June 2022 Summaries

In-app messaging is a key component of customer engagement that uses hyper-targeted notifications to reach users while they're using an app, website, or product. It provides personalized rapport with customers through features like messages, Product Tours, Surveys, and Mobile Carousels, which can be used to onboard new users, promote stand-out features, get user feedback, and retain existing customers. Unlike push notifications, in-app messaging encourages deeper usage and education while the user is in the app, making it an effective way to drive action and results. To optimize in-app messaging strategy, businesses should provide easy exits, make messages visually appealing, pay attention to metrics, use rules to target messages, test and iterate on messages, set up follow-up actions, and create consistent experiences across web and mobile platforms. Several brands are leading the way with in-app messaging by using Intercom's platform to contextualize customer feedback, drive action, and improve customer satisfaction scores.

Today, Intercom is introducing new next-generation bot capabilities to boost the power of its automated support. The exciting features launching today are Custom Actions and Custom Objects, which are no-code capabilities that will help increase automated resolution rates and self-serve capabilities, guaranteeing a faster, more seamless customer experience. These features will allow bots to access external information, answer more questions than ever, and enable customers to self-serve. With Custom Actions, users can connect their systems with Intercom in a quick and easy no-code environment, making API calls that present information in bots or take actions such as updating contact details. Custom Objects provide a flexible way to import and model data in a way that makes sense for businesses, giving them brand new flexibility and control over their data. These features work together to uplevel Custom Bots and Resolution Bots' ability to solve common customer queries, offering a faster, more effective support experience and reducing inbound volume. The benefits of these features include increasing rate of automated resolutions, ensuring better end-user experience, setting up in minutes, eliminating context-switching, and providing a whole new layer of context to customer interactions, facilitating a more personalized support experience and strengthening customer engagement.

Intercom SMS is a two-way SMS solution that facilitates real conversations between businesses and their customers, building relationships and bringing engagement to the next level. It offers a seamless customer experience by integrating with existing channels, allowing teams to continue building on valuable context from customer interactions. With Intercom SMS, businesses can boost customer engagement by enabling immediate responses, tracking and monitoring campaign performance, and leveraging rich first-party customer data for targeted messaging. The solution also maximizes the value of SMS through integrations with scheduling tools, system updates, and lead generation/Account-based marketing workflows. By enabling two-way conversations, Intercom SMS enables businesses to create a seamless customer experience, use first-party data to guide their messaging strategy, implement powerful workflows to increase adoption and engagement, leverage existing Inbox rules for high-priority customers, and use macros to tackle common queries with saved replies. With its high delivery and open rates, SMS gives crucial messages the best chance of reaching and being read by customers, making it an ideal way to communicate with customers anytime, anywhere.

We are excited to sponsor a new equity, diversity, and inclusion scholarship for students of the University of Limerick's Immersive Software Engineering (ISE) course – valued at €10,000. Software engineering will play a crucial role in the future of business, society, and even our planet, and we need diverse teams working on the world’s most pressing problems to ensure a bright future. Intercom is committed to building diverse teams by celebrating differences and fostering belonging. The scholarship aims to facilitate students from underrepresented groups to pursue a career in software engineering, providing them with practical experience and access to education. The course offers a holistic approach to software engineering skills, blending academic theory with hands-on experience, and is designed to prepare students for the real workforce.

At Intercom, product teams often focus on core functionality at the expense of considering the onboarding process. Onboarding is critical to a product's success as it determines whether customers can use the product's game-changing features. Without an accessible onboarding process, outcomes are difficult to achieve. Focusing on the onboarding process from the beginning of new product development is crucial for mid-market and enterprise customers. A well-designed onboarding process can simplify the customer journey, reduce wait times, and increase product usage. By outlining three key components - people, steps, and questions - Intercom was able to create a robust onboarding process that addressed real customer needs and facilitated a smooth journey to full usage.

A sales-qualified lead (SQL) is a prospective customer who has indicated through a series of actions that they have a high probability of converting, having expressed interest in a product or service and been vetted to meet specific criteria. The BANT framework can help streamline this process by evaluating factors such as budget, authority, need, and timeline. Qualifying leads saves companies time and resources by providing a better customer experience and increasing conversion rates. Tracking sales leads through each stage of the sales funnel helps calculate conversion rates and identify areas for improvement, ultimately informing strategies to re-engage potential customers and drive conversions.

