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

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

salesforce.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 261 posts

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

#71

Post by awongh »

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…

afaik you are not the customer for customer support, and in the vast majority of cases human phone support is setup for the opposite case where people just want to be walked through something they can't find in the UI.

So this isn't as much of a financial engineering cost cutting move as it feels like to the type of person who truly calls because the require a human. It truly provides better service to the majority of people because they get their answer faster and more efficiently.

This is also demonstrated in the pricing of these systems at a per "open cases resolved"- they're putting their money where their mouth is.

Of course I'm also personally in the group where I call because I can already read a support page and I really need a human.... It could conceivably put true human support into another tier higher of perceived value.

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

#72

Post by willXare »

light_triad wrote: post #28

Interesting they agreed to sell after their rebrand to Fin a month ago. There's increasing competition in the customer support AI agent space: Sierra valued at $15.8 billion, Decagon at $4.5 billion. It looks like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is trying to compete directly with Sierra, which was started by his ex-Co-CEO Bret Taylor. Also about preventing independent AI support agents from becoming a control point outsi…

[flagged]

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

#73

Post by JumpCrisscross »

alpineman wrote: post #70
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

…why? What would the appropriate multiple between them be?

I can't answer that because it's irrational anyway. I don't know, how many millions of people work in support? Because the assumption that all those jobs will disappear is what is holding up the public valuations

> can't answer that because it's irrational anyway

Not how a valuation argument works! If you’re claiming this shows those valuations are irrational, you should be able to point to why. Otherwise, it’s just a “my vibes are off” comment.

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

#74

Post by whyage »

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.

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

#75

Post by margalabargala »

nerder92 wrote: post #38
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.

This is extremely naive and I’ll invite to try and built something like this and compare it with Fin performance

They didn't say Fin was valueless, they said it would become so in the future. 10 years from now i bet they're right.

Fin is a short term play and that's fine.

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

#76

Post by 3stacks »

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…

Unless it’s a Meta AI support agent, in which case it will bend over backwards for you up to and including resetting other people’s passwords for you. Now that’s service!

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

#77

Post by jmuguy »

ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #41
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 wit…

Well specifically with just the AI agent/customer support product I think businesses would do well to handle this themselves rather than hoping a one size fits all solution from Intercom would serve them. Not just from a bespoke AI solution but also on cost. The other aspects of Intercom's product, the little chat bubble, CRM, can be had for much much less from dozens of competitors.

I think they mostly benefit from time in market and name recognition. The AI angle was a good bet to make when they made it, but is increasingly less of a differentiator.

I don't think SaaS is dead - but I think for a product like Intercom, that is very expensive, they get eaten alive by smaller SaaS + in-house AI agent.

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

#78

Post by thepasch »

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've gotten two refunds I wasn't even sure I'd be eligible for without any hitches or issues through entirely AI support bots. As with many things it's always a matter of how it's implemented.

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

#79

Post by osivertsson »

conception wrote: post #48
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.

Customer support needs to handle edge cases. They are not documented because the company does not even know they are problems yet. Many companies win and lose here. Customers that bother going to customer support are often loyal and have valid concerns or insights. Use this information to win!

In my career a few customers that bothered enough to contact customer support helped us find hardware problems that slipped through at the factory and that caused problems for thousands.

Customer support can also feedback frustrations back to dev teams allowing them to build products that feel polished even when it could be labeled as not-a-bug.

My point being: There is a huge signal in customer support. Don’t just waste it by slapping AI on it.

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

#80

Post by ramblurr »

light_triad wrote: post #28

Interesting they agreed to sell after their rebrand to Fin a month ago. There's increasing competition in the customer support AI agent space: Sierra valued at $15.8 billion, Decagon at $4.5 billion. It looks like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is trying to compete directly with Sierra, which was started by his ex-Co-CEO Bret Taylor. Also about preventing independent AI support agents from becoming a control point outsi…

This is the second company (that I know of) that got acquired shortly after an AI pivot and re-brand. See: OpenAI to acquire Ona https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48491821
Post reply on HN