What is Reddit's opinion of
Intercom?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
➔ Intercom website
By popularity on Reddit, this Service is:
50 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
Fint Mascha, men det hele er jo opstået fordi du ikke har styr på kundeservice. Hvis du havde benyttet eks. Intercom havde du blot sat et auto-svar op om at i modtager mange henvendelser og bede folk væbne sig med tålmodighed. Samtidigt kunne i appellere til folk tjekker det T&T nummer ud som i selvfølgelig automatisk sender til kunderne.
At du er røvutjekket har intet at gøre med om PostNord har travlt. Du skal bare lære at kommunikere. Det skulle man egentligt tro at du som influent kunne finde ud af.
From Ken Norton's famous "How to hire a product manager" essay (https://www.kennorton.com/essays/productmanager.html ):
>Remember friend, nobody asked you to show up.
>Product management may be the one job that the organization would get along fine without (at least for a good while). Without engineers, nothing would get built. Without sales people, nothing is sold. Without designers, the product looks like crap. But in a world without PMs, everyone simply fills in the gap and goes on with their lives. It’s important to remember that - as a PM, you’re expendable. Now, in the long run great product management usually makes the difference between winning and losing, but you have to prove it.
And more about saying no as a PM - focused on product strategy, but obviously the more you take on your plate, the more stressful your life will be: https://www.intercom.com/blog/product-strategy-means-saying-no/
It's something I've wondered about as well. I think for the foreseeable future there will be a need for sales execs who handle enterprise and larger deals because of the complexity involved in shepherding large purchases, the need for custom workflows in large organizations, and the desire for large customers to have a dedicated point of contact/advocate within their vendors.
But with the rise of things like product lead growth and cloud marketplaces I could see a decline in the number of SMB and mid-market roles. Why pay a sales person when users can discover, test, and buy the product on their own? That's essentially the model Atlassian has taken: https://www.intercom.com/blog/podcasts/scale-how-atlassian-built-a-20-billion-dollar-company-with-no-sales-team/
Great! Thanks for sharing. I've been using Hotjar for a while. Thanks to their video recording I found out our Optimizely caused some sort of bug that broke our main lead form for Internet Explorer users. Could have been a while before we figured that one out via Analytics. Damn.
Also interesting are these from Intercom: https://www.intercom.com/books
These are my go-to marketing automation products, they all have free plans (but you really unlock their power on paid): MailChimp for sending automated emails, Intercom for nurturing and customer support, Landing Lion for building landing pages, split testing (CRO), visitor tracking, and lead capture (forward to MailChimp).
Hope that helps!
True. There are a lot of devs who can't discern good from bad design. And that's totally normal. The fact that you can do it is a definite bonus.
But be wary of the dribblization of design - yes it's a thing.
Product design is about making thigs work better, not just look nicer.
And sometimes, an "uglier" design will perform better than a "pretty" one because it's more functional. The majority of design on Dribbble is not functional. It's fantasy projects that haven't seen the light of day, and could never be executed as designed with the constrains of real life technology/content/product imaging etc.
I just read this a week ago and it might help you:
There are three stories you should know cold:
- why your company exists
- why you work there
- what you’ve learned from customers your company has helped.
I find the "Contact Us" options a bit inconvenient and it might slow down your business. You need a clearer call to action, and giant text at the top of the page isn't the best place. Ideally all three contact methods should be easily found in a few places. I highly recommend installing Intercom to talk to customers and relying on that instead.
It'll also likely need SSL certification if users are communicating with the site owner. This is a good choice for SSL and web application-level security.
Also, what about providing useful content, such as links to companies that do delivery so users can view their menus? I know it would be extensive, but useful, and might be a good way to establish partnerships in the future.
While this does not answer your question directly you might want to look into the "Intercom on X" ebook series which is 100% free.
Given that you're looking for knowledge around SaaS marketing you'll find "Intercom on Marketing" useful (https://www.intercom.com/resources/books/intercom-marketing).
It's been around for a few years now but basically the entire industry has caught on, at least in B2B SaaS.
Intercom used to actually champion this style but recently switched to a new style (minimalistic with on-page animations), likely to help differentiate themselves from the saturation of this style in the software market.
Don't be surprised if you notice more major SaaS websites moving away from this and exploring new illustration styles in 2020.
> It's not hard to not conflict with your own CSS
I think you may be misunderstanding the use-case. The iframe solution is not for avoiding conflicts in your own CSS. It's to prevent style bleed through when embedding your app in someone else's site.
My comment above was just demonstrating that even !important can't prevent that bleed through. You need encapsulation that only a separate dom can provide. Look at any embedded widget (e.g. https://www.intercom.com/) — they use iframes for exactly this reason.
