Intercom changes name to Fin | Hacker News Reader

Intercom changes name to Fin

intercom.com

24 pointsRyanShook39 comments

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Fin/Intercom: "Fin is defining the AI era of customer experience"

Zendesk: "AI-powered service platform"

Freshdesk: "AI-powered platform for modern customer service"

Where are the companies that are proudly promoting "human powered" customer support?

Ran out of VC money now that only AI companies get funding.

And only ai people are getting jobs

Humans are expensive! (AI is expensive too, but less directly and you don't have to pay for insurance (yet))

I work at Influx (https://influx.com) which is human powered customer support.

We've found that inevitably AIs have some error rate and customers want to escalate to a person.

Our strategy has moved to:

- Let humans do the things that humans are good at: judgement, decision making, high novelty situations.

- Let AI do the things that computers are good at: repetitive tasks that require persistent effort

We've seen a lot of clients turn on these AI tools in their helpdesk.. hope for the best.. and get crap results. The tech isn't the hard part, the AI needs access to high quality context to answer questions accurately. But that requires more than just connecting your google drive or scraping your website.

We've found that a skilled human operator + AI is the best way to engineer high quality context to get the most out of the tools.

Just hope for the best is always no good. Management can be so brainless. Especially when the oxygen in the meetingroom is depleted.

Coincidentally, I'd wager there are far fewer search results for "Fin CEO allegations"

I didn't know about this and yeah that's not good, I was prepared to agree but....7 years ago, if my Googling is correct? Idk, hard to lean into my jaundice on this one.

What are said allegations I must have missed this news cycle.

I... really would've expected this to be delayed while they acquired fin.com, but... seemingly fin.com is still a random finance/crypto startup?

Indeed, really strange.

> But the company behind it will be named after our leading customer agent platform, Fin. All of our 1,400 employees are now employed by Fin. You’re reading a post by the CEO of Fin.

Would have expected to read this on fin.com, not intercom.com, and also weird they never mention what domain name they'll use for this.

This announcement makes sense to me because I listened to this interview between the cofounder and one of the Collison brothers awhile back. https://cheekypint.transistor.fm/11

I recommend it if you’d enjoy a couple of Irishmen going back and forth about tech and business.

In short, Fin is their agent. They charge a dollar per successful customer session so they’re incentivized to make it helpful.

At the time of the interview, it sounded like Fin was still smaller than the help desk software but they saw it as having more potential. I guess it’s big enough now to justify renaming the company.

> They charge a dollar per successful customer session so they’re incentivized to make it helpful.

Doesn't that incentivize them to increase the amount of "successful customer session" regardless if that's beneficial for the (either of the) customers? Instead of resolving the query in one session, they could split it up into many, just helping the customer enough to be considered a success, but still so they come back?

No, but even if it did, there is a third party keeping them honest, the business that doesn’t want to be overcharged for successes and doesn’t want angry customers.

> Sometimes you see a corporate announcement that’s so obvious and so late, it’s almost an admission of failure.

...is this one of those times? Where does "Fin" come from?

I have a lot of mindshare built-up for Intercom based on integrating it, being a customer at one point, and using it on every SaaS landing page from 2010 to 2020. Ditching that sort of brand awareness for a new name seems like an odd choice.

This is a weird comment as it’s the name of their AI virtual assistant. It’s the face of Intercom.

It's not weird. I suspect a lot of us have no idea, and the author shouldn't assume the average readers know this. It would help to introduce "Fin" before making the claim that it's obvious.

I've never seen or interacted with Fin that I've noticed. Admittedly I've seen a lot less of Intercom over the last 5 years, they used to be on every SaaS site, but it seems there's a ton of competition there now. One of the banks I use uses Intercom for their support but I've never seen an AI bot there, only humans.

I suspect it's very visible for _Intercom_, but not necessarily so for everyone else.

The big question is whether "AI customer support" is its own category, where there is no leader yet, or if in the mind of the customer (entrepreneurs and enterprise) there is just one category of "customer support software" within which the delivery method is changing from human, to centaur, to AI.

If you assume the first case, building a new brand to try and dominate the new category is the right move. (at least according to the Al Ries/Jack Trout philosophy of positioning)

If the second is correct (which would be my perception, as someone with a similar experience as yours) then tearing down the old brand is a mistake.

I believe there was a window of opportunity where Kodak could have taken on digital photography, from their existing leading position because the category they owned was just "photography" (after all, there once was no other type).

It's only after they let the new category balloon that they became cornered into their existing category being renamed into "film" in the customer's mind, and by then it was too late.

> but Fin is our future.

Looks like the end to me.

Right out of the gate all I could think of with the name and that line is the end titles screen from old black & white films: Fin

Continuing the tradition of AI-company logos looking like buttholes.

Came here to say the same thing.

What’s up with that?

It all started with a sparkle.

Then every icon and logo was derived from that metaphor for "AI".

Besides a standard plain old rebrand - will there be any tangible benefit / gain from this move? Any reason for the rebrand to begin with?

Posted on intercom.com ...

Isn't Fin the same agent Anthropic uses for customer service?

Given its the first logo they show in their homepage, yes..

Intercom is dead. Fin.

Pronounced, "effin," right?

I have no idea what this is or what they do, and reading it made me realize that I still don’t - but for goodness sake can we stop naming things with dictionary words‽

And intercom is a thing, and Fin means fish or end. At least call it Fintercom or something.

At least I know he wrote it - it doesn't read like corporate bullshit. But it does read like he's several beers deep into a bender

What exactly is Fin?

That's what they write at the end of French comedy movies.

10/10 comment Monsieur

shit nobody cares about award

So Intercom has increasing market share, and they're increasing investment in it, but it is henceforth to be considered "baggage" and a past to be destroyed? Is this Innovator's Dilemma or Osborne Effect? Either way I'm glad I don't manage the Intercom team with my CEO writing stuff like this.

<s> On the other hand, look how well this same argument worked out for Block. </s>

Now I'm curious. What's Block?

who cares?

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