October 2024 Summaries

The interview features Kelly Burnette, a Classroom Success Manager at Writable from HMH, discussing her experiences and insights on customer service. She emphasizes the importance of listening, being timely, clear, and kind in providing support to customers. Kelly highlights the unique challenges of working in education technology and the need for a combination of product expertise and personal experience to understand users' needs. She also shares her productivity hacks, favorite book, and the best thing a customer has ever said to her. The conversation touches on the emotional aspects of customer service, including the power of positive interactions and turning negative experiences into positives. Throughout the interview, Kelly showcases her passion for making a difference in customers' lives and her commitment to delivering exceptional support.

Fin over email is a new feature of the Fin AI Agent, which resolves more than 50% of customer queries immediately. The agent can now provide instant responses to emailed support questions, using generative AI technology and the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework. This allows customers to receive answers to their queries in real-time, without having to wait for a human response. The development journey involved starting with research, defining the problem, and applying "first principles" thinking to create a new solution. The team faced technical challenges such as email deliverability, processing multiple queries in a single message, and formatting issues. They also had to consider user experience considerations, including designing an intuitive and natural experience for end users. To address these challenges, they adapted their underlying AI architecture, creating a new component specifically designed for email. The feature has already shown impressive results, with customers reporting significant efficiency gains and time savings. Fin over email is now available, offering a more seamless and efficient customer support experience across multiple channels.

Intercom is evolving its database infrastructure by moving to Vitess, a scalable, open-source MySQL clustering system managed by PlanetScale. The current architecture has been modified to eliminate downtime due to database maintenance and writer failovers, reduce complexity in working with databases across engineering teams, streamline the migration process, achieve straightforward scaling of MySQL for the next decade, and simplify connection management. Vitess offers native sharding support, zero-downtime maintenance and failovers, streamlined migrations, and automated index and query optimization tools. The partnership with PlanetScale provides a developer-friendly experience and takes on the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing the underlying infrastructure, allowing Intercom to focus on building its AI-first customer service platform for customers. Despite challenges during migration, such as latency spikes due to cold buffer pools and disk I/O saturation, lessons learned and mitigations implemented have set up success for future migrations.

We are excited to announce that Fin 2, our latest generation of Fin AI Agent, is powered by Anthropic's Claude Large Language Model. This collaboration enables us to deliver intelligence, performance, and reliability in customer service, redefining how AI can enhance customer experience. With Claude, we get faster responses, higher accuracy, and a deeper understanding of our customers' needs. Our goal is to resolve as many conversations as possible, delivering great experiences for our customers while staying at the forefront of AI innovation.

The Pioneer 2024 event, Intercom's first-ever AI customer service summit, brought together thousands of attendees to explore the transformative power of AI in support. The event featured Fin 2, Intercom's next-generation AI agent, which delivers human-quality service with powerful new capabilities. Renowned tech writer Benedict Evans delivered a presentation on how to think about the future of AI and its impact on industries like customer service. He emphasized that technological transformations often disrupt industries but also bring boundless possibilities. The event concluded with an extraordinary conversation between Stephen Fry and Brian Eno, who discussed their relationships with technology and its potential to transform lives for the better. Customer sessions showcased real-world results from companies using Fin, including Lightspeed Commerce, Synthesia, and Nuuly, which highlighted the benefits of AI in support operations and team dynamics.

Fin 2 is the latest generation of AI agent for customer service, delivering human-quality service to customers. It combines high resolution rates with powerful new capabilities in four categories: Knowledge, Behavior, Actions, and Insights. Fin 2 can learn everything about a product by connecting to various sources and provides accurate, thorough answers to help resolve issues more efficiently. The agent speaks in the tone of voice, is fluent in 45 languages, and follows guidelines, policies, and procedures to deliver the best customer experience. It can take actions on behalf of customers and provide insights to monitor and improve quality and performance for Fin and across the entire support organization. With omnichannel capabilities, Fin works equally well across chat, email, WhatsApp, and more. The agent is available at no additional cost, with a price of $0.99 cents per resolution.