August 2021 Summaries

With the launch of multichannel transactional messaging in Intercom, businesses can now send personalized messages to their customers across various channels such as email, push notifications, in-product messages, and banners. This feature is designed to empower companies to send all their customer messages from a single platform, eliminating the need for multiple tools and reducing complexity. With this new capability, customers can be reached where they are most likely to engage, at the ideal moment, using the channel that works best for them. The feature also enables businesses to own the messaging process from beginning to end, without requiring an engineering team, and provides a unified platform for all customer messaging needs.

The article marks a significant milestone for Intercom, a company that has been revolutionizing the way businesses interact with their customers. Over the past decade, Intercom has made tremendous progress in building its product, hiring talented people, and helping companies form lasting relationships with their customers. The company's journey began with the launch of its first product, the Business Messenger, which was released in private beta in 2011. Since then, Intercom has continued to innovate and expand its offerings, including the development of automated solutions under the Operator banner and the creation of a range of products designed to provide fast, convenient, personalized support to customers. The company's CEO, Eoghan McCabe, stepped down in July 2020, and was succeeded by Karen Peacock, who has already overseen an acceleration of Intercom's growth. As the company looks to the future, it is clear that Intercom will continue to be a leader in the customer messaging space, with a focus on delivering personal, satisfactory experiences at internet scale.

Intercom has released several improvements to its platform, including enhanced reporting capabilities, integrations with popular tools like Salesforce and Dialpad, a revamped mobile experience, and new features for better customer engagement. The updated platform includes new reports for resolution bot performance, macros usage data, and email deliverability rates, as well as improved syncing with Salesforce and the ability to launch voice calls directly from Intercom's Business Messenger. The mobile app has also received updates, including a new React Native wrapper and a redesigned help center for faster resolutions and reduced customer inquiries. Additionally, Intercom has introduced features such as granular email subscription settings, real-time event messages, and improved customer engagement capabilities to empower customers and teams to work more efficiently.

Intercom's journey to revamp its Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys is driven by a desire to move beyond vanity metrics and deliver actionable insights that provide value for both customers and the company. The NPS survey, traditionally a simple rating of 0-10, is often used as a benchmark of customer loyalty, but its effectiveness can be influenced by various factors such as survey mechanics, timing, and personalization. Intercom's approach involves targeting every customer, regardless of their spend level or satisfaction, to build a balanced picture of customer sentiment and identify opportunities for improvement. The company has implemented specific milestones for surveys at two months, six months, and every six months after sign-up, allowing it to understand the journey of its customers. Personalized communication channels are used to increase engagement and drive higher response rates, while survey messages are tailored depending on the rating a customer has given. To deliver action with NPS results, Intercom triggers responsive workflows using collected user data in Intercom to drive personalized customer experiences. The company believes that NPS should be just one input considered by a business and will continue to experiment and learn from its customers to improve its survey methods.

Proactive support is a strategic approach to anticipating and delivering on customers' support needs, where they are, before they ask for help. It empowers businesses to provide targeted, personalized support via messenger-based channels, reducing inbound conversation volumes and freeing up support teams' time for more complex queries. Proactive support enables businesses to set their customers up for success, protect their team's time, and create a better customer experience, ultimately contributing to business growth across the organization. By leveraging the right features and resources, businesses can implement a proactive customer support strategy that helps and delights their customers every step of the way.

We build a culture of low-risk learning at Intercom by shipping as quickly as possible while minimizing risk. We encourage engineers to ship small changes, known as "cupcakes," frequently and invest in our delivery pipeline to make deployments delightful and easy. To minimize risk, we employ techniques such as being available after shipping, shipping instrumentation first, using feature flags, shipping to a small subset of traffic, shipping the "read" path first, and documenting and sharing our plan and actions. These methods enable us to create a safe environment for engineers to learn from production while providing real value to our customers.

The company has refreshed its brand, focusing on five main pillars: illustration, color, typography, product, and voice and tone. The previous brand system was found to be difficult to replicate without an in-house full-time illustrator and lacked scalability. The new brand system has been updated to make it more scalable, with changes such as thinner lines, strategic usage guidelines, and the elimination of full-body illustrated characters. The company has also made updates to its core color palette, typography, product visuals, and voice and tone to create a more unified and cohesive brand. The brand refresh was a collaborative effort involving a world-class group of creatives, including designers, writers, typographers, photographers, illustrators, animators, and producers.

Preparing for a customer support interview at Intercom requires understanding the company's values and the interviewing process. The process involves multiple stages, including an application and phone screen, a take-home test, a manager phone screen, and a virtual onsite interview. To make a great impression, it's essential to practice storytelling, use the STAR framework, ask questions at the end of the conversation, and be prepared with technical skills for Support Engineer roles. Intercom values seven key qualities: being an owner, connecting personally with empathy, thriving under pressure, giving feedback fearlessly, focusing on fundamentals, being resourceful, and practicing patience. By understanding these values and preparing accordingly, candidates can increase their chances of success in the interview process.

Our company values "We obsess about our customers' success" and believe that understanding our customers holistically is critical to solving their most important problems. To achieve this, we've created a new team called Team RAD - Research, Analytics, and Data Science, which combines product research and data science into a single org with the goal of creating a holistic understanding of our customers. The team's mission is to drive effective evidence-based decisions through research and data science, using insights to shape strategy, build products that deliver real value, and empower evidence-based decision-making across the company. Key principles guiding the team include being evidence-driven yet opinionated, true strategic partners, focusing on the decision, spending less time on non-core work, and combining passion, creativity, and mastery in their approach.