January 2022 Summaries

Intercom is launching a new program for fast-growing, venture-backed startups, offering discounts on its main customer communication solutions for up to 95% off in the first year. The program aims to help founders optimize their customer engagement and drive revenue growth by leveraging in-context, conversational engagement. Intercom has partnered with several prominent venture capital firms and technology partners, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins, and Index Ventures. The new program builds on Intercom's existing early-stage startup program, which has helped thousands of startups scale from pre-seed. Successful startups that have already benefited from Intercom's early-stage program include Spendesk, Notion, Monzo, Frame.io, and Aircall. Intercom is committed to supporting its founder community through webinars, events, and partnerships with venture capital firms and technology partners.

Automated support can be deeply personal by respecting customers' time, anticipating their needs, and providing empathetic responses. Bots excel at handling simple queries, reducing hold times, and routing complex issues to the right teams. Contextual support is also personal when gathering data about customers and serving up relevant answers. Humans and bots complement each other, excelling in different tasks. By automating transactional queries, personalizing customer paths with contextual routing, and measuring impact, businesses can create a personalized experience for their customers while enhancing team efficiency. However, there are cases where automation isn't suitable, such as sensitive issues or high-touch customers, requiring human intervention. Ultimately, automation empowers teams to scale support and provide fast, personal responses, but it's only one piece of the puzzle that requires strong knowledge bases and empathetic humans to back it up.

The Intercom Customer Support Trends Report for 2022 reveals that support teams are facing unprecedented pressures, including a growing customer expectation gap, team burnout, and disconnected tech stacks. The report, based on surveys of over 1,200 global support leaders, highlights the top five trends transforming customer support in 2022, which include adapting to changing customer expectations, managing team burnout and attrition, overcoming technical integration challenges, providing empathetic support at scale, and rethinking outdated strategies and tools. To stay ahead of the curve, organizations can future-proof their customer support tools, strategy, and processes to meet the evolving needs of modern customers and help their teams thrive.

Building and scaling a sales team is crucial for long-term growth, but it requires intentional decisions on who to hire, what to pay them, how to onboard and train them, and more. A top-down and bottom-up approach can be effective in promoting the value of a product to an organization, while a pod model can create focused tight-knit groups that comprise team members playing different roles. Hiring sales people who are passionate about the company and its mission is essential, as is finding individuals who can blend art and science in their sales approach. A compensation model that leverages results-based incentives can provide tremendous upside for growth and allow CEOs to truly leverage their people. Aligning compensation to how a buyer buys and determining the base salary and variable split are also critical components of building an effective sales team. An onboarding process that incorporates different learning styles and preferences, as well as training reps for effectiveness rather than just efficiency, can help ensure long-term success.

At Intercom, the company prioritizes moving fast and making quick, effective decisions to ensure customer success. Collecting customer feedback is crucial for smart product decisions, but it can be time-consuming for both teams and customers. To overcome this challenge, Intercom focuses on speeding up customer feedback loops, which allows them to learn and iterate quickly while maintaining momentum and making customers feel included in the process. The company has moved away from traditional methods of collecting feedback, such as interviews or forms, and instead uses channels like Slack to facilitate cross-organization communication and gather feedback efficiently. This approach involves choosing a convenient feedback channel for respondents, strategically asking for feedback at the right moment, and forming a personal customer feedback group to foster deeper relationships with customers. By adopting this method, Intercom is able to provide customers with valuable insights and iterate on their product quickly, making them feel included in the process while staying ahead of the market.

Today, we’re excited to announce Intercom’s first virtual launch event, New at Intercom, to be held on March 23rd. We’re witnessing a dramatic one-way acceleration in the transition to a primarily online business environment, and that shift is transforming how businesses engage with prospects and customers. Our product teams are creating groundbreaking, innovative new features and products that will empower marketing, sales, and support leaders to embrace the changing world of customer communication. On March 23rd at 8am PT/4pm GMT, be the first to learn about Intercom’s exciting new product releases, and hear from Intercom executives and other industry experts as they explore the latest trends and forecasts across the industry. New at Intercom will be our first customer-facing, virtual product launch event, where we will tell you more about our company mission, unveil our most exciting new features, spotlight our customers, and hear from influential experts shaping the industry. The event will be two-hours long, including a keynote, two breakout sessions, and the opportunity to interact with our product leaders and executives. Gain invaluable insights: Hear from experts within Intercom and from other leading companies in the industry as they discuss top trends and explore the future of customer support, engagement, and marketing. Learn more about our product: We’ll be announcing our latest products and features, and will be taking a deep dive into the ways first-class customer engagement can strengthen your customer relationships and grow your business. Engage with industry experts: Ask your burning questions, share your thoughts, and gain insights from some of the leading figures in customer engagement. Network with your peers: Meet others in your industry, share experiences, and compare customer engagement strategies. Click here to register for New at Intercom – it’s free! And if you know other marketing, sales, or support leaders who may be interested in attending, share the link.

Brew and Review is a knowledge sharing loop created by the author, Nicole Rashied, for her Customer Success team at Intercom. The process pairs teammates up every two weeks to review and give feedback on recorded customer calls, done on their own time. The goal is to create a more cohesive experience for customers, prevent information from disappearing when employees leave, and save time and resources. The author defines the parameters for success, gets the team excited about knowledge sharing, puts the right tools and processes in place, sets live, test, and improve, and emphasizes the importance of embracing a culture of knowledge sharing. By implementing Brew and Review, the Intercom team was able to overcome the challenge of knowledge sharing in silos and create a more effective customer success process.

Continue, Stop, Start: Rethinking retrospectives` presents a framework to structure retrospectives for teams, careers, or projects, focusing on three key aspects: Continue (what's working well), Stop (what's blocking potential), and Start (new initiatives). The recommended order is to start with what's already successful, then identify areas to improve, and finally introduce new ideas. This approach helps teams balance actions, make informed trade-offs, and align expectations while focusing on impact. By considering the context and adapting frameworks to suit individual needs, teams can effectively use this technique to critically think about their performance and drive growth sustainably.