September 2015 Summaries

We recently created a feature in Intercom that none of our customers were asking for – video replies. This new feature allows users to respond to messages with a recorded video, which is then displayed in the conversation thread. The development of this feature was driven by a desire to bring face-to-face interactions to the web, and to create a more personal medium for businesses to communicate with their customers. To build this feature, we started by asking ourselves how we could make internet communication more personal, and then experimented with different prototypes until we found one that worked. We encountered several technical roadblocks along the way, including issues with video transcoding, but were able to overcome these challenges through a combination of innovation and pragmatism. The final product is a feature that allows users to record and send videos in real-time, which we believe has the potential to become a new standard for business communication.

We've been continuously deploying code at Intercom since its early days, with a core value of taking on big projects and breaking them down into small, safe steps. This feedback loop is invaluable, allowing us to learn about how people use our features, how the code performs in production, and whether it's a good idea at all. Our deployment process has become increasingly automated, with tools like Codeship and Muster streamlining the process to take less than 10 minutes end-to-end. This has several benefits, including helping new engineers feel productive from day one, cutting out bad behavior by making it easier to fix bugs quickly, and optimizing our deployment rate to make room for growth as a company.

The traditional SaaS sales team structure focuses on outbound sales, where salespeople pursue unfamiliar or uninterested leads. However, Intercom built an inbound sales team that prioritizes consultative selling and connects with people who have interacted with their product in a meaningful way. This approach has been successful, requiring quintupling the sales development representatives (SDRs) from three to 17 members. Key lessons learned include understanding the new SDR profile, qualifying leads for opportunity, emphasizing quality and quantity, evaluating performance beyond cold data, and investing in the future of SDRs. By prioritizing inbound sales and empowering their customers to succeed, Intercom aims to continue building, scaling, and optimizing their SDR team structure.

Effective messages have real goals that focus on the change desired in users, such as increasing usage or conversion rates, rather than just intermediate metrics like open rates or click-through rates. Different messaging scenarios require different levels of interaction and commitment from users, and having a clear goal in mind informs the focus of the message. Real goals should prioritize change over stats, with examples including onboarding and engagement, new product improvement, announcements, newsletters, surveys, quizzes, research, or questions, each requiring distinct metrics for success. Ultimately, knowing what you want to achieve before engaging customers is crucial for structuring messages and achieving desired results.

The Platform team at Intercom aims to ensure that Intercom works for everyone, regardless of their framework, programming language, or external dependencies. To achieve this, they provide a range of tools and APIs, including packaged integrations, webhooks, and external integrations, which enable customers to build unique business use-cases. Recent improvements include the launch of the Acquire package, which provides full API and webhooks support for logged-out users, and the Conversations API, which now supports a full range of actions. Additionally, Intercom has maintained client libraries for various programming languages and has released a WordPress plugin, making it easier for developers to integrate Intercom with their applications. The company is also rolling out OAuth as a more secure alternative to API Key authorization.

In a matter of weeks, accounting software startup ProfitBooks grew to over 1,000 customers, but found itself struggling to manage customer support, feature requests, and sales with multiple point solutions. The company replaced these tools with Intercom, discovering that its customers wanted to talk to them more, resulting in a 15-fold increase in message volume. With Intercom's automessage feature, ProfitBooks was able to send targeted customer communications, increasing open rates by 45% and leading to a 40% increase in customer renewal rate. The platform has helped the company improve user onboarding, increase user engagement, and differentiate itself from competitors, ultimately becoming an all-in-one solution for its customers' needs.

We are striving to make Intercom delightfully fast by providing a beautifully fast product for our customers, not frustrating them with slow page renders or web browser memory leaks. We have made significant improvements to performance in the past but haven't always hit our bar of ensuring performance is consistently excellent. To share performance details regularly, we will provide visibility into our performance numbers, allow us to celebrate performance improvements, and keep ourselves honest by making it clear when performance worsens. Recent performance improvements include reducing median response times from ~700ms to ~350ms on the page that boots the Ember app, and improving the user list's median time from 1500ms to 600ms. We have also simplified inbox performance by paginating conversations, avoiding unnecessary work, simplifying client-side rendering, implementing client-side caching of conversations, and numerous server-side controller improvements. Likely upcoming projects include further improving worst-case scenario performance on the page that boots the Ember app and continuing to improve customer experience on the user list. Our target is to make Intercom delightfully fast for our customers, and we are looking forward to sharing the next performance report with you.