March 2021 Summaries

The guide aims to help support leaders empower their teams to be both highly efficient and hyper-personal in resolving customer issues. It emphasizes that automation is essential for resolving simple, repetitive queries at scale, but human touch is required for complex, high-value issues. The framework outlined by Intercom combines proactive, self-serve, and human support capabilities to get ahead of known problems, resolve simple issues automatically, and quickly resolve complex issues. Automation can help free up the team's workload, allowing them to focus on high-value conversations and boost job satisfaction and morale. Key principles for an empathetic response include being personal, explaining things in multiple ways, knowing the product or service inside out, resolving issues rather than just addressing them, and watching tone with the PREACH framework. To measure success, support leaders should track business outcomes such as customer loyalty, retention, and renewals, efficiency gains, and learn from their metrics to iterate and improve.

With a comprehensive FAQ page or help center featuring concise answers to commonly asked questions, companies can create a first port of call for their customers. However, relying solely on an FAQ page is not enough, as modern customers often prefer to search directly for answers and may feel that the process of searching for answers is too cumbersome. To address this, companies should set up bots and automation to serve customers with on-demand, accurate answers they need, exactly when they need them. This can be achieved through various tools such as macros, resolution bots, articles in the messenger, and smart suggestions. By implementing these automated solutions, companies can reduce the response time for frequently asked questions, make a direct impact on the human cost of answering these questions, and provide their customers with a great self-service support experience.

Intercom has successfully completed a HIPAA attestation examination, ensuring it stores and processes healthcare data in a manner consistent with HIPAA standards. This is crucial as the digital transformation in the healthcare industry accelerates, requiring organizations to adopt new technologies while safeguarding patient data and privacy. Intercom's security and protection of customers' data are paramount, and this achievement demonstrates its commitment to fulfilling obligations related to storing and processing health-related information. By completing this examination, Intercom enables businesses in the healthcare industry to fulfill their obligations as well, providing a trusted platform for customer communications while protecting ePHI data. With HIPAA compliance in place, healthcare organizations can now enter into Business Associate Agreements with Intercom and start using its customer communications platform to better support patients while maintaining data security.

Self-serve support offers personalized experience to customers without burning out the team or budget. Modern customers expect instant answers and control, which self-serve support satisfies by providing contextual help content and bots that deliver real value over time. By using a framework like the Support Funnel, companies can resolve most simple queries automatically and free up human support for complex issues. Self-serve chatbots can be used to speed up response times, provide fast answers to frequent questions, and set customer expectations when the team is unavailable. To make self-serve support effective, it's essential to personalize the experience, keep interactions short and simple, set clear expectations, empathize with customers' needs, and provide an escape hatch for those who need human help. By tracking efficiency metrics, optimizing bots and help content, and setting bottom-line metrics that move the needle, companies can position support as a value driver and achieve world-class support without burning out their team or budget.

Grover, a platform that enables consumers to rent devices such as phones, laptops, and smart watches, is boosting the power of their support with custom apps built using Intercom. The company's product team analyzed customer behavior and leveraged insights to inform the development of these apps, which combined with Intercom's self-serve support capabilities have helped improve customer experiences and unlock personalized support at scale. By removing unnecessary buttons from the order confirmation page, enabling customers to self-serve through the cancellation process with Resolution Bot, and building custom apps for the Intercom Inbox and Asana, Grover has streamlined processes, improved team efficiency, protected customer data with high-level security measures, and created cross-functional alignment among multiple teams. The results of these efforts have been significant, including a 10% reduction in incoming volume and a 50% decrease in time to resolve sensitive GDPR requests.

Jean-Bernard Baptiste, a Senior Manager of Customer Support at HubSpot, discusses the company's approach to creating great customer experiences and unlocking business growth through proactive support, self-service, and human interaction. The team uses a combination of proactive, automated, and human support to drive value for customers, with a focus on adapting to changing customer expectations and preferences, such as the shift towards live chat as a preferred channel. Jean-Bernard emphasizes the importance of finding a balance between technology and humans in support, leveraging AI or bots to remove friction and enable humans to focus on high-value work. The company's success is rooted in its commitment to customer experience and continuous learning, with a focus on meeting customers where they are to drive growth and retention.

Proactive customer support is a crucial approach to regaining control in today's fast-paced customer expectations landscape. It involves providing help before it's needed, often through automated messages, product tours, and mobile carousels, to prevent common issues from occurring in the first place. This proactive strategy can drastically reduce conversations that reach support teams, increase customer satisfaction and retention, and position support as a core value driver for businesses. By identifying recurring customer issues, partnering cross-functionally, creating a qualitative feedback loop, and sending targeted messages, support teams can effectively implement proactive support strategies. Key metrics to measure include Rate of Automated Resolution (ROAR), conversations closed by articles, customer retention, product engagement metrics, and analyzing trends and themes in support metrics. Ultimately, proactive support is just one piece of the puzzle for delivering efficient, personal support at scale, requiring a combination of proactive, self-serve, and human support capabilities.

When working in a fast-paced industry, especially as an individual contributor across multiple teams, burnout is a significant risk. Burnout is defined as exhaustion caused by prolonged emotional, physical, and mental stress, often associated with work. Strategies to help prevent burnout include communicating project roadmaps and realistic expectations with colleagues, offering "positive no" responses to requests that cannot be prioritized, treating all asks as requests before committing to them, and prioritizing tasks using the boulder/pebble metaphor to manage workload effectively. By adopting these strategies, individuals can protect themselves from over-committing on projects while still making a significant impact in their work.

The Ultimate Guide to Conversational Support` is a newly published resource that aims to help customer-centric teams achieve fast, meaningful support at scale. The guide provides a proven framework for combining proactive, self-serve, and human support to empower teams to get ahead of known problems, automatically answer repetitive queries, and quickly resolve complex issues. By leveraging conversational messenger-based support, businesses can unlock the power to provide world-class, personal customer experiences while maintaining an efficient team. The guide offers a range of strategies and best practices from leading companies like Slack, Zapier, Wootric, and more, helping teams position support as a key value driver in their business.

We have recently unveiled a new "product decision framework" at Intercom to help us scale with our ambitions and bring value to customers quickly. The current decision-making process has evolved as the company has scaled, but it's now clear that it needs to be updated to keep pace with our needs and ambitions. We analyzed feedback from teams and colleagues across multiple disciplines, identifying recurring themes such as limited autonomy, vagueness on who makes decisions, and lack of accountability. To address these issues, we've devised a new framework with four principles: highly aligned strategically, fast and autonomous in execution, hungry for feedback, and owning the results. This new framework aims to improve our decision-making speed, quality, and consistency, ultimately leading to reduced market impact and better product success.

To uncover the 'why' behind customer questions, it's essential to put on your Sherlock Holmes detective hat and ask the right questions. This involves getting to the root cause of their query, understanding the wider context, seeing the full picture with visual aids, using examples to understand the outcome they're hoping to achieve, and not making assumptions. By doing so, you can provide better support through messaging or live chat, turning customers into advocates for your product by giving them personalized solutions that help them get back on track and go further with your product.