| Functionality | 7 <p>At it's core, Glassix offers a fairly strong omni-channel support product. It covers all the basic channels from email to social media (only modern B2B software teams who use Slack might feel left out). Additionally, it offers up a fairly comprehensive rules based chatbot builder and even the functionality to configure an AI chatbot. However, we were disappointed to see the lack of any kind of help centre functionality (either creating one for its own sake or to feed in as context for the AI chatbot).</p> | 9 <p>Intercom provides most of the essential support functionality needed by SMBs, covering a wide range of communication channels (excluding Twitter, Slack, and Discord) and offering industry-leading live chat capabilities. It also includes advanced AI, automation, and reporting features. However, some features that larger teams may find valuable, such as approval workflows, community forum management, and advanced telephony capabilities (e.g., group routing and overflow handling), are not currently supported.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 2 <p>We found Glassix to be very unintuitive to use. Its web app is poorly laid out, with many components and lines of text being chopped off arbitrarily - making some parts near unusable at times if it weren't for tooltips. This is a shame as its onboarding process was simple and clear. On average it would take an SMB employee a couple days to master its use.</p> | 7 <p>Due to its rich functionality and customisability, Intercom has a moderate learning curve but is generally user-friendly. An average SMB employee can become proficient with the platform after 1-2 days and some guidance.</p><p>The interface is intuitive, making daily use straightforward for most team members. </p> |
| Look and feel | 2 <p>When tested, we find Glassix to be dated, clunky and unintuitive. All too often, we came across arbtrarily truncated lines of text and core components. It's customer facing live chat widget feels years behind many modern competitors (even Glassix's own in app support widget had logos which didn't fit and white borders where colour fills were not applied correctly).</p><p>Similarly, its internal facing analytics dashboard, though comprehensive, is extremely overwhelming and painful on the eyes.</p> | 7 <p>We find Intercom's interface modern, sleek, with just the right touch of colour. However, page load times can be a bit slow, sometimes taking 2-3 seconds.</p> |
| Customisability | 7 <p>Glassix offers a deep set of customization options. When it comes to its customer facing live chat widget, you're able to customize everything from the basics (colour and logos) to deeper design elements (fonts and sounds).</p><p>Additionally, we appreciate the ability to create custom analytics reports which highlight the metrics you care about most on a timely basis.</p><p>When tested, Glassix's chatbot builder also offered a reasonable amount of depth and facets for creating an experience that feels unique to your business.</p> | 9 <p>Intercom is one of the most customisable Customer Support we've come across. User-facing elements (e.g. live chat, help centre) allow for deep customisation in appearance and layout.</p><p>Intercom also allows you to create custom data objects and track custom events about your customers to create highly personalised proactive messages and workflows.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 3 <p>Though Glassix does offer a self-serve free trial through their website, it's clear that the platform is not optimized for this. We found their onboarding process to be clunky and confusing (taking >15 mins to complete and integrate initial channels). Additionally, when it comes to long term customization, their odd integrations system wherein enterprise customers <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">can access some integrations built by external partners means that a full setup can take over a week.</span></p> | 7 <p>Intercom offers a simple, self-service free trial for their platform. Initial setup is relatively simple, taking less than 10 minutes to complete. Connecting your initial channels is fairly simple too with simple scripts for live widget integrations and easy email connection options. However, when it comes to deeper customization, there are a number of rabbit holes within which you could spend days e.g. setting up FinAI or customizing help centre appearances. </p> |
| Customer Support | 1 <p>Glassix offers customer support via a live chat widget within its web app. When tested, we found it difficult to get in touch with a real agent, occasionally taking over an hour to get a response. However, even once connected, we found agents to be particularly unhelpful - more focused on upselling than answering questions and often communicating poorly and even cutting off conversations when they didn't have an answer.</p><p>Additionally, Glassix's provided help centre is extremely complex (mixing developer documentation with agent guides is not user friendly). It also failed to answer most questions we had and was filled with bugs/typos itself.</p> | 8 <p>Intercom provides in-app live chat with Fin AI and their support team. We’ve found that while Fin AI delivers helpful responses, and it's possible to connect with a human agent - although this can take up to 6 business hours which can be painfully long in our experience.</p> |
| Integratability | 2 <p>Whilst we were pleased to see that Glassix offers an API, we were disappointed to see that it offers very little in terms of Glassix built integrations. Beyond its standard omni-channel offering, Glassix does not provide integrations with any standard sources of context you might expect such as CRMs or e-commerce/payments platforms. Instead they offer a bizarre system where customers on their enterprise tier can access some integrations built by external partners. Additionally, the lack of integration with an automation platform like Zapier makes it difficult for non-technical individuals to build out custom automations themselves.</p> | 10 <p>Intercom boasts a robust integrations ecosystem that includes popular CRMs like HubSpot and Pipedrive, project management tools such as JIRA, and email marketing platforms like Mailchimp. They also offer an API for custom integrations and are continually expanding their integration offerings, with the flexibility to develop new ones upon request.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 3 <p>Glassix does offer the ability to export some data to excel self-serve, however it's limited to certain report types and doesn't cover the full range of data stored in the platform. That being said, you are able to export data via webhook and API too.</p> | 8 <p>Users can export key data independently through self-serve options, while most other data can be accessed via API or provided upon request. Additionally, Intercom enables seamless data exports to relevant third-party vendors through pre-built integrations.</p> |
