Item: Intercom
Rating: 8
Author: Jordon Sargent

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Intercom is a customer messaging platform that enables our team to communicate with leads, qualified prospects, and current customers via in-app messages. This is being used by sales, support, customer success, and other areas of the business. The main departments using it include sales and support. It enables multiple departments to communicate and be on the same page without having to scroll through various email chains.

Pros and Cons

With Intercom, you can set up target, timed messages to your audience(s). When people sign up, drop off, become inactive, etc. you can send tailored messages.
Intercom allows for mass emailing without any problems.
Intercom is great for being able to collaborate and discuss a problem internally while reviewing the prospect's email.

When collaborating between various departments, there have been a couple times that I've accidentally sent what I thought was an internal message to the actual customer. While it was a user error, it's an easy mistake to do. Better distinction of who you're sending messages to would be helpful.
Sometimes it gets confusing when you reply to a message directly in Intercom, on mobile device, and via email. It just gets kind of messy because multiple messages come in.
The initial training is kind of confusing.

Return on Investment

Hard to measure ROI, but it's certainly increased efficiency and convenience when collaborating across teams.
Intercom is relatively inexpensive compared to other platforms that require mass email messaging.
It has brought together sales and support in a good, healthy way.

Alternatives Considered

Desk.com

We used Desk.com for a little while but never really dove into it because the initial set up and learning curve was too much. I wish we would have given it more of a try, but based on our needs, Intercom was just more user friendly and easy to use.

Number of Contacts (List Size)

25,000 to 100,000

Using Intercom for B2C or B2B marketing

Both

Other Software Used

PandaDoc, Join.me, Slack, Snagit, Outreach, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, DocuSign, Klipfolio

Likelihood to Recommend

Intercom is ideal for managing a large database of customers, clients, prospects, leads, etc. Here is a scenario in which Intercom is used at my organization on a daily basis: A prospect is going through our website and signs up for a free plan. While using the tool, they have questions so they send a message to us. It comes in Intercom to support. The support rep realizes it's a sales question so they notify me of it right in the app. I can go in and see the whole conversation and pick up where the support rep left off. Very helpful in that regard.