Hi Monish,

I'm Ruth and I lead Intercom's Support team in the EMEA region.

I'm sorry to hear you haven't been happy with our response times. While we strive to get back to all customers as quickly as we can, we set an expectation of a business day as we can experience backlogs from time to time (e.g. right after a new product release or if we experience higher inbound volume that we were expecting). However we're actively looking at ways to route more urgent conversations for faster responses which will hopefully align more with your expectations.

With regards to a paid support offering, we constantly review these packages to ensure that we're meeting customer expectations on both service and price. We will share details of any proposed changes to these offerings in due course.

On our bug updates process, our team doesn't keep tickets open right now for Support teammate efficiency reasons as it would be too much for each teammate to manage. Our team is automatically notified when a bug has an update; the conversation reopens in their inbox so this is the trigger for them to reach back out to our customers with news.

We have internal processes that determine the priority of issues by taking things into account like severity and how widespread it is, and as part of this internal process, we do have an open connection to our R&D teams in urgent cases. Our R&D teams use these internal processes to prioritise where they can have the most impact for most customers, which is why not everyone will always see their bugs getting prioritised immediately. With our roadmaps and products always evolving, it is difficult for R&D to give an ETA on bugs that are currently not bubbling up as part of that internal prioritisation system. I appreciate that this is not ideal for you when you have a very specific issue you are looking to have fixed. We are cautious that we do not want to set incorrect expectations with you either on these particular types of bugs, so as not to give false hope. I have flagged your views here with our R&D Operations team to take into consideration for further improvements of our bug management systems in the future.

However I'll also take a fresh look at your recent conversations with us and the bugs attached and see if there's anything we can do for you.

I really appreciate you flagging this feedback for our team as it will help us understand where we need to keep making improvements and ensure you have a seamless experience with us. I'm happy to discuss this more with you 1:1 if you like. Feel free to open a conversation in our Messenger if you'd like to chat with me. You can just reference this thread and a frontline teammate will pass the conversation over to me.

Ruth

I just made a complaint to my AE, because it took almost two days for them to reply a simple question.

Thank you for responding @ruth o​ 

Regarding prioritization of submitted tickets, that's the piece that concerns me a lot because when I submit a ticket via the intercom chat/messenger, it doesn't ask me what the priority is, etc., This is concerning because as a customer, I don't have any visibility or assurance that if I do submit a high-priority ticket, how will I know when to expect a response from Intercom - 2 hours, 4 hours, 24 hours? At the very least, like most ticketing systems we have with other vendors of ours, I would expect your chat/messenger to ask me "what urgency is this" or something along those lines. but it doesn't do that today. It almost sounds like I'm at the mercy of intercom support and can only hope that someone sees my ticket and responds in a reasonable amount of time.

Regarding fixing bugs, yeah, I agree that it's not practical to fix all bugs however again this goes back to priority. A good example of this would be that I filed a bug that when I apply a user tag to multiple users, I cannot report on that tag - period. This is a blocker, and I'm guessing it's also impacting other customers because your support team confirmed this bug. However, it went into the bug "black hole," and so I'm here wondering when I will ever be able to report on user tags. I asked most people in my team who frequently file bugs with your support team and I myself have been with Mode (my employer) using Intercom for almost a year. To date, we have never received a notification (that we know of) from your support team that a bug has been fixed. To me, what that means is Intercom has not fixed any bug reported by Mode Analytics in over a year! The perception is pretty bad. In most cases, it's a bug or a product feature request - neither of which has any resolution timelines associated with it.

Hi Fábio,

I'll reach out to you via Intercom to follow up and see what happened here!

Ruth

Hi Monish,

On prioritisation and expectations, we're looking into how we can use our bot flows to convey urgency and our new Tickets release to set a status you can clearly see. We're in the exploratory phase with each of these but I'm hoping we'll be able to release incremental improvements to our processes that will help address your concerns.

My team are reviewing the bug you've referenced to see if we can share an update. We'll reach out to you via Intercom when we know more!

@ruth o​ thank you! looking forward to it!

Intercom customer support is absolutely atrocious.
I have been an old time user and I remember enjoying working with their team.
In my eyes they have no credibility in support.
Self-serve, drip and lead work is what they do now. 

Support answer time is many days when you get an answer and the answer quality is soooo poor.
Either you have a simple question that you can answer yourself or use fin but if you need any descent SLA look elsewhere. Unfortunately when you go down the Intercom route for years it’s hard to go out and things have deteriorated so hard and fast but they got you and don’t care.