
I stopped using Intercom - gingerlime
https://blog.gingerlime.com/2019/why-i-stopped-using-intercom/
======
erikrothoff
We actually had to stop using Intercom because of their pricing. We had a
custom plan for years that accommodated our needs greatly. We were very happy
and sang their praises all the time. A couple of months back they announced
that they would be changing their pricing, so our $300/month price would
become $2000/month. We started a long discussion with a sales person back and
forth and they just wouldn't help us. We got copy and pasted responses that
were not at all answers to our concerns.

It ended with them charging us $1800 even though we explicitly said we just
wanted the "Chat" option for $100 per month a couple of times. After a
stressful evening they refunded us. It really did leave a bitter taste in our
mouth.

I agree completely with the article. Intercom was a crutch for us to deal with
the failings of our own product.

~~~
gaia
Could they be as bad as NewRelic sales people?

~~~
erikrothoff
Heh, I tried getting started with New Relic. I didn’t want to give up my name
(over chat mind you, not a signup form) and phone number so I never got that
account.

------
tylerrooney
I realize this article is one data point but I'd offer that I have a
completely opposite data point.

1\. We accidentally turned off our main Intercom in-trial campaign for a
segment of users during an AB test and were surprised how much lower the
conversion was. We re-ran the test ensuring both sides had our Intercom in-
trial campaign on. It increased in-trial conversion by 25%.

2\. We do pay a lot for Intercom (10 person support team, tens of thousands of
users, hundreds of thousands of leads) but we also use it a god damn ton for
new customer campaigns, activation, churn prevention, reactivation, etc and by
in-app, email, and mobile notifications. Replacing all of this would not be
cheap.

3\. Intercom can definitely be a crutch for bad UX. But you'll only know of
those problems if you're actually getting this feedback. It's then on you to
have the internal process for addressing common questions or requests in order
to reduce the volume of help requests for specific topics.

------
mattnewport
I hate these things, in the same way I dislike a sales person rushing up to me
immediately I set foot in a store. It's much worse on a web page,
simultaneously creepy like I'm being watched checking out the site and useless
knowing it's not actually a real person.

~~~
megous
You're being watched. Some of these tools (in the merchant's UI) have a list
of users browsing the website with an option to show in real-time what you're
doing, what page you're viewing, typing, and how you're moving your mouse
cursor.

They'd probably show your webcam and mic feed, if they could without being
obvious, too.

~~~
danellis
_message pops up_

"Hey, can I help? You look confused."

------
dylanz
He last used Intercom 3 years ago but is just writing about it now. A LOT has
changed in 3 years.

I’ve used the product on multiple projects over the years and it’s matured a
lot over time. We use it as a support tool and a way to identify qualified
leads. It’s also handles our targeted email campaigns. Their support staff is
incredibly on point as well. I personally think it’s a fantastic way to engage
customers. Seeing that little bubble in the corner of every site kinda drives
me crazy, but I know where to go if I have a question.

~~~
dewey
They specifically say that it's not about the product itself but the concept
of these on-page assistants.

> It’s mostly about intercom as a concept, rather than a specific
> implementation.

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kennbutler
At my current startup, we sell a rather pricy physical product and have been
using Intercom to nurture leads. It's been very useful, as we have lots of
leads that have specific questions that they want a human to answer.

We found that conversational engagement works the best for these leads, but
Drift does a far better job than Intercom at this. Currently planning on
migrating.

~~~
guzik
We are in the medical / research field - also selling a physical product. We
are using chatbot to answer sometimes really narrow questions about customer-
specific cases (they just would not fit the Help/FAQ page). LiveChat is where
most of our leads come from.

------
corobo
Does Intercom still do that really annoying bleep when it automatically pings
you with some guff? I stopped using Intercom myself (as a user)

Every damn site seemed to have it installed, ended up adblocking all of its
domains.

------
Cliffsides
Anyone have a recommendation for the simplest, easiest solution to solve for
"As a user, I'd like to express some concern, frustration, feedback, or
questions about your product". Intercom seems like the most well known, but
there's _a lot_ in that tool that we just may not need or use and I'm not sure
we're looking for something so "robust"... Then again, just slapping a support
email alias throughout the product and expecting users to find it and use it
doesn't quite solve the problem and it's not scalable. I intend to check out
Crisp, Intercom, Drift, hubspot, smooch, pipedrive, and Tawk judging by
responses below, but wondering if anyone can help cut through the noise with
some personal anecdotes. Just want to make sure users have a way of reaching
out and feeling that their voices are being _heard_

~~~
troydavis
For a Web app where I wanted as much feedback as possible, I embedded a 2-line
expandable text input box (and submit button) in the footer of every page.

At different times, the surrounding copy was something like “Question?
Suggestion? We’re at your service.” or “How can we improve this page? We’d
love to know.”

It worked great and I’d do it again for any new app. People brought up issues
large and small. The goal wasn’t to “engage” or “nurture” or whatever. We just
wanted to respect visitors’ time, which meant being as easy to reach as
possible.

------
seanwilson
I've been using Crisp for a while on my own project where users can click ito
start a chat (it doesn't pop-up with a message initially). I don't have any
hard data but I've found it really valuable in terms of being a solo
developer:

\- For support problems, resolving over chat is much quicker and personable. I
think this leads to happier customers. Composing well thought out and well
written emails back and forth eats up a huge amount of time in comparison.

\- It's way easier to get to know your customers more with chat. You can
quickly ask them a series of related questions and get an answer, whereas with
email it's much more effort on both sides e.g. a series of question/answers
like "What kind of website are you checking with the tool? Oh, so how many
websites do you have? Would you find it more helpful if...?" is painful over
email and they'd probably stop replying.

I looked at the free chat offerings from Crisp, Intercom, Drift and Tawk
recently. I think until you're getting large numbers of chat users per day
there's not a lot to decide between them. I mostly prefer Crisp because the
admin interface responds quickly and settings are easy to find. It's pretty
crazy how many features and settings they all have.

