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What happens when you provide great customer service? Your customers will keep coming back.
Nearly 60% of customers who experience great customer service buy from a company again. But if you want to create a great customer experience, you need to leverage the right tools. Consumers wants great service. And they want it fast. Without the right customer communication platform, teams will struggle to keep a handle on their customer communication and service.
In this guide, you’ll get a closes look at three of the best customer service platforms: Intercom vs. Front vs. Trengo.
In this article, I break down these three customer service tools. You’ll learn each platform’s standout features, integrations, and price so you can pick the best platform for your organisation.
Let’s dive in.
Trengo
Trengo is a customer engagement platform. Founded in 2017, Trengo’s centralised customer communication platform has over 20,000 users. The software lets you bring all you conversations into a user-friendly dashboard, giving you one comprehensive customer service solution.
What's so special about Trengo?
As an alternative to Front, Trengo has a few important differences that set it apart.
1. When it comes to social channels, Trengo keeps it simple
Unlike the complex setups of Intercom and Front which may leave first-time users or nontechnical team members feeling out of their depths.
2. Native integrations
Instead, Trengo features native integrations with Facebook, Whatsapp, and other social media channels. This means you can easily connect your social communication channels without a frustrating or technical onboarding process and get started from day one.
3. Collaboration features
Trengo’s also has a special focus on real-time collaboration, which is kept more in the background of Front and Intercom’s feature developments. Trengo lets you co-author responses in real-time allowing you to tackle an inquiry as a team to reduce ticket resolve time.
There's more
Trengo also features advanced analytics, AI-powered automation, dozens of native integrations, and a customer-first interface.
At only $113/month/5 users, the core features make it that many hardworking teams opt for Trengo.
Trengo's core features
Multichannel
Every growing business deals with a problem: customer inquiry overload. If you want to maintain great customer service, you need to answer people via social media, email, live chat, and more.
To keep up with managing different communication channels, Trengo unifies all conversations into a single inbox. Trengo’s omnichannel experience allows you to speak to customers from a single platform without having to switch between dozens of tabs and platforms.
Your team doesn’t have to work harder. Trengo will help you work smarter.
Seamless collaboration
As an Intercom alternative, Trengo offers real-time collaboration tools that are a built more for smaller teams than the enterprise teams of Intercom. This means your customer service team can co-author responses at the same time. With co-authored responses your customers can get an informed, in-depth answer quicker than ever (and your team will save time going back and forth with each other).
Automated time-savers
If you’re looking to cut back your customer service time, then Trengo is a great option. With AI-powered templates, you can dynamically respond to customers (leveraging their profile and information) to generate personalised responses that go above and beyond.
💡Trengo’s no-code chatbot and automated templates helped EVVO decrease customer service response time by 50%. Not bad, considering that they didn’t have to make a single additional hire.
Customer insights
In order to provide adequate answers, at speed your team will need a customer profile. Trengo provides important customer data right next to the conversations. So you can answer fast, well plus personalise interactions to create the best experience.
Reports and insights
Trengo offers analytics to help you track customer behaviour and your support team’s performance. With key data on conversation response times, resolution times, channel performance, and more, you can gain insights into your support performance so you can optimise your engagement strategy.
Integrations simplified
Before you choose a customer service platform, you need to ensure it fits in with your current tech stack. Trengo makes a complex integration game easy. Trengo offers native integrations with dozens of apps including Facebook, WhatsApp, and more so you can easily fit it into your current workflow.
Trengo reviews
Pricing
Trengo offers some of the best pricing available among customer communication platforms.
Intercom’s pricing starts at $74/month/2 users. Front’s pricing starts at $19/month/user, but the features are limited unless you pay $59/month/user (i.e. features like analytics), which can end up totalling over $192/month/2 users.
Trengo starts at $113/month/5 users, allowing you to get a feel for the platform and experience a wide range of features at a budget-friendly price.
Get a demo of Trengo today.
Front
Front is a long-serving communication management platform. Since 2013, the software has offered a variety of customer support services to businesses looking to improve their customer support.
