Skip to main content
Answered

Seeking Feedback on AI Automation Solutions for Intercom


Hi,

We have been using Intercom for our customer support for several months now and we are exploring AI automation solutions. Initially, we built workflows to handle basic support tickets, but we quickly found this approach to be unsustainable, as it became burdensome to maintain and scale.

We also tried Intercom Fin, which we found to be an improvement over workflows. However, it is quite expensive, occasionally provides incorrect answers, and struggles with more complex tickets. With Fin charging $1 per resolution and our support agents resolving tickets at about $0.66 each, we decided to explore alternative solutions.

I was tasked with identifying a viable option, so I’ve reviewed nearly all the apps listed under the Automation category in the Intercom App Store.

There are approximately 140 apps in the Automation category, and we focused on identifying those that can automatically respond to customer messages. From this list, we found over 20 apps that either offer or claim to offer this capability. Below is my research summarization, with a focus on two key factors: affordability and functionality.

Among the 20+ apps, “Foundkit AI Assistant,” “Fedra GPT,” and “Zane” appear to be discontinued, as their websites are no longer accessible. Additionally, "Gus" is limited to Spanish in its console, so we excluded it from consideration as well.

Name

Skip Reason

Foundkit AI Assistant

website not available

Fedra GPT

website not available

Zane

website not available

Gus

Only Spanish in its console

Our boss is cheap, so we’re looking for affordable solutions that offer a free trial, allowing us to thoroughly evaluate them before making a full commitment. Some apps lack transparent pricing or require a credit card to proceed, which we find less convenient. We value clear and upfront pricing, as the absence of public pricing often indicates higher costs. As a result, we decided to skip the following apps.

Name

Pricing

Free Trial

Siena AI

No public pricing

No

Parabolic

No public pricing

No

Forethought

No public pricing

No

DeepConverse

No public pricing

No

IrisAgent

No public pricing

Yes

AI Chat Support

$199/month, 500 responses

No

Threado AI

$249/month, 1000 queries

No

Ultimate Chatbot (Zendesk)

$1.5/resolution

No

EmbedAI

$19/month, 2000 messages

7-day trial, but need credit card

Among the remaining apps, some rely on rule-based systems combined with predefined templates to answer user questions, while others use workflow-based solutions that require defining and managing workflows to set up automation. We find these approaches outdated, as managing workflows can be cumbersome, and they often fail to handle complex cases effectively. Additionally, users frequently follow the flow only to receive answers that don’t meet their expectations. As a result, we decided to eliminate these options after initial testing.

Name

Pricing

Free Trial

Function

Snoooz

$19/month 1 user, 10,000 messages

7-day trial

rule based templates

Respell.ai

$59.99/month, 2000 tasks

125 tasks free each month

flow-based automation

UChat

$15/month, 1000 bot users

200 free bot users

flow-based automation

Botfuel Answers

$59/month, 1000 conversations

250 credits

flow-based automation

Moveo AI

$999/month, 1000 conversations

30-day trial

flow-based automation

Chatlayer

$399, 1000 conversations

14-day trial

flow-based automation

Meya

$999/month, 5000 MAU

14-day trial

flow-based automation

Finally, we identified four apps that meet our requirements. Among them, Quickchat, Aidan, and Airbot are chatbots capable of automatically responding to customer messages. Aissist.io, on the other hand, offers two distinct modes: auto-draft and auto-reply. This approach seems more practical, as it allows us to start with auto-draft and transition to auto-reply once the AI is fully prepared and optimized.

Name

Pricing

Free Trial

Function

Quickchat AI

$379/month, 5 user, 5 language, unlimited messages

7-day trial

auto-reply chatbot,

human handoff, smart lead generation available on premium plan

Aidan

$149/month, 1000 conversations

30-day trial

auto-reply chatbot and email, human handoff

Airbot

$299/month, 1000 interactions

7-day trial

auto-reply chatbot

Aissist.io

$0.05/message(base engine), $0.15/message(advanced engine)

1000 free quota each month

auto-reply and auto-draft to omni-channel, escalation, tagging, action, followup, insight

One thing worth noting is that most apps may have different user interfaces, but they generally function in the same way. You provide instructions (often referred to as AI guidelines, which are essentially prompts for GPT) along with a knowledge base (such as a website, PDF, etc.). When a user asks a question, the AI searches the knowledge base and combines the results with the provided instructions to generate an answer.

However, based on my findings, this approach falls short for more complex questions. Additionally, when the knowledge base is too large, the AI can become overwhelmed with excessive information, leading to confusion and inaccurate answers. Feeding the AI concise and relevant information is crucial for accuracy.

Among all the options I reviewed, only Aissist.io addresses this issue effectively. Beyond the standard instructions and knowledge base, it offers a smart tag feature, which allows for specific contextual instructions tailored to particular scenarios. This fine-grained approach significantly improves the accuracy of AI responses.

This is just my initial research. Does anyone have experience with these apps? If so, I’d appreciate it if you could share your thoughts, including the pros and cons of these solutions.

