May 2020 Summaries

We recently released our next generation support chatbot, Resolution Bot, designed to provide instant answers to customers right in the Intercom Messenger. The development of Resolution Bot involved a huge amount of work by multiple product teams, vast amounts of research by machine learning experts, and hands-on collaboration with the support team. Our Customer Support team provided 100 answers to our most commonly asked questions to help train Resolution Bot and make sure it was ready to go from day one. We relied on both anecdotal and analytical approaches to collate these answers, discovering that they diverged markedly from what the data revealed. The analytics team helped us identify the most glaring omissions, using conversation "clusters" as a platform to clearly outline questions for which answers were needed. Since re-launching Resolution Bot, we learned that it instantly solves 33% of common support questions and has helped businesses save their customers 109 hours over the last year. Our first approach to testing Resolution Bot was to build a dedicated group of Customer Support teammates who would create answers within Resolution Bot on the main Intercom workspace, test the product to see what worked and more importantly what didn’t, and provide detailed feedback to the product team. We established a special Resolution Bot team to focus on curating answers and maintaining and optimizing these answers, allowing our support team to focus on the meatier questions and help our customers in an even more valuable way.

As the landscape of customer success continues to evolve at a rapid pace, customer success managers must prioritize efficiency over just effectiveness. Efficiency refers to getting customers to their desired outcome quickly and without wasting effort or resources. In today's fast-paced environment, juggling everything on our plates, along with everything on our customers' plates, can feel like a herculean task. To achieve this balance, customer success managers must focus on streamlining processes, not just explaining features, empower their customers to help themselves through self-service resources, and track the time spent with each customer to identify areas of improvement. By implementing these strategies, customer success teams can increase efficiency while still delivering effective results for their customers.

At Intercom, a product-led company, great design and engineering come from empowered product teams that own a piece of the product. These teams consist of a Product Manager, Designer, and a few Product Engineers, working together to solve hard problems and build great software. The key to success lies in achieving alignment, cultivating empathy, fostering reflection, and embracing healthy tension within the team. By doing so, product teams can harness the mess of building product to create something truly exceptional.

Support teams play a crucial role in driving customer retention and reducing churn by creating a thoughtful, personal, and educational support experience that increases product satisfaction and deepens product knowledge. To achieve this, support teams should enable customers to get the most out of their products through support, providing delightful service and product education that creates confidence in the team's ability to help customers succeed. Additionally, support teams must tailor their strategy when working with customers who are about to churn, offering specialized support to each customer type, such as those who love the product but cannot afford it or those who are not seeing enough value. Furthermore, support teams should assist customers in difficult situations with efficiency and flexibility, providing consistent and fast responses during escalations and empowering their team members to make strategic, spontaneous decisions that can drive retention. Finally, measuring the success of customer retention and churn prevention efforts is crucial, using metrics such as activation metrics like usage of the platform and analyzing support conversations and help resources impact feature adoption.

To improve your email deliverability and open rates, it's essential to monitor your email sending reputation and address potential issues before they damage your brand. A healthy spam complaint rate is around 0.02%, but high complaint rates can indicate a problem with your emails. To reduce spam complaints, get permission through confirmed opt-in, validate emails at sign-up, and always include a low-friction way to unsubscribe. Sending relevant content to engaged users is also crucial for open rates, with the likelihood of opening decreasing after 14 emails. Aiming for an open rate of 20-30% is ideal, but this can vary depending on industry. To improve email deliverability, set up Google's Postmaster tool and consider using tools like 250ok to track signals critical to your email program. Additionally, validate emails at sign-up, clean up your email database regularly, and avoid sending irrelevant content or purchasing lists of invalid addresses. By following these tips, you can improve your email open rates, reduce spam complaints, and maintain a healthy sending reputation.

The company has launched several features to help businesses scale, including a new Resolution Bot that suggests answers based on customer input, an API 2.0 that provides access to customer and conversation data for business insights, and improved permissions with Custom Roles. Additionally, the company has introduced new apps in its App Store, such as Marketo, Octopods, Amplitude Engage, Heap, and KickFire, which provide tools for automation, messaging, user behavior analysis, and account-level enrichment. These updates aim to make Intercom easier to use, more intuitive, and more secure.

CSAT, or Customer Satisfaction Score, is a widely used metric for measuring customer service quality, but it gives only half the picture and can be misleading. CSAT is influenced by various factors such as product knowledge, tone/empathy, and solution, making it difficult to pinpoint the exact cause of negative feedback. Customers don't see the complex processes behind their requests, and their expectations may not align with a company's internal quality standards. To get a complete overview of support interactions, teams should combine CSAT with Internal Quality Score (IQS), which measures how well agents' responses align with internal quality standards. IQS can be tracked by analyzing conversation reviews, using scorecards to reflect quality standards, and conducting regular review sessions. By balancing CSAT with IQS, teams can gain a more accurate understanding of their support quality and identify areas for improvement. Tools like Intercom can help track CSAT and IQS, providing a comprehensive view of customer feedback and enabling data-driven decision-making.

Helping businesses connect with their customers is what Intercom has been doing since its inception, but it also believes that building better connections between businesses can help everyone succeed. Over the past few years, Intercom has given a lot of thought to the ingredients of a successful app ecosystem and how to build fruitful partnerships. The company recently launched its App Partner and Service Partner programs, which unlock new sales, marketing, and technical opportunities for companies it collaborates with. Building a successful platform is about more than just providing APIs or an app store; it's about building resilience and value through mutually beneficial relationships. This requires understanding the challenges of developing a platform, including mistakes that can derail efforts to foster a healthy platform. Intercom has also learned from its own experiences in creating a health check for apps on its App Store and has gained insights from other successful platforms like Salesforce. The company believes that cities can teach us about building platforms by facilitating increased connectivity and creating value through interactions between people. By focusing on making it easier to create value through increased connectivity, platforms can drive growth and success.