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Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

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Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#41

Post by ai_fry_ur_brain »

jmuguy wrote: post #30

Intercom is definitely one of those SaaS that I figured had essentially zero value prop once businesses figured out how to train their own support agents, so congrats to them for exiting before that happens.

Why would businesses do that when they can pay a fraction of a ML departments salary to a company like fin?

This is the same reasoning people use to say SaaS is dead, but it makes no sense. Rolling things yourself is often 10x more costly and not worth it, even with agents you need to pay 5-10 guys 150k-250k a year to build and train your own agent, why not pay fin 250k flat and not deal with any of it? Same goes with basically all other software that has nothing to do with your core product.

SaaS is alive and well and will continue to be.

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#42

Post by twodave »

For years I always felt if I got a human on the other end I could understand that a company valued me as a customer enough to provide fantastic support. I could still understand the trade-off if I called and got someone barely-understandable, as long as they can still solve my issue. AI support agents tend to just make up reasons they can’t help you or you’re holding it wrong, or they are only able to do things the UI already allows, so they are actually of negative value to me.

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#43

Post by gib444 »

s_dev wrote: post #13
asim wrote: post #10

When did intercom change its name to Fin?

30 days ago. No joke. https://www.intercom.com/blog/today-intercom-becomes-fin/

"Fin is clearly our future" by choosing a word which means "end" in Latin and Spanish ... LOL

Almost like a pre-announcement about the acquisition?

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#44

Post by embedding-shape »

ceejayoz wrote: post #34
embedding-shape wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I'll bite, what is this main issue that seemingly everyone but you are able to see?

Talk to random non tech people about customer service bots for five minutes and you’ll find most people see it.

I'm guessing parent is not talking about something super obvious to the rest of us, that'd be disappointing.

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#45

Post by dd8601fn »

cpursley wrote: post #25

Wild, the AI support and bots suck so bad, I've literally lost sales due to them. No matter how much support docs and history you feed them with for context, they just don't cut it. People would rather wait for a real person than go in loops with a wrong/bad support answer...

There’s essentially no such thing as good case deflection. All of it exists at the expense of customer experience.

But businesses will always chase that dream of reduced customer contact, so Salesforce will keep selling it to them.

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#46

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

AI support agents, chatbots, etc. on web sites these days are the equivalent to search engines during the dot com boom. Everyone felt that having a search engine on their dot com was the killer feature that was going to win. There were a lot of companies building search engine technologies and selling them too. Now its ubiquitous that most ecommerce sites have a search bar but nobody cares about the underlying technology much, its consolidated and commoditized.

Good on Intercom for getting acquired.

If we're seeing larger consolidation/acquisitions happen, does that mean the hype train has hit a key station?

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#47

Post by projektfu »

I always hated seeing Intercom bugs when a simple help menu would work better, but it proves that being annoying is a winning strategy. As my various SaaS packages have switched to AI bugs, I have never had one successfully help me until I say, "Can I please speak to a human?"

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#48

Post by conception »

twodave wrote: post #42

For years I always felt if I got a human on the other end I could understand that a company valued me as a customer enough to provide fantastic support. I could still understand the trade-off if I called and got someone barely-understandable, as long as they can still solve my issue. AI support agents tend to just make up reasons they can’t help you or you’re holding it wrong, or they are only able to do things the U…

I would say this means the problem you are having isn’t documented by the company then. AI help agents are just fancy documentation search engines. If it’s documented someplace they do well, if not they try to help but ultimately can’t.

I’ll note this failure mode generally applies on tier 1/2 support with humans as well.

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#50

Post by Robdel12 »

Huge congrats to the intercom team on that! Intercom was pretty great for me during my Percy support years. Their current AI direction is rough, though. When I went to use them for my product I was (am?) building, I found intercom unrecognizable with the entire ai pivot. Honestly made me sad but that’s how it is these days
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