The platform lets you manage all of your emails in one place with shared inboxes to improve email management. You can create internal discussions with team members, resolve email inquiries as a team, and automatically reply to emails with templates.
Front's core features
Multichannel inbox
Front lets you combine all of your communication channels into a single inbox. This means you can access all conversations from social media, SMS, email, and more all from one place.
This means your team doesn’t have to dive into each tool and platform to respond to customers.
Team collaboration
With Front, your team can work together to respond to customer questions. If a newer customer support agent can’t answer a question, they can get their customer success manager to jump into the conversation and help out easily (in real time).
Customer history
To give your customers the best possible experience, you need to be able to see their historical interactions and purchases with your company. Front lets you do this (not available on their Starter plan) so you can personalise interactions with your customers.
Automation
Front lets you and your support team save time with different workflow automations including auto-responder messages to your customers. This means you can hand off repetitive, time-consuming manual tasks to the software to save time.
Front reviews
Pricing
Front offers their Starter plan, which is their basic plan, for $19/month/user. However, they require you to use a minimum of two seats, so you have to actually pay $38/month to get started.
If you’re wondering about the pricing of Front app vs Intercom, Front is about half the price to get started. However, their Starter plan only includes basic features. You don’t get access to analytics and the collaboration features are limited. Front offers a 7-day free trial.
Intercom
Intercom is another popular customer communication platform. Founded in 2011, it’s the oldest of the three platforms in this guide. Intercom offers live chat, basic ticketing customer messaging, product tours, and an AI chatbot.
Compared to Front, Intercom is much more robust. It also lacks certain features that Trengo is equipped with.
Intercom's core features
Collaboration
Like Trengo and Front, you can combine all of your customer conversations into a single inbox. Your team can handle all communications, including live chat and phone calls in one place for improved communication management.
AI chatbot (Fin)
Intercom recently launched Fin, an AI chatbot that helps automate your customer service. He can expand on replies to customers, summarise conversations, and rephrase your answers.
Fin can automatically reply to common questions on channels like WhatsApp, your website, and other mediums. Intercom’s claim is that Fin’s can answer 50% of all inquiries.
Help centre
Intercom offers a help centre for customers who are looking for simple self-service options (Trengo does too). Rather than having to reach out to someone for help, they can head directly to the help centre to get quick answers. It includes FAQs and helpful articles (and Fin can help guide the user to what they need).
Product tours
One thing that sets Intercom apart is product tours. These are personalised tours your customers can take through your different products to help go from customer service to sales. But, it’s not available on their basic plan. You need to sign up for Pro or Premium to access this feature.
Intercom reviews
Pricing
Intercom is the most expensive of the three platforms in this guide by a long shot.
Starting at $74/month/2 seats so if you’re on a limited budget, it makes it challenging to even get started, despite their 14-day free trial. Plus, there’s also a lack of transparency in their pricing. You can only reach 1,000 customers or potential customers and then you’re charged if you go above this limit.
Comparison: key features and functionalities
Here are all the main features of Front vs. Intercom vs. Trengo compared side-by-side:
Choose the right customer engagement platform for your business
If you want to delight customers with your service, you need to start with the right tools. A customer communication platform is an essential tool stack for any business looking to offer better support and grow their brand.
But, navigating all the different customer support tools can be confusing, especially when there are so many available. When navigating the endless maze of customer service software options, finding the perfect platform can be overwhelming.
After checking out Trengo, Front, and Intercom, you likely have a good idea of what platform you’re wanting to try. Keep in mind that there isn’t a single platform that’s perfect for every business. Your business, industry, budget, and unique needs determine what platform is right for you.
The rundown: Intercom vs Front vs Trengo
- If you have a flexible budget, and are willing to pay more for analytics, Front is a good choice.
- If you’re a very big sales-driven organisation with a large budget, Intercom is a good choice.
- If you’re looking for an affordable and scalable, all-in-one solution, Trengo is the best option.
