Why we Dumped Intercom and Moved to Crisp (and so should you!)

A few years ago a consultant convinced us to integrate Intercom into our website. In retrospect this was a mistake which I’ll discuss in more depth below. We migrated away from Intercom last month. That was a great decision!
If you still use Intercom I suggest you take a long look at some of the fresh competition.

We moved to Crisp which is more affordable and a superior product.

But let’s start by itemizing what is so bad about Intercom.

Loyalty

A loyal customer/employee is crucial for business growth and success. A key to loyalty is being loyal to begin with. We try to be as loyal as possible to our customers on many fronts (compatibility, support, refunds etc.).

One such aspect is pricing. We raised our basic subscription price in 2015, we still have a lot of subscribers on the old price and those are our best subscribers!

These are guys that kept their subscription continuously since 2015, they are loyal and we value them even if they pay a very low price.

Intercom recently announced a price structure change. This change would have increased our already high costs by a factor of five!

They announced that insane change by email to one of our agents (not even the account holder), one month in advance. Just so we are clear, we were already thousands of dollars annually for Intercom to begin with. When we contacted them and asked them about it their only response was to try to get us to agree to a sales call…

Unfortunately Intercom a type of tool that needs deep integration into the business process which is why we didn’t remove it before. The work of removing it was painstaking and getting the same level of integration with Crisp will take months. However, we decided there was no one to talk to and this cinched the deal.

Choosing Crisp

Unfortunately the field in which Intercom operates is so crowded you can only see the companies that have heavy VC money behind them e.g. drip et al.

These companies have roughly the same feature set as Intercom and similar pricing structures to cover the ridiculous VC valuations. Outside of the states you can find far more competitive options that go well beyond the offerings from Intercom. I spent weeks looking through such tools and most of them were pretty similar.

Crisp stood out. It has roughly the same feature set as Intercom with a few additional features and it has simple/affordable pricing. The support from the team over there is great and new features pop up often.

Crisp vs. Intercom

Let’s put the price to the side for a moment and try to discuss the products on their own merit. I can’t say I did a thorough analysis but as a heavy Intercom/Crisp user these are my opinions.

Lets start with a couple of things I liked in Intercom which are still unavailable in Crisp:

• Threaded discussions in the chat are handled better
• Analytics on email sending is better (not in website though)

Leads

The biggest problem I had with Intecom is that they separate leads from users and charge the same for both.

A lead is a person who visited the site but you don’t know who he is. A user is a logged in user. If a lead enters his email address into intercom he’s still a separate lead and isn’t merged with his user account. This is supposedly for security so a person can’t impersonate a user… But that’s a red herring. They could have marked “unverified” entries or provided a link between the two accounts.

The reality is that you end up with multiple redundant accounts and some of your user support goes into the lead while other goes into the user. That means conversations are lost and become invisible. The only real purpose of this is to overcharge on leads, we literally took time every month to delete leads to keep our price manageable as leads are redundant… But we also deleted user data as a result.

One Intercom user who was communicating with us was complaining about something. When our agent tried to understand what he was complaining about he asked her to look in his chat history. But it was hidden in a lead and was hard to find in intercoms UI. He didn’t believe our agent who said she can’t see the history he was talking about. I was eventually able to find his other account after a digging through piles of leads.

Again, this boils down to a company that over monetizes its users.

User Accounts

Crisps insight into users is much easier to read. They color code events and place them in a sensible location.

I can now look at a specific user and understand what’s going on where in Intercom this was a mess. It was made even worse in Intercoms redesign which made the UI harder to navigate.

Mobile

Intercom was unusable on mobile. There was no way to disable it there.
Crisp can be disabled on mobile but is usable there to begin with. It doesn’t annoy.

People would complain about our site a lot mostly because of Intercom. When we looked at it this almost always boiled down to complaints on our mobile website.

Gifs

Intercom added the most annoying feature in history: gif support.

Users started sending us animated gifs. I know some people like these things but for us that was stupid and redundant. We’re trying to support developers and prefer to keep this to the point. Having a distracting animation in the conversation made it unreadable.

Crisp has a “while you wait play a game” feature, but it can be turned off (which we did). They let us adapt the way the widget looks/behaves to the type of business we have.

I commented about the gif issue in Intercom’s public blog post and a lot of users chimed in complaining about it. Intercoms solution was swift and simple: they disabled commenting on future blog posts… This goes back to my point about customer loyalty. That feature is still there.

Visitor View

Crisp has an excellent visitor view. It has given me a level of insight into our site visitors that neither Google Analytics or Intercom have given. It might be because we integrated Google Analytics badly though.

It’s similar to the realtime view in analytics but it goes much further.

Hacker Friendly

The tools are very hacker friendly, markup and REST API’s. Developers are responsive and proactive in their attitude.

There was developer support in Intercom too but after working for a while trying to implement basic functionality to complement our standard transactional emails we eventually gave up as the event processing system in Intercom is just horrible.

Make the Move

The way I see it, Crisp is moving to answer customer needs. Intercom is moving to increase monetization. I don’t think anyone should use Intercom regardless of the price. It’s a company culture issue that’s probably unfixable.

It’s been a month since we moved and so far I’m very happy with the result.