May 2022 Summaries

Great Question, an all-in-one customer research platform, helps businesses gather actionable feedback from customers by asking great questions and making it easy to build a panel of customers, schedule research studies, send incentives, and synthesize insights. To ask your customers great questions and gather actionable feedback, businesses should bake in a process and culture of customer feedback, make use of research democratization, personalize outreach while working at a larger scale, identify their customer advocates and become their biggest supporters by sharing value for the customer and acting on their feedback. Ultimately, simplicity is key to success as first-party data holds the power to drive lasting customer relationships and engagement.

First contact resolution (FCR) is a metric that measures how often customer queries are resolved after the first interaction with the support team, providing insight into the efficiency of responding to customers' challenges. The FCR rate is calculated by dividing the number of cases resolved on the first contact by the total number of customer inquiries over a given time period. A good FCR rate is generally considered to be between 70-75%, where 25-30% of communications with customers can be categorized as repeat calls. Higher FCR rates equate to higher customer satisfaction, while lower rates lead to frustration and potential churn. Improving FCR requires root cause analysis and addressing issues such as unclear messaging, inadequate training, and lack of knowledge base resources. By creating multiple paths to resolution, improving customer service training, clarifying messaging, and providing easy-to-find resources, organizations can increase their FCR rate and improve overall customer satisfaction.

Customer onboarding is the process of welcoming new customers and educating them about a product, aiming to reduce anxiety and provide value. It typically includes steps such as sending welcome messages, conducting signup surveys, offering product tours, habit-forming messaging, inviting others, milestone messaging, and follow-up as needed. This process is crucial in setting the tone for the customer relationship, making a first great impression, and proving that the investment was worth it. A reliable guidebook-like approach to onboarding provides customers with necessary information to get started, enhancing the customer experience throughout their journey.

A marketing-qualified lead (MQL) is a prospect who has interacted with a brand's marketing content or channels in a meaningful way, but hasn't yet engaged with the sales team. Marketing and sales teams should work together to define what a qualified lead is, typically a prospective customer who has expressed a need for the brand's products or services and isn't opposed to purchasing. An MQL lacks one or more of the key components that qualify an SQL, such as budget, authority, need, and timing being right. A good benchmark for converting MQLs to SQLs is around 13%, with referrals from websites, customers, and employees having a higher chance of success.

At Intercom, their infrastructure is designed to scale alongside their growing customer base. They aim to deliver a reliable and performant experience for modern enterprises, with systems that can handle massive workloads. The company has built its platform on top of a small set of core technologies, allowing for deep domain expertise and world-class observability tooling. This enables them to run less software, focusing on high availability, scalability, reliability, and secure-by-default build patterns. Their infrastructure is designed to serve hundreds of thousands of companies, big and small, with a global presence in multiple regions. The company's operational reviews ensure that scaling is a key input in their roadmapping process, allowing them to keep up with customer demands while maintaining a smooth operation.

Mentorship can play a key role in career growth, whether as an individual contributor, manager, or director. However, the traditional view of mentorship often overlooks opportunities for one-to-one guidance and instead focuses on creating a broader culture of support across teams. This broader definition recognizes that every team member has something to teach others and learn from their peers. By leveraging mentorship across teams, companies can build an environment where people feel comfortable asking for help and providing advice, fostering growth and development. To do this, organizations should focus on creating spaces for feedback and action, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of their team members, and identifying opportunities to facilitate mentorship in everyday interactions. As a mentor or mentee, it's essential to be aware of your own privilege and biases, as well as being open to receiving and offering guidance. By taking these steps, companies can create a culture of mentorship that benefits everyone involved.

First-party data is a rich, first-hand source of truth that powers personalized customer engagement efforts. It's information collected directly from customers, site visitors, and app users based on their actual interactions with the business across numerous touchpoints. This type of data allows businesses to create ultra-personalized content, advertising, and experiences that cater to individual users, providing a higher standard of engagement. In contrast, third-party data is collected by organizations without a direct relationship with the audience, often being ambiguous and restricted by data privacy laws. As companies move away from third-party data, they can leverage first-party data to create cohesive and personalized experiences, drive truly personalized customer experiences, and uncover deeper insights. Intercom's unified platform, The Engagement OS, ensures businesses can gather accurate data directly from customers, making it easier to power targeted messages and workflows, and continuously optimize how the business operates in simple and efficient ways.

The future of marketing is shifting towards engagement-driven marketing, where the focus is on delivering personalized messages to individual customers across various channels. The traditional mass media approach is becoming less effective, and businesses need to adapt to rapidly changing environments, including global, multicultural audiences, and an abundance of channels to reach them. Engagement means delivering the right message to the right person at the right time, and it's about increasing customer retention rates through personalized interactions, rather than just increasing channel presence. A successful engagement strategy involves working across sales, marketing, and support teams to create a seamless experience for customers, driving growth, lower costs, and more secure revenue streams.

