Intercom Surveys In-Depth Review + Better Alternative

Intercom surveys were introduced about a year ago to help product and support managers capture customer feedback insights.

A multi-faceted tool, Intercom hopes its latest addition will help product managers better collect customer feedback and capture customer insights that drive results.

In this article, we take a close look at Intercom surveys and examine the creation process, pricing, and better alternatives.

TL;DR

• Intercom is a robust tool for solving a variety of customer-related problems, from customer support to onboarding and engagement.
• ‘Intercom Surveys’ is a relatively new feature that still grows, dedicated to the creation of surveys for collecting customer feedback. It only supports two survey types: long-form and short-form surveys and the customization options are very limited.
• Long-form form surveys require more detailed responses and time to complete while short-form surveys are intended for collecting bite-size feedback, faster.
• Intercom Surveys help you create customizable surveys that capture customer feedback and help you understand the customer experience.
• It enables you to create custom NPS surveys, analyze them, and program follow-up actions based on users’ responses.
• You can also launch surveys on both mobile (iOS and Android) and web platforms while reviewing survey analytics on a simple dashboard that helps you better understand customer insights.
• Intercom’s startup plan sounds cheap – costing $65 for up to 500 MAUs, but the price goes up very steeply (up to $1200!) if you go over that. Intercom surveys come as a separate add-on costing you another $49/month.
• Thanks to its more extensive customization options, powerful segmentation feature, and robust workflow control, Userpilot is a better alternative for building and analyzing user feedback with surveys.
• Designed strictly to help you shape your product experience, Userpilot helps you reach just the right customer, even allowing for localization into a target customer’s language.
• Book a demo today to learn more about how Userpilot helps you efficiently capture customer feedback without code.

What is Intercom?

Intercom is a robust tool for customer messaging and service automation. It helps product owners scale support and create a modern, personalized customer service experience.

Intercom provides a range of tools to help users provide comprehensive customer support and communication.

These tools are grouped into four major categories:

• Customer support: These tools help you to manage your customer support tickets, provide lightning-fast responses to queries, automate response workflows, and enjoy omnichannel support management.
• Engagement: Take advantage of AI-powered automation to better engage users. Create custom chatbots, provide relevant suggestions, and improve the customer experience.
• Onboarding: Drive product or feature adoption with product tours, in-app messages, tooltips and banners, in-app help centers, etc.
• Surveys: A more recent addition for creating contextual surveys, generating survey reports, and managing automated follow-ups based on those responses. However, its surveys were introduced only last year and still lack customization options.

Let’s look a little closer at Intercom Surveys and see how it compares to other alternatives, and if they suit your business needs.

Intercom survey types

The type of survey you create will determine how users view or respond to your survey. With Intercom, you have only two survey categories:

1. Short-form or Small format surveys.
2. Long-form or Large format surveys.

Short-Form Surveys

As the name implies, short-form surveys are lightweight and brief.

These surveys are non-urgent and do not disrupt the customer experience. Instead, they’re displayed as floating banners at the bottom of a page.

Small-format surveys are ideal for rating scales like your NPS surveys and other surveys with a brief intro and a few questions.

However, with short-form surveys, you can’t apply a multiple-choice answer scale which can be problematic when creating CES or CSAT surveys. For that, you will need to create long surveys.

Long-Form Surveys

Long-form surveys appear as a modal fixed to the center of the screen, which the user must interact with or dismiss before progressing with their activity. This can be intrusive for some users, and the lack of customization options make its usability limited.

You should also not use them as often as they disrupt the user experience.

What you can do with Intercom surveys?

From collecting customer feedback to measuring user sentiment or satisfaction, Intercom surveys help you gauge your user’s pulse. It assists you to:

Collect product feedback

Use Intercom surveys to ask users about their experience with your product right within your application.

Launch surveys anywhere – within the app, in Messenger, via emails, etc., and get customer insights while they’re fresh in mind. The tricky part here is that the ability to launch surveys anywhere comes as a separate add-on with separate pricing. For instance,  you will need to pay $9/per team member for Whatsapp messaging.