Best answer by Julian Murray

Understood, this is what I expected the answer was thanks for clarifying. If calculation is just on pay per hour, than it is cheaper. If the calculation included other employee costs, light, heat, HR, systems etc and a minimum of 1.5x FTE cost. than the 0.7/resolution would look more like similar cost to Fin resolution, but still in the range of queries you stated above regardless of your calculation. Would be keen to hear about your final solution when you select thanks. 

View original
Did this topic help you find an answer to your question?

9 replies

  • New Participant
  • 1 reply
  • January 16, 2025

Hey there,

I’m one of the founders of Aidan (My AskAI), happy to answer any questions!

To your points above:

- We spend a lot of time working with customers who have pretty complex questions, e.g. Customer.io, a B2B email platform with a lot of integrations and API docs, they are currently seeing AI resolution rates in excess of 65% (and climbing), you can read a case study we did with them here.
- While it is definitely important that the quality of the information going into the bot is high, we have customers with over 10,000 pieces of content performing very strongly, so it is more a question of quality of docs versus quantity when it comes down to whether the AI will identify the right one for answering with.
- We also offer custom instructions, tagging and more for further customization.

If you have any other questions or want to try us out, let me know, happy to help you get set up!

Mike

p.s. Here’s a case study with Freecash, currently using our AI to answer over 50k tickets/mo in Intercom.


  • New Participant
  • 1 reply
  • January 23, 2025

@Production AI have you tried gradient labs agent? we’ve just started using it and have been very impressed (integrated w. intercom)


Julian Murray
  • New Participant
  • 3 replies
  • January 23, 2025

@Production AI  Curious to see calculation inputs for support agent resolution and it being cheaper than Fin, which is incredibly competitively priced. Also charged on resolution and not conversation touch points. Not questioning your maths but would be keen to understand an scenario where human works out cheaper for engagement than Fin? Not something I have seen in other service business cases. Are the queries very simple and typically first touch / quick resolution? 


  • Author
  • New Participant
  • 3 replies
  • January 25, 2025
Julian Murray wrote:

@Production AI  Curious to see calculation inputs for support agent resolution and it being cheaper than Fin, which is incredibly competitively priced. Also charged on resolution and not conversation touch points. Not questioning your maths but would be keen to understand an scenario where human works out cheaper for engagement than Fin? Not something I have seen in other service business cases. Are the queries very simple and typically first touch / quick resolution? 

If you hire your agent from Southeast Asia or East Europe, or South America, the price is much cheaper than an agent in US. The $0.7/resolution is very common for our industry. Because we pay our human agent about $6 per hour.


Julian Murray
  • New Participant
  • 3 replies
  • Answer
  • January 27, 2025

Understood, this is what I expected the answer was thanks for clarifying. If calculation is just on pay per hour, than it is cheaper. If the calculation included other employee costs, light, heat, HR, systems etc and a minimum of 1.5x FTE cost. than the 0.7/resolution would look more like similar cost to Fin resolution, but still in the range of queries you stated above regardless of your calculation. Would be keen to hear about your final solution when you select thanks. 


Well, lets face it: Fin is completely wrong in a lot of situations. Comes with old solutions that are fixed ages ago and is very expencive. It is charging also for the automatic handled self support articles that are now done for free. So Fin would cost us WAY more than a support agent. We have thousends of tickets handled through the self support now and are NOT going to pay for a failing Fin. Fin is lightyears behint on what is going on in the world right now. They want to sell me Fin so I ALWAYS see in gray what the answer would be. Well happy to NOT active Fin.

 

Super interesting atricle.


By the way, I talked to some reasoning AI and asked for an AI that can mimic my style and connect through API to Intercom. It's interesting to see that all these solutions are not in the app store. Are they too good? This is my list I got back:

https://www.ada.cx/

https://www.zendesk.com/service/ai/ai-agents/#

https://www.digitalgenius.com/

https://forethought.ai/

 

I did not dive into them yet since I got distracted by this message ;-)

 

 


  • Author
  • New Participant
  • 3 replies
  • February 6, 2025
Siebrand Dijkstra wrote:

By the way, I talked to some reasoning AI and asked for an AI that can mimic my style and connect through API to Intercom. It's interesting to see that all these solutions are not in the app store. Are they too good? This is my list I got back:

https://www.ada.cx/

https://www.zendesk.com/service/ai/ai-agents/#

https://www.digitalgenius.com/

https://forethought.ai/

 

I did not dive into them yet since I got distracted by this message ;-)

 

 

@Siebrand Dijkstra I did check Ada and Forethought. Forethought is available on Intercom, I did not see Ada on Intercom. However, both of them do not provide public pricing. So I think they will not be cheaper than Fin. Pricing is very import to our boss. So we did not check those solutions. For Zendesk, it is another customer support platform, and its pricing is similar to Fin, it charges about $1.5/resolution if the volume is small, it gets cheaper with larger volume. I did not check digitalgenius because it is not available on Intercom. We are happy with https://aissist.io/ right now.


  • New Participant
  • 1 reply
  • February 6, 2025

Thanks for the summary and valuable information. This is very helpful for newcomers like us.


Cookie policy

We use cookies to enhance and personalize your experience. If you accept you agree to our full cookie policy. Learn more about our cookies.

 
Cookie settings