Fin by Intercom vs. Smith.ai vs. SnapEngage

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

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.

Incentivized

It helps business grow, if your business is more reliable on marketing or if your business is in starting stage implementing SnapEngage to your website will give a kick start to your business because it helps to get close with the customers which are in need with those quick questions and responses we are getting from customers using chat agent.

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

• They set up and monitor your chat on your site, giving your prospects instant service.
• I have spent so much time with their support team. I never felt more welcome to an SaaS.
• Their phone monitoring system saves you time and will increase your profits by converting more leads into paying clients.

• Allows team members to see type in real-time before it is submitted. This enables us to gather information for responses in a more timely manner.
• We can see which of our team members are available, busy, or not-available.
• Ability to see some biographical information of chatters and to sync information with Salesforce.

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.

• Although you can close the chat message, the chat bubble can not be closed and it can cause issues being able to read website content.

Incentivized

• The admin dashboard is the hardest to navigate of any tool I've ever used! THere are 7 tabs in the left-hand panel. Just within the one tab that reads "Settings" (there is a separate tab for "My Account", also Permissions?) there are 9 tabs at the top (which include names like "Agent Settings", "Integrations", "Design Studio", "Options", "Hub"), then at least another 8 tabs WITHIN those 9 tabs, giving you a total of 14 different pages of settings to search through, again, JUST in the Settings tab. What the heck?!
• Something as simple as notification settings are spread throughout the 14 different settings pages mentioned above. Rather than having one area where you can enter email addresses for notifications, I've had to search through the 14 pages and use Ctrl+F on multiple occasions to fully remove a user from all the notifications they received. This should be much simpler!

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

I give SnapEngage a 9 due to how successful our company has been while using it. Unless prices were raised by an insane amount, I don't see us using a competing service.

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.

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.

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

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.

I have never needed to contact them for support.

Incentivized

Easy to know the learning path

Incentivized

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

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.

Incentivized

We actually demo'ed LiveChat and LivePerson and besides SnapEngage having a better UI and ease of use, the support from their team was worlds and away above the rest. They let us run an extended demo, gave us constant support, and made sure we felt comfortable before we went live with the system.

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

• 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).

• It has allowed us to provide more service with a much smaller team than our phone team.
• It provides us with data helpful to not only ourselves, but our marketing team as well.
• It's customizable so it allows us to create and update our platforms immediately when needed.

Incentivized