There is a great free book on what to factor in when deciding how to setup support at a startup by the folks at Intercom -
https://www.intercom.com/books/customer-support
I am not affiliated with them at all, just found it a well formulated book. And they offer support services. I have not used them, but they look better than zendesk.
And don't get zendesk. I found it complicated.
You won't believe this, and I may sound like a dick
This sounds like a you problem, not a customer problem.
I suggest you read the Not a map article on intercom.
For people that want more information
If you enter the part of the email after the @ into a web browser. It takes you to a company
That claims to specialize in business communication with clients.
The email looks like an employee for crypto.com - followed by the company - followed by the 3p service which helps manage their email communications.
This website was first archived 12/1996 on waybackmachine and has been archived 4,993 times in total
I think it’s legit.
If you enter the part of the email after the @ into a web browser. It takes you to a company
That claims to specialize in business communication with clients.
The email looks like an employee for crypto.com -followed by the company - followed by the 3p service which helps manage their email communications.
> A company with a good product but a bad sales team will go under while a company with a bad product but a good sales team will prosper
I need a source for this.
A good product doesn’t need a sales team to begin with. Take Atlassian for example. They’re currently worth $20b. In 2016 they conducted over $320m in sales with a $5b valuation. They didn’t have a single sales person on payroll.
Slack, worth $4b, is one of the fastest growing enterprise chat solutions. In 2016, 2 years after founding, they conducted over $64m in sales. Their CEO is extremely vocal about not hiring sales people.
https://www.businessinsider.com/slack-ceo-stewart-butterfield-no-salespeople-2016-3?amp
This dynamic can be observed across many more companies like Dropbox, Twilio, Kik, Yammer.
The funny thing is, these are literally B2B SaaS companies where sales is supposed to be their bread and butter. They don’t even represent the domains of the actual most valuable tech companies in the world that make an app that goes on your phone, and that are worth 20x what these companies are worth.
Regardless, this is besides the point. Whether a company has a good or a bad sales team is irrelevant. Good sales teams need a product to sell. Bad sales teams need a product to sell. Sales people in general, need. a. product. to. sell.
This is absolutely unacceptable and your company should have a policy and process in place to address this.
For example, I found this article addressing this type of thing specifically where there are template replies that CSR's can use referring to an acceptable use policy and de-escalating the situation. This should be something that your management team and legal is involved in. https://www.intercom.com/blog/how-to-cut-the-cord-on-inappropriate-customer-conversations/ I would address this with your manager as here is what happened, here is how I felt/responded and how can we resolve this going forward in order to continue assisting customers while also drawing boundaries about what is not acceptable.
No one is going to fault you for initially responding thank you to a compliment if you were unsure how to respond, and if they do, that's not someplace you want to work.
I don't really know what this means, but yes, we're like every other company in that we use automated ticketing tools in order to track and prioritize support requests. If you've asked a company for help in the last few years, chances are it was this way.
https://www.intercom.com https://www.zendesk.com https://www.servicenow.com
Yep, this is a huge trend and for many disruptive companies, it's a new reality for some time already! There are companies like Unity, that started to use this type of conversational marketing and generated 80% of their sales revenue through messenger! With instant interactions based on user behavior, they have increased visitor to paid conversion rates by 45%. They used Intercom to achieve this, check it out.
From what I was seeing, it looked like their Help Center features were only available if we coughed up $99/month for their "Grow" plan which included chat which we didn't need (we handle Customer Support issues in a shared slack channel w/ our customers).
I'm sure we would have used it if we could have gotten just the KB
I'm not sure how Intercom integrates with Shopify, but it's definitely worth checking out. Everyone is using Intercom for customer service nowadays. Super easy set up
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I just read the free ebook "Intercom on Starting Up" the other day (https://www.intercom.com/resources/books/intercom-starting-up) and they have a very good chapter on pricing.
What they did initially was to just charge ~50$ and see how their customers react (Jason Fried gave them that advice).
I think it's good to keep in mind that you can and should always adapt pricing as your product will provide more value over time.
Better to estimate effort than time. Look up ‘planning poker’, and the RICE matrix, for better alternatives. :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_poker
https://www.intercom.com/blog/rice-simple-prioritization-for-product-managers/
What type of concept are you playing with? Digital/physical?
I'll post this above as well, but assessing prioritization is extremely helpful...I'm definitely happy to answer any specifics since it definitely varies from idea to idea!
Exactly. Graphic design is about problem solving. Something that looks good but has no use will likely vanish, something that looks like shit but is useful will likely prevail.
I read an article a few days ago called "dribbblisation of design". Basically designers work on useless product designs that don't solve anything but they look good, so it's good design, right?
