March 2017 Summaries

Support tickets alone are insufficient for providing a truly personal experience, as they lack the conversational nature of human interaction. Businesses must strive to create a more personalized approach by being friendly and natural in their tone, explaining things in multiple ways, and using emojis to communicate. This involves actively listening to customers, apologizing when issues arise, and proactively addressing potential problems. Additionally, businesses should be knowledgeable about their product, never assume anything, and think like the customer to deliver a more effective support experience. By adopting these best practices, businesses can move beyond traditional ticket-based support systems and provide a more engaging and human-like interaction with their customers.

When potential customers sign up for a product, they don't come out of nowhere but rather have an established way of doing the job they're thinking about hiring the new product to do. To understand this "backstory," it's essential to answer three questions: Are prospective customers using an existing product to do the same job today? How easily can they evaluate your product against their current one? What barriers will they encounter if they decide to switch to your product? By understanding these backstories, you can reframe your initial interactions with them and improve your product accordingly. This involves meeting them where they're at on the Jobs-To-Be-Done timeline, making the best impression while they're actively looking for potential solutions, deciding which one to use, and switching over. People are busy and have a limited amount of time and attention, so it's crucial not to ask for too much effort from prospective customers too soon on the timeline. By asking these questions and incorporating what you learn into your product's new customer experience, you can make your future customers less likely to end up in your competitors' hands.

Sending product announcements without considering your audience is like writing a love letter and then addressing it “to whom it may concern” - Every week you'll receive a dozen emails from companies you know nothing about, telling you about some feature you don't understand, that was added to a product you don't use. People lament how email marketing has become less effective these days, but when reviewing some of these mails, it's not surprising. At Intercom, we encourage customers to send well-targeted messages, treating their userbase as distinct groups: active and inactive, with each group requiring personalized approaches. Active users should receive relevant updates tailored to their usage, while inactive users need a more nuanced approach, considering individual characteristics and behaviors.

Voice UI has emerged as a viable technology, but its usefulness depends on the context or "place-ona" in which it's used. Voice won't replace existing technologies like touchscreens, and instead complements them. The current speed and accuracy limitations of voice UI make it less suitable for tasks that require rapid input or processing. However, there are scenarios where voice is particularly useful, such as driving or playing music while walking around the house. As audio processing technology improves, voice UI may become more effective in these areas. The development of true multi-modal messaging systems, which enable seamless communication across different contexts and interfaces, holds promise for the future of voice UI. Ultimately, voice UI requires careful design and delivery to unlock its full potential and provide a valuable user experience.

When a company experiences growth, prioritizing minimizing downtime over maintaining full product capabilities becomes crucial. Intercom's experience with huge spikes in users online led to the development of the Big Red Button, a global killswitch that can pause workers and relieve stress on databases, ensuring app availability while slightly delaying updates to user data. By making this sacrifice, companies can protect their overall product stability, even if it means temporarily disabling certain features.

When Intercom released its new messenger with the ability to create rich, personal profiles, only 13-15% of customers fully completed their profiles. The main reasons for low adoption were visibility and education. To increase adoption, the growth team integrated profile creation into the onboarding flow and product gave higher visibility to profile editing within Intercom itself. A simple walkthrough was added to the app on startup that asked for missing profile components to be filled in, along with the ability to edit profiles from anywhere. The design team used a system-level approach to understand the problem, map out an inventory of parts, states, rulesets, and more. They also considered platform-specific steps such as camera permissions. After sketching out directions, they met with colleagues to get feedback and decide on next steps. The design team worked closely with engineering and the brand design team to create a simple and effective solution that increased profile completion rates from 14% to 46% within a month. Key takeaways included making sure the problem is crystal clear to all stakeholders, grounding the problem in research and metrics, thinking big and starting small, designing with engineering early and consistently, nailing interaction design as soon as possible, knowing your metrics of success, and tracking the success of your solution.

A successful product manager is one who can blend technical, design, and business-driven approaches to create innovative solutions that meet customer needs. This requires curiosity, a willingness to learn, and the ability to set aside personal perspectives to focus on the user's needs. Effective product managers prioritize research, collaboration, and communication to drive success, rather than solely focusing on technical skills or specific disciplines. By adopting a perspective-driven approach, they can create teams with diverse skill sets that add value through their unique contributions.

