Intercom Review 2024: Features, Pros and Cons, Pricing

Intercom is a popular chat platform for customer support and heavily used by software business. But should you use it to handle all of your chat messages and create your chatbots?

With this in-depth Intercom review, you’ll discover all of Intercom’s features, pros and cons, its pricing plans. And you’ll know when you should use it.

Let’s dive in!

What is Intercom?

Intercom is an all-in-one customer experience platform. You can use it to proactively engage with visitors, automatically answer questions and manage your customer support.

Intercom can be installed on multiple channels, including websites, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook.

The Intercom platform is built on 3 key features:

• Helpdesk: Shared inbox to handle your incoming live chat conversations and tickets
• Fin AI Agent: train a chatbot on your own data and let it automatically reply to customer questions
• Proactive support: Advanced website widget to reach out to your customers

How to Create an Intercom Chatbot

In Intercom, you can control your account from several tabs:

1. Help Desk – this is where you can access your inbox and tickets
2. Fin AI Agent – this allows you to the NLP and the knowledge base
3. Proactive Support – used to send proactive messages from your website
4. Automations – used for creating custom chatbot flows
5. Articles – provide access to Help Desk articles
6. Reports – this where you can access your analytics
7. Contacts – an overview of all the people who talk with your chatbots
8. Messenger and Omni-channels – allows you to install the automations on multiple channels
9. App Store – allows you to access and install multiple integrations
10. Get Started Guide – provides access to helpful resources

When you sign up at Intercom, it provides you with a “quick-start guide” to help you get started with their platform, which is really useful:

To create a chatbot on Intercom, you can use two features: Workflow Automations and the Fin AI Agent.

Workflow automations can be used to create custom chatbot flows, while you can use the Fin AI Agent to train a chatbot on your own data, such as your website and documents. In this section, we will focus on the Workflow Automations. The Fin AI Agent will be covered later in the AI section.

Each workflow automation in Intercom starts with a trigger. After that you can add multiple blocks to design your chatbot flow. Each block can consist of multiple steps. A step is one part of your chatbot flow, such as sending a message, converting the chat into a ticket or letting the Fin AI Agent answer the question:

Additionally, you can also use this Intercom to collect data:

Or use Branches to create conditions and personalize conversations:

With Intercom’s flow builder you can create these workflows in a matter of minutes. Once you have created an automation, you can click on the Preview button to test the workflows you’ve built:

So in general, the flow builder is really easy to use.

When creating my first automations, the only drawback was that the interface could be quite overwhelming. Especially, the difference between Automations and the Fin AI Agent is hard to understand at the beginning, because this is not explained clearly.

Chatbot elements

Intercom provides many chatbot elements to create your chatbots. There are 3 elements I would like to point out:

Collect data: With this step, you can ask a question and store the answer in a custom field.

Branches: By using branches, you can create personalized conversations based on the fields in Intercom.

Reusable workflows: With reusable workflows you can create one automation and reuse that across your chatbot, which is great for scalability.

Contacts

In the Contacts tab in Intercom, you can see a complete overview of everyone that talked with your chatbot:

When you click on of your users, you can see their custom fields, tags, recent pages on your website they viewed and more:

With Intercom, you can just ask a question to the user and store the answer in a custom field or assign a tag.

Additionally, you can create your own user segments by filtering on specific custom fields and tags.

Intercom AI & NLP: Fin AI Agent

With Intercom’s Fin AI Agent, you can train a chatbot on your own data and then it can automatically reply to questions from customers. Fin is powered by a mix of models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4.

You can train the Fin AI Agent on Snippets, PDFs and website URLs:

Once you have trained the Fin AI Agent on your data, you can see all the content in Content section:

Additionally, you can also create your own custom answers. It could be that you don’t want every question answered by the Fin AI Agent, so then you can create your own custom chatbot flows for this:

Live Chat

Intercom has a built-in live chat that you can use to hand over the conversation to one of your agents:

This live chat is a shared inbox, where all of your live chat and conversations are handled in one overview.

Intercom Live Chat has auto-assignment rules that allow for the automatic distribution of conversations to teammates or teams based on specific criteria.

Channels

With Intercom, you can handle conversations on your website, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, SMS and within your apps.

This is great, because then you can serve your customers over multiple channels with one tool.

Marketing

Intercom has Proactive Support that you can use to proactively send messages to your visitors, leads, and customers. When doing this you can send simple messages or you can create series and product tours. When you creating a new message you have a lot of options you can choose from like:

1. Proactive Messages
2. Posts
3. Product Tours
4. Banners
5. Series

Let’s go by them one-by-one:

Intercom’s Website Widget

The website widget of Intercom is pretty advanced.

First of all, you can set up your widget so it matches the branding of your website. You can use it to add:

• Messages
• Tickets
• Tasks
• Help
• News

Intercom Posts

Intercom Posts are pretty similar to Chats, but the difference is that the chat widget opens with a small post in it:

Also, you can create a large post that opens up as a pop-up:

 

Intercom Product Tours

This is one of the best marketing opportunities of Intercom, showing a tour of your product.

