August 2018 Summaries

Video Bots is a solution that helps businesses leverage video to create personal and engaging experiences that drive action. By automating next steps, it enables leads and customers to take the right action without losing context. The use of video in sales automation has been found to increase engagement rates by 4x compared to email for businesses already using bots. Video Bots can be used to personalize an experience for each customer, promote products, ask for feedback, or simply start a chat. With its Custom Bots ecosystem, the solution allows businesses to couple video and bots to create even more personal and engaging experiences for their customers. The platform is now available for sign-up on the website.

The Intercom Brand Studio has established a set of core values that guide their work and decision-making. These values aim to create an environment where team members can thrive, grow, and contribute to the company's success. The values are centered around optimism, passion, positivity, and inclusivity, emphasizing the importance of building trust, making each other better, supporting the mission, and seeking to understand the problem and each other. The team seeks to make good decisions, trade-offs, and investments of time to defend their ability to move fast for the long term, while also being scrappy and open-minded. The values are meant to be discussed, debated, and evolved, with feedback expected from all members of the team.

To ramp up your Customer Support team using Intercom, it's essential to provide a cohesive and timely onboarding process that captures the great work of your current rockstar support reps. This can be achieved by pacing the speed and expectations for learning customer support, utilizing resources and tools, such as Saved Replies, Smart Suggestions, and Help Center Articles, and following up on previous work to continually improve. By doing so, you'll help your new hires develop product knowledge, create a better customer experience, and become proficient in handling customer conversations, ultimately reducing the risk of reinventing the wheel each time a new support member joins.

Live chat is a powerful channel for converting visitors into valuable customers, with website visitors being 82% more likely to convert if they've chatted with the business first. A short conversation can pay off, with just one reply increasing the likelihood of conversion by 50%, and a simple conversation with 6 exchanged messages making a visitor 250% more likely to become a customer. Live chat increases conversion rates by focusing on "where" visitors are most likely to need real-time responses, often on pages other than the homepage. Bots can augment human sales teams, converting 36% better, but should never pretend to be humans and should not replace them entirely. Ultimately, live chat bridges the gap between personal service and automation, introducing a new way of selling and marketing for businesses, and has been successfully implemented by various companies such as Tradeshift, Salesloft, and Copper, achieving significant increases in sales opportunities and leads.

The text discusses how people in tech often overestimate the impact of big things and underestimate the power of small things. It uses the examples of flying cars, chatbots, and VR to illustrate this point, noting that these technologies have not yet lived up to their promises. The author then shares a personal anecdote about designing a chatbot in 2015, which failed to deliver on its hype. However, they argue that perhaps we were looking at chatbots the wrong way, and that small innovations can add up over time. They introduce Custom Bots powered by Operator, a tool that enables anyone to build their own bots, and see it as a small step in a big direction towards a potential chatbot revolution. The text also highlights the importance of understanding that progress is not always linear or binary, and that the future is often built on a collection of small innovations rather than a single big thing.

Custom Bots are customizable and can automate various user interactions while maintaining a positive conversational marketing experience. They can be used to capture leads, schedule meetings, provide personalized recommendations, and more. Six essential chatbot recipes for sales and marketing teams include a qualification bot that connects with the right leads, an out-of-office bot that captures leads 24/7, a product recommendation bot that increases first-time purchases, a pricing page bot that captures high-intent visitors, a competition bot that makes lead capture fun, and an enterprise bot that moves high-value customers faster through the funnel. These chatbots can be built with Custom Bots in minutes without coding, and they offer various benefits such as reduced inbox overload, increased conversions, and improved customer engagement.

Personalized landing pages are targeted direct response pages tailored to specific sets of keywords that a website visitor might use when searching for a solution. They can help improve conversion rates by providing relevant experiences for users, reducing friction and connecting the dots for them. To create personalized landing pages, marketers need to prioritize opportunities they want to test, identify target audiences, review current marketing site assets, build DRLPs with tailored copy and features, test everything through data-driven decision making, and scale their approach by focusing on high-impact keyword groups and using templates to reduce resources and time. By doing so, personalized landing pages can deliver a better user experience, increase conversions, and drive revenue growth.

Our company recently released Custom Bots, a significant update to our chatbot platform Operator, which allows customers to create entirely customized bot experiences for their business. This move was made after realizing that our initial offerings were too simplistic and didn't meet the needs of our users. We had to embrace complexity to provide more flexibility and customization options. To contain this complexity, we reused existing patterns and components from within our system, creating a WYSIWYG editor for content and actions. This approach allows customers to easily engage with the feature and form their own ideas, while also providing stable and solid first steps to help them get started. The introduction of Custom Bots leverages the power of apps, enabling users to end flows with relevant and actionable results, and delivering massive benefit while minimizing complexity. Additionally, we've found that templates can smooth out the bumps of complexity by guiding customers through the process and providing a clear starting point for their custom bots. Overall, this update is about empowering our customers to fully program and control chatbot flows, and giving them tools to make automation more relevant and mutually useful.

Building content that addresses timeless themes and answers recurring questions can be an effective strategy for businesses looking to create evergreen content. Publishing content that focuses on enduring ideas and advice, rather than reacting to current events, is key to retaining relevance over time. This approach has been successful for Intercom, where 40-60 percent of pageviews come from articles published more than nine months ago. To implement an effective evergreen strategy, businesses should not publish and forget, hold their nerve, shine a spotlight on their content, leverage social media, lean into it, convert visitors with CTAs, and consider the limitations of this approach for their specific business needs.

Growing up surrounded by video games helped shape the author's perspective on product management. Simulation games, such as SimCity and The Sims, taught them valuable skills like strategy, planning, prioritization, and crisis management. These traits are essential in product management, where teams must allocate resources effectively, balance competing priorities, respond to emergencies, and continuously improve products to meet customer needs. The author's experience with simulation games has helped them develop a strong foundation for their role as a product manager, enabling them to approach challenges with a sense of strategy, patience, and resilience.

The new product called Custom Bots allows users to create completely customizable chatbots on their website in minutes, which can help drive business growth through efficient customer communication. These chatbots run on the user's website and guide visitors to the right outcome without manual human intervention. They are designed to be highly targeted and can perform various tasks such as qualifying leads, scheduling meetings, and connecting customers with support teams. The product is built on top of a messenger platform that is increasingly becoming the preferred communication channel for businesses and customers. With Custom Bots, businesses can expect immediate efficiency gains, new customer growth, and the first full realization of a completely new way of doing sales and marketing for internet businesses.