Intercom - A More Human/Personable Approach to Technical Support
May 15, 2017
Intercom - A More Human/Personable Approach to Technical Support
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Intercom
We use Intercom for 2 primary use-cases:
- Managing our Knowledge Base - Intercom has given us the ability to have a well-organized and intelligent knowledge base that helps our customer find the answers they need quickly. It reduces their dependence on live support to have a knowledge base that is so easy to navigate, and we benefit from how easy it is to share with customers via in-app chat.
- In-App Chat (for Technical Support Purposes) - Intercom allows us to deliver in-app chat to our customers for the purposes of technical support; while we initially considered rolling out to our home page for sales assistance, we realized that required far more bandwidth without providing much additional value. But using it for technical support allows us to engage with our customers effortlessly as we provide the support that they need.
- Knowledge Base - Intercom has given us the ability to have a well-organized and intelligent knowledge base that helps our customer find the answers they need quickly. It reduces their dependence on live support to have a knowledge base that is so easy to navigate, and we benefit from how easy it is to share with customers via in-app chat. It's also quite simple to produce content.
- While this sounds like it should be common amongst knowledge base providers, it wasn't in our experience, so we were very happy when Intercom fit our needs.
- In-App Chat (for Technical Support Purposes) - Intercom allows us to deliver in-app chat to our customers for the purposes of technical support; while we initially considered rolling out to our home page for sales assistance to those visiting our website, we realized that required far more band-width without providing much additional value on the sale side.
- In-app chat seems to be more personal / personable than email, and less time-consuming for us AND our customers than a phone call. We are VERY pleased with this functionality, and it's done in a cleaner and more "colorful" way than what we saw in the competition.
- Deep-dive user-level analytics - Intercom gives us the ability to identify each user in our platform and some of their basic behavior when interfacing with our technology. It's helpful for our Product Management team to identify major trends, and is occasionally helpful for our Customer Success team to get such granular information as well.
- Intercom was initially overwhelming - there's so much data I was presented with when I first logged in, and I didn't know where to start. Their tool tips in the app didn't make things much easier on me, and most of my understanding of Intercom was passed on to me from employees.
- I can't think I've ever been contacted by Intercom in any way other than automated outreach trying to sell me more features. Some hands-on training would have been very helpful when I started, but I also feel like I'm getting too many emails from them.
- Improved customer experience - while difficult to quantify, we received positive qualitative feedback regularly after implementing in-app chat as our customers have loved the ability to access help when they need it in a convenient matter
Compared to most of the competitive market, Intercom seems to be the most human/personable approach to customer success, customer service, and technical support. The alternatives are primarily built on an archaic approach - "take a ticket and wait in line" - that we worried would cause our high-value customers to be unimpressed with the level of service we provided. Intercom allows us so still engage with customers in a scalable way that we can track / evaluate / learn from, but in a way that has impressed our customers... and that's not something I've experienced before using the other classic "desk" approaches.
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