Considering Intercom?
Intercom is strong on in-product messaging. Support is one of several things it does.
When Intercom is the better choice
Intercom is very good if in-product engagement, onboarding tours and lifecycle messaging matter as much to you as support does. If your problem is specifically ticket volume, a focused helpdesk will usually cost less and do more.
Where we differ
Claims in the Kognit column are things you can hold us to. The right-hand column describes patterns across the category — not Intercom's current feature set, which changes and which you should verify with them directly.
Your knowledge base and connected data only. It will not invent a policy you never wrote down — an empty knowledge base produces escalations, never guesses.
Varies widely. Ask any vendor what happens when their AI has no answer: the useful ones escalate, the risky ones improvise.
Refunds, billing and cancellations always route to a human. Not configurable — the cost of an AI being wrong about a refund is asymmetric.
Often a tunable confidence setting, which means the guardrail is only as good as whoever last edited it.
An hourly cap on automated replies. If a knowledge article is wrong at 3am, twelve customers see it rather than four hundred.
Rate limits are usually about throughput, not about bounding the damage from a bad configuration.
Email, live chat, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger — one ticket shape, one SLA clock, one queue.
Most cover the main channels; check whether each is a first-class inbox or a bolt-on with its own rules.
Calculated in business minutes with your timezone, working hours and holidays. A ticket arriving 16:30 Friday on a 4-hour target is due Monday 11:30, not Friday 20:30.
Ask specifically whether out-of-hours arrivals manufacture breaches. Plenty of tools count wall-clock time.
Moving from Intercom
You do not cut over on a single day. Run both in parallel until you stop opening the old one.
- 1Forward your support address to Kognit alongside Intercom
- 2Import conversations and contacts
- 3Move your articles into the AI knowledge base
- 4Install the widget on a single page first to compare behaviour
- 5Roll out fully once answers look right
Common questions
No. Kognit is a support platform — shared inbox, AI answering, ticketing. If proactive product tours are core to how you operate, keep a tool that specialises in that.
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