January 2019 Summaries

We use bots 24/7 at Intercom to automate workflows and conversations, including sales and marketing, support, and backend tasks. We've implemented Custom Bots that proactively engage with visitors on our website, qualify leads, and send them on the right customer journey. These bots have improved our sales and marketing efficiency by qualifying leads instantly, engaging higher-intent leads faster, and asking more qualification questions on pages with lower-intent visitors. Additionally, we use Resolution Bot to automate common customer support questions, allowing our support team to focus on tougher questions and tasks. Task Bots also help us gain efficiency in our backend workflows, such as setting reply time expectations and rating conversation quality. Our automation technology, Operator, is fully integrated into our operations and will continue to be invested in to make our capabilities more robust.

A great partnership between product and sales requires shared definitions of success and an agreed upon process to collaborate. Product teams need to understand the value, marketability, adoptability, justifiability, security, scalability, reliability, usability, and sustainability of their products, while sales teams must understand these same criteria as well. Mutual understanding is key to collaboration on the product roadmap, which should capture customer problems, stack rank, status, persona, segment, and order of magnitude, allowing for feature requests prioritization based on problem severity and size. A successful product business requires a balanced approach, weighing different inputs such as table stakes features, recent launches, new innovations, and causes of customer churn to achieve a dominant market position.

Preventing customer churn and retention is a proactive approach that involves identifying leading indicators of churn, such as inactivity or limited usage, and taking steps to expand customer usage by educating them on the parts of your product they're not using. This can be achieved through targeted learning modules, such as video lessons, that introduce customers to actionable takeaways and help them continually realize the value of your product, reducing the likelihood of churn.

Lead nurturing is the automated process of guiding prospects through the buying cycle, from initial interest to successful adoption and beyond. It involves communicating with leads throughout their free trial period to nurture them towards conversion. Traditional lead nurturing strategies often use one-size-fits-all message schedules that ignore individual user behavior, but behavior-based nurture messages adapt to a user's actions and usage patterns in real-time. A well-crafted lead nurturing campaign can increase the chances of converting leads into long-term customers by providing personalized messages at the right time and in the right medium. Key strategies for improving nurture campaigns include targeting users based on time, behavior, and specific signals; avoiding conflicting messages; using signals to send follow-ups; keeping it simple at first and adding complexity gradually; messaging people in the right place; and measuring the success of the campaign by tracking conversions and removing leads from the nurturing program after they have converted.

Nothing comes for free in software, as the costs of development, maintenance, and support are not negligible. The act of discussing or debating whether to implement a feature incurs time costs, while the actual implementation, testing, and verification processes also incur significant expenses. Communication with customers, team members, and support teams is never free, requiring resources for documentation, tutorials, and updates. Once a feature is implemented, ongoing maintenance and support are necessary, adding to the overall cost of ownership. Just like house pets, new features may seem like a bargain at first but can become costly in the long run due to their ongoing expenses.

The Complete Guide to Using Chatbots for Sales is a resource that aims to help businesses leverage chatbots to scale their sales and revenue growth. The promise of chatbots is attractive, as they enable businesses to grow their revenue 24/7 and at scale. Modern prospects expect a personalized, on-demand buying experience, and chatbots make it possible to sell to leads in real-time. Chatbots are capable of automating away repetitive parts of the sales process and can be infinitely customized. The guide offers straightforward advice on how to engage customers with bots, includes five essential templates for launching chatbots, and features an interview with growth expert Sujan Patel.

The Intercom marketing team has curated a list of five books that had an impact on them in 2019, which they hope will have the same effect on their readers. The books cover a range of topics, including technology, marketing, and writing. "The Inevitable" by Kevin Kelly explores the forces shaping the future of technology, while "How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know" by Byron Sharp argues that broad reach is key to real growth in marketing. "20 Ads That Shook the World" by James B. Twitchell provides context for the world of digital advertising, and "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser offers advice on writing effectively. Finally, "Make Time" by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky focuses on creating time to focus on what's most important. The team's diverse perspectives and experiences are reflected in their selections, which offer a mix of practical advice and thought-provoking ideas for marketers and anyone interested in exploring the impact of technology on our daily lives.

When considering a significant career change or relocation, weighing the pros and cons is crucial. This involves assessing three key factors: professional challenges, company trajectory, and new city opportunities. A simple framework can help evaluate these elements to determine if a move will be worth it. While uncertainty exists, making an informed decision based on opportunity, growth potential, and personal values can lead to a fulfilling life change.

The Modern Guide to Live Chat for Marketing` aims to help marketers personalize their message and engage with new users through live chat. The guide covers the fundamentals of live chat in the marketing funnel, its best practices for implementation and automation, and how it can be used to proactively engage with customers in real-time. Recent studies have shown that over 50% of buyers are more likely to buy from a business they can message, making live chat an attractive option for marketers looking to increase engagement and conversion rates. By leveraging live chat, businesses like OutSystems were able to grow engagement by 50% in just three weeks through the use of custom bots and automation.

In 2018, Intercom doubled its R&D teams to continue innovating and expanding its product offerings. The company opened new offices in Sydney and London, raised $125M in funding, and set out to revolutionize customer experiences with automation technologies like bots. This year, Intercom introduced several key features, including Resolution Bot, which learns from common questions and provides on-brand answers; Custom Bots for sales and marketing teams to create unique automated flows; a new Messenger that powers all customer communications and enables teams to accelerate growth across the entire customer lifecycle; and an expanded public App Store with over 130 integrations that help streamline workflows and increase productivity. The App Store was launched in response to the challenges of managing multiple tools, which can lead to wasted time and friction for customers. By providing a platform for automation and integration, Intercom aims to make its product do the talking and drive real results across an entire customer journey.