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Intercom Pricing 2022

One of the most important steps to achieving customer success is communication. With the right software, you can offer attentive customer service and build lasting relationships. Many software will offer features like chatbots, ticketing, messaging, and real-time analytics. You will find that content management software (CMS), customer relationship management (CRM) software, and communications software will have these features built in.

Intercom is a communication software-as-a-service (SaaS) that has custom plans for big, medium, and small businesses. They’re great for companies that want to offer multiple lines of communication with tools to streamline team member workflows.

For a quick overview of Intercom, click here.

What is Intercom?

Intercom is an all-in-one customer communications platform. Their platform is designed to help you build and strengthen your customer relationships through messaging tools. This is achieved with marketing and collaboration integrations. Some valuable intercom features include live chat software, outbound email marketing, A/B testing, and customer data analysis.

Intercom is similar to a customer relationship management (CRM) service because the goal is to help sales and customer support teams improve and maintain client relationships. The difference is that although intercom does have some marketing features like lead generation, it doesn’t have the same amount of sales support tools.

Intercom users can drive further customer success with available integrations like HubSpot, Slack, Salesforce, Zendesk, Mailchimp, and Pipedrive. This way you can provide a help desk with a personalized customer experience while also focusing on reporting and conversion management. Intercom support is also especially geared towards eCommerce platforms, with options to add chat bots and track analytics on your site.

Here is a tutorial on how to set up Intercom for web platforms.

Intercom Plans

Many business subscription pricing models are like goldilocks and the three bears, small, medium, and big. Intercoms plans are tailored to the needs of your specific use case.

For example, conversational support does not have the least features compared to all of them. It’s very feature-rich, especially for starting and maintaining customer conversations. Conversational Marketing doesn’t have the most features, it just has the most marketing features. This is the same for all the plans.

Intercom’s Conversational Support plan is best for maintaining conversations and evaluating customer satisfaction. It’s great for customer support teams and sales teams as well. The plan offers messaging with bots, conversation management features, ticketing and help desk functions (it’s the only plan that has it), and a myriad of reporting features.

The Conversational Customer Engagement plan is best for teams that need strong messaging capabilities with a bigger focus on campaign building and testing for service effectiveness. It’s similar to the Support plan with it’s messaging control, but does not have a help desk or ticketing ability to track conversations.

This plan would be great for analytics teams implementing new ways to attract customers and improve service.

Conversational Marketing is an option that’s better for teams that want strong messaging and bot features for growing their audience. This plan has a wide range of conversation management features like tag rules and rating. Its messaging features are geared towards sales, with bots for lead qualification as well as custom email templates.

You might expect this plan to come with campaign and targeting features but those are mostly available only in Customer Engagement. Conversational Marketing is more focused on reporting and messaging configuration.

Most Intercom plans are meant for medium and large businesses. Their Starter and Early Stage subscriptions are meant for new entrepreneurs.

Intercom’s Starter and Early Stage startup plans are for very small businesses. Starter comes with basic but strong features like chat, email, help desk, and analytics. Early Stage is more of a sampler of other great services but the discount only lasts a year. It’s best for startups that need help getting their new product off the ground.

If you find that you’re a small business that desires other affordable options for customer management, we have a pretty good one.

Intercom Alternatives

HubSpot CRM is one of the best software available, and has a stacked free version. They are a leading CRM known for their ease of use platform and startup-friendly environment.

HubSpot Free CRM is an affordable choice if you’re a small startup that can’t budget in Intercom’s discounted plans. It’s also the better choice if you’re more worried about marketing rather than just maintaining customer conversations. HubSpot’s Free CRM also includes chat and email functionality.

Some of the most important features of HubSpot’s Free CRM include live chat, robust email marketing, ticketing, an intuitive reporting dashboard, and management for contact deals. For a complete list of their free tools you can go here.

HubSpot also has more affordable subscription plans for customer service and CMS. Ther customer service comes with a help desk, customer portal, and knowledge base automation. They start at $45/mo annually. HubSpot CMS A/B testing, custom reports, and website building features. It starts at $23/mo annually.

When you find that your team and budget have grown, you will always have the option to integrate your HubSpot account and buy Intercom later on.

More Resources

If you need more choices to look through we have three lists with insightful user reviews. These include customer success software, help desk tools and platforms, and services that offer chatbot technology.

We also have lists for popular CRMs, and contact management software (CMS). There you will find very similar features to what Intercom has to offer.

For those that have used any of the platforms discussed here please leave a review to help other buyers make informed decisions.