Create welcome surveys to personalize user onboarding

Welcome surveys are a marvelous tool for any product manager looking to nurture the customer experience.

They tell you about the user, their challenges, and their goals with your product.

The insights from surveys help you personalize the onboarding experience as well as the product experience.

Intercom surveys help you create welcome surveys that appear at the beginning of the customer journey, so you can help them achieve success much faster.

Create, target, and send NPS surveys

Intercom allows you to design targeted NPS surveys – either using an existing template or from scratch. You can design the survey to be as simple or complex as you desire and will be able to include follow-up questions based on each user’s response.

Intercom’s NPS surveys are easy to create and can be customized to match your brand’s theme and colors. You can also send them to your entire customer base or specific user segments. However, you can’t automate NPS surveys to be sent every month/or after a specific time. You will have to create them from scratch. Compared to Intercom, Userpilot allows you to tag NPS responses based on certain conditions so that you can filter NPS results and analyze them and address customer issues accordingly.

Send surveys across the web and mobile apps

One of the significant advantages of Intercom surveys is the ability to deliver your survey and receive customer feedback over both mobile (iOS and Android) and web platforms. You can send to mobile only, web only, or both, depending on your goals.

It’s important to note that Intercom has a limit on “people reached” when it comes to outbound messaging. When you hit the limit, you can’t send other surveys to your customers.

Customize your surveys

You can customize and personalize your surveys to match your product’s native look and feel. This includes customizing the:

• Colors – Match your survey buttons and background to your brand/product color.
• Sender – Add an optional sender avatar and company name to give your survey a personal touch.
• Intro – Provide context for the survey with intro screens that capture customer interest and sets expectations.
• User attributes – Make the survey even more personal by including unique user attributes of the receiver, such as their personal or company name.
• Text formatting – Use formatting options like headers, italics, links, etc. to give your survey the right feel and highlight keywords.

On the other hand, here are some of the customization limitations of intercom surveys:

• Limited design customization – Intercom surveys offer several design options but the overall design layout is fixed. Businesses cannot fully customize the layout of the survey to match their branding or design aesthetic.
• Limited question types – Intercom surveys offer a limited range of question types such as multiple choice, rating, and NPS (Net Promoter Score). Businesses cannot add more complex question types such as open-ended or matrix questions.
• Limited skip logic – Intercom surveys offer some skip logic capabilities, allowing businesses to show or hide questions based on the user’s previous responses. However, skip logic is limited in terms of its complexity and cannot handle more advanced branching or conditional logic.
• Limited integrations – Intercom surveys can be integrated with other third-party tools, but the options are limited. Businesses may not be able to integrate their preferred tools or platforms.
• Limited targeting options – Intercom surveys allow businesses to target specific segments of their user base, but the options are limited. Businesses cannot fully customize the targeting criteria, and they may not be able to target users based on more specific behaviors or actions.

What users say about Intercom

Intercom boasts a 4.5-star rating on Capterra and a 4.4-star rating on G2. Users hail it for its robustness, customer support, and overall ease of use. However, concerns remain around the ever-increasing feature collection, sometimes to the detriment of existing features.

For example, the user below highlights how Intercom’s extensive feature list can get overwhelming for users, noting that it’s “helpful, but a little bit overwhelming.”

Intercom surveys pricing

When it comes to Intercom pricing, things can get a bit tricky as the website does not provide a straightforward answer regarding package costs. The only information available is a starter package for small businesses, which costs $74 per month, billed annually at $888 per year.

For Intercom’s primary packages, including Support, Engage, or Convert, users need to schedule a demo to determine the package’s price. The cost of each package is determined based on the number of seats required (referring to each team member) and the number of people the business has reached in the past month through outbound messaging. As a result, it can be quite challenging to evaluate the costs of using Intercom before committing to a subscription.

Besides that, Intercom Surveys comes as a $49 per month add-on to their Starter plan, which means you will need to pay at least $124/per month for Intercom surveys.

Why you might need an alternative to Intercom surveys

Despite its many decent features, Intercom Surveys still lags behind more specialized products and may fail to meet all of your needs.

