February 2020 Summaries

Resolution Bot is the next generation of Answer Bot, introducing automation to fully resolve customer issues. It moves beyond generic answers to meaningfully solve customers' problems using machine learning technology. Resolution Bot automatically resolves 33% of common support questions and saves an average of 109 hours of customers' time over a year. The bot provides real solutions to customers' problems right there in the conversation, enabling businesses to deliver personal, real-time resolutions at a global scale. Resolution Bot has been improved with four new features: answering customer questions as soon as they start typing, scaling conversational support globally with six new languages, tailoring answers based on customer demographics, and boosting bot performance with fresh insights. The bot is now available to benefit businesses and can be learned more about by accessing a link provided in the text.

Hostinger, a web hosting provider with over 29 million users in 178 countries, was experiencing slow response times and delayed resolutions with their traditional email ticketing system. To address this issue, they implemented Intercom, which provided a conversational support experience allowing customers to message the team directly without having to join a queue or take a ticket. This change resulted in a significant reduction of response time from 2 hours to under 2 minutes and an increase in customer satisfaction score from 83% to 95%. With Intercom, Hostinger is able to provide 24/7 hands-on support and maintain a high level of quality in their service. The company's Head of Customer Service, Darius Grigorjevas, notes that the key to exceptional customer support lies in understanding the customer's mindset and finding the best solution, which Intercom has helped him achieve.

The success of Intercom can be deeply intertwined with the technology they use in their stack. Eight years ago, Ember was released and has been used by Intercom for about six years, starting when the author joined the company. In that time, Intercom grew from a small office to 600 people across five offices, valued at over $1 billion. The web has undergone significant changes, with frameworks improving capabilities for small teams to produce amazing experiences in short periods. JavaScript has also evolved, and compilers like TypeScript and Babel have enabled experimentation and adoption of potential features earlier. Ember's strong conventions help new engineers get up to speed quickly, enabling Intercom to ship a feature on their first day and another the next week. The company uses a "ship every day" approach, with frequent releases following a six-week cycle. This allows for continuous improvement and adaptation to changing requirements. Ember follows SemVer strictly, ensuring backward compatibility, and has evolved its rendering engine from primitive to what is considered one of the best-in-class. Glimmer, introduced in 2.10, treats templates as a programming language, using a VM to run compiled code, resulting in fast parsing and compact size. The company's new set of modern Ember features, Octane, will land incrementally over the next six weeks, improving performance and capabilities.

Our support team hosts regular sessions where new and experienced Intercom colleagues join members of our Customer Support team to answer tailored customer queries in the inbox, providing a unique opportunity for every team within Intercom to see their work through the lens of customers' needs. These sessions add context to traditional customer voice reports and help teams understand customer use cases, driving empathy and informing product roadmap and company strategy. By hosting regular sessions tailored to each team's needs, we create a customer-centric culture that prioritizes our customers' needs and problems, leading to direct business impact such as new features, improved educational content, shorter wait times for customers, and better internal relationships.

The new API version 2.0 of Intercom provides a more powerful and intuitive search capability for customers to pull, analyze, and update contact and conversation data. The updated Conversations API, along with brand new Contacts and Data Attributes APIs, allows users to filter contacts and conversations using any combination of fields. This enables the creation of custom reports, business intelligence tools, and personalized customer conversations using Intercom data. The search functionality has been transformed by this release, making it more robust, intuitive, and powerful, which is crucial for businesses to improve their team's performance, drive decision-making, and deliver deeper context for more personalized customer interactions.