~~~
jmkni
+1 for Crisp. It’s the bit of Intercom most people want, and nothing else.
Highly recommend it.

------
ddebernardy
> The short, simple, and most crucial reason: it didn’t work. How do I know?
> We A/B tested it. Over a fairly long time and a large number of people.

I'd love to see the actual numbers. The screenshot OP posted suggests they've
been running A/B tests with 115 + 108 users, which is just not a big enough
sample to derive any conclusions.

IMO Intercom's plans are too pricey once you've more than a few users, and its
specialized competitors are usually better. But methinks it's a sane choice
regardless for most early stage startups: you get a good enough version of
just about every tool you need.

As to the other complaint (popup is too familiar) they might have been doing
it wrong -- as in like a sales in a retail store showing up asking "can I help
you?". Only show the popup when something interesting _that you 're digging
into_ happens. And man the fort, to make sure there's someone answering at the
other end when an actual user replies; else it's pointless.

~~~
gingerlime
OP here.

> I'd love to see the actual numbers. The screenshot OP posted suggests
> they've been running A/B tests with 115 + 108 users, which is just not a big
> enough sample to derive any conclusions.

The screenshot is from the intercom.com website. Not related to our own
experiment, which was run outside intercom.

I'm having trouble finding the actual raw experiment results, but I would
imagine it covered 10s of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of
participants, running for a month.

Regarding the other comments: yes, maybe we were doing it wrong. But we've
given it way more attention and though than "hey, can I help you?" and really
tried to target specific events etc. And also, we're a B2C so volumes are high
but customer lifetime value is relatively low, which increases the acquisition
costs.

------
gk1
This is a list of minor complaints from three years ago. Intercom has had
several big updates and pricing changes since then. I don’t think it’s fair to
post this (you have the right, of course) without seeing what’s changed since
then.

I’m not a huge fan either, and I helped two startups move OFF Intercom just
recently. But my issues with it today probably won’t be relevant three years
from now.

~~~
gingerlime
OP here. Yes, there are some minor complaints, and I do imagine some things
have changed (happy to hear about pricing, because it was truly horrible in my
opinion).

But I think the fundamentals aren't minor. The end-user experience isn't
drastically different now than 2 years ago. And our A/B test back then is
likely to produce similar results today (although we're unlikely to test it
again). I still feel that it's a crutch. And I think intercom is a victim of
its own success, even more so today than a couple of years ago.

~~~
gk1
If you take out the complaint about pricing, then what remains is a general
take on live-chat solutions. It's a valid complaint--and, from my experience,
correct for most cases--but shouldn't be aimed solely at Intercom. I've tested
live chats from Intercom, Drift, HubSpot, Smooch, and others, and they're all
equally underwhelming.

~~~
gingerlime
I think I also addressed that on my post. My personal experience was with
intercom though.

