Fin vs. Salesforce Starter

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.

Incentivized

If you own a business that has complex selling processes or requires integrations with 3rd party tools/systems, you should look at Professional, Enterprise, or Unlimited editions. Salesforce operates very well across pretty much every industry, but not all sales, marketing, and operational processes are created equal. If your marketing process requires a long list of sendable contacts then I would recommend adding on Pardot or Hubspot. Always start small and scale up, to avoid boxing yourself in down the road.

Incentivized

• It is very easy to train
• It does a great job of recommending answers when little context is given.
• I love the ability to create a snippet to address issues in the moment or in the long term, based on FAQs.

Incentivized

• Tracking phone calls is extremely easy when using the app on the iphone. After a phone call is complete it prompts the user to enter in call details.
• SalesforceIQ also automatically logs emails for us. This has saved us time from entering in information manually.
• SalesforceIQ was easy to set up and allowed us customization for fields that were relevant to our business.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Table views can be sorted by column. Filters can be applied, but only to one column. Multi-column filtering like Excel allows would be extremely useful and a big improvement.
• The ability to quick copy data in a table view would also be helpful, like (ctrl ') in excel.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

The system is very user-friendly on a desktop but lacks mobile friendliness. The Customer relationship manager disappears after the deal is signed. We struggled to get the system in a usable format, which was not cost-effective. The CRM system on desktop was great but way more complicated than it should be.

Incentivized

always there

Incentivized

works perfect

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Easy to know the learning path

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The implementation was surprisingly easy but we are having to adapt from our old process to work well with Intercom.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

more expensive but as an industry leader and go, the learning curve pays for itself in ROI in lost time in onboarding

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It made the job more efficient for staff so they can spend time doing other tasks rather than configuring and maintaining Salesforce Starter.

Incentivized