Intercom: great chat style UX, but not ideal for email support based orgs
June 06, 2022

Intercom: great chat style UX, but not ideal for email support based orgs

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Intercom

We used Intercom on our home page to intake questions about sales, services, features, scheduling, and occasionally support. Inside our app, we implemented Intercom as part of our real-time support imitative. On the home page, we'd often receive questions from BDRs about pricing, and seeing demos, but that information didn't flow into any other system so we moved to use Intercom to combine prospect and customer communications into a single platform so support agents could jump in and help answer questions.
  • Intercom has some powerful automated workflows that can be fully customized for teams that want to provide a robust self-service experience.
  • Intercom's chat UI has a casual UX which makes it feel like you're texting directly with an agent. This helps the requester feel more comfortable when using chat.
  • Intercom has the ability to memorize the users who have used chat previously and remember chat states so if a user starts a chat and leaves their computer, the chat will pick up where it left off even if the agent closes the chat on their end.
  • Intercom is trying to be an email-based ticketing solution too, but UX the implementation of conversations on the agent side is the same as a chat conversation. This makes keeping different email threads pertaining to different topics organized and easy to identify.
  • Because Intercom uses a chat-style UX for communicating between agents and customers, there is no subject line in the UI, which makes finding a specific ticket about a specific issue very challenging.
  • Intercom advertises its solution as a simple "plug in this JS snippet and you're set!" but the reality is far from that. If you want to get the most out of Intercom, you really have to connect to your CRM, set up rules about how users are containerized, make sure prospects coming through the home page are properly segmented from users who are logged into the app, etc. Intercom sales really could be more transparent about the setup and configuration process.
  • Simple UX for users makes Intercom friendly and inviting.
  • Easy integration into third party apps.
  • Automation and self service features.
  • We were able to reduce our email support load by 13% within 3 months of implementing Intercom into our support process.
  • Fully integrating Intercom into our support and CRM ecosystem took over 2 months to fully iron out to the point where the systems were correctly linked and communicating.
  • We were able to improve first reply time to less than an hour on average.
Intercom was built as a chat-first support system, but that UX doesn't translate well to email or form-based support processes. Zendesk is built for email first support and has a pretty good chat support experience, but it lacks a lot of automation that Intercom includes. For teams who want or need AI and automation, Intercom does very well compared to Zendesk chat.

Do you think Intercom delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Intercom's feature set?

Yes

Did Intercom live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Intercom go as expected?

No

Would you buy Intercom again?

Yes

Intercom is great for companies that need a flexible chat-first service to assist prospects and customers alike. If you are having issues trying to provide a good real-time support experience, it's about time to give Intercom a try. The service integrates into systems like Zendesk and Hubspot to synchronize the data across your customer-facing software ecosystem.