Design and collaboration go hand-in-hand, and running a successful product design workshop requires careful planning and execution. A well-structured workshop can help teams untangle problems, generate new ideas, and make decisions. To create a productive design workshop, it's essential to start with an overview of the goal, determine who needs to attend, list tangible outcomes, decide on the date and location, work backwards to plan the activities, detail each section, use improv games to warm up, be mindful about brainstorming, sketch out more ideas, share ideas productively, delegate when needed, make slides or a virtual whiteboard, and keep track of time. By following these tips, facilitators can create an engaging and effective workshop experience that yields valuable insights and creative solutions.

Customer lifetime value (CLV) represents the total estimated amount a customer is expected to spend on products or services over their lifetime. To estimate CLV, customers must be assigned a specific value based on average purchase values and frequency rates, then multiplied by the average customer lifespan. CLV helps forecast future revenues, target valuable customers with sales and marketing efforts, identify most valuable customers for loyalty initiatives, predict which types of customers will be most valuable over time, inform overall marketing strategy and budget, and turn low-CLV customers into high-CLV ones by encouraging increased spending. Research suggests that a good CLV should be at least three times greater than customer acquisition costs (CAC), indicating healthier businesses with loyal subscribers or frequent buyers over long periods of time.

Workforce engagement management (WEM) is a technology used by companies to increase engagement among their customer service employees. It encompasses tools that monitor employee interactions with customers, training programs, and strategies to motivate employees. WEM aims to improve the employee experience by focusing on employees' needs, leading to more productive, content, and engaged employees. Companies use WEM tools for various reasons, including planning workforce needs, routing customer requests, recording interactions for monitoring and training, providing product knowledge training, tracking performance, evaluating customer satisfaction, and reducing burnout by automating routine tasks with self-serve options and chatbots.

Lead generation is a marketing strategy that aims to generate interest for a company's products and services, turning leads into prospects and nurturing them down the marketing funnel. A lead is an individual who has shown some level of interest in a brand, while a prospect is a qualified lead who can make or influence buying decisions. Lead generation strategies often incorporate various tactics such as advertising, social media, chatbots, newsletters, email marketing, website blogs, online coupons, free trials and demos, product giveaways, and external services that capture leads. Software tools are also used to generate leads by adding pop-ups, chatbots, contact forms, and other attention-grabbing elements to websites. Effective lead management involves getting leads, qualifying them, nurturing them, and moving them forward to conversion, with both marketing and sales teams playing a crucial role in the process.

A call center is a business operation that provides customer support through various communication channels, including phone calls, emails, live chats, and social media messaging. Call centers are typically staffed by trained representatives who handle inbound and outbound queries from customers, with the goal of providing helpful and attentive service. The technology used in call centers can vary, but common solutions include voice-recognition software, distribution software, call recording tools, and customer relationship management dashboards. In contrast to traditional call centers, contact centers offer a range of omnichannel options for customers to interact with businesses, allowing them to choose their preferred method of communication at a time that suits them. This approach can lead to improved customer satisfaction and experience, as well as benefits for organizations without the necessary employee resources.

A customer journey represents the interactions a customer has with a brand from initial awareness to point of purchase, encompassing marketing campaigns, website exploration, and purchasing decisions. The customer journey is composed of touchpoints, which are points of contact that can be used to grab attention and increase engagement. A customer journey map visualizes these interactions, mapping milestones and identifying key moments where customers may become engaged or disengaged. This map helps companies understand their customers' needs and tailor messages to guide them toward a purchase. Analyzing customer journey data provides insights into purchasing habits, pain points, and effective touchpoints, enabling businesses to refine their marketing and sales efforts.

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric used to measure customer experience and loyalty, quantifying how likely customers are to promote a brand in a positive way. It categorizes customers into three groups: promoters, passives, and detractors, with promoters being loyal customers who encourage others, passives being happy but not fully committed, and detractors being unhappy customers who will dissuade others from buying. To calculate NPS, companies poll their customers using a 0-10 scale to gauge likelihood of recommendation, then subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. A good NPS survey should be brief, specific, and ask honest questions, while also providing an opportunity for customers to share unique perspectives. A high NPS score indicates that a brand is doing something right, while a lower score provides valuable feedback to improve weaknesses.

The lifecycle of a customer is guided by a marketing process that nurtures them through various stages, from initial awareness to becoming a brand advocate. The length and complexity of the lifecycle vary depending on the product or service being sold, with some requiring continuous nurturing to ensure repeat business, while others have shorter lifecycles where immediate re-engagement is necessary. The stages include awareness, engagement, evaluation, purchase, loyalty, and upselling, each requiring different strategies to build trust, educate customers, and foster long-term relationships. Implementing a solid customer onboarding process is crucial throughout the lifecycle to ensure customers start off on the right foot and stay engaged with the brand over time.

