Buyer's Guide
Customer Service Software
Intercom

Intercom Buyer's Guide

This guide has been created using Cledara’s data to help software buyers make an informed decision on whether

Intercom

is the right solution for their business.

Pricing per year
From
$
1558
to
$
18656
similar to
Popularity
18
%
 of Cledara customers use
Intercom
Security + compliance
SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR
 compliant

Intercom Buyer's Guide

Customer messaging platform that centralizes communication for businesses.

Pricing per year
From
$
9701
to
$
18656
similar to
category/app team
Customer Support
Customer Success
Sales
reviewed by
Nikesh Ashar
Popularity
18
%
 of Cledara customers use
to
Intercom
Security + compliance
SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR
 compliant

What is Intercom?

Intercom is a popular customer service solution. It helps businesses run their support operations with inboxes for support agents, live chat features and built-in phoning capabilities. You can also use Intercom to host help center content, and to create an AI chatbot to answer common queries. Overall, it streamlines customer communication, fostering engagement and enhancing support efficiency.

Overview

Intercom
HQ
California, United States
Founded
2011
Country availability
Global
Customer Support
Customer Success
Sales

Cledara’s Take

As customer service solutions go, Intercom is a market leader—and for good reason. It provides companies with a comprehensive range of ways to interact with their customers, from AI-powered chatbots to push notifications, newsletters to help centers. Despite being feature-rich, the platform is refreshingly easy to use. It also provides good analytics insights to help you keep improving your customer communication. There are cheaper platforms out there, but if you’re prepared to pay for it, Intercom offers everything you need to foster a close relationship with your users.

Brad van Leeuwen
Cledara's Take author
Founder & COO at Cledara

How much does Intercom cost?

Intercom’s pricing depends on the size of your business, the features you plan to use and the number of seats you require.

Plans and pricing

Company size
Lower price
Median price
Upper price
0-50 Staff
Lower Price
Median Price
Upper Price
0-50 Staff
$
1558
$
5222
$
9701
50-100 Staff
Lower Price
Median Price
Upper Price
50-100 Staff
$
4755
$
12054
$
28850
100-150 Staff
Lower Price
Median Price
Upper Price
100-150 Staff
$
1346
$
6858
$
18656

Open Pricing Index

What is Intercom used for?

According to reviews from its users, these are the main use cases for Intercom.

Use cases

Customer support

Intercom helps streamline customer support by providing a centralized system for support teams to manage and respond to customer inquiries. Support agents each have their own inbox, where they can work through customer queries, replying via live chat or email.

Customer engagement

As well as providing support to your users when they need it, Intercom allows you to engage with them proactively. You can send notifications, emails, or website banners to lists of specific customers. You can also create multiple Help Centers and News Centers tailored to audience subsets.

Main features

  • Live chat
    Intercom helps businesses offer live chat support, allowing customers to communicate with their support agents in real time. Each member of your support team gets their own inbox, where you can assign tickets to them and track their customer conversations.
  • Help center
    Intercom allows you to create a searchable knowledge base with articles to answer common customer questions. You can even create Help Centers for separate audience segments, if, for example, you have customers on different membership tiers.
  • Email marketing
    You can use Intercom to send automated email sequences to onboard and convert users or make them aware of upcoming changes to your product.
  • Chatbots
    Intercom allows you to train your own custom chatbot to provide support when human agents are unavailable. These are driven by AI.
  • Reporting and analytics
    Intercom offers extensive reporting and analytics features so you can track live chat and customer support performance and see how users are responding to your help center articles.

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What do people think of Intercom?

We’ve looked at reviews across a number of platforms and summarized the sentiment of Intercom users. Here are some of the aspects customers value about it, and some which could be improved.

View on G2 (4.5 stars) View on Capterra (4.5 stars)

Highlights

  • Customer communication
    The overwhelming sentiment from Intercom’s reviewers is that this is a seamless way to interact with users, with a range of options to make communication about your product fast and easy. Plus, it’s simple to manage support agents’ workflows via Intercom.
  • Proactive support features
    Several reviewers shouted out Intercom’s proactive support features, which allow you to flag product updates to your users with banners, emails, tooltips, and notifications.
  • No learning curve
    Several users mentioned that it’s easy to get up-to-speed with using Intercom with very little training. It’s also easy for end users to navigate Intercom’s chat features and help center.
  • AI-powered chatbot
    Some reviews praise the AI Chatbot feature, which you can train to give answers to your customers’ most common questions, and save your support agents’ time.

Concerns

  • Pricing of add-ons
    Some customers disliked having to pay extra to unlock advanced features, and consider the pricing structure quite complicated.
  • Introduction of new features
    A handful of reviews mentioned that Intercom seems to release new features in Beta mode, before they’re fully developed, and be slow to roll out the more polished versions.
  • Support times
    Ironically for a customer service solution, some reviewers mentioned that it took longer than they’d hoped for Intercom’s own support agents to reply to queries.

Intercom security and compliance

Intercom

is compliant with:

SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR

What are the alternatives to Intercom?

Intercom is a very comprehensive customer service platform, but if you’re considering a subscription, it’s worth also examining some alternatives. LiveChat might be more appropriate for customers who prefer a lower price point, and Zendesk may be a better match if you don’t plan to make use of Intercom’s sales and marketing features.

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