Anyone on this sub should read this because it's exactly what's happening. You experimented with a poster for your friend and it looks nice? Cool, now show me the though process you went through.
Are you looking for an open source library you can build on or a paid solution? Is this between you and the users, or user-to-user
For the first use case, at the startup I work at we use Intercom. What you describe is typically fairly difficult to do well and from a business point of view it will likely be cheaper to just use a paid solution that works with no fuss.
I have also had the experience of rolling my own. I didn't use a specific Vue lib, but I used Firestore for the database which gives your real time connectivity out of the box.
Intercom have a great presentation on this. https://www.intercom.com/books/jobs-to-be-done
Biggest mistake I made in the first year of my startup was not digging into this in enough detail and *really* understanding what my customers were using the system for.
- Before / after moneto could be split a lot better, rather than having one sentence after the other, at the very least they should be on separate lines. More than that, you could present a visual separation by putting them in separate boxes or something
Consider old intercom design: https://web.archive.org/web/20170310105013/https://www.intercom.com/
You might want to look Intercom's extensive content library on customer support. They cover a lot of best practices for this kind of thing, and even if you don't use their products they're very useful resources.
I always like to link people to the following article on why there are no small changes. Obviously it's about a different kind of software but the point stands.
It was non-traditional. I was doing traditional enterprise sales at a vendor prior to Atlassian. They don't take customers out on the golf course and have expensive lunches. They don't need to. It is a low-touch sales model for a lot of it but there is still a relatively small team of sales professionals. The Enterprise sales people that they get in are there mostly doing Enterprise License Agreements and they pass a very strict culture test . This post on Atlassian's unique sales model describes it well.
At Intercom, we've been incrementally upgrading our almost 6 year old Ember app to Octane as the features have landed over the past 8 months. Our app continues to be in great health and we continue to ship hundreds of times a day with a constant stream of features that our customers love. Octane is a huge leap forward for Ember. Its APIs are extremely well designed, composable and cohesive. The new Glimmer components and @tracked properties have resulted in waves of negative diffs as we refactor parts of out app to Octane and, IMO, are an advancement in the state-of-the-art component state tracking / reactive UI.
If you've tried Ember before and were turned off by some of it's slightly weird APIs (computed properties, component APIs like tagName, classNames & event handling, the ember object model), you should take a second look.
With Octane, Ember is a framework for rapidly building high quality web applications that will remaining healthy over time as the platform and JS ecosystem rapidly changes.
I'd suggest reading Paul Adams article (or watch his presentation) about the role of UX design and where it really fits into the business. It might change your perspective. https://www.intercom.com/blog/the-end-of-navel-gazing/
Notice this is not happening just with web design. And it's not just you who think something similar.
This is more caused by what I thought they called "the dribbble effect" but now is "the dribbblisation of design". TL;DR: Now designers do stuff to impress other designers (and get internet pointz, and as a placebo to make them think they will land great gigs), not to solve actual problems. Those kind of designs are what feed dribbble.
General thoughts
It's important to think about how frequently you review your prioritised backlog of roadmap candidates, if you're prioritising on the fly all of the time but don't take the chance to step back and review your high-level goals, it's easy to just build the next top of the list (which could have been prioritised 6 months ago).
Involve your stakeholders, whether that's actually doing the prioritisation together or reviewing your prioritise. When someone comes to your with a request that they think should be number one, it's really beneficial to be able to go here's my prioritised roadmap, here's how we prioritise, let's score your idea together.
Have some form of filter for ideas, as prioritising can take a good amount of effort depending on the level of detail you decide to go into (e.g. you need to go get a load of customer data to understand the potential impact of an idea. Asking the requestor to fill in something like a Lean Canvas can be really helpful to create a shared understanding of what it is you're trying to prioritise.
My favourite framework
I've used RICE (Reach x Impact x Confidence x Effort) well. IMHO what sets this apart from other frameworks is:
Impact: Forces you to think about what impact this will have on your goals and strategic alignment. (Linking into Ryfitz47's comment)
Confidence: How confident are we that this roadmap item will have the desired impact and forces you to have conversations around risks + assumptions.
Building upon what Intercom have, I put together a confidence scoring system for my team, something similar to this to make sure that we all have a common understanding of what being confident means.
Here is a pretty good overview.
There isn't going to be a "silver bullet." It's a highly contextual thing to your business and a continuous process.
Each quarter I pick one part of onboarding to improve as a project and focus on the thing I think would deliver the most value if we improved it.
Intercom has several great use cases. Recently I've been getting a lot out of their Customer Lifecycle Management tool. Free trials for Intercom are available and I would definitely recommend giving their other tools a go as well!
