Fin by Intercom vs. Streamsend (discontinued)

FIN is great if you need someone to direct the customers based on their problems. You also have the option to use multiple languages if you have a worldwide customer base, so that's great. If you provide enough documentation to feed it, FIN can also solve tickets on its own, which enables your team to focus on other tasks. You can also have him handle conversations in other applications, such as Discord or Slack, and have them create ticket issues in JIRA if your team uses it.

Incentivized

The best scenarios would be email marketing campaigns such as eBlasts, Evites and newsletter/notifications. I believe Streamsend would be less appropriate for overall branding campaign and strategy.

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

• Streamsend reports allows us to see who is opening our email blasts and it even pinpoints how many viewers then go onto look at our social media sites and website.
• Streamsend allows you to go back and review past email blasts. This prevents me from creating marketing material similar to what I have done in the past.
• The site shows you who's email address was undeliverable. This helps me to weed out any old e-mails or individuals who requested to block the blasts.

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.

• Easier ability to delete old subscriber lists.
• Notification when emails for the month are running low.

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 renewal process is easy and doesn't require much thought. Our accounting team already has Streamsend as an approved vendor. We are happy with Streamsend and how it works. Switching email systems would require training and a learning curve that will be difficult to schedule in a busy department. The quality and reliability of Streamsend is something our team and attorneys trust.

Incentivized

The core experience is solid but the key friction across our team is that there are so many new features for improving Fin are being launched. Content improvements, guidance settings, recommendations, trends, and monitors are each useful in isolation, but they sit across separate areas of the platform with no clear starting point. The recurring feedback from my team is that it is hard to know where to focus. A consolidated "Improve Fin" section could really improve the experience, the ideal option would be a training page where our team could improve Fin in one place, ideally by answering questions and Fin would then be able to add those details in the right place, where it's creating new guidance or building procedures. I feel that would make uptake a lot quicker.

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

Although we have not utilised a specific chat box like Fin before in other websites, we have used ChatGPT and Claude within our general work. Our Product and Engineering team make use of Devin within Azure Dev Ops to support with their work. However, Fin is the most suitable for what our Support Team requires as this can be integrated into our chat with customers.

Incentivized

I do not like the Constant Contact interface at all, and find Streamsend to be a modern and suitable alternative to the popular MailChimp.

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

• I saw an impact on our ROI when using Streamsend for our weekly newsletters, since we used them as a redirect back to our website for new business
• The only negative impact I can think of would be the loss of some our registrants through our email database. Some thought that we sent out Eblasts and newsletters to frequently.
• It did help with faster lead conversion as we saw higher traffic and visitors to our website through direct click-through from our email campaigns

Incentivized