Fin by Intercom vs. Salesforce Service Cloud

While Fin is an awesome investment, the setup and tuning of responses to meet brand alignment and delivery have taken some time. If you prioritize not just resolution rate and accuracy, but style and delivery, it's a bigger lift. However, for the vast majority of businesses, the step and its impact on resource management are a worthy investment.

Incentivized

This cloud is a good option for attracting large numbers of customers for mid-scale and large-scale organizations. However, it’s not suitable for small companies or startups due to its high cost. For use cases where real-time input from customers is taken and then processed on the cloud to give them output, this platform is a must.

Incentivized

• Great UI - everyone has their own inbox but can still see all incoming messages.
• Fin AI - we love the AI functionality, it saves tons of time of the team.
• Automated emails - we configured Intercom in a way that it uses a lot of information we have about our users (e.g. their subscription, date of upgrade, etc.) so that we can use it to automate communication.

Incentivized

• Super fast set-up of the service from design through to production.
• Robust method of release management from sandbox, to test, to production.
• User access controls can be fine grain, which is great for GDPR requirements, limiting access to only necessary data.
• Simple api integrations with other third party systems
• Broad range of features and functionality
• Einstein search features provides faster information mining for our agents as they help to resolve customer requests.

Incentivized

• Some things are repetitive. Ex: If you provide guidance to ask a follow-up question, it'll ask that follow-up question each time.
• It'd be cool to have a "vibe" check for auto-sorting. Ex: We have responses to our outreach feed into Intercom. It'd be cool to have a way to auto-sort based on if they ask a detailed question or just a plain "interested" response.
• It'd be cool if Fin by Intercom flagged conversations, like it a customer seemed agitated, for the team to review.

Incentivized

• A free trial would be extremely valuable to customers who are not able to commit to a full plan.
• The pricing of this program is not priced competitively with other similar services.
• Can be quite time consuming to maintain.
• Not user friendly if you aren’t tech savvy/familiar with software.

Incentivized

It's currently a perfect fit for our needs, and we are customer-focused and small. When we grow, we may need to re-evaluate, but our current team finds it easy. Reviewing conversations is simple and allows for great training. The canned replies make service fast and easy. Smart suggestions remove the need to re-write technical walkthroughs and explanations for our FAQ

Incentivized

Professional edition works best for a small company with lower call volumes and is very useful but as you grow exponetially I think it has limited ability to do all the things we want to - SLA management, defect, release management to name a few. Reports and dashboards being available in real time.

It takes a bit of getting used to. It's easy to start off with simple pieces of answering queries, etc. The real part is when one tries to use workflows with triggers and automation. Then, it can be a whole different experience. I would love to see it being much simpler in terms of usability there.

Incentivized

I love that the Salesforce Service cloud provides all of the functionality that I need when implementing business processes for our customer support representatives. It even has enough functions and features that allow us to customize and expand upon our current processes, giving us the ability to go above and beyond what we've thought we could ever do. Using cases coupled with Salesforce's automation tools help ease the workload and keeps our data integrity intact.

Incentivized

always there

Incentivized

Salesforce's Trust Center clearly communicates occasional issues to anyone who subscribes, down to an organization's cloud instance. Bundled sandboxes ease updates, and seasonal upgrades are seamless, scheduled well in advance with plenty of information about what's coming. Support agents have noticed intermittent Omni-Channel disconnects due to internet connections, and these are clearly notified.

works perfect

Incentivized

Load times can be slow, but this is also based on how much customization you have done. We added a lot of custom fields which could cause additional slowness in loading. This was never anything that affected our overall efficiency. I did not notice that Service Cloud slowed down any of the systems we had it integrated with

Incentivized

Intercom is the premier customer support/engagement model and it definitely has one of the top tier customer support teams as well. I don't think I have ever waited more than 5 minutes to get the information I need or get help with an issue. They are incredible and I aim to model our customer service department after them.

Incentivized

Salesforce offers support, although it generally gets routed to overseas support teams first, and once they are unable to help, it gets escalated up the chain to higher tiers. Frequently, the answer back from support is that there is no native solution, and we either have to turn to the AppExchange for some solution provided by another developer, or custom build our own solution.

Our in-person training was provided by our implementation partner and it was quite good. This was in part because we were already working with them and so it naturally leant itself to a good training relationship. And because they were building our customizations and configuring things, they could then provide training on those things naturally.

Incentivized

Easy to know the learning path

Incentivized

Trailheads are great but it was often unclear what actually applied to our organization. This made it difficult to get a whole lot out of it. Part of it is that because the basic Salesforce features didn't quite work for us, we had to add customizations, which then nullified a lot of the training.

Incentivized

The implementation was surprisingly easy but we are having to adapt from our old process to work well with Intercom.

Incentivized

I would go through an implementation very differently knowing what I know now. It was difficult coming from systems we liked in post-sales service and having to adapt to the clunky and underwhelming feature set in Salesforce. I would trim back our expectations

Incentivized

In my experience, what Intercom has done with Fin by Intercom is far more innovative and forward thinking than other tools I've used. It's intuitive, easy, and they are always releasing new things to make Fin by Intercom even more powerful.

Incentivized

I honestly prefer Zendesk to Salesforce Service Cloud. I find that Zendesk is easier to manage both on the support ticket side, as well as the knowledge center side. It looks and feels easier to use than Salesforce Service Cloud. Salesforce Service Cloud is fine, but it is expensive as well.

Incentivized

The product has scaled up with our company growth just fine. No issues here other than slowness in clicking around and running reports

Incentivized

• I like how I don't feel like I need to constantly be monitoring support, especially on weekends
• It's great that the user will get some response right away, I just need to hope that the response they do get is good enough if I'm awk

Incentivized

• We have cut our service team in half over the past 5 years due to the efficiency of the tool
• The amount of direct inquiries to our technical team is less than 10% compared to the number support tickets that get entered in the system for them to work in a more organized manner
• Responses are 100% more timely because tickets can be responded to by any individual in the queue or on the team, as opposed to direct emails to just one person

Incentivized