Zendesk: "AI-powered service platform"
Freshdesk: "AI-powered platform for modern customer service"
Where are the companies that are proudly promoting "human powered" customer support?
We've found that inevitably AIs have some error rate and customers want to escalate to a person.
Our strategy has moved to:
- Let humans do the things that humans are good at: judgement, decision making, high novelty situations.
- Let AI do the things that computers are good at: repetitive tasks that require persistent effort
We've seen a lot of clients turn on these AI tools in their helpdesk.. hope for the best.. and get crap results. The tech isn't the hard part, the AI needs access to high quality context to answer questions accurately. But that requires more than just connecting your google drive or scraping your website.
We've found that a skilled human operator + AI is the best way to engineer high quality context to get the most out of the tools.
I recommend it if you’d enjoy a couple of Irishmen going back and forth about tech and business.
In short, Fin is their agent. They charge a dollar per successful customer session so they’re incentivized to make it helpful.
At the time of the interview, it sounded like Fin was still smaller than the help desk software but they saw it as having more potential. I guess it’s big enough now to justify renaming the company.
...is this one of those times? Where does "Fin" come from?
I have a lot of mindshare built-up for Intercom based on integrating it, being a customer at one point, and using it on every SaaS landing page from 2010 to 2020. Ditching that sort of brand awareness for a new name seems like an odd choice.
If you assume the first case, building a new brand to try and dominate the new category is the right move. (at least according to the Al Ries/Jack Trout philosophy of positioning)
If the second is correct (which would be my perception, as someone with a similar experience as yours) then tearing down the old brand is a mistake.
I believe there was a window of opportunity where Kodak could have taken on digital photography, from their existing leading position because the category they owned was just "photography" (after all, there once was no other type).
It's only after they let the new category balloon that they became cornered into their existing category being renamed into "film" in the customer's mind, and by then it was too late.
I suspect it's very visible for _Intercom_, but not necessarily so for everyone else.
And intercom is a thing, and Fin means fish or end. At least call it Fintercom or something.
<s> On the other hand, look how well this same argument worked out for Block. </s>
