17 years helping Canadian businesses
choose better software
About Intercom
Intercom is the complete AI-first customer service platform, improving experiences for customers, support agents, and managers
Combined with my WordPress website, it has revolutionized my customer service. It's very easy to use for both the end user and me as an admin, yet so powerful.
Customer service is terrible and they just don't give two hoots about their customers. Constantly introducing new features but not actually fixing the main feature that someone would need.
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Filter reviews (1,078)
An innovative and beneficial resource for businesses.
Comments: Better and more convenient contact between us and our customers is always appreciated. Easy history tracking is made possible by this intuitive tool. It's simple to record my conversations and analyze them afterwards for development purposes.
Pros:
An easy-to-use intercom system. Easy to use even for first-timers, this program has just the right amount of detail without being overwhelming. The intercom is similar to another email program that we use, and I can explain why. Its fast features and user-friendly interface, such as the helpful and funny bot, greatly enhance customer service and lead to exceptional client satisfaction.
Cons:
I find that the intercom sometimes has trouble loading some conversations, which is a major drawback for me. As a customer service representative, you're fielding calls while waiting for the intercom inbox to load the customer's information. In addition to the holdup, additional issues have slowed down the operation of the customer support team.
Alternatives Considered:
A Great Lead Capture
Comments: Makes customer communication and customer acquisition easier. I wish the chat flows were more advanced and customizable. There was definitely a learning curve with the chat flows. Also, I don't believe I can export contact information with my leads.
Pros:
-Capturing emails and names -Integrating to Hubspot and other software for easy lead closure -Creating chat flows allows us to communicate to customers faster and saves us time
Cons:
-Would like to combine actions on Intercom -Hubspot Integration is not perfect; would like to have specific field matching -Chat flow capabilities are limited
The best - at a price
Pros:
Very complete solution, probably the best in the category
Cons:
It is quite expensive very others competitors out there
Unreponsive and caused a severe service disruption
Comments: When COVID hit, we were evaluating our software solutions and inquired about switching from an annual contract to month-to-month. We asked what the changes to our pricing and feature suite would be if we moved forward with that change. We didn't get a response. Instead I received an automated email from their [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] that our contract was cancelled effective [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN]. We reached out and for several days, did not get a response. On September 17th, our service was completely halted in the middle of the workday. Our team was unable to respond to any customer tickets for the remainder of the day. When we finally did get a hold of someone, they told us they were switching us to month to month, just as we had asked. We were told that was a completely different business platform and required a transition. None of this was communicated to us prior to the (entirely preventable) service outage, and again, we were just inquiring about the options should we choose to switch. We lost our settings as well as a previously agreed upon pricing discount built into our contract when they made this change. A manager was brought onto the phone and we were told they would get back to us with a concession because of the severe service disruption. We were never contacted again, until today when I was sent an email stating that they will not offer any concessions and they are sad to see us go, but that my Relationship Manager [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN], will no longer be available to me starting next week.
Pros:
When we were first started using them, they were flexible, had great customer service, and seemed genuinely invested in helping us succeed.
Cons:
Their customer service has been incredible poor. They caused a completely preventable service disruption that caused several hours of outage for our team, and have been difficult to get in touch with.
Intercom Response
4 years ago
Hi Susanna, I'm sorry to hear about your experience with Intercom - this is certainly not how we want our customers to feel. I've taken a look through your account and can see there's an opportunity for us to more clearly communicate the necessary steps when changing billing models so you don't miss any steps. This is something that we're working on at the moment so I assure that your feedback will not go unheard. We never want an Intercom user to loose access to our tools as we recognize businesses rely on our services. Our Relationship Managers work exclusively with customers on annual contracts so as you will be moving to a monthly model you will no longer have access to that team, however you will still have access to to our support team via the messenger. I do want to recognize that response times in previous months have not been where we'd like but we've made changes and are back on track now. Thanks again for this post, Kate (Intercom - Customer Engagement)
BEST APP FOR LIVE CHAT
Pros:
INTERCOM IS EASY APP TO MAKE SURE THAT YOU STAY KEEP IN TOUCHWITH MY TEAMWORKER!
Cons:
THERE IS NO PROBLEM WHEN I USED IT AND INTERCOM RUNS WELL
Alternatives Considered:
Most overrated thing on the market.
Comments:
Try to avoid it or at least not build the critical parts of your busyness on it.
Chat and message history both work fine.
Everything else is a source of endless pain and despair.
