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 …
Fin by Intercom is great with supporting users through onboarding questions, explaining the basics of our product and how to use it. Even with guidance, Fin by Intercom sometimes keeps trying to troubleshoot technical issues after it goes beyond what we have in our knowledge base for solving common issues, which can be a frustrating experience.
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.
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.
Sometimes Fin can provide incorrect information when using previous conversations as a source; this is one of the few downsides, as teammates can sometimes make mistakes.
We also sometimes see that Fin does not pass to a human as quickly as we would like, but this could also be a training improvement our business needs to implement.
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.
The Intercom plattform is amazingly well and this allows us to use FIN to its fullest potential. You have various ways of customizing your agent (from name, voice, guidance, escalation rules) and you have various built-in ways of understanding your performance and where you can improve (optimizer, topic explorer, etc.). And of course you can use FIN to ask questions about FIN! And FIN from Intercom is very well trained on itself, helping with most setup questions easily.
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.
We used it a few years ago, and it was not as feature-rich for our needs. It lacked true AI capabilities, was hard for users to understand, and created workaround issues. The internal ticket system was difficult to use and led to many missed issues and calls.
Greater customer satisfaction: Implementing Fin by Intercom AI and Intercom in general has definitely improved our CSATs from our customers. We are now consistently getting high 90s (in percentage) from our CSATs, both for Fin by Intercom and teammates. So yes, our customers are really happy with how Intercom is working.
Reduced speed and responses: Since implementing Fin by Intercom AI and Intercom, our speed and resolution has increased massively. Resolution times have gone from days to hours with Fin by Intercom AI included. And now, with AI, customers are getting instant answers around the clock, rather than having to wait for a person.
New role opportunities: Fin by Intercom AI have lead to many new roles created, including mine. Which has expanded overtime.
