September 2018 Summaries

The company Intercom has released new revenue and sales team performance reports that provide instant visibility into how using Intercom has a positive impact on businesses. These reports give marketing and sales teams deep, actionable insights into their business's revenue growth, including metrics such as influenced opportunities, pipeline value, and deals won. The reports also surface data on individual pages and messages on websites to identify which ones generate the most conversations and revenue. Additionally, users can compare performance across different sales teams and teammates, as well as see the impact of different teams and what it took to close large deals. With these insights, businesses can make data-driven decisions to maximize Intercom's impact on their growth.

As messaging continues to revolutionize business communication, Plushcap is excited to share a vision for the next chapter in this space. Seven years ago, Plushcap made a bold bet on business messaging and has since shipped products at breakneck speed, watching as it became the de facto way for businesses to build relationships with customers and drive faster growth. However, despite its meteoric rise, messaging is approaching its human limitations, requiring thoughtful and effective scaling. On October 11th, Plushcap will share a vision for how businesses will communicate with customers in the future, including a new product designed to support this vision.

The text discusses the importance of creating an ideal onboarding experience for complex products used by businesses. It highlights five essential tactics to achieve this: providing immediate utility or demonstrating it as realistically as possible, organizing the flow based on value rather than technology, motivating users through the process by linking tasks to benefits, reassuring and coming back to high-anxiety tasks, and guiding customers through non-product tasks too. These tactics aim to reduce friction and anxiety while making the onboarding experience easy and compelling for new users. By doing so, complex products can deliver a revolutionary value proposition that justifies investment and adoption.

At Intercom, Custom Bots aim to revolutionize sales cycles by providing highly customizable chatbots that enable both customers and sales teams to achieve the best outcomes from interactions as fast as possible. These bots solve the "last-mile problem" in sales by gathering information in a productive way and using it to deliver real, actionable outcomes in that moment, rather than relying on humans for resolution at a later date. By leveraging apps in their Intercom App Store, Custom Bots enable businesses to conclude interactions with the most appropriate workflow, whether booking meetings or completing tasks, ultimately reshaping the sales process and providing a new baseline of productivity.

Live chat tools for sales teams enable real-time connections with website visitors, allowing businesses to turn impersonal funnels into personal, real-time connections. To maximize the benefits of live chat, sales managers need to help frontline reps develop three critical skills: treating chats like phone calls or in-person meetings, being prepared to tackle a wider range of tough questions in real-time, and accelerating the sales cycle and closing deals. By developing these skills, sales teams can improve their efficiency, build trust with leads, and increase revenue.

As a product engineer at Intercom, the author has learned that shipping software requires finding a balance between speed and safety. Initially, they thought shipping was someone else's concern and focused on building code, but now they understand that shipping is an integral part of their role. The company's infrastructure supports safe deployment, allowing them to ship ambitious changes as small, safe steps, much like surgical precision. This approach has become second nature in the culture, enabling frequent deployments with no fear of breaking production. However, the author has started questioning whether they can trade some safety for speed and has identified potential tradeoffs, such as adding feature flags or performing schema changes that could be done more efficiently during a partial outage. Ultimately, finding this balance requires understanding both engineering and business contexts, making it a challenging but rewarding challenge for engineers.

The new features from Intercom aim to increase conversions and grow businesses by helping sales, support, and marketing teams work more efficiently. Custom Bots provide intelligent automation that qualifies leads automatically, books meetings, and hits sales numbers with the perfect bot for each business. The Intercom App Store offers 100+ apps to acquire, engage, and retain customers, while also allowing users to build their own apps with a new Messenger framework and Developer Hub. Additional features include increasing webinar registration with the Zoom Webinars app, driving engagement by featuring announcements and content in Messenger, harnessing actionable customer feedback with the Coda App, automatically syncing Intercom leads and users with 100+ other tools, downloading and sharing conversation transcripts, and improving automation at scale with updated webhooks and APIs.

We invented our Custom Bot chatbot builder to capture the complexity of human conversation in a visually comprehensible manner. We faced significant challenges, including how to represent multidimensional conversations in a flat structure. Our approach involved designing a linear builder with two key aspects: a "nav" or bird's eye view and an "editor" or focused view. To help teammates intuitively build complex flows within this structure, we introduced more system complexity by adding constraints such as lettered paths and branching buttons, which shielded teammates from complexity and helped them manage their conversation flow in a sensible manner. Our final design polished up the builder's visual and interaction details, structured navigation to function as a preview for the full conversation flow, and reduced unnecessary parts of the UI to focus on the conversation paths themselves.

In an on-demand world where customers can research, buy and sell everything they want with just a few clicks, traditional sales approaches are no longer effective. The future of selling lies in real-time sales, which involves connecting with leads when it's convenient for them through live chat, whether 1:1 conversations or automated by a chatbot. This approach allows sales reps to engage with leads at the exact moment they're most engaged on your website, qualify them on the spot, and move deals forward without forms or callbacks. By capturing intent quickly, businesses can gain a competitive advantage, swiftly converting valuable paid traffic into revenue, and augmenting their marketing efforts in real-time.