In my opinion, there is no better way of onboarding new customers than just showing them how to do it, step-by-step.

And it is also really simple to create a tour, you can just click on parts of your website and add instructions:

Intercom Banners

Intercom also provides Banners that you can put on your website.

Banners are highlighted sections on the top or bottom of your website that you can use to promote something, such as a discount:

Intercom Series

Series is a visual campaign builder that allows you to send emails, posts, chatbot flows and product tours if the user meets some conditions.

For example, you can use Series to create an onboarding campaign for new customers:

Overall, the marketing possibilities of Intercom are great for websites.

Unfortunately, Intercom doesn’t provide any marketing possibilities on other channels, such as Facebook and Instagram.

Integrations

Intercom has an App Store with 100+ integrations, such as Google Analytics, Stripe, Salesforce and Jira:

What is so great about their App Store, is that every developer can contribute to it. For example, Intercom itself doesn’t provide a Telegram integration. But, by using an App in their App store, you can create this integration yourself.

If that’s not enough, you can use Zapier or Make (formerly Integromat) to integrate with almost any software application on earth.

Moreover, you can also get or send data from other systems by creating an API call and you can receive webhooks when an event is happening inside Intercom.

Intercom Pricing

Intercom’s pricing starts at $39/seat/month and goes up to $139/seat/per month. Each of their plans comes with a 14-day free trial, that requires no credit card.

Intercom’s Essentials plan ($39/seat/month) gives you access to the shared inbox, Fin AI Agent, basic automations, the website channel and Banners and Tooltips.

If you want more powerful automations, multiple team inboxes, Social channels, and a multilingual help center, you need to go with the Advanced plan which costs $99/seat/month.

Lastly, Intercom has the Expert plan that starts at $139/seat/month and also gives you workload management, multiple help centers and  custom roles:

Also, for each resolution of the FIN AI Agent you have to pay $0.99. Besides that, there are also additional charges for SMS, WhatsApp and Email campaigns.

Lastly, you can add Proactive Supports option, such as Product Tours, Surveys and Series for $99/month.

Intercom Reports

Intercom has a really extensive Reports section. The platform comes with many pre-built reports:

For example, you can see a report with the resolution flow of Fin AI Agent:

Analyze the effectiveness of your customer support team:

Or analyze your custom workflow automations:

And if that’s not enough, you can also create your own custom reports:

So I think this is great. Using the Reports in Intercom, you can easily improve your chatbot flows and support team’s effectiveness.

Intercom Templates

Intercom provides 65 templates you can use to build your chatbot flows:

Unfortunately, you cannot create these templates yourself and share them with others.

Support

Intercom provides lots of tutorials explaining their platform and they have a huge documentation.

Moreover, they also provide support through live chat and email.

Is Intercom worth it?

So, should you buy Intercom to create your chatbots?

Yes, you should.

Intercom is a great all-in-one customer support solution tool to serve customers over multiple channels: websites, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and SMS.

By using its flow builder and built-in AI features, you can set up advanced chat automations without any coding. With its live chat, you can hand over any conversation to a support agent. And with over 100 direct integrations, you can connect it to any other application you are using.

Additionally, Intercom also provides many marketing possibilities, such as broadcasts, Product Tours, Banners and Series to engage with your customers. And it has a very extensive Reports section you can use to improve your chatbot flows over time.

Go to Intercom

There are only two drawbacks of Intercom:

In the beginning, Intercom can be overwhelming. Especially the difference between the Fin AI Agent and Automations wasn’t entirely clear. So it could takes some time before you fully understand Intercom.

Second, Intercom can be too expensive for small businesses. Intercomes provides many features and I think the price is totally worth it, but paying $99/seat/month isn’t for most small businesses.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Intercom Chat?

Intercom Chat is an all-in-one customer experience platform. You can use it proactively engage with visitors, automatically answer questions and provide real-time customer support.

You can install Intercom Chat on multiple channels, including your website, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and SMS.

Does Intercom have an AI Chatbot?

Yes, Intercom has an AI Chatbot, called Fin. With Fin AI Agent, you can train a chatbot on your data and then it can automatically replies to questions from customers. Fin is powered by a mix of models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4.

Is Intercom chatbot free?

No, Intercom chatbot is not free. But Intercom does provide a 14-day free trial (no credit card required), which allows you to test their platform.

How much does Intercom cost per month?

Intercom’s pricing starts at $39/seat/month and goes up to $139/seat/per month. Each of their plans comes with a 14-day free trial, that requires no credit card.

The Essentials plan ($39/seat/month) gives you access to the shared inbox, Fin AI Agent, basic automations, the website channel and Banners and Tooltips.

If you want more powerful automations, multiple team inboxes, Social channels, and a multilingual help center, you need to go with the Advanced plan which costs $99/seat/month.