August 2022 Summaries

Stripe Atlas helps startups incorporate with just a few clicks, removing paperwork, legalese, and hidden fees. Mercury provides banking services tailored for startups, including FDIC-insured accounts and integrations to help founders manage spending and ensure compliance. Brex offers corporate cards, an FDIC-insured account, 24/7 support, and rewards to help teams spend cleverly without breaking the budget. Deel simplifies global payroll and hiring for small startups by removing compliance and paperwork hurdles. AWS provides cloud computing resources to scale businesses, with architecture guidance and expert support through its Activate program. Notion offers a collaborative platform for team productivity, housing key documents and ensuring everyone is on the same page. Segment collects, cleans, and acts on customer data, empowering startups to build fast with a reliable stack. HubSpot manages the customer relationship throughout the sales and marketing funnel and beyond, offering a unified CRM. Intercom helps startups communicate with prospects and customers across every stage of the customer journey, making internet business personal through personalized messaging. Building a strong tech stack can help small teams operate at scale without burning out, by removing time-consuming tasks and admin, improving efficiency, and empowering teams to focus on impactful work.

Push notifications offer a powerful way for marketers to capture users' attention and engage them in real-time. To make the most of push notifications, it's essential to personalize messages, avoid being spammy, pay attention to mobile use patterns, choose clarity over cleverness, adapt notifications to real-time information, and measure effectiveness rather than relying on vanity metrics. By following best practices and using tools like Intercom, marketers can send targeted, relevant, and timely push notifications that improve user experience and drive business outcomes.

Registration for our fall 2022 product launch event, New at Intercom, is now open. The event will take place on October 12th, 2022, and will focus on customer retention as a key to a thriving business. Industry leaders will share insights on effective customer engagement strategies, including the importance of messaging, in-context communications, and in-product messaging. Attendees will also get an exclusive peek at Intercom's latest products and features. By prioritizing customers, businesses can drive growth and success.

Customer retention has become increasingly important to businesses as they navigate rising consumer expectations and reduced headcounts. Shifting focus to customer retention can be twice as powerful as customer acquisition, with a 1% decrease in churn boosting the bottom line by 7%. Great customer support is critical to this effort, with 32% of consumers citing bad customer service as the main reason for discontinuing business. A great support strategy can reduce churn, improve customer lifetime value, and boost the bottom line. To drive retention from customer support, businesses should focus on four key areas: leveraging customer data to personalize interactions, automating and self-serving support for speedy resolutions, meeting customers in the right place and time, and improving team efficiency. By reinforcing their customer support strategy with these elements, businesses can reduce friction, increase satisfaction, and continuously generate revenue without burning out their team or investing in extra headcount.

In today's market, customers expect personalization, and research shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences. Marketers recognize the value of personalization, with 99% believing it advances their customer relationships and 85% wanting to prioritize personalization in their organizations. To create more personalized marketing campaigns, consider using first-party customer data to enrich your messaging, integrating your tech stack to create cohesive customer journeys, reaching people in the right channel at the right moment, and building personalized campaigns across multiple channels. By leveraging these strategies, you can drive better results, impress customers, and turn them into long-term advocates.

The importance of cross-functional teamwork in building successful next-generation products cannot be overstated. It requires a wide variety of skills, perspectives, and expertise coming together to create something truly valuable. Effective cross-functional teams are led by a conductor who ensures all the instruments are in harmony and everyone knows their role, timing, and goal. However, this doesn't mean that teams need to work on big projects or have a conductor to call the tune every day; it's about fostering everyday cross-functional excellence. This requires a comprehensive framework for considering how teams interact with one another, which includes communication, collaboration, and coordination. By understanding these three Cs, organizations can make their work more efficient, resolve problems, and make better decisions informed by the wider context of other teams' priorities, roadmaps, and issues. To map out what your team is and isn't doing, create a list of all the ways you currently work with other teams and distinguish these activities into communication, collaboration, and coordination. By laying out your current cross-functional practices and identifying areas for improvement, you can start forming your best ideas and elevate your teamwork capabilities.

Support teams are facing a critical juncture where business costs and customer expectations continue to grow while resources like headcount and budget decrease. Modern customers want a personal, on-demand experience from businesses, with 75% of support leaders saying customer expectations have increased but only 34% confident they can meet those expectations. Efficient, personal support is the name of the game when it comes to closing this gap, and supporting customers in the context of what they are doing, in their moment of need, is the fresh approach that businesses require for modernized customer service. This approach means solving problems while customers are using your product, app, or website, powered by automation and self-serve capabilities, turning support teams into significant value drivers without making investments in numerous tools or increasing headcount. Providing a support experience that’s future-proofed involves supercharging communication methods, leveraging data to fuel efficiency, and integrating tech stacks across channels, allowing teams to provide more personal, efficient support and delight customers. The business benefits of providing support in context include reducing investment costs by improving operational efficiency, increasing customer retention through faster resolution times and reduced first response times, and driving sales through improved reputation and repeat business. Every support conversation is an opportunity to drive loyalty and growth by removing roadblocks as they happen, providing quick, personalized, and relevant help to customers inside your product, app, and website.