The new integration between Intercom and Microsoft Teams allows users to gain valuable insights into their customer support processes, including the number of conversations being handled, busiest times, and response speeds. This integration brings key data from Intercom's help desk solution directly into Teams channels, enabling teams to collaborate on providing better support in real-time. The partnership between Intercom and Microsoft has created a seamless experience for users, enhancing their overall interaction with customers. With this integration, users can discuss insights with teammates, identify areas for improvement, and take action to optimize their support processes.

Explaining complex software to non-technical customers can be challenging, as it requires bridging the gap between technical and non-technical language. A senior lead on a customer support team uses an analogy of being like an API between developers and customers to highlight the importance of effective communication. To explain technical concepts to non-technical people, it's essential to avoid assumptions, use clear and concise language, and be able to explain things in multiple ways, such as through different formats or places. Additionally, thinking like the customer is crucial, considering their workflow of questions and providing answers that address both the initial question and potential follow-up questions. By following these tips, developers can better support their customers and provide them with a positive experience.

The text discusses the benefits of having designers ship code to production themselves, rather than relying on engineers. This approach can empower designers to take ownership of their work, improve productivity among engineers, and reduce communication overhead. To achieve this, the design team created a workshop that demystified the process of shipping code, provided designers with enough skills to make an impact, and removed fear associated with shipping code. The workshop led to immediate changes in how the design and engineering teams collaborate, including shared vocabulary, code reviews, and designers creating their own pull requests. The text also outlines rules of thumb for determining what designers should ship, such as focusing on design-focused updates, simple or small changes, fast execution, and confident implementation.

There are hundreds of customer service metrics that can be tracked for conversational customer support, but only a few are truly indispensable to every great customer support team. Metrics such as total conversations, conversations per teammate, conversations per teammate per day, response time, and customer satisfaction provide valuable insights into the performance of a support team. Tracking these metrics over time allows teams to identify trends, anticipate future challenges, and make data-driven decisions to improve customer experience and reduce stress on the support team. By focusing on a small set of key metrics, teams can avoid analysis paralysis and gain actionable insight into their day-to-day tactics and strategic planning.

As an introvert, collaboration can be challenging, but it's essential for career progress and success. To overcome this, one must master collaboration skills, which involves being proactive in planning meetings, setting clear goals, and having a well-defined agenda. It's crucial to ensure that interactions with teammates are meaningful and authentic, avoiding unnecessary meetings. By doing so, introverts can effectively communicate their ideas and build strong working relationships, ultimately achieving success in their careers.

Design thinking is a crucial approach for solving complex problems, particularly in data analysis. Design principles can inform data problems by encouraging a holistic and systematic approach to problem-solving. Designing from first principles involves starting with the foundational level, building up solutions one clear piece at a time, rather than iterating out of the middle of a problem. This approach ensures clarity and alignment with the desired solution. Thinking in systems is essential for anyone working on complex problems, as it forces consideration of interdependencies and the impact of changes. Design systems, not pages, prioritize understanding how components interact with each other. Value reusage involves valuing consistency over change for change's sake, encouraging reuse of patterns, queries, metrics, and data definitions to make the codebase easy to maintain and unambiguous. By applying these principles, organizations can provide a valuable framework for solving complex problems across their company.

User engagement is a crucial aspect of product development that can significantly impact a company's success. Unlike other metrics like page views or conversions, there is no one-size-fits-all definition of engagement across different products. However, ignoring user engagement at your peril, as seen with Snapchat's $20 billion valuation largely built around users signing into their product multiple times every day. To increase customer engagement, it's essential to make a strong first impression by explaining how the product works, motivating users to get started, and letting them know how to get help when needed. Gradually exposing the depth of your product through features like email notifications, third-party integrations, and export features can also encourage users to stick around. Announcing new features and improvements in-app is more effective than traditional marketing channels, and engaging customers during trials can provide valuable feedback for product development. By implementing these strategies, companies can increase user engagement and ultimately drive business success.