Pros:
Integration with communication sources, say you may set up the email to be shown in chat history as a messages. Embedded chats with history are quite nice, it has both the messages and notes left by the supporting team members to each other. Chat itself works quite good and overall thing of a good quality. Not quite sure this is their own development, but it doesn't really matter. Webhooks, these one is a good thing to integrate your decision making software with customer lifecycle events, for example to send email when credit card is about to expire, of when customer purchased something few times. Actions - automated reactions to customer or lead lifecycle events. Filtered cogorts are called segments in Intercom, they have their own filtering panel which is similar to one that can be found on other products.
Cons:
Bugs. They are everywhere. Updates may be lost, updates may be rejected by intercom because of server side exceptions, or mysterious thing called "concurrent updates" when there is just a single update. They have huge API downtimes which can be traced by Intercom's API 5XX responses but technical support always denies the existence of a problem or downtime. Technical support is one of the worst supports I have ever seen. They know nothing, they do not want to learn, the problem is always on your side even if it is their server who responses with 5XX status. Intercom is hugely, fabulously overpriced. On paper Intercom has a set of importers - they are useless, as there are no transformation or calculated fields. Now imagine you need to import hundred of thousands customer profiles from legacy system. Due to absence of data transformation mechanisms you are unable to import them as is and have to resort to preparation-export steps. The problem is that you can not perform more than 85 API requests per minute. There was batch API but today it is 1) deprecated and 2) counts the record inside the batch by the same 85/min limit. Sometimes customer profile may just disappear. Some of integrations provided by Intercom would not work as they have never been tested. There is no API call to "archive the segment" despite it was proposed few years ago. Intercoms offers one of the worst client libraries on the whole github and they reject PR's.
Intercom Response
4 years ago
Thanks for leaving us such a thorough and candid review Aleksandr. I'll make sure to send all of this feedback on to the relevant internal teams as we really do use this to inform what we ship. Kate (Intercom - Customer Engagement)
Tried-and-true solid customer interaction and support channel.
Comments: Very positive overall, we used it to interact with customers.
Pros:
Excellent tool for interacting with customers in real-time.
Cons:
It is a bit costly, but the benefits outweighed the costs.
Intercom; awesomely easy and stressless customer service platform.
Comments: Useful in contacting customers and team mates in the most stressless manner.
Pros:
Very basic and easy to navigate especially in customer support and it is intuitive.
Cons:
Nothing, because it has been so great in customer support and the automation set up is very easy.
Live Chat support is awesome
Comments: Very happy for live support and chat feature
Pros:
The ease of use and the option to use as a support chat tool and also as support article feature.
Cons:
The email option isn’t easy to segment with our customer base
Excellent Live Chat Platform
Pros:
Highly used, very professional livechat software that everyone is familiar with
Cons:
Can be a bit pricey when you have a very small team
My favourite support tool
Comments:
Only good experience overall
Great support team
Price could be better
Pros:
Easiest support tool to have. Makes your team very accessible, also makes the support process simple for the end users Good integrations and useful statistics provided
Cons:
Pricing - it is not very cheap. Pricing also often changes Help center tool - it could really use some help and updates Also, a lot of Add block tools catch Intercom as an ad and blocks it - thus creating inconvenience for end users having to choose between
Intercom Response
4 years ago
Thanks for letting us know that Intercom is you favorite support tool and we're helping you deliver such a good user experience. I appreciate your feedback on our pricing, Articles feature and ad block issues. I'll make sure these get back to the right people here. Thanks again, Kate (Intercom - Customer Engagement)
Alternatives Considered:
Intercom is helping customers success, support, marketing and sales
Comments: It is a perfect solution for a B2B SaaS business.
Pros:
We started using Intercom in 2018. The platform has changed over the years drastically. Many new features have been delivered that you can call Intercom a proper all-in-one solution.
Cons:
The worst part is the buying process—many calls with sales guys who you have to tell the same story again. If you are a startup, try to go with a fast-to-implement and easy solution.
The really bridge the gap between customers and our service
Comments: Their customer success team is great, even on the days when I'm not the most gracious customer. I even try to emulate some of their practices because I feel heard as a customer when I suggest features or report what I think could be bugs in the system.
Pros:
The ability to converse with our customers quickly and seamlessly between email and the messenger app is great. They've thought through this feature set very well and it brings us very close to our customers and we are able to convert leads very well through this service too. Other similar apps function the same, but their UI/UX is lacking compared to Intercom. The actual feel of the app is clean and friendly and dare I say...even fun to use. Customer success at Intercom is also excellent, they've got our backs and I appreciate it (although getting paired with someone in a vastly different time zone can hold up ticket times on our end).
