July 2022 Summaries

The Intercom integration with HubSpot enables sales and marketing teams to better understand, nurture, and convert leads by leveraging data from live chat and messaging, smart workflows, and business intelligence. The integration automates manual tasks, creates a more personalized experience for new contacts, and reduces customer acquisition costs. By combining live chat and chatbot technology with CRM, teams can capitalize on having detailed information on prospects and guide them to the information they need. This integration also enables sales teams to accelerate sales productivity, maximize marketing prospect data, and close more deals by utilizing features such as automatic lead qualification, custom workflows based on conversation data, improved lead routing and time to close, and automated customer support inquiries and follow-up.

Intercom's goal is to build a platform that consolidates customer communications and offers seamless integrations with other tools in an enterprise's tech stack. This allows businesses to nurture their relationships with customers more effectively, while also reducing the complexity of managing multiple tools. Intercom achieves this through its App Store, which contains over 350 powerful apps and integrations, as well as its REST API, which enables developers to build custom applications on top of the platform. The company prioritizes interoperability with other tools, providing features such as webhooks, low-code integrations, and a developer hub to support this goal. By doing so, Intercom aims to empower businesses to scale and grow their customer relationships more efficiently.

Customer activation is a crucial process that motivates prospects or customers to take the next step in their journey. It involves understanding the customer lifecycle, cultivating relationships, and tailoring marketing efforts for each unique stage of the journey. Left to their own devices, customers may drop off at certain stages due to various reasons such as cost or lack of value. Customer activation campaigns are designed to spur specific actions, such as product promotions, free trial periods, informative content, customer support, or discounts on renewals. These campaigns must be tailor-made for a particular audience and delivered strategically through the right channels and touchpoints at the right moments. The goal of customer activation is to inspire leads and customers to take an important step in the customer journey, such as making a purchase, subscribing to a service, or signing up for marketing communications.

Conversational AI technology simulates person-to-person communication for users through text-based or speech-based inputs, recognizing and responding to user queries by leveraging NLP and machine learning. These technologies operate by analyzing massive datasets to yield sophisticated outputs. NLP takes place across four stages: input generation, analysis, dialogue management, and reinforcement learning, with machine learning continuously improving the AI's accuracy through pattern recognition and prediction. Conversational AI is already being employed by many companies and can be seen in examples such as chatbots and virtual personal assistants. Its advantages include providing round-the-clock customer support, capturing sales leads, and optimizing marketing efforts, making it an efficient and cost-effective way to scale customer success initiatives.

In uncertain economic times, building a strong business requires excellent customer experience. Research shows that 88% of customers believe customer engagement has a significant impact on their organization's bottom line. To foster strong relationships and deepen engagement, support teams can optimize processes and leverage the right tools to improve efficiency without sacrificing customer happiness. Four ways to boost efficiency include optimizing your support tech stack to reduce time spent switching between tools, using automation to make headcount count for more, delivering personalized customer experiences through proactive support, and being present at moments that matter with in-context communications. By implementing these strategies, businesses can significantly improve their business resilience and set themselves up for long-term success while saving time and money.

Conversion rate is the percentage of people who complete a desired action after being exposed to a brand's sales and/or marketing channels. To calculate it, you divide the number of conversions in a given time frame by the total number of users who visited or engaged with your service, then multiply by 100%. A conversion rate can range from 1% to 5% for e-commerce brands and around 2% for B2B brands. Conversion rates matter because they measure the success of marketing or sales campaigns, help assess how to appeal to prospective customers, and drive improvement where needed. Understanding a baseline conversion rate is essential in monitoring changes made to a website or channel. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) involves analyzing a channel's baseline conversion rate, making changes, and monitoring their impact on conversions to enhance the user experience and achieve better results for brands.

