Item: Intercom
Rating: 9
Author: Jeanette Wiley

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

At Owl Labs, we use Intercom for our live website chat for sales and support. We have Intercom integrated with the rest of our tech stack, including Salesforce, Calendly, and Zoom. While we don't use Intercom for traditional ticketing or knowledge articles, we've found the integrations they offer to meet our needs completely and ensure they work well with our existing use cases.

Pros and Cons

Onboarding and Support.
Documentation
Integrations
Many opportunities to lean on AI.

Navigation is a little bit clunky/confusing at times.
Wish we had the ability to customize a few features more than we can.

Return on Investment

Reduce response time.
Increased self serve options.
Better expectations set with customers

Usability

Overall, I find that Intercom has almost every feature on our wishlist. Sometimes, I find the location of admin settings a little bit clunky, but part of that may be that I'm newer to the tool. On the chat visitor side, I find Intercom to be flawless (as I've used it frequently as a chat visitor with other orgs).

Integrations

We use Intercom with Salesforce, Calendly, Shopify, and Zoom. Intercom has tons of integrations, including options to work with various social media platforms. This was a huge selling point for us as we needed Intercom to work well with our existing tech stack. We've been really pleased with its number of integrations.

Alternatives Considered

Drift, Salesforce Service Cloud and Talkdesk Studio

We've used both Drift and Salesforce chat at Owl Labs in the past, and I didn't find them to meet our needs or customer needs the way Intercom has been able to. Intercom ranks higher for us regarding Integrations offered, customization, AI functionality, and user-friendliness. In the past, if chat visitors would click around our website, they'd have to start their chat over again from the start and lose their communication history with us. We also found that Salesforce chat did not have enough customization that we needed. One small example is that in Intercom, you can see when another teammate is looking at a chat and tag them in notes to collaborate. We didn't have access to anything like that when using Salesforce chat. Intercom has made it easy to work alongside one another to be more efficient.

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

Talkdesk, Calendly, Groove, a Clari company

Likelihood to Recommend

Intercom is great for companies that want to not only offer reactive support but also offer methods of proactive support & outreach in a variety of ways. I've used Intercom both as an admin, as well as a chat visitor myself when speaking with support teams at other organizations. I love that I can go back and reference my previous conversations, as well as check out new releases and updates when they are shared with me ahead of time.

Intercom's integration options make for seamless addition to tech stack.

Overall Satisfaction with Intercom