Fin by Intercom vs. Vision Helpdesk

Fin is great for using for first line support. We use Fin for conversations where customers have a standard question, and Fin is able to pull from our content to answer this accurately and go above and beyond to include some basic problem solving. This really helps us free up our Support Team's time for more complex queries. Fin isn't appropriate for us on technical issues or conversations which require human support. We've had to remove Fin from interacting on these conversations as customers were becoming frustrated with speaking to AI, or having Fin be unable to problem solve. However, this was easy to set up through Intercom, and now customers with complex questions/situations or bugs/technical issues do not engage with Fin and Fin only handles suitable conversations.

I think that there is probably nothing that Vision Helpdesk can't do given enough work to customize it. The problem is that you almost have to have someone dedicated to knowing everything there is to know about the system and then have them be the administrator of all the customizations and feature additions you want. It's great that it can do so much, but it's not great that it's so complicated and has very little out-of-the-box configurations.

Incentivized

• Serves as the first point of interaction.
• Answers questions based on the knowledge base.
• Tries to suggest a solution for reported issues (in some cases).
• Gives the option to improve its answer.
• Learns from other conversations and replies by humans.
• Understands other languages.
• Interprets images (somewhat).

Incentivized

• The best thing for us - the timer. It's really cool. We can start the timer and end it when support finishes. It's very important for working with other companies we give support for.
• Good-looking, with good visualisation and usability dashboard.
• Ticket transfer between support users, comments, ticket printing.
• The best price and functionality, comparing to other help desks.
• Support. Best support I have seen on internet. Helped with setup, and helped with few minor questions.

• 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.

• Chat feature.
• Remote desktop.
• Get more integration with other software and Mobile apps.

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

For us it's really best solution.

From an administration standpoint, Fin is very easy to set up, train, and test. Having the ability to impersonate a user in our system to see how Fin responds is huge. It lets you test several situations and throw curveballs at it (as customers will) without the risk of setting Fin live and wondering what will happen. It's also easy to fine-tune. Some chatbots you can never quite get right without spending hours on, but Fin usually takes a few minutes to dial it in. From a customer standpoint, Fin couldn't be easier to engage with. We tell customers up front it's an AI bot and they're wow'd with the experience

Incentivized

Really simple, good-looking interface, many features and customizations

always there

Incentivized

works perfect

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Support from Vision Helpdesk was rather lackluster. We uncovered a bug pretty early on in our use of the system and it took them about a month to fix it. Our internal admin of the system had to keep pestering them to get it fixed. It wasn't critical to our business but was something we needed fixed and it just seemed like they didn't care that much about fixing 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

We only used the free live chat version from HubSpot, so Intercom is yards better! If I were just comparing an actual live chat between the two tools, HubSpot was often clunky and delayed, and it was hard to find past conversation information

Incentivized

Vision Helpdesk was more open for an NGO while the other companies were more attended on the "big-money", which we don't have as an NGO. Second point is that Vision Helpdesk is very easy and simple to use. Not too much installation, programming etc.

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

• Most cost-effective help desk software I have researched from Kayako to SAAS [products] like Zendesk.
• We got more features and easy customization done with Vision Helpdesk which where not possible for Zendesk and Kayako was too costly.
• Ticket tracking has been easier and faster with Vision Helpdesk; for our web hosting business we prefer a download version which is not possible with SAAS help desk providers ( Zendesk or Freshdesk).