Cons:
There are some gaps in the help center and email features. It would be ideal to create/edit documents in a manner closer to Microsoft Word or Google doc, as those are the standard for editing documents these days. Little things like not being able to create a list inside of a document the way I would in other apps can be frustrating, but there is usually a workaround of some sort that will suffice (I'm just picky). It would also be nice to only be paired with their team members in our time zone. Working in the US and then being helped by a team member from Australia means our ticket times take much longer and conversation is hard to do in real time.
Alternatives Considered:
A true ecosystem
Comments: We have stuck with intercom for 4 years at this point and no plans to leave. I think that is testament to how strong an offering they currently have.
Pros:
I would not have written a positive review about Intercom 12 months ago. There were too many small grievances with the individual features that were all building up. Recently the platform has matured enormously. It feels like the team at intercom has come into it's stride. New features like Series, Guides ect and most importantly - how they all work together - has made it a much better experience.
Cons:
Currently my 2 biggest gripes are cost and customer services. I do think for a scale-up the price gets very steep very quickly. The customer support thing is more annoying - a core part of Intercoms offering is instant-chat. I remember 2 years ago their own instant chat was really great - now it can take a long time for a response to come in.
Intercom Response
4 years ago
Thank you so much for leaving us this review. I just shared your comments with our Product team and it mad their day! Especially the team working on our Series product :) I also really appreciate your feedback on our costs and support wait times, even more so considering you have been such a loyal and log-term customer. As of late our reply times have unfortunately slowed but we've been working (and hiring!) diligently to speed things back up to the expected turnaround times. That said our reply times do range from a few hours to a few days based on subscription (Premium receives the fastest turnaround time) and nature or urgency of the query. When it comes to costs we always aim to align these with the value you are seeing so if you feel this is not the case please do get in touch with the team via the messenger to chat through your options. Thanks again, Kate (Intercom - Customer Engagement)
Mostly great, with some glaring issues
Comments: Mostly positive, but even so we are in the process of switching to another tool that has more straightforward pricing and complete features.
Pros:
Generally Intercom is easy to use and their documentation is quite good, so it's usually easy to find the answer to any question we might have. Anytime a new feature or change is rolled out, they offer pretty solid onboarding and walk you through how to get the most out of it. In terms of capabilities, I'd say Intercom offers more than most. Many options for integrations. We use it for lead generation, email marketing, customer engagement, and tickets. In all cases it is pretty quick and easy to use and easy to collaborate with team members.
Cons:
We've been using Intercom for years without any significant issues, but over the past 2-3 years it has grown and evolved in ways that haven't always been positive. Their customer support is much slower and less responsive than they once were. As they've added new features and capabilities they've also increased fees and now you have to pay separately for every tiny thing. It seems like every single feature in the platform requires a paid upgrade and this rapidly and significantly increases the cost. Reporting is very weak and only goes back a few months (it's so bad that we don't use any of it... all of our reporting is done externally with integrations).Finally, and perhaps most significantly, many of their features don't really work the way they are marketed or the way that you'd expect. This has led to continuous disappointments when we learn that certain features don't really do what they claim to do. They are must more limited than they appear, and when you speak to their customer support about it they are always scrambling to offer you some sort of a workaround. Workarounds can be fine, but they shouldn't be required so frequently, especially for such an expensive tool.
Alternatives Considered:
A pricey but extremely competent choice of chat
Comments: Very well! everything from sales calls, onboarding, setup and support have worked very well.
Pros:
Integration was easy with webhooks easy accessible. It is also very easy to customize chatflows with many different response options, making it a breeze to set up multiple scenarios. I do also enjoy the customization possible to for example have different chat prompts depending on the webpage a visitor goes to. On the other hand this is sometimes a bit overwhelming - I want to explore more and a customer success manager would be nice to have for this.
Cons:
The price. Honestly, it seems like they try to raise and raise to squeeze a lot of money out of small businesses. Also, their pricing model is pretty difficult to understand, so be aware of all the choices you make during your sales call/order.
Fairly unreliable tool
Comments: When it works it is great, but the support team often avoids helping with issues and isn't available during a major outage.
Pros:
It has great features, when they are working correctly.
