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Intercom Customer Support - response time experience?

  • 12 October 2022
  • 6 replies
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M
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This is not really a messenger-related question, but I'm really frustrated.

 

What's everyone's experience with the Intercom Customer Support team in terms of responsiveness? I consistently have a really bad one. Most of my tickets take around 24 hours to receive the first response. When I chatted with their Account rep/CSM, I was told that 24 hours is "expected" - which I think is really ridiculous. I would expect something a bit shorter like 4 hours or 8 hours. This basically means that I don't even get timely answers to urgent questions.

 

The Account rep/CSM told me about the "Premium" support option - which also seems VERY expensive and something that I feel like most vendors offers at a way lesser cost.

 

Additionally, if there is a product bug, they refuse to keep the ticket open even if I ask them to since they have no ETA. There doesn't seem to be a way to escalate a product bug as well.

 

What's everyone's experience and how have you worked around this (if)?

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Best answer by Ruth O 19 October 2022, 19:46

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Ruth O
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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

E

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

M
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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.

Ruth O
Userlevel 2
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Hi Fábio,

 

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

 

Ruth

Ruth O
Userlevel 2
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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!

 

 

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

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