September 2020 Summaries

Aircall's Global Head of Customer Care, Ian MacLean, discusses the challenges of preventing the "swivel chair effect" in support teams. The Aircall team has built integrations with systems like Salesforce and Intercom to simplify data exchange and eliminate manual switching between tools. To provide a consistent customer experience, Aircall dedicates extensive resources to its support arm, including multiple channels for customers to receive support. The Conversational Support Funnel breaks down the customer journey into proactive, self-service, and human stages, with automation playing a crucial role in powering human support. Ian's team uses automation to collect valuable information from customers, freeing up agents to focus on high-touch interactions. Aircall's tech stack includes Intercom, JIRA, and Aircall for phone support, with the company prioritizing customer-centric tools that improve the customer experience. As the industry continues to evolve, Ian emphasizes the importance of balancing what works with what's next, blending best practices with innovation to provide a great level of service.

We built Series, a visual campaign builder that allows customers to easily create sophisticated customer journeys using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. This was achieved after considering four different approaches: evolving Smart Campaigns, creating a rigid visual builder, a semi-flexible visual builder, and a fully flexible visual builder. Our guiding principle was "No black boxes," ensuring customers knew what was happening in each part of the series without ambiguity. We looked outside our product by analyzing customer feedback, competitor solutions, and digital visual builders to guide our thinking. Finally, we tested our assumptions with dozens of customers to discover dozens of use cases, needs, and confusions that hadn't been previously considered. The flexible visual builder was chosen as it ticked all boxes: understandable, resonating with the mental model of most people in the market, and testing well. This process taught us lessons on iterative improvements, considering external perspectives, and investing in realistic prototypes to achieve objective confidence in our solution.

Series is Intercom's powerful new visual campaign builder that enables seamless orchestration of multiple different types of messages across various channels, including emails, mobile carousels, and in-app messages. It harnesses the power of multiple channels to reach customers wherever they are, allowing for precise targeting based on behavior in the product or engagement with prior messages. The tool offers a simple drag-and-drop campaign builder that creates ideal customer journeys with flexible wait times, different message types, and tags related to how users react. With visual reporting capabilities, businesses can gather insights into how customers engage with messaging campaigns, spotting any holes or inconsistencies in the journey. What sets Series apart is its ability to co-ordinate all customer messaging from a single place, allowing contextual response to customer behavior, making it easier to guarantee desired reactions. The tool connects various channels, offers granular audience targeting based on prior message engagement and product data, and provides sophisticated templates to get campaigns up and running quickly. It also includes features such as fallback messages, starting conversations with sales or support teams, and seamless onboarding experiences. By using Series, businesses can ensure coherent, relevant, and personalized messaging across platforms and channels, smoothly orchestrating their customers' journeys.

The company Intercom has developed a customer support tone of voice framework called PREACH, which stands for Proud, Responsible, Empathetic, Articulate, Concise and Human. This framework helps ensure consistency in the way support teams communicate with customers, while also delivering personalized and conversational support at scale. The framework is designed to be easily understood, remembered, and shared, using an acronym that guides teams on how to approach customer interactions. By applying the PREACH framework, Intercom aims to maintain excellent customer relationships, deliver high-quality customer experiences, and reinforce its company culture and standards.

We recently shipped new features to Intercom's support capabilities, including advanced ticketing workflows and richer reporting. To improve the usability, intuitiveness, and polish of our main product navigation, we analyzed complexity creep that had crept into it over time. We gained a deep understanding of the problem by talking to customers, who identified two discrete issues: unclear icons and unintuitive ordering of items within the navigation. By focusing on these problems, we made simple yet impactful improvements, including reordering our navigation to prioritize Inbox and redesigning our navigation icons based on four principles: obviousness over prettiness or cleverness, passing the squint test for individuality and collectivity, drawing from our logo's anatomy, and sweating the details. We also polished the executional details, such as hover states and product icon alignment, to create a more intuitive and polished navigation that combats entropy by continually revisiting fundamental parts of our product to rationalize, simplify, and repair.

The art of the customer follow-up and delightful customer service is a crucial aspect of providing a positive experience for customers. It involves asking questions, listening actively, and showing care about the customer's needs and concerns. A proactive approach to follow-up can help ensure that customers feel valued and cared for, leading to increased retention and loyalty. Consistent and thoughtful follow-ups are key to delivering excellent customer service, and timing is essential to catching customers at the right moment. By using modern business messengers, sending targeted messages, offering helpful content, and asking if there's anything else that can be done, businesses can create a proactive support model that sets them apart from competitors.