> Of course, intercom.io isn’t the only one now, and there are a few
> competitors in this space. The principle is pretty similar though. I think
> intercom was the most successful company doing this, or the first, or both.
> But it’s not really important. It’s mostly about intercom as a concept,
> rather than a specific implementation.

~~~
gk1
Fair enough. I must’ve skimmed past that in my first reading.

------
ChrisMalherbe
Intercom is a good tool for support, but we have run into a lot of bugs using
deeper features.

Their support is great, they allways get back to you.

We started using intercom for all outgoing communications especially email
campaigns and ran into reporting bugs, built in templates not showing on
outlook, events being not usable in mails ect.

You can only create a company via the API, which by the way loves to duplicate
your contacts from time to time.

As a support tool, it is great our users are used to using the bubble to chat
to us but we have moved the our mailing and crm elsewhere.

I think about intercom being very useful if you sell a low value product to a
lot of clients, so large user base at $5 each.

------
AznHisoka
"The friendly bubble is just everywhere… So from a novelty thing, it becomes
“oh. that bubble again”.

This. Exactly this. It's just like banner ad blindness. Sure, it'll work in
the first year or so, but after that, people will start to turn blind to it.

------
nikolay
The pricing of these services is outrageous. GitHub, for example, gives a lot
more value, does a lot more, and charges a lot less per user. When you add all
those different services a startup or small nonprofit needs, it ends up being
a lump sum.

------
ryanbertrand
We tried using Intercom as a “all in one” tool for support, leads, CRM, and it
just wasn’t good enough.

We ended up getting Pipedrive for the CRM. Then we hooked up the new Pipedrive
integration which is one click to generate a new user, and deal after they
show interest with our bot or with us.

For support, we love it and so do our customers. I know there are a lot of
chat solutions but it feels the best to me. The bonus is it is integrated with
our Help Center (also Intercom) so it is very easy to send embedded articles
right in the chat. Our customers love this :)

We are a small team and we were able to reduce the amount of support phone
calls (they wanted a phone call to ask the simplist things) by answering
quickly on live chat. This allowed us to be able to serve multiple customers
at once in a async fashion.

~~~
dylanz
We use Intercom for support and push SQL's into Pipedrive. It works great. It
keeps Pipedrive clean and our Sales people focused on real opportunities. We
use Intercom a lot for its "segments", and do a lot of personal mail from
there. For example, we hosted a drink-up in Copenhagen one day and was able to
quickly shoot an email to all customers living there in about 2 minutes. I
used a filter to identify who hasn't used the app in a while, remembered their
names, and inquired when I met them. I dig it for that.

------
noahmbarr
Intercom is a shadow CRM that tries to do everything but ultimately fails to
do anything well.

IMHO, Intercom has excellent fit for early stage go-to-markets, but gets
ripped out by specialized tools, purpose built and sold to line function
(marketing, sales, support, etc)

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tsergiu
We used to use Intercom and were frustrated that they charged us a random
amount every month.

They also don't have tools for lead gen or making calls to customers. It was a
big pain having our calls go through skype. We'd have to take manual notes on
the call and there was no good way to schedule follow ups so we ended up using
a mish-mash of systems to do this.

Shameless plug: In the end, we started a competing product, MomentCRM, which
has simple, predictable pricing, and spans the entire lifecycle of your user.
No more data silos or "integration engineers"! I'm one of the founders, and I
will move mountains to make sure you're happy if you decide to try it :)

------
dmeagor
The problem with most of the cool toys like intercom is that they don't scale
for freemium SAAS companies unless you've got a ton of investor cash to burn
through.

We trialed freshchat/desk for few months but their app was very buggy and in
one instance actually broke our (kwiksurveys) angular backend when their site
went down due to some dodgy event hijack code if I recall.

We then found helpscout which I highly recommend as a low cost intercom
alternative. The helpscout UI is great and the support team was faultless. It
doesn't have any of the automation of intercom so we pair it with
activecampaign until I can find something better.

On a related note we're about to sign up with chargebee as chargify / recurly
want to bill 6x as much for a near identical if not worse product. If it's two
things I hate it's a turnover tax, and having to have a 30 minute chat with a
sales consultant.

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vincelt
I'm missing a nice open-source self-hosted alternative to Intercom and alikes.
For early startups and small projects it's not realistic to pay such a monthly
amount when you have few users and no funding. In my case I don't need all
that sales and CRM stuff. A good support solution would be a great start.

------
nik736
It's way too expensive for what it delivers.

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vaultcool
I mostly stopped using it because it's so expensive and we didn't get a lot of
benefit out of it. Just people asking questions that can be answered by
reading the first line of the page they're on.

------
JackPoach
I wonder if 'Intercom makes no difference in conversion' is the rule or the
exception. I wish there was a meta study. Also, it's worthwhile to mention
that there are 100% free really good Intercom alternatives, like
[https://www.bitrix24.com/tools/contact_center/](https://www.bitrix24.com/tools/contact_center/)
and [https://www.tawk.to/features/](https://www.tawk.to/features/)

~~~
noer
While a meta study might be helpful directionally, it's really something that
every product should consider testing. Different customers/users want
different things and it's probably worth doing your own test if you're
curious.

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3into10power5
I add this to my /etc/hosts file. Could not be happier 0.0.0.0 nexus-
websocket-b.intercom.io

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hippich
any open source solutions for intercom? (chat piece)

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ykevinator
Spot on. Great for support, played for lead gen.

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tsunamifury
If you can’t use a high touch interaction to increase conversion, then you’ve
got something very wrong going on that’s bigger than intercom.

~~~
gk1
Disagree. I’ve tried other live chat solutions and they don’t help. The issue
is that in order for the overhead to be worthwhile (ie, the time and attention
of operating the chats), the conversion improvement has to be massive. It
never has been, for me.

~~~
rdlecler1
Intercom solution can increase your customer acquisition cost with more
onboarding support costs so you need a higher lifetime value of the customer
to compensate.

