September 2022 Summaries

You're not starting from scratch: How your transferable skills can help you get ahead in a new career is about how someone who previously worked as an editor and a journalist successfully transitioned into a software engineering career, leveraging their existing skills to excel in their new role. The article highlights the importance of not dismissing one's existing skills, learning from others, embracing struggle, showing work early and often, and applying these lessons to future endeavors. By recognizing the value of transferable skills, individuals can gain an unfair advantage in their new career, overcome impostor syndrome, and achieve success despite feeling unqualified or lacking relevant experience.

In a rapidly changing business landscape where companies are feeling the financial squeeze, a new guide is being launched to help businesses unlock customer engagement and drive action with in-product messaging. This approach allows for timely, targeted, and personalized interactions with customers while they use products or websites, leading to increased product usage, activation, and customer retention. By implementing in-product messaging, companies can activate customers faster, find value up front, and drive the actions that want customers to take, ultimately exceeding customer expectations and boosting loyalty. The guide will share actionable strategies for engaging with customers at the right moment, driving action directly from products, apps, or websites, and increasing customer loyalty. With personalized in-product messaging, companies can craft messages using customer data, activate customers faster with onboarding messages, drive key actions with targeted messages, measure business success, and optimize their messaging strategy.

Intercom has been named a Strong Performer in Forrester’s 2022 Conversation Automation Solutions New Wave, recognizing the value it brings to its customers and highlighting the growth potential of this space. The company believes that its ability to deliver in-context conversations sets it apart, as well as its vision and roadmap. Forrester evaluated Intercom on 10 criteria, with differentiated ratings in conversation delivery and roadmap, and the report covers the Conversation Automation Solutions Market, vendor performance, and customer value that solutions like Intercom can provide to B2B Marketers.

The Onboarding Starter Kit' is a refreshed guide that helps businesses onboard their customers successfully in the modern age. The kit provides practical strategies, concrete message examples, and powerful targeting suggestions to turn new signups into power users. It focuses on creating impactful, targeted onboarding campaigns that activate customers, reduce churn, and build long-lasting relationships from day one. By downloading the guide, businesses can generate more engagement, loyalty, and retention, making it a valuable resource for companies looking to gain a competitive edge in today's market.

Elasticsearch is a crucial component of Intercom's infrastructure, supporting various core features like Inbox and API. The company faced an availability risk due to uneven distribution of traffic/work among nodes in its Elasticsearch clusters, leading to load imbalance issues. To address this problem, Intercom migrated some of its clusters to fewer but bigger data nodes, which helped distribute shards more evenly and reduce the load on individual nodes. However, this approach had limitations, including the need for larger nodes, which could be expensive to add incrementally. A longer-term solution involves increasing the number of smaller shards relative to the number and size of data nodes, which can help achieve better load distribution without compromising performance. Intercom achieved significant cost savings and performance gains by implementing these changes, reducing costs by up to 40% in some cases and improving median request latency by 100%. The company's goal is now to make it easier for engineers to interact with Elasticsearch as they introduce new products and features, aiming to provide a seamless experience without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

The future of customer support is shifting towards a more personalized, efficient, and proactive approach. This involves delivering in-context support through messaging channels, supplementing with self-serve tools and automation, prioritizing employee experience, and leveraging data to drive targeted engagement. By adopting these four foundational beliefs, businesses can unlock benefits such as greater customer satisfaction, improved efficiency, deeper engagement, and happier support teams. A next-generation customer support tool is needed to facilitate this transformation, providing a modern and user-friendly interface that enables support teams to work more effectively and deliver exceptional experiences for customers.

Intercom has released several new features to improve customer experience, including Tooltips for driving product adoption, localized support in Resolution Bot with five new languages, personalized posts at scale, two-way SMS conversations from the Inbox, and stronger team management capabilities. These updates aim to provide a more personalized, contextual, and convenient experience for customers while empowering teams to work more efficiently. Additionally, Intercom has introduced new localization options, improved survey reporting, and enhanced teammate away reasons to support large-scale team management.

At Intercom, they deliver complex changes by breaking them down into small, controlled steps. This approach makes it easier to build and review changes, allowing for faster delivery of value to customers. The team acknowledges that mistakes are inevitable and encourages a culture where they can be learned from quickly, rather than trying to correct them before shipping. By focusing on smaller iterations, the team reduces the complexity of large changes, making it easier to validate and adjust as needed. This approach also helps build momentum by delivering small wins regularly, which in turn speeds up decision-making and reduces the risk of surprises. Ultimately, building in small steps requires a deliberate team culture and infrastructure that prioritizes peer reviews, automated testing, and rapid deployment. By adopting this principle, Intercom is able to deliver customer value faster and more reliably, while also making it a more enjoyable experience for their engineers.