Today, retaining customers is more valuable than acquiring new customers, but facing economic uncertainty and limited resources, support teams must work smarter to increase loyalty. In the digital era, customer expectations are rising, but many support teams lack modern tools and strategies needed for personal, efficient support at internet scale. The key ingredient your support tech stack is missing is in-context support, which empowers teams to deliver exact support customers need, at the precise moment they need it, efficiently without increasing headcount or hours logged. With the right in-context support tools and strategies, you can elevate your support team from drowning in repetitive queries to becoming hyper-efficient, customer-retaining business partners, building trust, connection, and deep loyalty with every conversation. The guide shares powerful strategies for increasing customer loyalty and boosting your bottom line without overstretching your team or resources.

At Intercom, the company values clear guiding principles to build product and keep teams aligned. The engineering principle "shape the solution" allows them to deliver better customer value by involving engineers from the outset in the development process. This approach enables great engineers to care about what they're working on, understand the role of collaboration in building products, and make informed trade-offs to ensure cost-efficient solutions are delivered. By collaborating with colleagues across Product and Design teams, engineers learn to think like designers and product managers, leading to a culture of ownership and zero blame. The company's approach has resulted in successful projects such as Inbound Custom Bots, where engineers worked closely with designers to come up with a new pattern that would serve customers well and bypass technical constraints. By shaping solutions from beginning to end, Intercom aims to build better products for its customers and empower its engineers to grow and learn.

Intercom has been named to the Forbes Cloud 100 2022 for the sixth consecutive year, ranking #35 on the list of top private cloud companies. This recognition is a testament to Intercom's ongoing innovation and excellence in delivering breakthrough value to its customers. The company is working hard to create new ways for businesses to connect with their customers, particularly during challenging economic times when strong customer engagement and retention are crucial. With customers consistently seeing fast ROI from using Intercom, the company is honored to see many of its customers featured on the Cloud 100 list. Intercom's continued inclusion among this prestigious group validates its mission to make internet business personal and its vision for making online communication a reality as all businesses become online.

At Intercom, they use a collaborative approach to user testing by carrying out evaluative research early in the product development process. They aim to get product concepts in front of users before any code is written and are trying to find the right balance between "crude but early" and "polished but late". To determine the ideal level of design fidelity, they need to identify which problem they're trying to solve: testing concepts for value, testing system design for usability, or testing usability itself. The goal is to create a research stimulus that communicates the idea being tested without unnecessary details, such as using simple text descriptions, storyboards, or landing page mockups. They also emphasize the importance of starting with the problem and aligning with cross-functional partners in design, product, and engineering. By finding the right balance between fidelity and abstraction, they can elicit accurate insights from users and build confidence in their product design direction.

The text discusses the importance of considering costs beyond just customer acquisition when growing a business. It introduces the concept of Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), which is the total cost of acquiring a new customer, including advertising costs, salaries, and other expenses. The article explains that treating all ads equally can lead to suboptimal results, as different ads have varying levels of effectiveness. By considering CAC, marketers can optimize their investments and make informed decisions about where to allocate resources. The text also highlights the importance of Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) in understanding the revenue generated by customers over time, which helps determine the allowable CAC. Additionally, payback periods are discussed as a critical factor in determining how quickly cash is generated from paying customers. The article concludes that using costs and LTV to optimize programs can help drive growth, but cautions against "growth at any cost" and encourages marketers to partner with their finance teams to make data-driven decisions.

Intercom has been recognized as one of the best places to work by several renowned employer awards, including Bay Area Best Places To Work, Fast Company's Best Workplaces for Innovators, and Inc.'s Best Workplaces. The company culture at Intercom is built on its values and vision, which attracts talented and innovative employees who contribute to making internet business personal. With 92% of employees recommending the company as a great place to work, Intercom prioritizes providing a challenging and opportunity-filled working environment that fosters growth and development. The awards reflect the company's commitment to innovation, employee wellbeing, and creating a workplace that encourages deep focus and sets people up for success at every stage of their careers.

In July, Intercom released several key features to help businesses improve customer engagement and retention. The company's research from Harvard Business Review Analytic Service found that customer engagement is crucial for loyalty and retention. To achieve this, Intercom has introduced new features such as the ability to embed surveys in emails, live preview functions, dynamic content, custom bot linking, granular subscription management, and updated sender address settings. These updates aim to increase response rates, efficiency, and personalization, making it easier for businesses to connect with their customers on a more targeted and personalized level.

Customer retention is a crucial aspect of any business, as it measures how successful a company is at satisfying existing customers and keeping them over time. A good retention strategy can be more powerful than customer acquisition in driving growth and increasing revenue. Embedding a culture of retention into your organization and prioritizing customer engagement at every stage of the customer journey are key to improving retention rates. Strategies such as reducing time to value, helping users achieve product mastery, embedding products into workflows, motivating users with new features, and reactivating dormant users can also be effective in retaining customers. Additionally, understanding what inactivity looks like for your product, using email early on, targeting the right customers, being personal, and being thankful, honest, and respectful are essential best practices for retention messaging. By implementing these strategies and best practices, businesses can improve customer loyalty, increase revenue, and build a sustainable long-term business with a reliable revenue stream.