Intercom

Pros

From both the administrative and user perspective, the ease of use and just overall depth of what you can create with the product is very impressive. It allows a great amount of customer support to be automated and simplify it's delivery via articles and a knowledge base that'll continually grow.

Although it's not the biggest feature, as a user, I love that it's focused on getting you an answer/resolution the quickest way possible given the same entry method. Type "adding users" in an application with Intercom support will quickly both deliver you articles that can potentially solve your problem or will also quickly deploy a CSM to you to answer it directly in case it was a bit more complex.

Best part though is the feedback cycle, you're typing exactly what you want to know into the application and if no articles return: New Content Topic.

Cons

Theres really not much. I've run into situations where it was wrongly applied within other organizations and not properly resourced, giving a less than average experience. But that's not as much specific to Intercom themselves.

Given they are the industry leader, it can come at a premium for a larger organizations.

Alternatives Considered

Olark, Confluence and Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Choosing Intercom

Overall compatibility with scaling of the company and support infrastructure. Not enough functionality to grow out an effective customer knowledge base that's as simple to approach for customers and internal content builders alike.

Switched From

Confluence

Reasons for Switching to Intercom

The overall growth of the company and product over the past few years and the speed in which they've been able to push out updates and new features shows a lot of promise over their competitors. Honestly, the user experience that we had been encountering when coming upon sites and companies that were using Intercom was so positive that it was hard to not want to give that same experience to our users.

Pros

For the most part intercom is a great product. We like: 1. the chat function. Clean, easy to find most information we need for support chats. 2. many useful features other than chat support: Help center, proactive supports.

Cons

1. Multi-locale support. I have been using intercom for about 3 years now and I am still shocked that there's no support for multiple locales in articles and messages, which are common on other platforms. In both jobs that I used it for we cater to very international audiences. This means that for every message and article we set up we have had to set up multiple of the same messages with a different suffix to distinguish the language. 2. Long lists of event and user properties. if you work with a big/complex products, there will be tons of events to use. It's sometimes difficult to find what you need, especially if you are not familiar with the lexicon, in that tiny dropdown list. 3. Support chats sometimes go to the user's email. This has happened quite a lot to us and we have got really frustrated users because of this. 4. A bit slow. I have always found navigating through intercom to be rather slow. I feel like I have to wait every single time I click on something.

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.

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.

Pros

It is very good for dealing with live tickets as it allows you to distribute tickets to several people in the company. The AI they are putting in the chat is also cool.

Cons

As you have a large team, the price can be a bit difficult to scale.