot from responding when it’s no longer needed (unless you manually reply again).
Reporting is barebones at best. If you need special reports, we had to go through Parature to have them built.
The use of frames on a website is very 1990s. It actually impacts usability of the product, especially when combined with how Parature handled sessions. An engineer could only work one ticket at a time which, honestly, isn't very realistic for a busy support team that is working on several issues at a time.
Support was often unresponsive when contacted for unplanned problems.
The knowledge base was not very friendly for clients and it provided no real encouragement for it to be used.
It took several clicks to do something as simple as edit and assign a ticket or to close a ticket.
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.
It's pretty simple to implement. Naturally, there are some processes that are complex, but it's a naturally complex task that it's trying to tackle, so that is understandable. Occasionally it's not clear if one should create a new snippet for a nuanced question vs a custom answer - and then the custom answers can be tough to train.
It was bulky, cumbersome, and didn't allow us to handle the volume of cases we received on a daily basis. Many of our issues were highly technical in nature and we would often need to work on 2 or 3 at once. The poor design choices prevented this, which was unfortunate.
They recently had one very extended outage. It was a data center issue - but they were not diversified enough so in the end the system was down for almost 8 hours. There are also periods of time where for no reason the system simply doesn't respond. This small outages are usually short (just a few minutes), and have in fact been occurring less often, so it appears some corrective actions have been taken.
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.
FIN/Intercom has a much better UI and feels more integrated than Zendesk. The reporting is also much more straight forward - using something like Zendesk Explore is painful and feels like I'm using something 10 old. FIN also integrates better with other products, and we've been able to create custom apps/widgets using the Intercom Canvas app far quicker than we could with Zendesk.
