Congrats, Intercom

Really, what is a CRM in a hyper-connected, technology-driven 2015? Although CRMs used to be just for Customer Relationship Management, over time they’ve evolved to help businesses make the most out of every aspect of digital sales and marketing. Today, a CRM is not just a customer database, instead, it’s closer to artificial intelligence. Modern CRMs not only store contact information but build an entire fortress in which a business can comfortably house all its operations, its vision and its future.

Many companies, including ours here at Agile CRM, have focused on building a CRM that not only does the basics but includes features and extensions that we believe can revolutionize the way your business performs against competition. These new CRM and Marketing Automation apps are a result of extensive research and development. They’re the product of dedicated minds focused on building next-gen apps that are feature-rich, intelligent and automatic.

One of the companies that has pursued this goal impressively is Intercom.io, a Dublin-based customer communication platform that offers an innovative way of communicating and engaging with customers. Agile CRM congratulates Intercom for their recent Series C funding of a whopping $35 million.

It is estimated that over 3 million conversations happen between customers and businesses per day, so, customer communication platforms have become extremely relevant and important. Intercom.io, a customer communication platform, has equipped over 7,000 businesses with the tools required to ensure that communication is fast and support is meaningful – quite a phenomenal number. Intercom offers 5 basic packages, each of which is designed to perform a specific function for Sales, Marketing, Product, Support, or a whole business team. According to Intercom’s statistics as reported on TechCrunch, their paying customers use an average of over 2.5 packages each.

It’s essential for modern B2B SaaS companies to provide innovative “packages” or feature sets that are seamlessly integrated onto a single platform. At Agile CRM, we believe that a CRM platform in particular should not only bundle Sales, Marketing, Web Engagement and Customer Support, but also support for third-party extensions in an intuitive, easy-to-use interface that takes little or no time to get started.

When compared with competitive products on the market, Agile CRM offers more features at a lower price point. Comparisons with other CRMs also reveal that we actively strive to be the best possible SaaS CRM that an SMB can buy, thanks to our integrated sales and marketing automation feature set, which includes more features than 90% of all CRMs in the world today. For example, while Intercom’s Engage package lets you send in-app messages (inside your app) or emails to customers, Agile CRM’s web engagement helps you send in-app messages and emails and also lets you create custom popups for discount offers, newsletter signups and more, with no coding whatsoever! When web engagement is made to work with email and mobile drip marketing, conversions are waiting to happen. Of course, all of these features need to be easy to use. That’s why we built a drag-and-drop campaign editor into the CRM.

Agile CRM’s easy drag-and-drop campaign editor

We are always hard at work taking Agile CRM a step beyond the modern CRM. We also integrate with major service providers for specific functions, including Twilio for Telephony, ClickDesk for Live Chat, ZenDesk for Customer Support, Stripe for Billing and Payments, Shopify for eCommerce, and many others, because we truly believe in a healthy competitive ecosystem that benefits CRM users, CRM providers and the collective evolution of technology.

However, it seems that not all companies like comparative advertising. In a recent conversation with Intercom, we were asked to remove our Intercom comparison page because, according to Intercom, it has “false and misleading information.” We have also received a letter from Intercom’s legal counsel claiming that our comparison with Intercom is “wrong, false and deceptive.”

The letter says that we have “falsely mentioned Intercom does not have Telephony integration which is totally untrue.” However, when we spoke with Intercom representatives via chat, they made it clear that Intercom does not have any native calling at the moment and that they only do call tracking. So, our comparison with Intercom was correct and factual.

On our comparisons pages, all comparisons with competitors have been made after careful evaluation of their product compared against Agile CRM. Comparisons such as these help customers decide the type of product that best fits their business type so they can make informed buying decisions. The FTC and the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, Inc. (NAD) govern the laws of comparative advertising in the USA. According to them, a comparison that is “clearly identified, truthful, and non-deceptive” benefits consumers and is highly encouraged. This is exactly what our comparison pages are designed to do – they’re here for you, the consumer, so that you can make informed choices about the tremendous array of sales and marketing software on the market today.

At Agile CRM, we will continue to create features that help growing businesses sell like the Fortune 500, and we’ll also continue to honestly draw comparisons against our competition. After all, competition breeds innovation. In the end, we can only hope that businesses don’t forget about the bigger goal: to create a product that can offer full value to a customer at an affordable price.