Tiered support is a customer service model that organizes multiple levels of support, allowing companies to efficiently allocate resources and provide personalized attention to customers. This approach involves creating different tiers of support, with increasing levels of expertise and knowledge required for each tier. The first tier typically handles quick-fix issues, while subsequent tiers require more specialized assistance. A tiered support model is commonly used in companies where customer challenges are recurring or common, and where IT or product teams need to be available to troubleshoot specific issues. By allocating resources accordingly, a tiered support model helps ensure that customers receive the right level of attention, allowing employees to maximize their skill sets while providing personalized service.

The concept of customer relationship management (CRM) is a strategy and methodology that focuses on building authentic, meaningful relationships with prospects and customers to keep them connected and loyal. CRM involves leveraging technologies to meet customers' needs, providing 360-degree visibility into their behavior, interests, and engagement. This enables companies to deliver exceptional service, personalize messaging, and create tailored experiences that exceed customers' expectations. By doing so, CRM helps increase sales, decrease churn, and differentiate a company in the market. It also empowers teams to derive real insights from data, drive informed decisions, and make marketing more effective. The benefits of CRM include improved profitability, customer retention, and the creation of brand advocates and ambassadors who promote a company's products and services. CRM is typically divided into four stages: data collection, analysis, refinement, and execution. It also encompasses various examples, such as exceptional service, personalization, social media engagement, loyalty programs, and surprise and delight initiatives. Ultimately, CRM is essential for good business, as it helps companies keep current customers rather than attracting new ones and increases brand relevance, revenue, opportunity, and sustainability over time.

A push notification is a short, clickable message sent directly to users' devices, providing timely updates on new features, unread messages, or special offers, which can be highly effective and engaging marketing tools if done well, but risk being irritating if not. Targeted news items, behavior-based messages, upgrades, and updates that add value to users are examples of push notifications that inspire engagement. Mobile push notifications appear on mobile device home screens and serve various purposes, including alerting users to new features or sales promotions, while social media apps use them to increase user engagement. Web push notifications are sent through desktop or mobile web browsers and resemble mobile push notifications, with a recommended frequency varying depending on marketing goals.

Customer cohort analysis is a branch of behavioral analytics that involves segmenting customers into groups based on their shared characteristics to gather targeted insights on their behaviors and actions. A customer cohort is a group of customers or users who perform shared actions during a set period of time, such as signing up for a product in the same month. By analyzing trends in cohort behavior, companies can improve retention, target messaging, and meet customers' needs, yielding more valuable insights and data to inform marketing strategies and development decisions.

Built for You is back with several powerful product updates that help improve how businesses collect, access, and use first-party data to influence their products and scale their businesses. The new features include advanced reporting for Surveys, which enables deeper insights into customer behavior, branching logic, which makes Surveys more relevant and tailored to customers' needs, and triggering Surveys in mobile apps, which gathers in-context feedback from customers. Additionally, enriched mobile push messages with images are now available, allowing teams to create contextual, personalized, and engaging push messages without using any code. The platform also supports Australian data hosting, providing businesses with the option to have their customer data processed locally, reducing costs and complying with future regulations. Furthermore, Intercom has introduced new features such as granular permissions, versioning in Product Tours, and bulk actions for managing articles, empowering teams to work together more efficiently. These updates aim to supercharge engagement efforts by providing in-depth insights into customer habits and enabling teams to engage with customers at the most opportune moment.

The Intercom Inbox is a new, next-generation support inbox designed to handle high volumes of customer conversations at scale. It aims to empower teams with a fast, effective, and powerful tool that resembles the world-class tools used in personal life. The new Inbox features an intuitive design, blazingly fast loading times, keyboard control, improved Smart Replies, customization options, and a view for managers. These enhancements are designed to increase productivity, efficiency, CSAT, and team morale, while meeting customers' needs with a future-proofed solution that adapts to different businesses and support teams.

Email marketing is a valuable way to communicate with customers at every stage of their lifecycle, regardless of the company size. To create successful email campaigns, it's essential to have an ideal timing, clear subject lines, personalized messaging, on-brand design, and a clear call-to-action. Additionally, tracking key metrics such as open rate, clickthrough rate, unsubscribe rate, and conversion rate can help gauge success. Email marketing services like Campaign Monitor, Mailchimp, Privy, and Intercom offer various features to support businesses of all sizes. Examples of top-notch email marketing campaigns include those from Hungryroot, Scott's Cheap Flights, Wistia, Asana, and H&R Block, which demonstrate effective timing, personalization, and design.