For example, you might need more customization (or templates) than Intercom provides or you may want more control over segmentation or contextualization.

Additionally, Intercom can be expensive for what it offers. You’ll need the basic plan and the add-on ($124). It doesn’t offer a free version and its lowest plan is not affordable. All of these can make you seek out alternatives that better serve your needs.

Userpilot: A better alternative to Intercom surveys

Userpilot is a specialized no-code tool that enables you to build flexible, personalized, and contextually relevant in-app experiences.

As alternatives go, Userpilot ranks highly for SaaS businesses looking to capture customer feedback with hyper-targeted surveys, trigger them contextually, and quickly analyze results.

Let’s examine some of the features that make it stand out.

Create and customize different surveys code-free

Similar to Intercom, Userpilot is a code-free tool that enables you to create and customize different surveys in a WYSIWYG format.

Userpilot lets you create a wide range of survey types, including short, long, NPS, CSAT, churn, PMF, and smiley face surveys, among others.

You’ll find a template for you, whether you’re trying to determine your users’ specific jobs to be done (JTBD), seeking customer feedback on a specific feature, or seeking insight into your customer satisfaction levels.

Embed different elements in your surveys

Whether you’re using a template or creating one from scratch, you’ll be able to customize the look and feel of your surveys as much as you desire.

Starting from your text, you’ll have the option of using headers, underlines, bold/italics formatting, etc.

You will be able to adjust your survey colors by selecting from the available options or adding your own. You’ll also be able to embed things like emojis and images (such as your logo).

Trigger surveys contextually

Where your survey appears is critical to the quality of responses you receive. To that end, Userpilot gives you full control over when and where your survey appears.

This may mean having a user persona survey on your welcome screen, triggering a churn survey after a user clicks the ‘Unsubscribe button’, launching a slideout after a user interacts with a new feature, etc.

Whichever one it is, you’ll have the freedom to define the custom events (simple or complex) that trigger your surveys.

Segment customers to collect targeted feedback

Many times, your surveys are not intended for your entire customer base. Instead, you need the feedback of a specific segment of users to help you understand their customer experience.

Userpilot’s segmentation gives you full control over the user group(s) that see your surveys. You can slice and dice your user base on six different criteria:

• User data – including their ID, plan, device type, signup date, etc.
• Company data – including the company size, activity levels, etc.
• Individual feature usage – including usage data, ‘last seen,’ etc.
• Engagement profiles – including UI-pattern-specific engagement, like ‘in-progress’ checklists.
• Customer feedback – such as user segments that complained about a specific feature or bug.
• Other pre-existing user segments.

Localize your surveys and NPS

If your user base cuts across multiple language groups, you can write your surveys in one language and employ Userpilot’s translation and localization service to convert your text to other languages.

This feature allows your users better understand and go through their surveys, whether they’re English or Non-English speakers, thus refining the quality of customer feedback you receive.

Analyze responses in the NPS dashboard

Userpilot gives you all the tools needed to properly analyze your feedback responses and extract actionable insights.

Your NPS dashboard enables you to view your NPS score and the percentage of promoters, passives, and detractors in one place.

You can also take it a step further to layer over exact words associated with a good or bad score and see the factors that influence recurrent patterns for good or bad.

Finally, you’ll be able to tag NPS responses based on certain conditions, making it easy to filter NPS results, analyze them, and address the customer’s concerns accordingly.

What users say about Userpilot

Userpilot boasts a 4.6-star rating on both G2 and Capterra; it is widely hailed for its extensive control flow and onboarding features, as well as its approach to customer success.

According to this user, it’s an “excellent user engagement tool with a great team to back it up.”

Userpilot pricing

Userpilot employs a multi-tiered pricing model starting at $249 per month. To find the ideal package for you, you may have to speak with a sales agent.

Userpilot pricing

Conclusion

Intercom Surveys do a decent job of helping you capture customer feedback and evaluate customer insights, but you can get a lot more out of your surveys with Userpilot.

Userpilot enables you to build hyper-targeted and extremely contextualized surveys to ensure you receive actionable insights. To learn more about how it helps you, book a demo today!