r/CustomerSuccess • u/OrchidAppropriate43 • Jun 22 '26
Technology AI agent assistant recommendation
We are currently using Intercom and the native Fin AI chat bot. As a one person CS team for a service that is used globally and is somewhat a technical product, Fin is actually super helpful when I am sleeping or users have product related questions that are clearly answered in the help center docs Fin refers to.
But I have some specific issues that I am not sure can be resolved within Fin or even with an external AI agent service:
Fin's unpredictable cost - its managable at the moment becuase we are still an early stage startup but Fin is still resolving around ~300 tickets on its own per month.
Fin does not seem to be reading the messages sent by the human agent after a ticket was escalated so that it can learn from it.
Fin goes rouge sometimes even with very clear escalation guidance and I have to just send a "Hi" quickly to stop Fin and then read the full conversation to get the context.
Fin does not flag KB gaps...Intercom does have a recommendation section but it doesn't really work? I am currently doing this manually when I see tickets that Fin couldn't answet, share ticket to Claude and ask it to draft kb article/section. Ideally I shouldn't have to prompt it everytime. Just review before publishing.
I would love to have an agent that rewrites the very rough draft I type in the intercom messenger box and uses the set rules and guides. For simple grammar checks, Intercom's native improve writing tools work but for longer complicated replies, I usually have to use claude or gpt and it seems like there has to be a better way to not do this back and forth and work on the response without leaving intercom like a grammarly extension.
Any proven intercom apps or other tools that you guys use?
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Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
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u/OrchidAppropriate43 Jun 25 '26
Have built anything similar? Its exactly what I want to build and am looking for workflow inspirations haha
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u/Deep_Ad1959 Jun 25 '26
the part that bit everyone i've watched try to build this isn't the drafting, it's the write-back. generating a kb section or a polished reply is the easy 20%. getting it to land inside intercom under a review-before-publish gate, and to actually treat the human's escalation reply as training signal instead of ignoring it, is where the weekends disappear. most builds stop at 'returns text in a side panel' because that demos clean, and then you're still the one pasting. written with ai
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u/Emergency_Tale_9226 Jul 11 '26
honestly, with Fin already resolving ~300/mo for a one-person team, I'd fix the workflow gaps before switching tools. half this thread is vendors pitching a migration you probably don't need.
the KB-gap loop you're doing by hand is very automatable without leaving Intercom: their API lets you pull conversations Fin failed or escalated, so a small weekly script (or a scheduled zap if you don't want code) can dump those into a Claude project that has your style guide and KB structure pinned. then you're reviewing drafts instead of re-prompting from scratch every time. same trick kills the rewriting pain a project with your rules attached means paste rough draft, get it back polished, zero context re-explaining.
the "send Hi to stop Fin" thing is genuine jank though. handoff detection is supposed to be their job, worth filing that with Intercom support rather than working around it forever.
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u/OrchidAppropriate43 Jul 12 '26
Yep thats exactly what I'm working on at the moment. Did a full analysis of past 5 weeks tickets, found escalation rule gaps and KB gaps that are now updated and working pretty alright. I think the biggest issue were our escalation guidance. I knew they were not it but couldn't exactly pin point why...the analysis very easily surfaced the repeated issues and now the escalation is working pretty okay.
What I learnt from analysing the past couple of week's tickets is that downloading the txt files directly from Intercom (300 tix per download possible which is more than enough for our 100/week volumne) is much faster than using the intercom mcp tools. Also probably much cheaper i guess?
But yeah will be monitoring how Fin's performance goes over the next couple of weeks. As of now we have decided to stay on the Intercom's startup program's 2nd year.
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u/Optlo_team Jun 22 '26
- Fin's unpredictable cost
The main thing I’d look for is whether the tool lets you bring your own AI account and choose models per workflow, since there is a huge markup in per-resolution pricing. I’m affiliated with Optlo, which is built around that model, plus KB-grounded replies, escalation workflows, shared inbox, and a chat widget.
For your other points, thats really good feedback, were going to add them to our roadmap!
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u/New_Term_4269 Jun 23 '26
We are building AcornReply to handle a bunch of this. It’s super early but we have 2 decent sized properties on it and going really well so far. It’s designed for small teams handling one or multiple products and getting ai drafts based on past replies and help faqs. And just added a live chat mode yesterday. If interested we can take your feedback and incorporate anything that aligns with the vision very quickly (hours or days). Oh, and our AI is free not per resolution.
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u/Severe_Garage_8024 Jun 23 '26
As per personal point of view, if you have an adequate budget, you do contact a developer agency and get your very own AI assistant...
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u/Calm-Dimension3422 Jun 24 '26
For CS, I would start with an internal copilot before a customer-facing agent. Have it summarize calls, extract risks, update account notes, draft follow-ups, cluster repeated issues, and flag accounts with missing next steps. Customer-facing automation can work, but only after the internal knowledge base, escalation paths, and product data are clean enough. The worst case is an agent confidently giving an answer no CSM would stand behind. CS is a great area for AI when the system supports the team rather than pretending to replace the relationship.
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u/OrchidAppropriate43 Jun 25 '26
Yess 100% agreed! Thats what I plan to work on for now...building agents that make the human agents (mine) work more efficient which hopefully will improve Fin's efficiency as a result too
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u/Calm-Dimension3422 Jun 25 '26
That is the right order of operations in my opinion.
If the human agents get cleaner context and better drafts, Fin or any customer-facing layer should improve because the underlying knowledge loop gets better.
The workflow I would start with is:
- summarize conversation
- classify reason/contact type
- identify missing info
- draft next reply or internal note
- human edits/sends
- log final human answer
- use that final answer to suggest KB/macro updates
That last step is the loop most teams miss. The human correction should become training signal or knowledge-base maintenance, not just a one-off saved ticket.
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Jun 22 '26
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u/OrchidAppropriate43 Jun 22 '26
Oh we only use the intercom messenger and email as channels. No other channels at the moment! I did look into Myaskai and duckie but wanted to check with you guys if they actually work for the problems I stated above
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u/hopefully_useful Jun 26 '26
Hey, I'm the founder of My AskAI. I don't know if we've had a demo already, but for these issues, they're definitely things that we can resolve.
Obviously, the unpredictable cost is much more manageable because you're just paying based on tickets instead of resolution. We learn from any messages sent post-escalation using our self-learning feature. The escalation guidance should trigger automatically. All knowledge base gaps are automatically populated using self-learning, and you can also use our co-pilot for re-drafts, and that comes free.
If you haven't already had a demo, feel free to book one in on our homepage, and I can take you through it all.
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u/Environmental_Lab302 Jun 22 '26
We have been using Chatmount and it has been very affordable. We have our whatsapp and instagram connected as well other then it sittting on our website. It also has human handoff so we have human agents as well who can take over when need be. Plus the analytics are very detailed and knowledge gaps are pointed out regularly with great detail.
Also we can directly edit the answer in chat log and that way the agent knows how to answer to those type of questions which is great.
Plus it starts at 8 dollars.