In the digital age, call deflection is a technique used to redirect a portion of incoming customer service calls to digital support channels, reducing the burden on call center employees and alleviating high volumes of calls while allowing customers to reach a solution faster. This approach has benefits for both customers and teams, with research showing that it can reduce call center call volumes and operating expenses by up to 25-30%. By giving customers the option of digital support, companies can lower customer service hold times, improve first contact resolution rates, and minimize repetitive calls, ultimately reducing agent fatigue and burnout. With satisfied customers and a more manageable workload, employees are more content with their business and better equipped to perform at their jobs. Leveraging digital channels and automating elements of customer service can help customers resolve issues faster, add to customer safety, and reduce costs, making call deflection an attractive solution for companies looking to improve their customer experience.

Creating quality customer experiences has become business critical during times of economic uncertainty, as businesses strive to retain customers. New research from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services reveals that effective customer engagement is a critical value driver, with 88% of executives agreeing that it impacts their organization's bottom line. However, many companies face barriers such as disconnected tech stacks and siloed data, which hinder personalization efforts. The top trends transforming customer engagement include the importance of cross-functional collaboration, the need for connected tools to provide personalized communications, and a scarcity of talent with expertise in customer engagement. As businesses look to future-proof their customer engagement strategies, they must prioritize culture, technology, and talent to deliver world-class experiences across the customer journey.

At Intercom, technical conservatism is a guiding principle that emphasizes reusing existing technologies and frameworks in the stack, promoting tried and tested patterns and solutions. This approach helps teams focus on improving products by building, releasing, and iterating on solutions, rather than evaluating new technologies and spending time on already solved operational problems. By leveraging familiar infrastructure, such as Elasticsearch, Intercom has been able to scale faster and deliver value more quickly, while also making the most of team time and compounds the value of ongoing improvements. Technical conservatism is not a hard-and-fast rule, but rather a guideline that allows teams to stay focused on what's important - solving customer problems and delivering value - while still being open to introducing new technologies when they offer significant benefits.

At Intercom, they created a unified Research and Data Science (RAD) function to drive effective, evidence-based decisions. They developed a clear team mission, vision, and purpose, established a set of rituals and processes, hired talented new team members, and created dedicated career ladders for both individual contributors and managers. The RAD team is aligned on behaviors and standards, with a focus on mastery, partnerships and influence, impact, leadership, communication, and feedback and collaboration. The management track has its own five essential skill sets, including leadership, people management, business strategy, product strategy, and execution and impact. Intercom prioritizes clear expectations to maximize growth and impact, demonstrating what great looks like through established standards from the moment new team members join.

A customer data platform is software that aggregates and organizes customer data from multiple sources into a single, consistent database. This allows companies to unify customer profiles, make informed decisions about marketing strategies, and drive personalized messaging. The purpose of a CDP is to enable customer modeling, optimize timing and targeting of messages, and provide insights into customer behavior. Benefits include breaking down silos between teams and departments, uncovering new upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and providing insight into customer sentiment. A CDP is important because it collects first-party data directly from customers, which provides an unaltered view of their behavior and preferences. It also helps with compliance by storing data in a single, organized database that can be easily accessed and managed. Key features include the ability to ingest real-time data, capture full detail of ingested data, support indefinite data storage, and share data with external systems.

When running an online business, it's crucial to be aware of the threats and vulnerabilities that exist, such as data breaches and customer trust loss. To secure your Intercom workspace, you need to strengthen your teammate authentication with 2FA, SSO, or SAML, prevent user impersonation and conversation theft in Messenger, implement "least privilege" with roles and permissions, monitor suspicious activity, and set up security contacts for important communications. By following these best practices, you can protect your data, maintain customer trust, and stay vigilant against potential security issues.

