Everything you need to know about Fin, the breakthrough AI bot transforming customer service

We’re excited to announce that Fin, Intercom’s AI bot powered by a mix of large language models including OpenAI’s GPT-4, is now available to everyone.

For support teams that care about quality of customer experience, cultivating brand loyalty, and setting themselves up for success in an AI-powered customer service world, Fin is here to help.

What is Fin? Fin is a breakthrough AI chatbot powered by large language models (LLMs), including OpenAI’s GPT-4, and Intercom’s proprietary technology. Using advanced AI language models, Fin ingests your existing support content to resolve up to 50% of queries in a way your customers can trust, providing safer, more accurate answers than any AI bot on the market.

Thoughtful design, built for customer service

There’s been a major step change in AI and the power of LLMs, with OpenAI and ChatGPT putting generative AI front and center. When our engineers first got their hands on this technology through our partnership with OpenAI, we immediately recognized the huge opportunity to build an incredible AI teammate for customer service teams. From that point on we had a singular focus – to create the best customer service chatbot on the market.

A first-order solution would have been to reskin an existing LLM chat experience for customer service. This approach – which many AI chatbots in the market have adopted – wasn’t the right step forward for us or for our customers, as it fails to account for the unique needs of customer service teams and support leaders.

So we built Fin to be:

• Trustworthy
• Controllable
• Seamless

Trustworthy

“Hallucinations” were the fly in the GPT soup when we started working on Fin. How could we prevent an AI bot from simply inventing answers or having inappropriate conversations with customers?

An AI bot you can trust: We’ve limited Fin to providing answers based solely on your support content. You choose Fin’s sources and the information within them. Unlike many other AI chatbots, Fin has no problem saying “I don’t know” and swiftly passing the question to a member of your support team if it can’t find the answer in your support content. As a result, you can avoid giving your customers the wrong information, or venturing outside topics related to your business.

Controllable

Customer loyalty is tough to win and easy to lose – and a lot of CS leaders are reluctant to set an AI chatbot loose on their customer queries without guardrails in place. Providing a high level of control over Fin was a priority for us.

Control when you want it, human when you need it: You can choose exactly who and what Fin answers – and when a query needs that human touch. With features like custom actions to deliver bespoke answers to your most important questions; audience targeting so Fin always reaches the right customers; and the option to preview Fin before setting it live, you can be sure Fin is working in the way that suits your business best. When Fin doesn’t know an answer, it can triage complex problems and pass them directly to your human support teams – giving your customers a frictionless experience.

Seamless

Customer service teams have specific workflows and processes that they’ve honed over years. The last thing they need is an AI bot that introduces a totally new and separate way of working. We were determined that Fin should slot smoothly into any CS team’s tech stack.

Fin works for you: Fin is an out-of-the-box solution that’s incredibly easy to set up. For Intercom users, Fin is built to work natively with the entire Intercom platform, respecting your existing setup, automations, and workflows.

What can Fin do for you?

The concept of a high-performing, futuristic AI chatbot sounds great in theory, but what can Fin do in practice? Here are the outcomes you can expect from adding Fin to your support offering.

How does Fin help your support team?

• Reduces support volume: Fin can resolve up to 50% of your support queries instantly and accurately. By cutting your support team’s inbound volume, Fin gives support reps time to focus on more complex customer queries that are best resolved with a human touch.
• Improves operational efficiency: It’s not just us who think AI is the answer – 67% of North American support leaders are planning to invest more in AI over the next year. Support teams are constantly expected to do more with less, and Fin is ready to plug that gap with dramatically reduced response times, quick and accurate resolutions, and seamless handoffs to your team where needed.
• Creates happier teammates: Intercom’s 2023 Customer Service Trends Report revealed that 81% of respondents believe technology will help to improve the employee experience and reduce attrition. Fin offers support teams the chance to get off the customer query “hamster wheel” and focus on the most fulfilling, high-impact parts of their jobs: whether that’s cultivating customer loyalty with top-tier support, contributing to team operations, or developing new skills.

How does Fin help your customers?

• Faster resolutions: For many, the word “chatbot” triggers memories of endless conversation loops as frustration builds and queries remain unresolved. Fin offers rapid resolutions to as many as 50% of queries – and if it can’t find the answer within your support content, it can triage the query before passing to your team. No matter what your customer’s query is, Fin provides the support they need, when they need it.

• Converses naturally: Your customers won’t need to speak “robot” to chat with Fin. Interactions are natural, friendly, and conversational – like talking to a support agent. Unlike other chatbots, Fin doesn’t need specific phrasing to understand a customer’s question. It can decipher meaning from the most complex queries, ask clarifying questions for maximum accuracy, and rephrase help content in a way that makes sense to the customer.

• Provides answers they can trust: The chatbot skepticism ends here. With every answer Fin provides to a customer, it includes links to its sources within your support content so they can be sure the information they’re receiving is accurate.

Not like other chatbots

Customer service is evolving fast, and there are already some chatbots on the market that work with ChatGPT – but you won’t find anything like Fin in the CS industry; here is just some of what makes Intercom’s AI chatbot uniquely suited to your team.

• Ease of setup: Fin rapidly consumes your support content from Intercom Articles, Zendesk Help Center, or any public URL to begin answering questions in minutes. Just point it at your support content and turn it on – or take a more cautious approach by previewing your setup before you set Fin live.
• Customizability: Fin fits with your brand. You can rename it, change the Fin icon to your own logo, and personalize the Fin messenger to make sure your customers find themselves in familiar territory when they seek support.
• Scalability: Reach customers wherever they are. Fin can seamlessly switch between Messenger, SMS, WhatsApp, and more to offer your customers a truly omnichannel experience – at scale.
• Accuracy: Fin draws its answers from your support content, constraining it to your approved materials when resolving customer queries to minimize hallucinations and prevent inappropriate conversations.
• Reporting: Measuring success is a crucial element of any high-functioning support team. Monitor Fin’s performance with usage and performance metrics – with article-level metrics and content scores coming soon.
• Pricing: While competitors price chatbots based on metrics like deflection or API calls, we looked a little deeper into what would work best for support teams. These metrics, while useful in their own ways, can be misleading – leaving customers unsatisfied, and your team’s bill on the rise. Fin is priced per resolution: the percentage of support requests addressed by Fin where the user indicated Fin answered their question or left without asking to talk to a human. That way, you can be sure that when you pay for Fin, you’re paying for results.

What’s next for Fin?

We’ve built a groundbreaking AI bot that’s producing incredible results for support teams – but we’re not finished by a long shot. We’re taking all of our customers’ feedback on board, and working to improve and augment everything Fin has to offer. Here are some of the things we’re working on:

• Multilingual resolutions: Later this year, Fin will be able to detect a customer’s language and respond in any of the 43 languages that Intercom supports.
• Powering Fin with your own conversation data: We’re working to add your conversation data as an input for Fin. That would mean that as well as learning and improving as you update your support content, Fin would also incorporate information from answers given by your support reps – expanding its capacity to reduce your support volume.
• Elevated reporting: We’ve already mentioned the upcoming article-level reporting and content scores, but we’re also working hard to allow Fin to plug into third-party dashboards so non-Intercom users can benefit from in-depth measurement and reporting.
• Email as a channel: We’re committed to making Fin an omnichannel chatbot, and we’re close – email as a Fin channel is a priority for us.

Fin can halve your support volume, takes just minutes to activate, and opens countless doors for your support team. What are you waiting for? Try Fin now by testing it with your own help center or start a free trial.