Improving by Leaps and Bounds
September 28, 2023
Improving by Leaps and Bounds
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Intercom
My organization uses multiple aspects of the Intercom solution. It's used for outbound messaging, in-application messaging, customer support, and the Help Center/knowledge base articles. My own interactions with Intercom are mostly limited to the outbound messaging features (for sending release notes) and the articles/Help Center, where I spend most of my time. It may be that my organization uses Intercom for CRM as well; as a freelancer, I don't have full visibility.
- Intercom is continually improving the articles/Help Center feature on an ongoing basis. It was very sorely lacking two years ago, but during the intervening time they have vastly improved the feature. They're approaching to feature parity with more advance tools I've used elsewhere, and they now have some cool features that are better than some of their competition.
- Intercom seems invested in improving the outbound messaging feature, as well, though I don't interact with it as often. But they've been making improvements.
- Intercom seems to be striving to be competitive with the implementation of generative AI-driven features (and I'm not talking about chatbot). Specifically, an AI tool recently appeared in the articles editor--I haven't messed with it very much, but from what I can tell, it couldn't possibly be any easier to use, and seems reminiscent of other generative AI tools available externally.
- Getting into the nitty gritty, then--the articles/Help Center has improved vastly in two years and I believe that will continue. however, there are still some shortcomings/missing features and functionality. For example, there's no built-in grammar check (it does spell check, but can't detect usage mistakes).
- I'd also like the Help Center/articles feature to allow direct access to the HTML/CSS for quick edits of content created using the WYSIWYG editor.
- You can't control the font at all, other than applying broadly defined styles like H1, H2, H3, or H4. (For example, there's no control over font size, color, or background color/highlighting, although they have recently added some handy support for handsome plug-and-play callouts.)
- The outbound messaging feature--at least using the "Email" module--has a much more restrictive feature set compared to the Help Center/articles editor. I get the impression it's just not caught up yet.
- The Help Center/articles feature doesn't play nice with other popular text editors. If I copy and paste from an Intercom article into a Google Doc, for example--which is often necessary--the result is a train wreck of styling failures. Very much of the document styling, white space, table structure where applicable, image sizes, about half the RTF---the whole thing comes off completely wrong. I end up having to spend extra time reformatting the content for the benefit of the intended audience, just to avoid appearing as (more of ) a nincompoop when internal stakeholders review my content.
- As a freelancer and individual contributor, I don't have visibility into metrics like ROI or most measurables, so I can't answer this.
As a freelancer and individual contributor, I don't have full visibility. I know there's some direct integration with our product itself, not just for in-product, customer-facing coms and product tours but also for audience targeting. For example, Intercom supports the ability to check attributes of user records in our product, allowing us to very specifically target or gate Help Center content to the right audiences (although that's done at the whole article level, not in blocks or sections). I would guess it's integrated into some of our external systems, but I don't know for sure.
- Zendesk Guide, Atlassian Confluence, Salesforce Service Cloud, Microsoft Parature (Discontinued) and ReadMe
Keep in mind that my day-to-day focuses mainly on Help Center/article content. That's all I'm comparing/evaluating in this specific response. Intercom has come a long way in the two years or so that I've been using it. They've made major strides toward feature parity for articles and Help Center features and functionality. I'd say right now they're close to being on par with Zendesk Guide, but still lacking a few key features. On the other hand, they've got ZD Guide beaten in some other areas--mostly recently added capabilities like direct, simple control over image sizing in article bodies (vs. manually clicking and dragging to resize images in ZD). One area where ZD (and I believe Confluence, if I remember correctly) still has Intercom beat is in the process of creating inline hyperlinks to other articles in your same Help Center.
Do you think Intercom delivers good value for the price?
Not sure
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?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy Intercom again?
Yes