Cons:
There is no live support. During major outages, which are far from uncommon, it is impossible to reach anyone. Their support is only available via chat, with 1-5 business day response times. Since the support team uses the same chat platform they offer to customers, it isn't possible to reach someone during a major outage. The support is very low quality during emergency situations, so it is not a dependable tool for teams offering live customer support.
Intercom Response
last year
Bobby here from the customer support leadership team. Overall, sorry to see this and happy to chat more if you want — send me a message by email or LinkedIn DM! I also wanted to follow up on your feedback regarding our processes. We use Statuspage to communicate with customers during an incident or outage. We post as soon as we begin troubleshooting, share updates along the way, and communicate when it's resolved and what happened. You can also message us on Twitter during an incident, or send us an email. Intercom promises a 99.8% availability. We have never missed this, and on average exceed this target so outages are very rare thankfully. The CS team aims to respond within a few hours to 1 business day. Very soon we'll be even faster, and we'll continue to give human support to everybody. Bobby
A lot of features but overpriced for startups
Comments: Intercom solutions solve real problems however if you are a startup I don't recommend using it since you really feel that they try to lock you. They attract you with their startup package and then it will take some effort if you want to switch to another supplier.
Pros:
Intercom is a combination of tools providing different values and solving different problems. We use chat, article, product tour and several other tools. Overall they all solve a specific problem.
Cons:
Every tool we use has some limitations and we often need to find workarounds to reach our goals. However the worst point about intercom is their pricelist Even if you own a PhD you will have a hard time understanding how much to pay if you add an option. Every tool is an option that keeps adding to your bill plus they have triggers to increase the bill according to the number of users. Overall you don't really know where you're going with the way they charge you.
Intercom Response
3 years ago
Hi Stephane, Thank you for taking the time to leave Intercom a review. We appreciate you taking the time and letting us know what features you like and are helping your business. I'm sorry to hear you are disappointed in our pricing, we try to charge a price that reflects the value our product brings while letting both our businesses succeed. However, we understand that no price structure will suit everyone and are sorry that you find it to be expensive. If you have any questions around why you are being charged a certain price, please always feel free to get in touch via the Messenger and we would be happy to help. Thanks, Eabha (Customer Engagement)
One of the main features of the product doesn't work and they don't give a sh*t
Comments:
Bloated features
Not easy to use
Terrible customer support
Don't fix issues and don't seem to even care.
Would NEVER recommend.
Pros:
We use Intercom to generate leads for our business by engaging with website visitors through live chat.
Cons:
The ability to ask visitors key information such as name and email address disappeared overnight and Intercom never told their customers this feature had stopped working. We had to discover it for ourselves, only to be told that they knew there was an issue and it was not a priority to fix. Basically, it was tough luck! This is after they took ages to get back to our support ticket. Customer service is terrible and they just don't give two hoots about their customers. Constantly introducing new features but not actually fixing the main feature that someone would need! We're looking for an alternative to Intercom and as soon as we find it we will be leaving
Intercom Response
4 years ago
Hi Kate, thanks you for leaving us this candid review. I've looked into your conversation history with the team and can see the bug you experienced is still under investigation as it only seems to be affecting a small number of accounts. I know that's not helpful when you are one of the accounts affected though and understand your frustration. (Update: This bug has now been fixed by our team.) I can see you have since cancelled your subscription so I want to thank you for being an Intercom customer and wish you and your company lots of success in the future. Kate (Intercom - Customer Engagement)
Good product let down by atrocious customer support and shady pricing practices
Comments: We've been with Intercom for a number of years and unfortunately the customer service in the last 18 months has been atrocious. It's not possible to call anybody... everything is done via chat, which would be fine if they responded in a timely fashion but often it takes weeks to respond and often they'll just go radio silent. The irony. Whilst the product is very good, it will get VERY expensive VERY quickly once you start using the whole suite of products. Their constant changing of product names and pricing options is annoying to say the least, particularly when you come to use a feature that was previously within your package only to find it's been moved into a more expensive package and you need to upgrade to use it. Oh, and then there's the annual auto-renew buried in the small print so if you decide to move away from Intercom which we have just decided to do, you'll probably be tied in for longer than you expect.
Pros:
The software to be fair is the best integrated product out there if you need live chat, knowledgebases, chatbots, outbound marketing etc., all in the same package. The range of features is VERY comprehensive. Outbound campaigns are really nice as is the knowledgebase.
Cons:
Notifications for incoming chats are poor. If your support team are doing tasks other than sitting on Intercom all day it's easy to miss incoming chats. The AI bots are more miss than hit in my experience when it comes to suggesting solutions and some of the bot responses are simply bewildering.
