November 2018 Summaries

We have introduced API versioning in Intercom to improve the developer experience by allowing for safe and frequent upgrades, reducing friction and complexity. This is achieved through the creation of multiple releases of our API, each with its own set of changes, which can be easily rolled back if needed. The introduction of a version change concept, where a single change made on an API model is represented by a description of the change, the public model it's targeting, and a transformation to the previous version of the model, enables us to update our public models to the latest version while still allowing for backward compatibility. This design allows us to have a single implementation of the logic, eliminating duplicated code and reducing maintenance overhead, making our codebase more robust, reliable, and maintainable. With API versioning, we can now release changes to all our platform features more frequently and safely, improving the quality of our platform and the apps built on top of it.

The growth of video customer service is transforming the way businesses interact with customers, providing faster, more convenient, and personalized experiences. As companies move away from traditional methods like phone calls and emails, they're turning to video as a key tool for building relationships, resolving complex issues, and creating a sense of trust with their customers. By leveraging video in various ways, such as answering support tickets, onboarding new users, nurturing sales leads, documenting tutorials, and providing personalized experiences, businesses can deliver lightning-fast customer interactions while maintaining a personal touch. This integration is especially seamless when paired with real-time messaging tools like Intercom, allowing for a more engaging and responsive experience that keeps customers happy and builds loyalty.

SaaS startups can benefit from a structured sales approach to increase growth. Defining marketing personas helps target the right customers, while meeting them and gathering feedback is crucial for product iteration and improvement. Identifying a market-specific methodology and creating a well-defined sales process are also essential. Compelling content generation through inbound marketing, lead qualification, and managing first sales meetings can help generate leads and close deals. By following this simple sales methodology, early-stage SaaS businesses can ensure their efforts are rewarded, but it's crucial to adapt the approach to unique circumstances.

Messenger Apps are a new feature in Intercom Messenger that allows businesses to integrate third-party apps and tools into their workflow, making it extremely customizable. To simplify app development, ngrok is a useful tool that creates public URLs exposing a web server on a development machine, allowing developers to set webhook URLs while developing their app without additional infrastructure. With ngrok, developers can get started quickly by downloading the tool and setting up a tunnel to their server, which exposes their development server to the outside world. The ngrok web interface provides useful features such as inspecting traffic, replaying requests, and request/response validation, making it an invaluable tool for building Messenger Apps.

Sales KPIs are a crucial part of any high-performing sales organization. They provide a clear understanding of customer acquisition and help drive key outcomes by measuring the performance of individual sales reps, teams, and the entire organization. The 18 top sales KPIs tracked at Intercom include lead generation metrics such as sales eligible lead delivery and first response time, pipeline creation metrics like stage one opportunity creation and conversion rates, new business metrics like average revenue per account and new logos acquired, existing business metrics like expansion dollars and churn dollars, organizational attainment metrics like net new revenue attainment, and individual performance metrics like quota attainment and revenue sold per rep. By tracking these KPIs, sales leaders can gain visibility into their team's performance, identify trends and themes, and make data-driven decisions to drive growth and efficiency. The key is to use the right metrics in context, as isolated metrics alone are not enough to achieve meaningful outcomes.

A well-defined growth stack is crucial for businesses aiming to scale and grow. Currently, many sales and marketing teams are using outdated tech stacks that hinder their ability to efficiently nurture leads, close deals, or onboard new customers. To overcome this, companies should focus on building a growth stack that accelerates speed to lead, makes customer handoffs invisible, and measures success with a common data model. When evaluating tools for the growth stack, it's essential to consider whether they enable better collaboration, faster decision-making, and drive revenue growth. Ultimately, businesses should adopt a customer-first approach, using integrated marketing, sales, and customer success tools that prioritize the customer experience to stay competitive in today's market.

Sales velocity is a powerful metric that measures how long it takes for a business to generate revenue, providing insight into the speed at which leads progress through the sales pipeline and the amount of revenue generated over time. It helps forecast when a business will hit its quota and allows sales teams to optimize their performance by focusing on four key components: number of sales opportunities, average deal value, win rate, and sales cycle length. By increasing these variables, such as qualifying leads for quality, driving up average deal size through strategic pricing and upselling, optimizing personal win rates through in-depth discovery and competitor analysis, and shortening the length of the sales cycle, sales reps can boost their sales velocity and ultimately hit their targets more efficiently.

Intercom has released seven new features to help customers deliver personalized experiences at scale, including intelligent automation and data-driven insights. These features include Resolution Bot, which automates answers to common questions, Video Bots for maximizing engagement, a Google Analytics app for measuring conversions from the Messenger, updated scheduling apps that make it easy to book demos and meetings with leads, tracking of actions visitors take on your website, customization of conversation context in the Inbox, and capture and saving qualification information in Custom Bot flows. Additionally, Intercom has launched several new apps on its App Store, including Unbabel for automated translation, Outgrow.co for interactive content sharing, Workato for intelligent automation, and Zapier for automating tasks across tools.

The rise of mobile micro-formats such as stories has exploded in popularity, changing the mechanics of mobile interaction. Stories raise interesting design questions, including how they will change traditional newsfeed dynamics and what role ubiquitous cameras will play in shaping communication with these formats. The core mechanics of any newsfeed-based product have remained relatively the same over time, but stories bring new elements such as camera input and personal, direct communication between creator and audience. This shift towards mobile-only experiences is changing how we interact with digital content, making it more immersive and suitable for consumption in AR/VR environments. The impact of stories on design is still evolving, and their potential to shape our tools and ourselves cannot be overstated.