March 2020 Summaries

Intercom, a customer messaging platform, is highlighting the efforts of its customers in providing relief during the COVID-19 pandemic. Various companies, including e-learning platforms and healthcare providers, are using their products to help teachers, doctors, and patients remotely monitor symptoms, provide education, and assist with mental health support. Some examples include Showbie, The EverLearner, Albert.io, Suki, Therapy Brands, Qare, Solv, Lifen, LetsGetChecked, accuRx, Hiyacar, WhileAtHome.org, LetsBuild, GetCalFresh.org, Tully, and EndPandemics.Earth. These companies are making a significant impact in supporting individuals affected by the pandemic, from providing free or discounted services to offering resources for mental health support. Intercom is showcasing these stories as part of its efforts to provide positivity and inspiration amidst the crisis.

Intercom is committed to ensuring business continuity during the COVID-19 pandemic by prioritizing employee health and wellbeing, suspending non-essential travel and office visits, and implementing remote work policies. The company's infrastructure services are fully operational globally, leveraging Amazon Web Services for redundancy and resilience. Intercom has designed its products with this in mind, using redundant systems and automatic failovers to minimize disruption. Despite the challenges, the company remains committed to delivering support and innovation, with a focus on helping customers navigate increased volumes of inquiries and queries. With a strong partnership with AWS and a robust internal response plan, Intercom is well-positioned to continue serving its customers during this uncertain time.

The Intercom team has been supporting the fight against COVID-19 by offering their platform free of charge to various organizations and individuals working on critical projects, such as data aggregation sites, infection tracing tools, and healthcare startups like Solv and Lifen. These efforts have helped communicate with those in need at large scales and efficiencies required during the crisis. The Intercom team has also been inspired by these initiatives and is committed to building a world-class communication platform for healthcare providers.

During a crisis like COVID-19, managing support communications effectively is crucial to maintaining customer trust and satisfaction. To achieve this, proactive messaging can help reduce the Support team's load while providing customers with fast, transparent answers. It's essential to make every message count by being respectful of people's time and needs, defining customers' needs upfront, segmenting specific groups, sending messages in context when needed, practicing email etiquette, focusing on customers' needs, preparing for an influx of replies, responding to inbound conversations with empathy, relying on bots where humans aren't needed, and providing support to the Support team as well. By following these tips, businesses can ensure they're supporting their customers efficiently and empathetically during a challenging time.

We're cultivating a robust app ecosystem by addressing the issue of apps breaking or becoming non-functioning. We realized that maintaining an "app ecosystem" is similar to tending to a garden, requiring constant care and adaptation to ensure high quality and usability. By assessing the health of individual apps weekly and adapting their treatment as needed, we can diagnose problems quickly and prevent them from becoming major issues. Our goal is to provide a cohesive end-to-end experience that's informative and actionable, while simplifying complexity and providing meaningful context. We've designed a system that requests an app's status for every workspace it's being used in, verifies its functionality, and guides users with simple steps to fix potential issues. By taking this approach, we aim to make our app ecosystem more robust and resilient.

Training a chatbot to have automated conversations with customers is becoming increasingly necessary as it can help scale businesses faster and more efficiently by automatically resolving common customer questions, allowing teams to focus on more complex issues. To train a chatbot, four key starting points are recommended: recognizing common customer questions, creating answers for broad topics, answering many questions on the same topic, and optimizing underperforming answers. By doing so, businesses can improve their customer experience, efficiency, and overall success. Regular maintenance and review of chatbot performance are crucial to ensure its effectiveness and continuous improvement.

We've shifted our customer support to a fully remote model, requiring us to rethink our workflows, automation tools, and day-to-day rituals to protect team dynamics and productivity. We're doubling down on teamwork best practices such as implementing smart meeting strategies, reminding the team of shared values, and investing in collaboration and knowledge-sharing tools like Slack, Zapier, and Guru. Automation is ideal for repetitive tasks like routing, tagging conversations, and answering common questions, allowing us to drive greater efficiency and cost savings. To create a sense of normalcy and fun, we're maintaining habits like sharing Spotify team playlists, setting up Google Hangouts meeting rooms, and adopting new rituals such as morning surveys, team challenges, and frequent postings of our metrics dashboard on Slack. By equipping our team with the right tools and fostering a culture of trust and accountability, we aim to minimize any negative impact on our customer experience and stay productive in our remote work setup.

As remote workers, it's essential to consider the limitations of nonverbal cues in digital communication. Assuming positive intent can help prevent misinterpretation, which can lead to misunderstandings and damaged relationships. Clarifying ambiguity by overcommunicating or using clear language can also help ensure that messages are understood accurately. Additionally, expressing oneself through various means such as emojis, punctuation, and text formatting can add tone and personality to digital interactions, making them more relatable and engaging. By following these principles, remote workers can effectively communicate across land and sea, build strong online relationships, and navigate the unique challenges of distance communication.

We look for designers at Intercom who can contribute to a conversational design process that is accessible, efficient, and respectful of time. We value modern, simple design work with fundamentals of design, but also care about deeper details such as product strategy and scoping. We want to understand how you have an impact on quality below the surface. Our ideal candidate is adaptable, yet shares their opinions; has a growth mindset; is curious about themselves and others; and values kindness and generosity. We encourage candidates to ask us hard questions in interviews, as this shows they can question our strategy and roadmap.