If you're trying to integrate live chat for new and existing users, and need to automatically pull up their info without asking them - take a look at using Intercom https://www.intercom.com/ - it can basically do exactly that.
I'm not a big fan of it personally, it seems a bit invasive - but a lot of startups swear by it.
A lot of these numbers are really far off. For example, you guessed 20 developers but they had 177 in August last year, and they've kept hiring a lot more.
here some article that would be helpful for you. https://www.intercom.com/blog/the-dribbblisation-of-design/
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in my opinion, design is about solving problem and doing daily ui is impractical.
if your design is lack of background, problem, goals and users description then it's only wasting your time. Unless, you only want to improve and increase design skill then doing daily ui is benefit for you.
Intercom, with the launch of their bot, have released an interesting case study on support bots, and yes it boils down to 24x7 availability, speed of response, and reduction of human involvement. Bigger companies like HP and Macy's that already have 24x7 call centers use chatbots to reduce costs and manage peaks (like Black Friday).
Outside of support use case, I'd say most bot flows are limited to 1-10 utterances indeed (I'm talking about 1-5 utterances for intent fulfilment, whereas there can be 100s of various intents). But users can still find value there. A lot of use cases don't require such complex interactions. Bots are also valuable when used for notifications - in case of Osome, we send out notifications about key events - like company AGM or documents that need to be signed.
When developing new intents in bots, we start with fully automated "happy scenarios" (user is cooperating and acts predictably) - this usually covers more than half of interactions. The rest will initially fallback to human, but the rate of fallback goes down, as you step-by-step analyse and automate the other paths.
Some more interesting insights from Intercom:
How to train a conversational chatbot
The 100 answer challenge: How our support team helped train Answer Bot
As mentioned by bendahen mentioned Spiceworks already, it's hard to beat free if costs are a potential issue for you (though you mentioned you are willing to pay for a service that is helpful for you above).
Additionally, I've seen a lot of vendors we've worked with (Regroup, PaperCut, and others) using Zendesk as their ticketing platform so it may be one of the good "standard" choices.
For our college campus we've been using Web Help Desk (since before it was acquired by Solarwinds and was still an independent company) and it's been a good solution for our needs but might be more complicated than what you need.
One that I believe might be a bit more CRM-like that I've seen some startup companies use is the following one: https://www.intercom.com/
This feature here sounds like it would solve the current issue you have with everybody responding from the same email address and things getting mixed up: https://www.intercom.com/inbox
Just curious, what is CSAT? What type of customer service reporting are you looking for?
Yeah Intercom’s price varies by number of users and number of products you use. Can be confusing.
How did the sales team drop the ball?
Would you qualify for either of these pricing plans?
https://www.intercom.com/early-stage https://www.drift.com/startups/
I feel they are simpler more accessible pricing.
My flatmate works in their London office and spent a month in their Dublin office. I think he likes it.
Their product management and design writing is respected in London. See https://www.intercom.com/books/jobs-to-be-done
So we are more break-fix than MSP (we use the MSP tools, but they are billed as line items and any work we do is hourly). Recently, we've recognized that our clients' expectations when it comes to support are changing. Customers are becoming a bit more savvy and have expressed both the desire to try things themselves and reach us easier. To this end, we've implemented what we're calling "Support, Your Way". We have been working on getting Intercom (https://www.intercom.com/) setup to centralize all support there. Clients can text us, email us, or chat with us via our main website, our help portal, or our remote support portal (Connectwise Control). All of those entry points feed into Intercom. Through their help articles system, we have about 80 articles in there, ranging from setting up Office 365 email in iOS mail to installing Backblaze to a new computer. All the content was pulled from our vendors, in most cases requiring not much more than just copy/paste. I'd be happy to share the URL if anyone is interested, just PM me as I don't need to be bombarded with chat requests from vendors and bored assholes. :)
https://www.intercom.com/live-chat this is what we love intercom for, everything works well and its also connected to our crm.
We started at tawk then to drift and now at intercom. At lower price same features would definitely win me over.
I think you should have a look at Intercom's site (https://www.intercom.com/) for inspiration. They have one menu for products, which pops to reveal simultaneous products and solutions (applications in your case) menu, when the mouse hovers over it.
Just get out of the building - go to your closest mall and start selling people on your product (if it's already out) or concept - and ask for their email and contacts while you're at it. Start with things that don't scale (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html) like serving your initial customer needs yourselves (finding flights or deals for them manually) and keep learning about the community. My best tip - focus on a narrow group of people to serve - serve them exceedingly well and grow from there. Narrow your target audience to the extreme (like - 22-28 YO, travels for business).
I'd also recommend you look into Intercom (https://www.intercom.com) - we just started using it and it's absolutely amazing.