Editors' Review by the Customer Chat Software Review Team
Intercom is a customer communications and engagement platform for businesses of all sizes across different industries. It allows teams to engage and support their customers through multiple channels.
Through in-app messages, targeted emails, live and automated chat, push notifications, and a fully integrated help desk, the platform enables sales, marketing, and customer care teams to engage and provide high-quality support for their customers and clients. Intercom caters to different types of businesses and teams, regardless of scale or industry, by providing them with tools and features that will help them deliver the best and highest-quality customer experience possible.
Intercom is being presented as a conversational relationship platform or an engagement OS, as it provides an open channel between the business and its customer base. The platform works by breaking down silos, bringing together all customer information, and streamlining workflows to build a consistent and ongoing dialogue.
The platform provides three main features, which are the live chat function, a chatbot capability, and an integrated help desk. However, it also offers a plethora of other robust features and tools such as chat volume management, customer context keeping, group conversations, scheduling, routing, call-out collaborations, qualifications, and CRM integration. Intercom also works as a mobile application, giving users the ability to instantly and efficiently handle leads while on the go. The software is compatible with both iOS and Android devices.
Intercom is a feature-rich customer engagement and conversational relationship solution that helps businesses develop and nurture customer relationships by delivering quality experiences through personalized interactions. The following are some of the key features offered by Intercom:
Intercom’s business messenger is a next-generation messaging tool that is designed to be highly customizable so it matches your brand; i.e., it will feature your company’s style, layout, and content while your team is building meaningful customer experiences and interactions.
The Intercom messenger is purpose-built for modern businesses and customers, helping sales, marketing, and support teams deliver faster answers for new leads, existing customers, and site visitors. It can also provide better onboarding experiences for new users as well as a much deeper connection with relevant resources and content across the whole customer journey.
This messaging tool is also quite adaptable, as it does not necessitate a lot of time, various tools, or technical support to customize. You can easily customize the messenger to match your brand without writing a single line of code. It’s efficient, flexible, and configurable to meet your specific requirements.
With a customizable business messenger, you will be able to deliver a consistent brand experience at every touchpoint. Intercom’s next-gen messaging solution allows you and your team to develop a simple yet engaging messenger experience that fully immerses customers, old and new, in your brand.
With Intercom’s custom bots, businesses will have the ability to create chatbots that can scale every aspect of their operation. These customizable chatbots can assist in qualifying more leads, expediting customer resolutions, and building and growing the company’s pipeline.
The best part about this feature is that creating the chatbot doesn’t even require coding. The custom bots can be configured so that they will be capable of asking the right questions and then automatically prioritizing queries and directing new conversations to the appropriate personnel for more efficient customer support.
Intercom’s custom chatbots can be configured so that they will be able to carry out tasks that are specifically tailored to your unique business requirements. You can also fully integrate the Intercom chatbot into your existing tech stack, have them automate your workflows, and have them assist your support and sales teams.
Intercom provides businesses with up-leveled support automation that can effectively scale their teams by simply resolving around 33% of common customer queries. The resolution bot is a complete self-service solution that’s available 24/7 to provide automated support. It uses machine learning technology to speed up resolution times for customers, even if the sales/marketing reps or the support personnel are busy or offline.
Intercom’s resolution bot features easy-to-train automation capabilities, thanks to machine learning technology. It learns from past conversations with customers and automatically recognizes similar questions, allowing it to serve up the most appropriate answer. It also helps to eliminate or at least minimize repetitive work by letting users configure the chatbot to instantly respond to repetitive questions, saving the team time.
Intercom is not just all about chatbots and resolution bots. While communication is one of the platform’s core functions, it also works to ensure higher engagement from customers. With the product tours feature, businesses can easily connect all important aspects of their product. It aims to introduce new customers to the brand and its products through guided experiences, which can have a significant impact on adoption rates.
With interactive product tours, brands can help their newest customers easily discover everything they need to learn about the product they’ve signed up for, ensuring better onboarding experiences and higher adoption. The product tours feature helps businesses onboard users more effectively and show off the new capabilities of their products.
All this will have an important effect on the amount of work that support teams will be facing. By providing customers with proactive guidance, there should be fewer of them directed to the support inbox.
Some of Intercom’s main benefits are its ability to efficiently capture leads, its wide variety of features, and its robust communication and engagement solutions. The following are some of the core advantages that you can expect from using Intercom for your customer support, communications, and engagement needs:
By utilizing Intercom and all its capabilities, businesses will have the right tools at their disposal to successfully engage the highest quality leads. One of the main reasons for this is targeted messaging.
The platform gives sales and marketing teams the ability to create and execute targeted messaging campaigns instead of using forms. It helps qualify better leads for the team and direct the best ones to the right sales personnel while making sure that Salesforce is always in sync. This enables businesses at any scale to convert leads faster, providing the opportunity for real-time engagement and communication.
Intercom’s business messenger is served as a built-in chat widget that delivers an intuitive and user-friendly live chat experience to customers to a great extent. The platform boasts several live chat innovations that benefit the overall user experience. For example, the tool eliminates all the unfriendly pre-chat forms by embedding a small email capture form within the chat window itself, so it isn’t imposing on the customer’s conversation.
Intercom has a clean and highly intuitive dashboard that displays detailed information about your customers. It contains status updates as well as client data categorized into three main segments: new, active, and inactive clients. Teams can view and get real-time notifications of client status updates. They also have the ability to create custom segments according to preferred user attributes and/or events.
The platform provides users with a comprehensive and clear picture of every client, which includes their social profiles, location, and recent activity, among others. Having access to real-time data on customer activities provides sales and marketing teams with actionable insights into the needs and preferences of their target customers. This means they can create and execute campaigns that are targeted toward their intended audience.
Intercom offers three main solutions that are well-suited for most businesses. These solutions are Support, Engage, and Convert solutions, which all have quote-based pricing. Support is designed to help businesses provide customers with high-quality, personalized support at scale. It comes with human, self-serve, and proactive support features and capabilities.
Engage is all about features and capabilities that help businesses onboard, engage, and re-engage their customer base, while Convert offers tools to help convert site visitors into paying customers. An enterprise option is also available, with enterprise-grade security, HIPAA support, advanced permissions, and extensibility to help meet all enterprise requirements.
A Starter package is available for very small businesses and startups starting at $74/month when billed annually.
Intercom is a robust and feature-rich customer support platform that leverages machine learning and behavioral targeting to help brands get a better understanding of their customer base, as well as improve and benefit from their customer communication and engagement efforts.
Intercom is a highly advanced solution that is well-suited for small to large businesses and tech-forward enterprises looking to identify, capture, and convert quality leads for their marketing and sales teams. It is also a good platform for businesses looking to deliver high-quality customer experiences and establish industry-standard customer support.
