Item: Intercom
Rating: 10
Author: Peter Snowdon

Overall Satisfaction with Intercom

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Intercom helps us manage all of our in-bound and out-bound customer service enquiries including sales and after-sales issues. It allows our team to properly case-manage customers' enquiries and has helpful features that ensure we never lose an enquiry, forget to follow-up, or take too long to reply. It helps us remain incredibly responsive to enquiries and means we achieve high net promoter scores as a result. The platform also allows us to manage enquiries received from two separate websites/brands, which each have their own branded messenger but allows a single team to manage enquiries all in one place.

The on-website messenger is slick and very functional and really makes it easy for our customers to contact and engage with us.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Case management - allowing other teams (dispatch, accounts) to all contribute
Snoozing - allowing us to come back to enquiries and ensure they're never forgotten
Simply on-site contact with our team with live response times that build confidence
Canned replies - allowing us to introduce consistency and high standards in all our comms
Outbound email - incredinly powerful, ensuring all our comms are in one place
Multi-branded messengers on two different sites - allowing us to centralised responses behind the scenes but maintain brand separation

Cons

Exporting conversations - we need to do this for things like customer disputes and chargebacks, however the export is a simple unformatted text file, which is not an acceptable capture of the threads as it can be simply edited. A clean and neat PDF export would be fantastic.
Better/simpler spam and abusive user blocking, maybe based on IP address or sender domain
A lower cost - there are many free/low cost platforms now, and I feel your costs are high

Return on Investment

Much faster response time and better customer care NPS scores as we no-longer 'drop the ball' on complex enquiries
Back office resource rationalisation - meaning lower staff costs due to smarter working
Brand prestige - I think Intercom elevates our small business to the level of the 'big players' and is a symbol of the importance we place on responsive customer care

Usability

The platform is powerful but I'd like better control over the parts I can turn on/off for my team. Due to the new layout, it can be a little tricky working out how I do certain things that were familiar before. Overall, though, it is intuitive and have required very little training of new staff.

Integrations

Yes - we integrate it with our social media presence and order system/platform (Shopify), plus our email mailbox for both in and outbound communications. It works well.

Alternatives Considered

I have not used any.

Key Insights

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?

Yes

Did implementation of Intercom go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Intercom again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Shopify, monday.com, Delighted by Qualtrics

Likelihood to Recommend

It works perfectly for us as a small team managing a large variety of sales and aftersales enquiries. It is far superior to email, which doesn't allow for case tracking and internal noting. It also allows us to deploy multiple websites/apps, each with their own brands and style, but is an interacted 'single view' behind the scenes.
It's great also now that Intercom links to our social media accounts, ensuring that all DMs on Facebook and Instagram are captured.

Comments

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A game-changing approach to elevating our customer comms