July 2021 Summaries

Technology plays a critical role in providing customer support at scale. With the right automation underpinning your tech stack, your support team can be empowered to strike the right balance between personalized support and efficiency. The key to this balancing act is the Conversational Support Funnel, which combines powerful elements of proactive, self-serve, and human support to ensure your support is scalable, personal, and efficient. Proven ways to leverage self-serve support include saving valuable time with automatic answers, boosting customer satisfaction through efficient, personalized support, keeping response times low as your business scales, adding more power to your support – with less effort, and building a self-serve support tech stack. With the right tools in place, support teams can provide personalized support at any scale while reducing first-response times, boosting team efficiency, increasing customer satisfaction, and more.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant shift in the way companies approach work, with many embracing hybrid work models that combine remote and in-office work. Intercom, a company that has invested heavily in this new approach, is now adjusting its strategy to ensure it finds the right balance between flexibility and productivity. The company's employees have been surveyed on their preferences for working remotely or in-office, and the results suggest that most teams prefer a flexible schedule with part-remote and part-in-office work. Intercom plans to introduce an activity-based working model, which will provide employees with different workspace options tailored to their specific needs. This approach aims to optimize office spaces and promote inclusivity among employees with varying work styles. The company is also exploring ways to make hybrid meetings effective, ensure inclusive operations, and support employee well-being in a post-pandemic world. With an iterative approach, Intercom will continuously learn and adapt its strategy as it navigates this new landscape.

Conversational support offers numerous benefits across various teams in an organization. It allows for the capture of important customer information upfront, enabling sales and marketing teams to provide tailored responses. Additionally, conversational support helps identify trends and opportunities, empowering product, research and development, and customer success teams to make data-driven decisions. By providing a seamless conversation flow, it enables teams like sales, marketing, and customer success to collaborate more effectively and improve customer satisfaction. Moreover, conversational support improves customer retention and acquisition, leading to increased revenue and business growth. Finally, it enhances support team engagement and happiness by reducing repetitive tasks and freeing up agents to tackle more fulfilling work. Overall, conversational support is a game-changer for every facet of an organization's business.

Intercom is a tool used by marketing teams to generate more leads and help sales teams close bigger deals faster. By combining Intercom's Business Messenger with other marketing and sales tools, companies can create scalable processes to de-anonymize web traffic, score potential leads, route them to the right people, and enable reps to communicate with prospects in an effective way. This can be achieved by optimizing the messenger to show on high-intent pages, qualifying leads before sending them to sales, automatically routing leads to the right people and providing visibility, enabling reps to engage at the best possible time, and keeping data in sync and triggering campaigns outside of Intercom. By doing so, companies can save up to 20% of their time and improve the efficiency of their sales teams.

As a principal engineer, setting and prioritizing goals autonomously is crucial to effectively manage time. Intercom's approach involves setting quarterly goals, breaking them down into cycle goals, and sharing progress with the team and manager. The goal-setting process involves considering business and product strategy needs, team needs, engineering org needs, and personal goals. When prioritizing work, risks associated with each input are identified, and priorities are aligned with personal goals. Nurturing other engineers by delegating impactful work is also essential. Writing up a first draft of goals using a spreadsheet or document, sharing it with relevant stakeholders, setting expectations, and revising as needed are key steps in the process. This method of planning has numerous benefits, including increased confidence to reschedule less urgent work, easier saying no to less important tasks, and a clear guide for self-assessments and performance reviews.

We've redesigned our job levels for product designers to provide a clearer map for advancing their careers. Our goal was to make them more useful, realistic, and shareable. We identified five key problems in the current system: unclear determination of ratings and promotions, gaps between senior and principal levels, holding people accountable for outcomes they don't control, overlapping competencies, and many undocumented expectations. To address these issues, we developed principles such as explicitly building on Intercom's core values and aligning with job levels for other teams. We also made changes to each competency, removing unclear or subjective expectations, making them mutually exclusive and exhaustive, adding new ones like "Helping people & teams," and documenting many previously unmentioned competencies. Our updated job levels aim to provide a sense of what "good" looks like and encourage actions that designers can control while promoting a culture of kindness and support in career development.

The article emphasizes that great onboarding is crucial in making a positive first impression and sets the tone for a fruitful relationship with users. It highlights three core components of successful onboarding: UI design patterns, contextual educational content, and contextual communication. To build a lasting first impression, it's essential to understand user needs, determine what the first use experience should achieve, and consider useful UI design patterns such as welcome messages, modals, empty states, inline hints and tips, tooltips, and interactive tours. These patterns can help guide users towards their "aha" moment, where the value of the product becomes clear. The article also discusses how to leverage user context in onboarding, using examples like Intercom's Product Tours that combine UI design patterns, contextual educational content, and contextual communication to create a seamless experience.

Strategies to take your customer support global` emphasizes the importance of providing instant access to support for customers across different time zones. To achieve this, businesses must implement a global support strategy that includes investing in workforce management resources, ensuring smooth handoffs between regions, establishing common KPIs, and leveraging multilingual support tools. Additionally, creating shared values while respecting cultural differences, rigorously communicating internal processes, and setting expectations, underpromising and overdelivering are crucial for building a world-class global customer support team that meets customers' expectations for real-time support. By following the advice of top support leaders, businesses can drive customer success and maintain a competitive edge in the market.