Intercom is the Customer-Centric Communication Platform for Small Teams
February 01, 2018

Intercom is the Customer-Centric Communication Platform for Small Teams

Ariana Thompson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Intercom

We use Intercom in a few ways for marketing and customer experience:
  1. To communicate with our customers across marketing campaigns
  2. New customer acquisition
  3. Segmenting our customer base depending on logic within our backend to target our communication
  4. Tag conversations and monitor incoming conversations to determine what their pain points are
  5. Utilize a Smart Suggestion feature to provide website and product walkthroughs (such as canceling their account or updating their information) that allows images and text.
  • Segmenting customers based on your backend API. This is such a critical part of our business for giving the right communication to the right customer.
  • Ease of use/intuitive interface. This is a product that needs minimal instruction and is easy to use.
  • Search functionality. You can search by customer/lead, by conversations, by word - the search is fast and relevant. Easier still if you tag conversations consistently.
  • Customizable fields for logging conversations with customers like "tickets". This is hard when you want to have a hybrid help desk and customer service team. Example: I'd want to log issues as solved or attribute an issue to a department and make that a required aspect before closing the conversation.
  • Issue follow up. You can use the "snooze" function, but that doesn't help if you want to close the issue and come back to it at a later date. Snoozed conversations are still open, which could affect your metrics if you look at conversations per hour.
  • Intercom icons indicating where it comes from (app or email) are hard to read .
  • Intercom has helped us utilize a waitlist to launch a new market and accelerated growth. We were able to contact all leads from target areas to let them know we were in their area, and then also able to send different messaging to people that were close, but fell outside our criteria.
  • We used Intercom Smart Suggestions to reduce repetitive responses to conversations and increase customer self-service on our website by 25%.
  • Intercom helps us reach 6000 relevant customers weekly, but also tracked our product usage over all customers from our service.
  • We have a super successful cancellation campaign that helps bring customers back to our product and gives us actionable feedback.
Intercom was selected before I started, and I'm so glad it was. It's a clear leader in customer communication with an effortless interface. It has the same key features as LiveChat (tagging, canned responses or templates) but it's easier to use and is less stressful for customer service teams. LiveChat is geared toward assigning conversations to a particular person, but Intercom is focused on quick replies and feeling like you're right there with the customer.
Intercom is great for a customer service oriented company where you care more about one person handling an issue in real time and completely, than a tiered support team that focuses on bucketing their interactions where the person who gets the initial request isn't the person who will likely handle it and resolve the issue.

I would not recommend intercom for a technical support help desk where ticketing is required for development work, or for a customer service environment where the key decision maker for an issue isn't available for immediate judgement calls. (Example: The customer wants a large dollar amount credit, and the person who is fielding conversations can't do that without authorization.)

Using Intercom

12 - C-Level - Communication with partners where they need to pass on the conversation later
Operations - Procuring product and connecting with leads
Sales - Supporting sales partnerships and initiatives
Marketing - PR, Outreach, new customer acquisition, coupon campaigns
Customer Service - Day to day issues and proactive communications about delays, missing items, changes to expected deliveries, or general FYIs
4 - We have 4 people who field incoming requests, and it grows based on active number of customers in the system as well and incoming conversations.
(If you're looking to put a number on things, it might make sense to look at acceptable response time - ours is 5 minutes)
We occasionally get a developer to work and implement API connections, which has a time and cost commitment, but it will worth it for the segmentation.
Everyone who uses intercom either messages directly to customers, or they work on messaging to customers.
  • Customer Communication (Proactive)
  • Reactive issue resolution
  • Customer campaigns and messaging to increase site traffic and product usage
  • We've migrated system-specific emails in our tool to Intercom using the webhooks with the API
  • Intercom + Zapier + Slack has allows us to review all internal notes/ comments and search for them later!
  • Integrations with Magento
  • Using leads for the waitlist for our product
It's currently a perfect fit for our needs, and we are customer-focused and small. When we grow, we may need to re-evaluate, but our current team finds it easy. Reviewing conversations is simple and allows for great training. The canned replies make service fast and easy. Smart suggestions remove the need to re-write technical walkthroughs and explanations for our FAQ.