Intercom Expert Reviews, Pricing, Alternatives - SSR 2023

Intercom, also known as the Engagement OS, is an all-in-one customer communication platform that marketing, sales, and support teams can use to convert website visitors into leads and customers, offer personalized engagement throughout the buyer journey, and provide unlimited customer support.

Established in 2011, Intercom is a modern customer communication platform that businesses can leverage to improve customer relationships, convert leads into customers, and drive revenue and growth. Intercom has a variety of features that make it a powerful tool, such as an easy-to-use interface, custom chatbots, extensive integrations, and advanced analytics.

Intercom's support solution allows you to deliver personalized customer support at any scale. You can send outbound messages, mobile carousels, banners, surveys to gauge customer satisfaction, and onboard new customers with product tours. You can also set up a Help Centre - a self-serve knowledge base of support articles that customers can refer to. This feature reduces the number of queries that your team has to handle.

The Intercom Messenger is the chatbot and live messaging tool that can be set up on your website or app and in your product. You can build and set up task chatbots to automate tasks, custom chatbots to perform specific actions, and resolution chatbots to provide answers to pre-configured questions. When human interference is needed, the chatbot simply transfers the conversation to a support executive. They also provide a 'Switch' feature that allows customers to switch from a support call to chat. 

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The Team Inbox is where teams receive notifications and chat with visitors. Agents can organize their workflows, collaborate with teammates, create end-to-end ticketing workflows, set up personalized responses to FAQs, route conversations to the right team, and more. However, the messenger does not have the 'message sneak peek' feature that allows chat agents to read what visitors are typing before sending a message. 

Intercom has a complex customer data collection function that allows it to collect and segment key data like name, email address, first and last seen on site, language, city, country, and browser version. You can also send and store customer user data attributes within Intercom. This allows you to better segment your marketing campaigns.

Intercom has a cross-platform campaign builder called Series, where users can create messages and flows to onboard new users, announce new products, or engage inactive users. They can either use one of the 12 pre-existing templates or the workflow builder to create a new campaign from scratch. 

Intercom provides a reporting dashboard with advanced analytics and insights for marketing, sales, and support teams. Some metrics available are lead response time, messages sent, message performance, message volume, engagement in the past 'X' days, customer satisfaction, responsiveness, conversation tags, and more. 

Overall, Intercom is a great tool for large businesses and enterprises that are looking to boost their marketing and sales efforts to drive more revenue.

While Intercom provides advanced capabilities, it comes at a significantly high cost of at least a couple hundred dollars a month. So if you're a small business that only wants a simple chatbot or live chat solution, then you won't be utilizing Intercom enough to justify the costs.

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• Business Messenger: The Business Messenger is Intercom's live chat software that allows website visitors to interact with your company's sales, marketing, or support teams through a chat widget.
• Team Inbox: The Team Inbox is a collaborative, shared, and highly customizable inbox that holds conversations across all your communication channels in an organized way.
• Outbound Messages: This feature allows you to nurture website visitors and leads by sending them targeted emails, mobile push, and in-app notifications.
• Chatbots: You can create task, custom, and resolution chatbots to answer customer queries, qualify leads, engage visitors, and convert leads to customers.
• Help Center Articles: You can create and publish a self-serve knowledge base of FAQs and support articles that can be shared during conversations with your customers.

Apart from this, Intercom also offers a range of features such as surveys, 2-way SMS, product tours, a customer data platform, a cross-platform campaign builder, A/B testing, mobile carousels, and more.

You can integrate Intercom with a range of tools, including Jira, Stripe, Zendesk, Google Meet, Kalus, Google Analytics, Mailchimp, Zoom, Marketo, Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, Calendly, and more. Further integrations are possible with Zapier, Integromat, and webhooks.

Intercom has a Starter subscription designed for very small businesses. Starting from $74 per month, this plan offers basic features like in-product messages, chat and email support, a conversation routing bot, a basic reporting dashboard, and 250+ integrations. This plan also has add-ons like product tours from $199 per month, WhatsApp integration from $9 per seat per month, and surveys from $49 a month.

Apart from this, they have 3 subscription plans for small, mid-sized, and large organizations. They are as follows: 

1. Support: This plan is designed for support teams and includes features like live chat, team inboxes, ticketing workflows, SLAs, workload management, conversational and resolutions bots, targeted messaging, and product tours. 
2. Engage: This plan is for businesses that want to onboard and engage with their customers. It includes features like outbound and in-product messaging, push messages, custom bots, mobile carousels, banner messages, multi-channel campaigns, A/B testing, customer segments, and integrations with tools like Salesforce and Marketo.
3. Convert: Designed to help convert website visitors into paying customers, this solution offers features like conversational chatbots, live chat for sales, smart lead qualification, multiple team inboxes, automatic meeting booking, prospect data, revenue, and performance reporting, and reverse IP lookup.

The pricing for these plans is not disclosed upfront and varies depending on the number of seats, and the number of people reached. For a custom quote, you can contact Intercom's sales team.

Intercom is a highly advanced customer engagement software ideal for large businesses and tech-forward enterprises looking to generate and capture leads for their sales and marketing teams.

Once you've paid for your Intercom subscription and created a new account, you can start the implementation process by setting up your workspace, i.e., install the Intercom Messenger, create the Inbox, and invite team members. Intercom also provides a "quick-start guide" to help you with this process upon signing up.

Intercom offers chat and email support to customers across all plans. They also have a help center where you can learn how to install, set up, and use Intercom, a Developer Hub that provides information on integrating or building on top of Intercom, and a community forum where you can learn, share, and connect with other Intercom users. Apart from this, they have an FAQ section on their website and a learning academy that provides deep-dive courses from Intercom experts.

Intercom was established in 2011 by Eoghan McCabe with the intention of creating a customer communication platform that sales, marketing, and support teams could use to engage customers throughout their buyer journey. Backed by leading venture capitalists like Social Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Kleiner Perkins, Intercom serves over 25,000 global businesses.