Our mission at Intercom is to make internet business personal by expanding our reach beyond regional and national borders. However, one significant barrier to this goal is the language barrier, which can hinder businesses from effectively reaching their global customers. To overcome this challenge, we have focused on facilitating multilingual experiences for our customers. We now offer support in over 32 languages across various products, including Messenger, Resolution Bot, Inbox 2, and more. Our website has also been freshly translated into four languages, with plans to expand further. This effort aims to strengthen relationships between businesses and their international customers by providing personalized interactions in the customer's native language. By embracing multilingualism, we can create a truly global vision for our internet-scale operations, ensuring that interactions with customers are pleasant, convenient, and personal across all languages.

At Intercom, building a resilient system is crucial for customer experience, and observability plays a key role in enabling humans to "look" inside the systems they run. The company has invested heavily in reliability and invests a lot in the reliability of their application, but unpredictable failures are inevitable, and when they happen, it's humans that fix them. Observability is essential for resilience, and Intercom defines it as a continuous process of humans asking questions about production and getting answers. To build a stronger culture of observability, Intercom has implemented several stages, starting with identifying the problem statement and formulating a solution, which involved shifting from metrics-based to tracing-centric tooling. They used an existing tracing library and performed a small adjustment to convert trace data into the Honeycomb-native format. The company also enabled teammates to adopt traces by finding allies, tailoring their message, and demonstrating potential. After completing the technical part of the observability program, Intercom has achieved several key milestones, including auto-instrumenting their main monolith application with high-quality attribute-rich traces and deploying Honeycomb Refinery to sample data dynamically and retain more of the "interesting" traces. To increase adoption, they offered optional tracing from the local development environment and added a custom bot reaction to a "show me web performance" message. The company is now focusing on measuring return-on-investment (ROI) on observability tooling and exploring front-end instrumentation, with the goal of building a culture of observability that will continue to evolve in the future.

Omnichannel support is a customer service approach that offers seamless support across multiple channels, integrating important customer data to ensure a consistent experience. This approach treats customer service touchpoints as one continuous experience, reducing customer frustration and driving brand loyalty. It differs from multichannel support, which operates independently of channels, allowing customers to choose their preferred interaction method but potentially leading to disjointed experiences. The benefits of omnichannel support include personalized and efficient customer journeys, impressive resolution times, and increased customer loyalty through the sharing of customer information.

Stripe has launched its new Intercom integration as part of the newly announced Stripe App Marketplace, which aims to provide personalized support experiences for millions of companies using Stripe's payment platform. The integration enables seamless context-sharing between Intercom and Stripe, allowing customers to view customer data across both tools and break down silos between different teams and software tools. By integrating Intercom's in-context support messaging solution with Stripe's payment platform, mutual customers can solve customer problems faster, carry out instant transactions, and prevent deal losses due to glitches or delays, all within the Stripe app.

The latest update from Intercom highlights several new features and enhancements aimed at improving customer engagement, support experience, and workflow efficiency. Two-way SMS allows customers to initiate conversations with businesses, increasing engagement and encouraging action. The next-generation Inbox is designed for scale, handling high volumes of messages while streamlining workflows and collaboration. Custom Actions and Custom Objects enable bots to access live data from internal databases or third-party tools, resolving more queries without requiring code. Dynamic email subject lines capture customer attention, increasing open rates, and new teammate permissions provide flexibility in team management. Additionally, improved interoperability with API v2.5 enables easier data export and workflow automation. These updates aim to help businesses modernize their engagement efforts, drive customer retention, and improve overall support experiences.

When designing a product, Intercom's design principle of "Connected, Modular Systems" emphasizes focusing on the system as a whole, rather than individual interaction or visual designs. This approach ensures that important decisions are made at a high level, without getting bogged down in minor details. By creating systems first, teams can increase efficiency and reduce costs by reusing components across multiple contexts. The principle also highlights the importance of modularity, which allows for varying feature capabilities across separate systems to be addressed more efficiently. Furthermore, connected systems enable differentiation from competitors through seamless integration and strategic advantages such as a business moat. By applying this design principle, teams can build successful products that focus on the right questions and deliver value to customers.