Intercom Educate — What a knowledge base should be–personal and intelligent

@mattnhodges this looks like the Knowledge Base product I've been waiting for. Extremely cool!

@chrismessina 🙌🏻

@mattnhodges and what about the price after 6 months? I don't want to invest all the time to create the content and after 6 months you decide to charge XXX for it. Btw. what is the long term plan, do you guys charge for every new feature by simply calling it a product?

@hjuskewycz 👋🏼 the simple and honest answer is that we need to understand how the product is used in the wild, so we can price it in a way that makes it affordable for customers of all shapes and sizes. Pricing is so, so hard. We want to make sure we get it right. To that effect, we're being upfront about our plans to introduce long-term pricing, and we will grandfather all existing Educate customers for 6 months following the introduction of long-term pricing. It's not lost on us that there is an investment of time to be made in creating help content–that's why we built importers, so it's much easier for you to see if the product is a good fit for your needs: https://docs.intercom.com/educat.... I'd encourage you to try Educate. I'm confident you'll find it's a lot more than a "feature". 😀

@mattnhodges Looks great, I've now tried it out. Seems like a great first step, I'd love to know your roadmap for it. A couple quick suggestions due to early limitations perhaps: a) Rarely does an article not reference another. The link feature during article edit should ideally offer a way to select existing articles to permit cross-linking. Right now you must manually locate an article's full URL (which could easily change later thus creating broken links that are hard to find). All links open new tabs right now as well which isn't ideal. b) Additionally, there needs to be a way for cross-linked articles to function if the Help Center is not public. There's no way to do it now it seems. c) Can the Help Center be made accessible to customers but not necessarily easily accessible to the public? We definitely don't want all content indexed by search engines but that can't be disabled currently. d) We often we want to add "contact us" in an article for more assistance or a step we must do on the customer's behalf. There should be a way to open the Messenger widget from a link in an article, not just when the article is disliked. e) The Help Center should ideally be promoted before the customer even starts typing in the Messenger. Ideally articles could be browsed and searched without leaving the page where the Messenger was embedded. I have to assume this is coming. Thanks!

@danielkempe Seriously. I was excited about this but looks like we will go back to using Helpscout's knowledge base.

@danielkempe Agreed. Every time a feature is introduced, my default reaction is "cool, but what's it going to cost me?" Same again here.

@danielkempe @caleb_delbegio @kevinace we're bummed, but completely understand why you might feel this way. Let me take some time to explain things from our point of view. At the very least, perhaps we can agree to disagree 😀 From the very start, we’ve thought of and built Educate as a whole new product, not simply a new feature. We're confident that if you take the time to try it, you will find that it adds a lot of additional value to Intercom that you're not getting today. A lot of alternatives in the market also charge you for this value–it's simply baked into their pricing plans. Our approach is different. We want to give businesses the flexibility to choose what they want to pay for and what they don't. While most companies will want to use both Educate and Resolve alongside one another (what we recommend), the reality is that there are some businesses only need one and not the other. The choice is yours. Charging for our products ensures we can continue to invest in them, improve them, and make them even more valuable to you. That said, our pricing is not without its problems–something we are actively working on addressing in the near future. It's worth noting that we have a history of shipping new features, improvements, and enhancements to our existing set of products, at no additional charge. Earlier this year we released Smart Campaigns for our Engage product (https://www.intercom.com/smart-c...) and our all-new Messenger (https://www.intercom.com/in-app-...), for all of Intercom's products. These are examples of major updates, but we've also shipped smaller new features and improvements more recently, like SMS notifications for our Acquire product (https://app.intercom.com/a/chang...) and a new Shopify integration (https://app.intercom.com/a/chang...). You can always check out our product changes page to see exactly what we've shipped and when: https://app.intercom.com/changes I'll finish by saying that this is just a v1 of Educate. We've got a bunch of improvements on the way, in addition to enhancements to our other products.

@topilarity great minds 😁 It's something we definitely want to do now that we have the core product out to build on. Stay tuned!

@topilarity Sooooon.

@eoghanmccabe as soon as the help desk can mitigate the customer actually having to contact us I'm 100% in. Congrats on the launch!

@xaviercoiffic I agree. I've enjoyed the opportunity to test this new product, but I think that Intercom's pricing could first-off use some serious simplification - and all of the features of Intercom should be available on a per-user basis for one price. The current bundle packages have relatively few differences for minor differences in price. Going from expensive to a little more expensive. Additionally, this seems like a natural extension of the messenger and other areas of the platform, and I don't think it merits a separate monthly cost.

@double_u_d not just yet, but it's something on our radar that we plan to get to soon :)

@mattnhodges keep me posted - I sometimes recommend content technology to my globalization consulting clients, and will be happy to point them to this Intercom solution once it's internationally enabled. PS: Feel free to ping me once you go into design phase for this feature set - I'd be happy to provide my feedback, both as a product manager and as a localization manager with 13 years of expertise.

@double_u_d Will do. Thanks for your support!

@gdeglin Not at this stage, but we'd be keen to understand why you'd want that. Drop us a line at intercom.com!