Alternatives Considered:
Extremely expensive and they make it extremely hard to move away
Comments: Poor startup support
Pros:
All in one system, with email, lite CRM and small analytics.
Cons:
Everything about intercom is built to keep you in the ecosystem. And the more you integrate the harder it is to move away. But they actively make it hard to move away. For example, by not allowing you to export your help articles and by creating random URL conventions to make it hard to redirect your help articles once you have built them elsewhere.
Intercom Response
4 years ago
Thanks for leaving us this review and for giving us your candid feedback. We always aim to earn our customers' business and trust through our product quality and the value it drives, we certainly don't want to make it difficult to move away if we're not the right fit. I'll make sure to pass this feedback on to the team here. Please do get in touch via the messenger if you would like to discuss this further. Thanks, Kate (Intercom - Customer Engagement)
Small SAS Use
Comments: Our main use for intercom is tier 1 chat support. Our users know that this is the fastest way to get ahold of us. In lieu of using a chatbot we've gone in and created a bunch of quick responses that we can go in and edit. This has cut down on the amount of time we spend chatting with a customer and it allows us to control the message that we are sending out across the board. We've also used campaigns to let our users know of new product releases and have sent out Net Promoter Score Survey's out in a campaign. I'd like to note that we do not use Intercom as a CRM for leads on enterprise accounts.
Pros:
Intercom is really easy to set up and importing users into the software is really simple. It's nice to be able to create an online library of help articles and have it available for our users to find. The chat feature is what we use most and our users definitely enjoy how easy it is to reach out to us.
Cons:
Our customers have a difficult time closing out of conversations or seeing actions on our screen that need to be taken on the right hand of the screen. The chat box will often times cause them to become more frustrated as they need to open and close the chat as we give instructions. The close button is in a circle under the chat, which is a spot that most people don't usually look for. There are a few customizable things that we'd like to see. Like the ability to create custom out of office messages or include holiday messages to let our users know we're either out of office or responding slowly.
Intercom is the leading support tool for innovative fast growing businesses
Comments: Intercom has been absolutely crucial to our 'scaling' stack from a startup to a fast growth upstart. I couldn't recommend Intercom enough to supercharge your support function.
Pros:
Where do you start with Intercom. They consistently build and ship world-class features to make support as easy as possible. By far, the introduction of FinAI has well and truly cemented Intercom as the support platform leader. We overlay FinAI onto Guru to create autonomous AI agents that can support our customers. It will completely change how we scale our business
Cons:
The biggest frustration is not having a vertical stack that handles both support and sales. Hubspot offers support and we have thought many times about moving to consolidate the stack and reduce costs. Intercom continues to deliver value keeping us within the platform.
Intercom Response
6 months ago
Hey Lucien, thank you so much for the awesome review! It means a lot to us that Intercom has been crucial in scaling your business. We get your point about a unified support and sales stack so thanks for sharing your feedback!
This software help me a lot!
Pros:
Intercom makes it simple to interact with customers; its simple and user-friendly design allows me to easily start and maintain discussions. Furthermore, its customization options enable me to personalize communications to certain customer types or deliver targeted messages based on automated triggers. I really appreciate how Intercom can be coupled with other platforms such as Salesforce and Zendesk, which allows me to communicate with clients in a number of ways. The reporting capabilities of Intercom are particularly beneficial for identifying user activity and responding fast to customer needs. Overall, Intercom is a great tool for staying in touch with customers, whether through newsletters or automated support.
Cons:
The intercom system has been commendable, with only a few minor hiccups or delays here and there which are understandable. Apart from that, it functions without a hitch, and this is a testimony to the diligent work put in by the development team. Their efforts have been invaluable in ensuring a smooth operation of the intercom system.
Alternatives Considered:
Intercom, an example of when people should stop building product
Comments: We're hitched to this wagon now for a while like it or not and they've got too much of our data, but I wish we weren't with Intercom, and one day we'll be brave enough to move.
Pros:
The platform at the most core / basic level, a simple javascript install for conversations with your customers, BIG TICK. I like the user experience for your users using the chat widget.
Cons:
It's ridiculously expensive and tiering it to your user numbers versus the number of customer support seats is fine, but it doesn't work once you get bigger, you'd just get a cheaper plugin. Also customer support for southern hemisphere is woeful, non-technical and the help docs / search (just try to even google stuff is very poor.