March 2022 Summaries

Intercom has launched its new feature, Intercom Surveys, which allows businesses to gather feedback from customers in a more personalized and contextual way. This feature enables companies to meet customers where they are, survey while staying on-brand, and go omnichannel with both web and mobile surveys. With Intercom Surveys, businesses can drive truly personalized customer experiences by using collected data to power follow-up actions and workflows at scale. The new feature is designed to help businesses act on survey insights and mold their offerings to customers' preferences, ultimately driving customer engagement and long-lasting relationships. By integrating surveys with the existing product, Intercom aims to streamline workflow and consolidate all customer data in one unified platform.

Digital transformation is accelerating due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with businesses facing pressure to become digital. Consumers are increasingly expecting exceptional, personalized experiences, and companies must deliver on these expectations or risk losing business. The lines between sales, marketing, product, and support are blurring, requiring a more customer-centric approach where every team works together seamlessly. To succeed, businesses need an integrated tech stack that enables seamless engagement across multiple touchpoints and customer journeys, using automation to provide personalized experiences at scale. By adopting this approach, companies can drive better employee and customer experiences, leading to reduced churn, increased expansion, and improved retention.

Intercom, a product-led company, prioritizes high operational standards including minimizing costs, addressing quality issues quickly, and mitigating security risks. The foundation of their operational health is availability, which they achieve through a combination of cultural, organizational, systems, and software engineering work. This includes investing in observability tools to understand how code behaves in production environments, building strong technical foundations with simple and proven architecture choices, and managing risk and responding instantly when things go wrong. By embedding availability in their culture, Intercom enables every engineer to build fast and safe products that are reliable and scalable by default. The company's commitment to its customers' success means that rock-solid availability is a must, allowing them to exceed their target uptime of 99.8% for several years.

The e-commerce landscape has experienced significant growth since 2020, with experts predicting that the pandemic accelerated transformation of the digital space by up to five years. To create excellent customer experiences, businesses must ensure that their tools work in synergy with each other, minimizing disruptions to both customers and teams. This requires having the right tech stack, which can be achieved through proactive engagement across e-commerce sites, utilizing self-service capabilities, and leveraging messaging platforms like Intercom and Amplitude to provide personalized messages and support. Additionally, integrating various tools, such as CRMs, payment processors, and order tracking systems, can help teams meet customer expectations without burning out. By bridging their tech stacks and replicating in-store experiences online, businesses can maintain momentum, increase revenue, and improve customer retention.

At Intercom, shipping a product is just the beginning, and they strive to deliver outcomes as well as outputs to drive real results for their customers. They aim to balance both customer and business outcomes, delivering high-impact outcomes for both. To achieve this, they frame the outcomes they're aiming to drive upfront, using specific R&D outcomes metrics templates to think through and articulate the results they want to see. They also ship a feature to solve a customer problem, driving certain customer behaviors and impacting business results. The company instruments its product to measure the outcomes it's striving for, tracking specific events of interest along with additional context. They always assume they need to iterate on their products, knowing that they won't get it exactly right for customers or businesses. After shipping, they fight for adoption and usage, defining and measuring core metrics like awareness, intent, activation, adoption, and engagement. Finally, they review outcomes and share their learnings, codifying their conclusions broadly across the company to ensure that delivering tangible value at scale is embedded in their culture.

We're continuing to add customizable features to Intercom to tailor customer experiences, allowing marketing, sales, and support departments to flourish. Premier Services provides additional services for a more personalized engagement, while conditional branching in bots enables faster responses without validation paths. Articles versioning allows viewing past versions of published articles, maintaining content uptime with this feature. Outbound messaging CSV reports have been updated for streamlined data analysis, and February flash updates bring improvements such as dynamic reply times, preventing duplicate Messenger conversations, and a redesigned Resolution Bot Behaviors page. Additionally, European Data Hosting is now available on the mobile app, API v2.4 has been released, and improved webhooks provide greater control over team needs and customer experiences.

Meet Intercom Community, a customer community forum created by Intercom, which aims to build relationships among its customers and provide them with a platform to share their expertise, learn from industry experts, and maximize the potential of the Intercom product. The community features various areas for discovery, including Q&A, groups, news & updates, and other resources, where users can engage in peer-to-peer conversations, access exclusive content, and earn rewards by progressing through membership levels. Intercom Community is designed to empower customers to support one another with their wealth of product knowledge and insight, and its vision is that its members will be the driving force behind its growth, engaging in meaningful conversations with each other and with the Intercom team.

We are in the midst of a complete transformation in how companies and customers interact with one another as all businesses become at least partially digital businesses, customers expect those online interactions with companies to be convenient, effective, and personalized. To answer these questions, Intercom is hosting its first global virtual launch event on March 23rd to unveil new features, share customer success stories, and provide insights into the company's mission and values, highlighting the importance of internet-scale engagement between businesses and customers in today's digital landscape. The event aims to bring together customers and industry experts for conversation, engagement, and interaction, showcasing Intercom's commitment to delivering value quickly and efficiently to its customers through features and products that cater to their needs.