At smpl.io (which we sold in 2020), we used Intercom’s messaging product to guide customers through a fairly intensive onboarding process. When potential customers first visited our site, we’d use Intercom’s visitor features to keep tabs on how many times they visited the site, and to see which pages they visited most often. Intercom’s messaging features were used to gently guide prospects to a free trial, or to ask us any questions they might have prior to setting up an account. Once they created their account, they were added to a drip-messaging campaign which helped guide them through a fairly complicated onboarding process, collecting feedback and sending them encouragement along the way.
Thankfully, Intercom’s documentation was extremely well-written and easy to use, and they provide heaps of best practices on the Resources section of their site. We used Intercom’s custom events API to track key points in the onboarding user journey, and set up email campaigns to follow up with users who never completed these processes. Intercom was also invaluable for customer support – having a real-time chat widget embedded in the site was such a superpower for our tiny 3-person team.
For the code school I helped run as Technical Director
[Gymnasium](thegymnasium.com uses Intercom to track user journeys from registration onward. Because Gymnasium isn’t a subscription-based business, it was far more important to be able to use Intercom to track events in users’ history. Gymnasium is a free, online code school which serves as one of the first steps in a talent acquisition funnel for parent company Aquent. Our small 5-person team was able to use Intercom to send real-time, meaningful user activity data to Aquent’s recruitment.
Pros
Intercom’s documentation is incredible, and integration was a breeze. They’ve done a great job of catering to developers.
Many, many add-on products to suit your needs as your product grows, like a hosted Help Center for your users.
Intercom has a generous early-stage startup pricing plan, which made our initial commitment a no-brainer.
Cons
Many options for customization also means many options to choose from, which can cause implementations to stall. My advice: try something, and make changes once you see how things are working
Intercom’s pricing is convoluted and confusing - after the early stage bliss period came up, things got expensive very quickly. This is fine if your company’s growth is up-and-to-the-right, but also presents a fairly large risk for companies that don’t grow quickly enough
Some ad-blockers straight up block Intercom’s script from loading - meaning certain users never saw our lovingly-crafted messaging, and never had their events tracked, etc. This made for a highly degraded experience for a measurable portion of our user base
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I’ll share some of my experience to get things started:
I’ve used Intercom extensively:
For the SaaS I cofounded
At smpl.io (which we sold in 2020), we used Intercom’s messaging product to guide customers through a fairly intensive onboarding process. When potential customers first visited our site, we’d use Intercom’s visitor features to keep tabs on how many times they visited the site, and to see which pages they visited most often. Intercom’s messaging features were used to gently guide prospects to a free trial, or to ask us any questions they might have prior to setting up an account. Once they created their account, they were added to a drip-messaging campaign which helped guide them through a fairly complicated onboarding process, collecting feedback and sending them encouragement along the way.
Thankfully, Intercom’s documentation was extremely well-written and easy to use, and they provide heaps of best practices on the Resources section of their site. We used Intercom’s custom events API to track key points in the onboarding user journey, and set up email campaigns to follow up with users who never completed these processes. Intercom was also invaluable for customer support – having a real-time chat widget embedded in the site was such a superpower for our tiny 3-person team.
For the code school I helped run as Technical Director
[Gymnasium](thegymnasium.com uses Intercom to track user journeys from registration onward. Because Gymnasium isn’t a subscription-based business, it was far more important to be able to use Intercom to track events in users’ history. Gymnasium is a free, online code school which serves as one of the first steps in a talent acquisition funnel for parent company Aquent. Our small 5-person team was able to use Intercom to send real-time, meaningful user activity data to Aquent’s recruitment.
Pros
Cons