November 2019 Summaries

Today, Intercom is launching Intercom Academy, a new learning platform that offers a series of on-demand courses designed to help customers become better at their jobs and grow their business. The platform was created after the company's Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder Des Traynor hosted daily "seminars" to educate new signups and prospects about achieving success with Intercom. The academy will provide comprehensive training guides, including courses for customer support representatives and sales development representatives, to help customers master specific skills and workflows. Intercom Academy is designed to empower customers to feel like experts in their field, align their teams, and grow their business. The platform will continuously add new courses, including ones for managers, developers, and job seekers, and will be shaped by customer feedback to meet the evolving needs of the market.

Most landing pages for SaaS products focus too much on highlighting features and not enough on the benefits, or vice versa, resulting in unclear messaging. A high-converting landing page should strike a balance between both, using concise language to resonate with the target audience. To create such a page, one needs to understand the "job" that people are hiring your product for, creating a messaging guide that highlights both benefits and features. The page should also be optimized for organic search, have a clear hero section that illustrates how the product gets the job done, showcase key features in an engaging way, include social proof such as customer logos and testimonials, clearly state pricing, make it easy to sign up with multiple call-to-actions, and measure, test, and iterate on the page's performance.

Chatbots are rapidly spreading beyond customer support to drive growth across various stages of the customer journey, with sales being the most common use case. Businesses have saved an average of $300,000 in 2019 from their chatbots, primarily due to increased efficiency and faster response times. However, consumers still prefer humans for quick interactions, but are open to using chatbots if it leads them to a desired outcome. The key to successful chatbot experiences lies in building seamless integrations between sales, marketing, and support teams, while respecting users' time and providing genuine help. With 2,000+ vendors to choose from, businesses should prioritize chatbots that deliver productivity features, respect users' time, and work to set up human teammates for success. Ultimately, chatbots will play an inevitable role in the future of online businesses, but it's essential to focus on building experiences that respect consumers' expectations and provide value beyond just efficiency gains.

A tech support team used Custom Bots, a highly customizable bot solution, to automate the triage process of incoming requests and improve resolution time by 50%. This resulted in saving 39 minutes per issue. The bots use structured questions to collect pertinent details from customers before their conversation lands in the inbox, allowing specialists to get straight to work on resolution instead of spending time on follow-up. The bot also automatically tags new conversations, reducing reporting time and improving insights into request types. A good triage process can help support teams properly assess issues and prioritize critical ones. Modern chatbots like Custom Bots are capable of automating repetitive workflows, freeing up team members for more complex questions that require human troubleshooting.

The Intercom design team switched from Sketch to Figma due to a complex tool ecosystem that became prohibitively messy and limiting. The team consisted of 19 designers working across multiple offices in different time zones, requiring a collaborative and transparent tool for effective communication and collaboration. Figma's features such as its document system, commenting feature, and web-based nature provided a solution to their problems. Although the switch was not without challenges, including imperfect UI and feature shortfalls with Sketch, the benefits of using Figma outweighed the costs. The team learned valuable lessons about starting with why, considering it as a project, testing it themselves, running a trial, supporting their team, and checking the community before making a change.

We transitioned from a MySQL and MongoDB-based system to an entirely new user storage system built on Amazon Aurora and DynamoDB, enabling Intercom to scale with its growing customer base while maintaining the security and uniqueness constraints required for its users' data. This change was made necessary by the need to manage a large and dynamic dataset of over 6TB, with frequent reads and writes, which previously caused outages and stress on the team. The new system allows for more scalable, secure, and cost-effective storage, with significant benefits including reduced maintenance and stress, while enabling Intercom to continue innovating and evolving its products and features without downtime.