August 2020 Summaries

I've summarized the key points of the text for you. A highly engaged engineering team is crucial for a healthy organization, and a manager plays a vital role in building engagement. To achieve this, managers should first understand themselves and their values, then develop a philosophy that aligns with those values. This philosophy should be adaptable, as managers need to be receptive to feedback and willing to adjust their approach as needed. Finally, managers must demonstrate genuine care for their team members, taking the time to listen to their stories and understand their individual needs. By applying these four lessons, managers can improve team engagement, leading to better business results and a more positive work environment.

Support teams face numerous challenges, including increasing customer expectations, team efficiency, and business impact. To address these priorities, support leaders are investing in technology to scale their efforts, with 55% planning to increase spend on tech in the coming year. A proactive approach is gaining momentum, with 78% of support leaders wanting to move from a reactive to a proactive model. Chatbots are also becoming increasingly important, powering faster resolutions and reducing overhead for frontline agents. Meanwhile, measuring ROI is becoming more crucial, with 30% of support leaders planning to measure their team's impact on customer retention. To achieve success, support teams must balance competing priorities and leverage technology to deliver fast, personal support at scale, while also prioritizing the Conversational Support Funnel to preemptively address known customer questions and automatically answer routine ones.

This article discusses the importance of conversational design for better products, particularly in software applications. It explains how human conversation is a sequence of verbal exchanges and how this can be applied to software interactions. The article highlights the need to bridge gaps in understanding between users and products by designing conceptual frameworks and systems that work for users. It also emphasizes the importance of sequencing turns in conversations, overcoming trustworthiness issues, focus problems, and delivery problems. The article suggests testing conversational experiences through table reads with team members and observing moments where the flow is logical or smooth. Ultimately, the goal is to create an intelligent system that's truly responsive to user signals, allowing users to respond and interact with the product in a meaningful way, which leads to UX empathy and a better understanding of user needs.

Take back your time: How to unlock the hidden value in your calendar` is a guide that shares five tips on how Executive Assistants can manage their calendars more effectively, allowing leaders to be productive and efficient. The article emphasizes the importance of budgeting time like money, identifying rhythm and flow, challenging non-essential meetings, thinking about the "why" behind each meeting, and saving time for unexpected events. By implementing these strategies, individuals can optimize their calendar management, reduce wasteful costs, and increase productivity.

The Intercom platform has launched a series of new features to help modern support teams handle rising volumes of complex conversations with confidence and efficiency. These updates include improved ticketing workflows, clearer expectations on reply times and team availability, and new reporting metrics for more detailed insights. Additionally, the platform now offers an Articles API for managing and measuring the impact of help docs across multiple platforms. The App Store has also seen a number of new apps published or updated to enhance customer experience and team efficiency. New features include message versioning, streamlined workspace setup, and onboarding for teammates. These updates aim to strike a balance between behind-the-scenes efficiency and maintaining personal customer relationships.

The text highlights the importance of localization for companies looking to expand internationally. It argues that not investing in localization can lead to significant costs, including barrier to international expansion, low conversion rates, and increased churn. The article also emphasizes the need for continuous localization efforts to ensure a seamless customer experience across languages. To overcome these challenges, companies can leverage tools like Lokalise, which provides a platform for managing localization efforts on an ongoing basis. By taking small steps towards complete product localization, businesses can make giant leaps in their expansion efforts and build relationships with a global audience.

Intercom has launched several upgrades to its platform for support teams, aiming to boost efficiency in providing conversational support. The new features include customizable inbox views that help track key conversations, conversation reassignments that respect team settings, a duplicate detection Task Bot, new conversation data attributes to drive customer insights, more powerful assignment rules for workflow automation, and more detailed Intercom reports to optimize support. These updates were developed by Intercom's Support and Product teams, who partnered closely to address the needs of larger teams with diverse workflows. The new features are designed to help support teams work smarter, not harder, while preserving customer experience.

Today Intercom is announcing its biggest ever launch with more than 20 new features designed to ensure prompt, personal support without sacrificing power or efficiency. These features transform Intercom's ability to handle complex customer issues by providing advanced ticketing workflows, powerful Inbox views, and sophisticated reporting capabilities. The new features aim to address the pain of choosing between traditional email-based ticketing systems that prioritize business efficiency over customer experience, and fast conversational support tools that lack flexibility for businesses. With these updates, Intercom is offering a leap forward in customer support, providing both power and flexibility without compromising on either.

The New Zealand-based mobile-centered solutions company PaperKite developed a contact tracing app called Rippl to help the country reopen its economy during the COVID-19 pandemic. With over 72,000 downloads in its first week, Rippl became widely adopted by businesses and individuals, serving as a crucial component in stopping the spread of the virus. The team partnered with the Ministry of Health and local government to roll out the app, which was built using Intercom's customer communications platform. To manage the high volume of inquiries, PaperKite used Intercom's Custom Bots to quickly answer anticipated questions and adapt to unexpected ones, allowing them to automatically answer 71.4% of incoming conversations and drive successful sign-ups. The partnership with Intercom enabled PaperKite to provide a consistent support experience, even for team members without prior customer support experience. With Intercom, the team could manage sensitive and dynamic issues effectively, ensuring a smooth user experience. As New Zealand settles into the "new normal," PaperKite will continue to invest in Rippl and ensure the safety of its community, safely assured that their support needs are covered.

At Intercom, a company that has worked hard to find a way to do both – to provide a great customer experience and operate with the efficiency that their company and team needs. They've achieved this balance by investing in a modern approach to customer support, called conversational support, which enables them to strike the balance between what's good for their company and what's good for their customers. This approach allows them to achieve high levels of efficiency and an enjoyable, personalized customer experience. The conversational support funnel is a powerful framework that can be used by businesses to achieve this balance, whether they are more like Zappos or Comcast. By using tools such as targeted messages, chatbots, and help articles, businesses can move from one-to-one customer interactions to many conversations at scale with automated and proactive support. This allows them to increase efficiency while improving customer satisfaction. The goal is not just a balance between customer experience and efficiency but also a strategic investment in creating a positive force on revenue.

Meet Dan Griggs, Intercom’s first CFO, brings extensive financial and leadership experience to the company as it enters a pivotal moment in its journey. As a company, Intercom is seeing record demand for its Business Messenger and larger businesses are adopting Intercom to build strong relationships with their customers. Large global brands like Amazon, Facebook, and Lyft are adopting Intercom to deliver conversational experiences to their customers at every stage of the customer journey. Dan has a tremendous track record of growing robust mid-market and enterprise technology businesses, including Sitecore and Rocket Fuel, where he played a critical role in transforming Sitecore from a perpetual license business to a subscription-based cloud software business. As CFO, Dan’s strategic leadership will help Intercom advance its mission, scale the business, and execute on long-term business objectives, including investing in product development and bringing conversational support to market. Dan is excited about the opportunity to build out a great team and help scale a company that’s transforming how businesses engage with customers.