September 2021 Summaries

Stuart, a logistics platform, has implemented Intercom's Conversational Support solution to strike the perfect balance between providing personalized and efficient support. The Custom Bots introduced by Stuart have saved over 2,500 support team hours per week, automatically resolving 55,000 chats every week, while reducing response time to less than 30 seconds and reaching resolutions 4x faster. By leveraging automation and technology, Stuart's support team can now focus on more complex requests, providing a better quality of service and experience to their delivery partners. The solution has also enabled the team to identify opportunities for growth, drive efficiency through automation, and implement a strong, scalable support system that benefits both the business and its customers. Looking ahead, Stuart plans to continue scaling their support, empowering their agents to quickly resolve issues, building relationships with clients and delivery partners, and providing a support experience that builds customer loyalty and advocacy.

The text discusses the evolution of Intercom as a product manager, focusing on upmarket companies and enterprise-scale customers. The author emphasizes the importance of understanding customer behavior, building for bigger customers without neglecting smaller ones, and creating products that cater to individual customer needs rather than industry standards. The article highlights three key beliefs at Intercom: customer behavior is more important than company size, building for bigger customers doesn't mean ignoring smaller ones, and building for customers, not competitors' customers. It also shares examples of how Intercom has adapted its product strategy to meet the changing needs of its customers.

The Intercom team has redesigned their Messenger to provide a more user-friendly experience for customers, making it easier for them to find answers and support on their own. The new embedded help center experience allows customers to search and browse articles directly within the Messenger, reducing friction and increasing engagement with self-serve support. This redesign aims to make self-serve support feel effortless, allowing customers to take care of simple issues themselves and freeing up support teams to focus on more complex queries. With features like a full-fledged Articles experience, self-serve first option, improved mobile app integration, and enhanced reporting, the new Messenger is designed to provide a seamless customer support experience that empowers customers to help themselves while still providing support when needed.

The support landscape has undergone significant changes, making traditional support tools no longer sufficient. Customer support is now business-critical and requires modern, connected tools to provide personal and efficient support. Only 37% of support leaders are happy with their current tools, highlighting the need for a new approach. The conversational support category is emerging and expected to explode in market share over the coming years. To future-proof your support tech stack, you'll need to adopt a modern, connected toolset that includes key strategies such as optimizing through a proven framework, connecting with relevant tools and integrations, and leveraging top tech stack strategies like HubSpot, Zapier, and Stripe.

At Intercom, a problem statement is a crucial document that outlines what problem the product aims to solve for its users. Writing a clear and concise problem statement requires careful research, understanding of customers' needs, and abstract thinking. Seven techniques can help overcome common challenges in creating an effective problem statement, including starting with the solution, trying wrong answers, talking to customers again, focusing on a person, designing solutions, skipping the preamble, and eliminating judgment words.

Proactive support is a strategic approach to anticipating and delivering on your customers' support needs, where they are, before they ask for help. This approach enables businesses to build lasting relationships with their customers, drive increased operational efficiency, and influence better customer satisfaction and retention. By leveraging technology and the knowledge and expertise of their team, companies can anticipate customer needs and use targeted messages, banners, custom bots, and more to alert their customers to temporary issues or provide a little bit of extra help where it's needed. Proactive support is enabling companies like Tanda, TrueCommerce, Spendesk, Living Spaces, and SMARTY to support their customers before they even need help, resulting in them being able to scale their support without dramatically increasing headcount, drive down inbound conversation volumes by up to 80% for temporary issues, and achieve sky-high customer satisfaction scores of upwards of 90%. The three pillars that underpin conversational support – proactive, self-serve, and human support – work together to empower support teams to tackle known issues before they arise, leverage automation and bots to power support at scale, and free up valuable time for their team to focus on complex and urgent customer issues that need a human touch. By using technology to detect signals in their product and monitor trends in inbound conversations from customers, companies can stay ahead of the curve and offer help to customers before they reach out to the support team, resulting in reduced wait times, faster resolutions, and higher customer satisfaction scores. Proactive support is also driving increased customer satisfaction and retention by empowering support teams to create experiences that strike the right balance between being personal and efficient, while also meeting – and exceeding – customers' high expectations.

This decision-making framework is designed to involve the support team in key decisions that affect their work, promoting a sense of ownership, fresh business ideas, and tapping into valuable knowledge and expertise. By categorizing decisions into blue (open to suggestions), green (multiple-choice), red (reversible), and gold (executive) colors, teams can ensure transparency, focus, and empowerment. The framework was developed after Intercom's support team expressed dissatisfaction with previous decision-making processes, particularly during challenging times. The approach combines elements of Jeff Bezos' decision-making mindset with awareness of the "bicycle shed effect" to avoid getting bogged down in minor details. By implementing this framework, teams can foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, and proactive work, leading to improved morale, productivity, and business growth.

At Intercom, product marketing is built with the market in mind, involving PMMs from the start of product development and beyond. This approach allows for a full-stack product marketing team to bring customer and market insights to inform product strategy, positioning, and messaging, ultimately driving better outcomes for customers and the company. The key to successful product marketing at Intercom is fostering close relationships with cross-functional teams, nurturing a talented and ambitious team, and continuously evolving to meet changing market needs.