April 2021 Summaries

At Intercom, a company experiencing rapid growth, they have developed a strong set of foundational principles to guide their organization in managing infrastructure costs. Their cost program is centered around maximizing efficiency while growing and serving new customers at scale, by taking a reactive approach to cost management, prioritizing opportunities based on impact, centralizing governance, monitoring ongoing spend without surprises, automating zero-touch costs, and empowering engineering teams with clear data and actionable insights. By implementing these principles, Intercom aims to minimize developer friction and maximize returns while maintaining a strong focus on product delivery and customer satisfaction.

Context is key in resolving repetitive queries at scale. By leveraging self-serve support, proactive support with customer engagement data, and optimizing workflows to provide efficient human support, businesses can turn the tide and get back to providing meaningful support for their customers. Empowering customers to help themselves with self-serve resources such as Macros and Articles benefits both customers and support reps, allowing customers to resolve queries in their own time while protecting reps' time. Modern support meets the customer at the right time and context, leveraging third-party apps to customize the setup for each touchpoint in a customer's lifecycle, further personalizing support and increasing resolution rates. Proactive support with customer data enables segmenting customers based on their lifecycle stage, type of content they're engaging with, or what pages they last visited on your site, allowing businesses to set expectations, provide support through onboarding, and educate customers on new features. By focusing on the user's needs and leveraging the right apps and integrations, businesses can meet and exceed customer expectations, providing a perfectly tailored experience that increases conversions, retention rates, reduces customer churn, and heavy lifting for support reps.

Innovation is a crucial aspect of any company's growth and success, but it's essential to understand what it means and how to foster a culture of innovation. At its core, innovation involves doing something new, different, and better. However, not all innovations are created equal, and some may be more effective than others. Designing things that are industry standard can have a significant impact and end up being a differentiator for a company. Understanding the different levels of innovation, such as business model, product strategy, and product execution, is also vital. Additionally, companies must prioritize product-market fit before deciding to innovate, as having an innovative product at the high level may not be enough to win customer loyalty. Ultimately, innovation and product-market fit are in a constant state of evolution, and companies must balance their investments in innovation and closing product gaps to achieve market impact.

The concept of "aha" moments in product onboarding refers to the emotional reaction users experience upon discovering the value proposition of a product, leading to delight and increased engagement. Researchers aim to identify these moments to guide users through their onboarding journey, as they are crucial for user retention. The anatomy of an "aha" moment involves understanding user intent, value discovery, and timing, which can be distinct from the onboarding process. While "aha" moments differ across users, patterns and themes can be spotted, allowing products to anticipate and guide users to these moments. The relationship between "aha" moments and activation is complex, as they represent different aspects of user experience, with activation being a business metric that suggests retention but does not reflect the user's emotional response.

In Intercom, shipping is the company's heartbeat, and running less software is a key principle. However, when building search functionalities, they had to make an exception by running their Elasticsearch cloud on AWS. They focused on three areas: applying security patches, performing software upgrades, and replacing failed EC2 instances. To achieve this, they utilized Chef for node-level automated lifecycle management and AWS Systems Manager (SSM) for cluster-wide workflows. SSM provided advantages such as automated maintenance windows and flexible instance discovery. The system is integrated with Datadog and Slack to provide operational visibility. By thoughtfully accepting the cost of this exception and iterating on it, Intercom was able to bring their Elasticsearch service back in line with their principles, achieving massive time savings and cost savings while maintaining flexibility.

The Customer Support Quality Benchmark Report 2021 highlights the importance of quality in customer support and how it's changing. The report found that customers want digital-first solutions, self-service options, and personalized conversational experiences. Support teams are shifting their focus from traditional metrics like time to close to more comprehensive KPIs that track accuracy, tone and empathy, and proactivity. The report emphasizes the need for a 360º view of team performance, aligning with organizational values, and using a scorecard to track unique internal quality standards. It also highlights the importance of peer-to-peer reviews, regular conversation reviews, and using difficult conversations as learning opportunities. Ultimately, defining what quality means for your team and building metrics around it can ensure consistent, conversational support experiences every time.