April 2014 Summaries

The author, a former print journalist and current managing editor at Intercom, explains the company's shift towards content creation as a key strategy for attracting customers. Unlike traditional content marketing approaches that focus on publishing regular content to attract visitors, Intercom aims to create long-lasting, informative content that resonates with its audience. The goal is not to become a news source or entertainment platform but rather to establish the company as a trusted authority in its field. By investing time and effort into creating high-quality content, Intercom seeks to build deeper relationships with its customers and peers, cutting out intermediaries such as PR agencies and advertising platforms. This approach allows for more meaningful engagement and direct communication between Intercom and its audience.

Our design process at Intercom is focused on problem definition, understanding the user's needs, and solving real problems. We have a deliberate and comprehensive approach that involves thoroughly testing how things work currently, understanding what a good outcome looks like, and measuring it. Our designers also research how other products solve similar problems, decide whether our requirements are different, come up with multiple solutions, iterate on their ideas, work systematically from level to level, optimize for simplicity, and don't stop when something ships. We strive to make design work that we can be proud of by involving multiple designers, getting feedback, and continuously learning from our previous work.

Using Intercom's Events feature, businesses can now trigger automated notifications to customers based on their actions within the product. This approach is about combining live insight into who users are with knowledge of what they're doing in the product to set up behavioral messaging. By leveraging this technique, companies can tailor messages to be relevant, contextual, and timely, increasing customer engagement and conversion rates. The Events feature enables businesses to send triggered messages at the perfect moment to further increase customer success and build an active community. Intercom offers this feature for free, and users can track events with the help of documentation and a quick video tutorial. By leveraging behavioral messaging, companies can drive customer success, close the feedback loop, and tailor their message to meet specific user needs.

Intercom has released a new feature called A/B testing for auto messages, which allows users to send the best messages to increase customer engagement and conversion. This feature makes it easy to test different elements of a message, such as medium, subject, and content, to find what works best for specific user segments. By combining targeted messaging with optimized elements, users can increase customer engagement and conversion rates. The new feature is designed to help businesses send more effective messages and build lasting relationships with their customers. Intercom's A/B testing feature allows users to test different message variants side-by-side, monitor performance, and continuously improve and refine their messages over time. With this feature, businesses can answer questions like "Is an in-app message going to drive more goal conversions than an email?" or "Which subject line will get more users to open my email?" and make data-driven decisions to optimize their messaging strategy. The new feature is designed to be simple and easy to use, allowing businesses to start testing and improving their messages today.

It's hard to imagine a product without search functionality, yet it's rare to see a product that does search well. The web is turning into an application platform where users interact with content every day, and effective browsing has become challenging due to the vast amount of content available. A great search experience is crucial for speed and relevance, providing the right result for minimum effort. To achieve this, a search engine should provide real results from the first keystroke, search across multiple attributes, rank results based on importance, explain why the results are there, offer meaningful filters, accept user mistakes, and provide a consistent experience wherever users use the product, especially targeting mobile devices.