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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

#181

Post by sgarman »

sneakymichael wrote: post #103
kreutz wrote: post #33

This sucks. I love Intercom. I hate Salesforce. I do not have confidence in Salesforce to be good stewards. Will never forgive how badly they've botched Heroku.

Woof, yes! Though I'm glad Heroku remains, and I ought to also be glad that it has been stable all these years, …it's clearly neglected. The very first interaction I have with Heroku is a two-factor sign-in, and …it's this horrible page hosted on salesforce.com, which doesn't have retina graphics (i.e. is blurry on screens Apple have used for 15+ years), doesn't work properly with automatic one-time-code generators (…

That new salesforce powered heroku status dashboard is a labyrinth of sadness.

https://status.salesforce.com/products/Heroku

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

#182

Post by tencentshill »

vanuatu wrote: post #145
janderson215 wrote: post #99

I see a lot of negativity in regards to using AI as a customer service agent. I have only spoken with 1 and that was calling Starlink customer support. It was easily better than 95% of customer support experiences I’ve had. My guess is the bad experiences have to do with bad execution. I’m sure some companies think they can just plug in AI and their job is done. Obviously that is wrong, but done right, the experience…

+1 its surprising to HN tech crowd but a well implemented support agent gets higher reviews and successful resolutions than humans

Are frustrated hangups before any resolution is reached a part of that data?

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

#183

Post by vanuatu »

tencentshill wrote: post #182
vanuatu wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 its surprising to HN tech crowd but a well implemented support agent gets higher reviews and successful resolutions than humans

Are frustrated hangups before any resolution is reached a part of that data?

yes, it counts as unresolved

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

#184

Post by [deleted] »

Nicholas_C wrote: post #178
janderson215 wrote: post #99

I see a lot of negativity in regards to using AI as a customer service agent. I have only spoken with 1 and that was calling Starlink customer support. It was easily better than 95% of customer support experiences I’ve had. My guess is the bad experiences have to do with bad execution. I’m sure some companies think they can just plug in AI and their job is done. Obviously that is wrong, but done right, the experience…

It's all about the execution. Most of our customer's prefer AI (per their feedback, so there is some selection bias) since they can get quick responses 24/7 rather than wait. That said there are still many cases where you need human intervention and it can be frustrating to have to get through the AI first (my experience with Stripe's AI support).

[deleted]

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

#185

Post by pixelready »

janderson215 wrote: post #99

I see a lot of negativity in regards to using AI as a customer service agent. I have only spoken with 1 and that was calling Starlink customer support. It was easily better than 95% of customer support experiences I’ve had. My guess is the bad experiences have to do with bad execution. I’m sure some companies think they can just plug in AI and their job is done. Obviously that is wrong, but done right, the experience…

Yeah, I think AI support is great for those low effort calls where someone wants something simple and clear and company policy is set up to just give it to them. That’s why a lot of people like Amazon’s bot, it has direct access to account details and can auto-approve simple things like a return that is slightly outside the return window etc…

But what you shouldn’t do is try to dress up adversarial policies behind a friendly customer service bot and then fire your entire support staff. That is immediately obvious and will drive people bonkers.

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

#186

Post by vanuatu »

ceejayoz wrote: post #170
vanuatu wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the company that implemented it (e.g fin) is liable, which is why customers pay for them

Is this a joke? https://www.intercom.com/legal/terms-and-policies/additional... > Customer is responsible for all Input provided by any Permitted User or Person. > Customer is responsible for its use of the AI Product(s) and Output, including responsibility for determining the ongoing suitability of its use of the AI Product(s) and Output having regard to Customer’s intended use of the AI Product and/or legal and reg…

hmm not sure if that would hold up in court. i was thinking of this case: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatb...

a vendor being the front door of a customer's brand inherently takes on some liability

thanks for the source though i wasnt aware of that

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

#187

Post by sdd2 »

aurareturn wrote: post #149
runako wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Fin prices at $0.99 per outcome. Only for companies with tremendous support volume would it even begin to make sense to build in-house. There's a wide swath of companies that do < (say) 20,000 cases monthly where the economics will never make sense. And a company finds Fin successful as it grows to 20k/mo, why would it decide to take on the headache as it grows to the 50k/mo? or whatever level whe…

The problem is that Fin prices at $0.99 per outcome. Only for companies with tremendous support volume would it even begin to make sense to build in-house. $0.99 could be the profit margin of small ecommerce businesses too so it might not make sense for small businesses.

Man you are delusional.

You clearly have never ran a business and don't understand the dynamics of the make vs buy decision.

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

#188

Post by phillipcarter »

nailer wrote: post #148
phillipcarter wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

For those who are curious (since we don't want to trample curiosity), Eoghan McCabe is a known abuser -- and has even apologized for it in the past -- and he attended David Sack's Trump fundraising event for the Trump 2024 campaign, including getting a photo with the man. He has reversed his stance on immigration (favoring the current admin's policies and ICE expansion), although it was likely the case that he attended as a pro-crypto pusher more than anything else. Whether or not he has significantly invested in crypto is speculation.

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

#189

Post by whstl »

aurareturn wrote: post #109
ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

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. I built an AI support agent in…

Rolling something yourself was a waste of time when SaaS was cheap and competitive.

Not they’re all getting incredibly expensive, even the last few startups I worked at were paying hundreds of thousands of euros for services that were total garbage.

Do I really need a crappy 20k/yr app to help me with my 1:1s? Do I really need a 100k/yr clicks counter that requires two devs to keep running and still heavily miscounts the clicks? Do I need another crappy app to manage my translation JSON files?

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

#190

Post by nitwit005 »

whyage wrote: post #74
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.

AWS has zero value because you can just buy a bunch of servers and rack them. And on and on.

If all you are using on AWS is EC2, I agree that it has no value. You should switch to a much cheaper option.
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