Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I stopped using Intercom

blog.gingerlime.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 63 posts

Re: I stopped using Intercom

#51

Post by cepth »

Cliffsides wrote: post #43

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…

I’ve personally rolled out a Freshworks implementation, and am quite happy with their products.

They offer Freshdesk for a customer support portal/ticketing system, and Freshchat for live chat. Total cost is a fraction of what you’d pay for Intercom, and the products are continuously adding new features.

Re: I stopped using Intercom

#52

Post by erikrothoff »

gaia wrote: post #36
erikrothoff wrote: post #24

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…

Could they be as bad as NewRelic sales people?

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.

Re: I stopped using Intercom

#53

Post by erikrothoff »

dylanz wrote: post #31
erikrothoff wrote: post #24

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…

Is this with their current pricing? We had huge bills for a while but their last pricing change ended up saving us a ton. Our bill went from about $2k/mo to about $300/mo. Before that we had implemented a custom job that kept our user count down, but we don't need to run that anymore.

Really curious, what is/was your active user count? Our problem is that we are a freemium product with 150k+ registered users, and maybe 60k active (and a fraction of that paying), of which we only have ~5k in an active campaign pipeline at a given time. So to be able to use Intercom we’d have to create a job to continuously archive a large portion every day to not have our bills skyrocket to bankrupt land (we’re not VC funded).

Re: I stopped using Intercom

#54

Post by troydavis »

Cliffsides wrote: post #43

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…

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.

Re: I stopped using Intercom

#55

Post by jmkni »

seanwilson wrote: post #23

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 eat…

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

Re: I stopped using Intercom

#56

Post by gingerlime »

ddebernardy wrote: post #44

> 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 spec…

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.

Re: I stopped using Intercom

#57

Post by retreatguru »

erikrothoff wrote: post #24

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…

We recently saw our price got from $375/mo to over $1000/mo for no new benefits. We are looking to consolidate users or find alternatives. We mainly just use it for support.

Re: I stopped using Intercom

#58

Post by Pinguman »

Cliffsides wrote: post #43

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…

Price went up 3x for me. Shifted to Freshchat from Freshworks and really happy I made the move.

Re: I stopped using Intercom

#59

Post by 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.

Re: I stopped using Intercom

#60

Post by dmeagor »

Cliffsides wrote: post #43

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…

If it's just feedback you want then you might consider creating a slideout sidebar survey using kwiksurveys (disclaimer: my company). The survey code partially preloads the form so it appears quickly when the button you attach it to is clicked.
Post reply on HN