A complete guide to Intercom web chat in 2024

Let's be real, nobody wants to send an email into the void and wait hours for a reply. When people have questions, they want answers right away. Live chat has become the standard for good customer service, and Intercom is one of the biggest names in the game.

This guide is a straightforward look at the Intercom web chat platform. We’ll dig into its features, walk through what it takes to set it up, and try to make sense of its pricing. By the end, you’ll have a much clearer picture of whether Intercom is the right tool for you, or if a different approach might make more sense for your business.

What is Intercom web chat?

It’s easy to think of Intercom web chat as just that little bubble that pops up in the corner of a website, but there’s a lot more going on under the hood. It's the front door to a much bigger customer communications platform designed for sales, marketing, and support teams. Its main job is to let you talk with website visitors and customers in real-time, but the system behind it is built to manage that relationship from start to finish.

At its core, Intercom bundles a few key things together: the Messenger your customers see, the live chat inbox for your agents, automated bots like its Fin AI Agent, and a built-in help desk. The idea is to give you one central place for every customer conversation, from their first visit to their hundredth support ticket. It's an ambitious goal, and it works by keeping everything inside the Intercom universe.

Key features of the Intercom web chat suite

Intercom has a ton of features, so let's break down the most important ones. We'll look at where its all-in-one approach really shines and where it might create some headaches.

Live chat and the messenger experience

The Intercom Messenger is what your customers interact with. It looks clean, you can customize it to match your brand, and it connects with apps for things like booking meetings or sharing help articles. It also keeps a running history of every conversation, so if a customer comes back months later, all the context is right there.

It handles both anonymous visitors and logged-in users pretty smoothly. A visitor is treated as a lead, and if they sign up, their chat history merges into their new customer profile. While the front-end experience is definitely polished, it's also designed to keep you locked into the Intercom ecosystem. As soon as you need to connect data or workflows with tools outside of Intercom, things can get a little clunky.

Fin AI agent and automation

Fin is Intercom’s AI chatbot, built to answer customer questions on its own. It can tackle common queries, solve simple problems, and pass the tough stuff off to a human. The AI trains on your help center content and acts as the first line of defense for your support team.

Fin is certainly capable, but you have to talk about its pricing. Intercom charges $0.99 per resolution, which means you pay a fee every single time the AI successfully closes a conversation. That might not sound like much at first, but those little charges can add up incredibly fast, leading to a monthly bill that's hard to predict.

There are better ways to do AI pricing. For example, platforms like eesel AI use simple subscription plans with no sneaky per-resolution fees, so you aren't penalized for automating support effectively. More importantly, eesel AI can learn from a much wider variety of sources, like your past support tickets, Google Docs, and Confluence spaces. This gives it a much deeper understanding of your business, so it can provide more accurate answers. You can even use the eesel AI Intercom integration to add these capabilities to your existing setup.

This infographic illustrates how eesel AI centralizes knowledge from various sources to enhance support automation, a key advantage in the Intercom web chat ecosystem.

Omnichannel support capabilities

One of Intercom's biggest selling points is its single inbox for multiple channels. Your team can handle chats from email, phone, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram all in one feed. If you're trying to consolidate tools and give your agents one view of the customer, this is a pretty big win.

But the catch is the same: this unified view works best if you go all-in on Intercom. If your team relies on other tools, like using Slack for internal chats or a separate CRM, the workflow can start to feel disconnected. You might find yourself bouncing between tabs to get the full picture, which defeats the purpose of an all-in-one tool.

Setting up and integrating Intercom web chat

Getting Intercom up and running can be either a breeze or a major project, depending on what you’re trying to do. Here’s a look at the setup process and where you might hit a few bumps.

The installation process

The basic setup is pretty simple. You copy a little piece of JavaScript code onto your website, and the Messenger chat bubble appears. Intercom also has plugins for platforms like WordPress, which makes it even easier if you're not comfortable with code. For a simple chat on your marketing site, you can be live in no time.

But the second you want to do more than that, things get tricky. To identify logged-in users and send custom information about them (like what plan they're on), you’ll need a developer to write some code. The initial simplicity can quickly turn into a more involved technical project.

This is a big difference compared to newer AI tools built for flexibility. For example, eesel AI has a completely self-serve setup that literally takes minutes. With one-click integrations for the major help desks, you can connect your tools and have an AI agent ready to go without needing to book any time with your dev team.

The challenge of an all-in-one ecosystem

Intercom’s whole model is built around getting you to use its entire suite. The platform is at its best when you use it for your help desk, AI, and messenger. While that can create a tightly integrated system, it often feels like you’re being pushed to "rip and replace" all the tools you already use.

That's a huge commitment, and it's risky. Moving your whole support system is a massive undertaking. You have to migrate all your data, retrain your entire team, and rebuild your workflows from scratch. What if you go through all that and find out it doesn't quite fit your needs? You're stuck.

A more modern approach is to find AI that fits into your current workflow. eesel AI is designed to make the tools you already love even better, whether that’s Zendesk, Freshdesk, or even Intercom itself. It adds a powerful AI layer right on top of your existing setup, giving you the best of both worlds without forcing a painful migration.

A deep dive into Intercom web chat pricing

Intercom's pricing can be a real head-scratcher. It’s not just a flat monthly fee; it's a mix of per-agent plans, per-resolution AI fees, and different add-ons. This makes it almost impossible to predict what your bill will be each month.

Here’s a quick summary of their main customer service plans, based on what’s on their pricing page.

Breaking down the seat-based plans

The base of your bill is the number of "Full seats" you need for your agents. The plan you choose (Essential, Advanced, or Expert) unlocks different features. The problem is, you might only need one or two features from a more expensive plan, but you're forced to upgrade and pay the higher per-seat price for your entire team.

The real cost: Fin AI's per-resolution model

This is where the costs can get out of hand. On top of what you pay for each agent, Intercom charges you $0.99 every time its AI, Fin, resolves a conversation.

Think about that for a second. This model basically punishes you for being successful with automation. As your company grows and you deflect more tickets with AI, your Intercom bill grows right alongside it. A busy month could lead to a shockingly high invoice, making budgeting a nightmare.

This is a world away from the straightforward pricing of other tools. eesel AI's pricing, for instance, is based on a simple, tiered model. There are no per-resolution fees. This gives you predictable costs you can count on and lets you scale your AI support without getting hit with surprise charges.

This image shows eesel AI's transparent, public-facing pricing page, which contrasts with the variable costs of Intercom web chat.

Is Intercom web chat right for you?

So, after all that, should you go with Intercom? It’s a well-designed, powerful platform, and it can be a great choice for businesses that are ready to commit completely to its ecosystem. If you’re starting from zero and want one tool to handle everything (and have the budget for its variable pricing), it's definitely worth considering.

But the downsides are pretty big. You risk getting locked into a single vendor, you’ll likely need developer help for anything beyond the basics, and most importantly, you’re looking at unpredictable and potentially steep costs from its AI pricing model.

A more flexible, transparent alternative to Intercom web chat

If that sounds like too much of a headache, there are other ways to go. For teams that want the power of AI without the vendor lock-in, eesel AI is the modern alternative. It’s built to work with the tools you already have, not replace them. You can get it running in minutes, connect all your knowledge sources for better answers, and get predictable pricing that makes sense.

Try eesel AI for free and see for yourself how easy it can be to add powerful AI to your current support workflow.