February 2021 Summaries

Intercom has announced two new powerful reporting features: conversation topics and custom reports. Conversation topics provide a visual representation of the most important topics in customer conversations, allowing businesses to identify patterns and trends with ease. This feature uses machine learning analysis to generate suggested topics for exploration, ensuring a deep understanding of customer concerns. With conversation topics, businesses can gain insights into conversation volume per topic, median response time, and CSAT, empowering support teams to provide better support. The feature also provides visualizations of the median response time and time to close, allowing businesses to identify areas where they need more resources and training. Additionally, businesses can manually curate topics to monitor and analyze conversations. Custom reports provide a flexible platform for measuring and analyzing customer support data, enabling businesses to build their own charts and dashboards to track industry-standard metrics and improve operational efficiency. These features aim to help support teams boost coverage and performance by providing actionable insights at the right time, freeing up teams to handle more complex queries.

Designers can't have new ideas without prior sensory input. This is influenced by how our brains work and the concept of building upon existing ideas to create something original. Great artists remix, recontextualize, and build upon existing ideas to create innovative work. Drawing an animal or a fruit that doesn't exist will result in bizarre drawings, but each one is an elaborate combination of elements seen before. Design works in the same way, with basic elements leading to more complex objects being created. To boost creativity, designers can explore visual elements such as buttons, objects, and Gestalt principles in layouts. Taking time to study these building blocks will save time in the long run. Collecting solutions, identifying useful features, and noting innovative products enables designers to produce viable solutions quicker. Examining core principles underpinning designs can also help. Variety is key when boosting creative thinking, and getting out of your routine and environment can help find connections between seemingly unrelated things. By questioning everything, applying newly discovered principles, and stealing inspiration before you need it, designers can improve their creativity and originality.

We've made several powerful updates across various features, including Series for messaging workflows, Banners for reaching customers in a subtle yet meaningful way, Resolution Bot to provide more support coverage, and Inbox and Articles for increased efficiency. New features include split testing in Series, annotations for collaboration, goal-setting capabilities for company-level data, tag management for streamlined workflows, non-dismissible banners to stay top of mind with customers, product tours directly from banners, looping mode in Resolution Bot to resolve conversations, bot introduction to clarify interactions, articles with new formatting tools, secure inbox permissions, and more sophisticated reporting with the Intercom API. These updates aim to help businesses support their customers at scale while maintaining seamless, personal experiences.

Beyond CSAT, customer satisfaction metrics are changing to reflect the evolving role of support reps. As automation replaces simpler queries with humans tackling complex technical and emotional problems, traditional metrics like time to resolve become less indicative of customer satisfaction. To rethink KPIs, companies must balance customer satisfaction with operational efficiency, leveraging automation as a key opportunity for improvement. This shift highlights the need to look beyond CSAT to accurately convey the value support teams bring to businesses, focusing on factors that reflect customer feelings about interactions and internal quality standards.