December 2019 Summaries

The decade software ate the world` is a narrative that attempts to capture the essence of the past decade's technological and economic shift, where software companies are increasingly taking over large swaths of the economy. The decade saw the rise of big tech giants like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Twitter, which collectively became leaders in industry. These companies evolved under new leadership, facing up to the responsibilities of their dominance. Software ate the world by making mobile devices essential for daily life, with over 3.2 billion smartphone users worldwide. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter struggled to manage the responsibility of hosting a global digital discourse, while also being vulnerable to misuse. The cloud and SaaS businesses revolutionized how business operates, with startups able to reach global scale at unprecedented speed. Streaming disrupted popular culture, transforming the way we consume music and television. As we look ahead to the next decade, it's clear that technology will continue to shape our interactions and relationships, with a focus on long-term, subscription-based relationships between businesses and their customers.

We've had a remarkable year at Intercom, marked by nearly 200 blog posts, three new podcast series, and 58 individual episodes. We published five guides on buying live chat tools and two books, including "Intercom on Sales" which shares our journey to building a billion-dollar business. The team highlighted their favorite projects, such as John Collins' article "Product management, fast and slow," Evelyn Clinton's debut blog post on public speaking, and Courtney Chuang's exploration of the role of sales in product-led companies. We also released our first-ever "Chatbot Trends Report" and a new version of our Intercom on Onboarding book, which offers best practices for guiding users from signed up to success. Our Senior Director of Design, Emmet Connolly, published two pieces exploring design choices, while Sofia Tzima's essay "Overcoming uncertainty: Why we need to redefine confidence for the workplace" emphasized the importance of developing a healthy sense of self in the workplace.

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a targeting strategy where businesses market and sell to accounts, rather than individual prospects. ABM treats each account as a market of one, tailoring tactics to the needs of that specific account. Unlike traditional B2B sales, ABM targets high-value accounts with personalized experiences, builds strong alignment between sales and marketing teams, and improves customer retention and expansion. To implement ABM successfully, businesses need to put in place the right team, tools, and processes, including data enrichment, account mapping and routing, multi-channel messaging, and reporting. With careful consideration of internal changes and tool implementation, B2B companies can scale revenue with ABM and build long-lasting relationships with big-ticket accounts.

The Product Impact Framework is a step-by-step process that helps organizations understand the causal relationship between product features and business outcomes. It consists of cause-and-effect steps, from shipping a feature to delivering a positive outcome for the business. The framework acknowledges two different approaches to building products: feature-driven projects and outcome-driven projects. Feature-driven projects focus on solving customer problems through iterative development, while outcome-driven projects start with desired business outcomes and work backwards to identify the necessary changes. Both approaches have their challenges, and it's essential to understand the center of gravity for each project type to adapt how you approach each one. The Product Impact Framework is a valuable tool for organizations looking to shift from feature-centric to outcome-focused product development.

The Inside Intercom survey aims to gather insights from readers and podcast listeners on what type of content they need to excel in their jobs. The survey will help influence the creation of new topics, expert interviews, and content delivery methods in 2020 and beyond. By participating, respondents will also be entered into a chance to win one of three annual Premium Spotify subscriptions, which would allow them to stay up-to-date with various tech and business podcasts.

A company's success is heavily influenced by its clarity of message and consistency in interactions across the product and brand. Building trust requires aligning values, decisions, and behaviors to create a cohesive identity that resonates with customers. Great companies prioritize relationships and authenticity, fostering human connections through their products and branding. However, companies often struggle with defining a clear value proposition, dealing with first-mover disadvantage, and stretching their brand into new markets, which can lead to misalignment and loss of trust. To navigate these pitfalls, it's essential to map product roadmaps across the Brand Architecture Matrix, define core values, and maintain alignment between products, branding, and market segments. By doing so, companies can earn customer trust, foster genuine human connections, and achieve long-term success.

The article highlights the importance of multilingual customer support for businesses that cater to a global customer base. It reveals that 29% of customers have been lost due to a lack of multilingual support, and 70% of end users feel more loyal to companies that provide support in their native language. The survey also found that offering multilingual support can overcome other product weaknesses, such as tolerating problems with a product if the customer's language is supported. However, finding people who have the right technical and language skills is a significant challenge. To address this, businesses can empower their support teams with translation tools, use chatbots to improve resolution times, and increase self-service support through an integrated, multilingual knowledge base. By implementing these strategies, businesses can provide great customer experiences globally without getting stuck behind language barriers or adding a ton of headcount.

We've made significant updates to Intercom's Outbound feature, including a revamped navigation and refreshed product names. The Messages section is now called Outbound and features Product Tours, Operator, and Reports in one place. Auto messages have been simplified with new terminology, and folders have been replaced by tags for more flexibility in organizing content. Additionally, we've introduced Resolution Bot to help with fast customer support, answer targeting to make responses more personal, mid-path actions for Custom Bots to guide users to the right outcome, path analysis to understand performance, and Inbound Custom Bots to triage new conversations before passing them to a team member. We've also improved tagging and reporting capabilities, including new tags settings, tag rules, and reports for response times and closed conversations. Furthermore, we've released several popular apps, such as Chili Piper, Prodsight, SessionStack, and Rybbon, that can help users streamline their workflows and improve customer engagement.