A help desk is a centralized department or group that answers employee or customer questions, and helps to troubleshoot issues as they come up. The use of a help desk demonstrates a company's commitment to providing the best customer experience possible. Help desks offer basic technical support or customer service, such as resetting user passwords, and can be used for both internal and external customers. A good help desk system relies on automation for efficiency, accuracy, and reporting, with features like ticketing workflows, issue tracking, and personalized support pages. Ticketing workflows put the emphasis on conversations rather than tickets, enabling teams to route conversations to the right team, get all needed context, and triage issues in a timely manner. Help desks as a service is a process of outsourcing common customer support inquiries to an external team of experts, allowing companies to free up resources for bigger objectives while eliminating the need for onboarding and training an in-house team.

A marketing campaign is a well-planned and executed strategy that aims to increase brand recognition, engagement, sales, and/or customer loyalty through various marketing approaches such as search engine marketing, digital marketing, affiliate marketing, and more. A marketing campaign differs from an advertising campaign in that it addresses customer needs more broadly through multiple channels. An integrated marketing campaign is a cohesive effort that uses consistent messaging across multiple channels to appeal to customers. Digital marketing campaigns rely on digital channels like social media platforms and websites to reach specific audiences. Email marketing campaigns use email to communicate marketing messages to customers, while influencer marketing campaigns utilize influencers to promote products or services. These campaigns are often orchestrated via different marketing tactics and media types such as print, social media, and digital websites.

A marketing funnel is a model that visualizes the path customers take from becoming aware of a product or service to purchasing it, showing the process for turning leads into customers. It typically includes five stages: awareness, interest, consideration, intent, and purchase, although some funnels may also account for customer loyalty and advocacy post-purchase. The "funnel" concept is used to describe the narrowing of marketing efforts from a broader audience at the top to a smaller section focused on serious buyers at the bottom. Marketing funnels show a linear path to purchase, but people often don't follow this linear route, so it's essential to include clear CTAs and links to capture intent regardless of where customers encounter the brand. The funnel stages are designed to cater to different customer needs: awareness and interest, consideration and desire, intent and purchase, with varying marketing strategies for each stage.

At Intercom, simplicity is a core principle that guides their product development and company culture. By keeping things simple, they aim to build better solutions that are easier to build and maintain, while also providing customers with intuitive experiences. This approach requires practice, clarity, and alignment between people, but ultimately leads to faster time-to-market, scalability, and customer value. The team prioritizes simplicity in every aspect of their work, from processes to technical approaches, and encourages collaboration to achieve a healthy balance between product design and implementation. As the company scales, they will continue to prioritize simplification to maintain their speed and high-quality product for customers.

IVR deflection is a technique that aims to improve the IVR customer experience by allowing customers to have a multichannel experience, enabling them to interact with the company through various channels such as phone, online form, chatbot, text, or email based on their preferred communication channels. This approach helps reduce the number of subsequent support calls and empowers customers to find answers for themselves, ultimately bringing down costs associated with staffing a customer service team by leveraging digital resources and content. IVR deflection provides customers with choices in how they prefer to interact, leading to more pleasant interactions for both customers and employees. While it shares similarities with call center automation, IVR deflection typically involves an automated phone system that deflects calls based on verbal responses or dialpad input, differing from automation technology which may engage customers through natural conversation before referring them to the appropriate tier of service.

Marketing chatbots are a powerful tool for marketers to engage with website visitors and turn them into leads. By automating interactions with prospects and customers, chatbots can qualify and nurture leads at all hours, regardless of whether the marketing and sales team is online or not. With the right setup, chatbots can power marketing efforts and help companies increase lead generation, conversion rates, and sales. Examples of successful chatbot marketing include Volvo Cars Amberg's custom price quote bot, which increased lead generation by 300% and conversion rates by 200%. Intercom also uses chatbots to engage with website visitors, qualify leads, and offer personalized customer experiences. To set up a marketing chatbot, companies can follow three steps: decide when and where the bot should appear, craft persuasive bot messages, and create the first bot. Best practices for a non-spammy chatbot experience include avoiding human-like behavior, triggering bots at the right times, testing and refining, and expanding marketing efforts with chatbots.

The Intercom platform has introduced several new features and improvements, including Instagram for Support, which allows customers to contact businesses on the most convenient channel for them. Multiple WhatsApp Business API accounts can now be connected to a single Intercom workspace, streamlining support operations. Dynamic content is also available, enabling personalized emails with tailored messaging. Resolution Bot answers can be tagged for organization and filtering, while improved reporting capabilities help analyze engagement and article performance. Custom Bots can now be previewed in a modal, providing a more streamlined experience, and SLAs have been enhanced with customizable response times. These updates aim to improve the overall customer experience and support operations within the Intercom platform.