Fin by Intercom vs. SoDash (discontinued)

It's excellent when users often have trouble understanding certain aspects of your product, so you don't have to manually share the same information every time. It's less appropriate if your user problems are user-specific, as then you probably don't have every expected case covered in your documentation, which then requires Fin to have access to your codebase, at which point you might want to consider building your own agent.

SoDash is excellent for businesses that get a high volume of customer service inquiries via social media, whether it be from one platform or many. It takes in data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google, Pinterest, Flickr, blogs around the web, and lots of others. It is equally suited for a startup with a small customer service department, or an older company with a large customer service department. The software allows customer service agents to attach comments/notes to each customer that other agents can see.

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

• SoDash covers more social media sources than any other tool on the market.
• SoDash's AI can interpret incoming messages and select and deliver the appropriate pre-written responses, allowing us to engage with large amounts of social traffic easily.
• SoDash rates Twitter influence, allowing you to see who the most influential people to your brand are.
• SoDash allows you to set-up email alerts for messages with particular keywords, high/low levels of activity, and even audio alerts should you want to run SoDash in the background.

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.

• The 14 day free trial was not fully functional, so I was not able to demo all its features.

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

FIN is easy to set up and pretty quick to get everything the way you need (some things could be handled better), and you can preview how it's going to work before it's available to everyone. Since you can use FIN on multiple channels, you can save a lot of time by not having your team work on multiple chat platforms as well.

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

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

We selected SoDash for two main reasons: 1) It takes in data from more social media sources than any other software, and 2) Its price point made it a good value. Those things are what differentiate it from its competition.

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 allows one customer service agent to do the work of two.

Incentivized