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Intercom
Customer communications platform providing messaging, support, help center, and AI-powered customer service tools.
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Crafting feature announcements that spur action - The Intercom Blog
A feature’s value depends on showing customers how it solves their problem, not on development effort. Intercom recommends targeting the right customers using message filters, such as those with access, those without (upsell), those who requested the feature, or those taking related actions, while excluding recently contacted (within 3 days) and new users (signed up less than 30 days ago). Choose the medium based on context: in-app for active users on relevant pages, email for re-engaging inactive users, and time announcements between 10am-2pm on weekdays for best open rates. The message should focus on customer benefits, be concise, include visuals, and stay personal. After announcing, track usage via events and gather feedback to inform future iterations.
Embracing a human tone in customer support - The Intercom Blog
The post argues that making customer support conversations more human, by acknowledging emotions and personal context, is key to delivering next-level service, especially on chat platforms like Intercom. It advises support reps to recognize ‘signs of life’ such as crying emojis or a simple ‘how are you?’, and to respond truthfully rather than with a robotic script. When agents inevitably make mistakes, such as sending the wrong link, they should own the error transparently and use humor or emoji to diffuse tension. Emoji and GIFs are encouraged in light moments, but the human tone should not be forced; it works best when natural and when reps look beyond conversations to gather candid product feedback. Over the long term, personal interactions make support faster by building familiarity with customers, allowing reps to recall context at a glance.
Learn How To Nurture New Signups Beyond The Free Trial
The SaaS law of averages suggests 40-60% of free trial signups use the product once and never return, often due to lack of perceived value or mismatched expectations. The Nurture Starter Kit is a guide for designing messaging campaigns to convert these signups into paying customers through improved communication. It advocates behavior-based triggered messages over timed drips, tailored to each customer’s definition of success, and includes half a dozen example messages. The kit also provides advice on measuring campaign effectiveness through actions that lead to conversions, not just macro-level rates. The goal is to make becoming a paying customer the obvious choice, avoiding radio silence followed by a last-minute expiration email.
What we shipped: 20 new features and counting - The Intercom Blog
Intercom shipped over 20 new features in the first half of 2017, reflecting its philosophy that shipping is the beginning of iteration. Support enhancements include office hours and away mode, an Articles autoresponder that guides customers to the help center while they wait with localization in 38 languages and a link back to the website, animated GIF support, and mobile app additions for articles, images, GIFs, and saved replies. Inbox improvements let teams sort by longest waiting, group conversations, and snooze conversations for follow-up, while integrations added Microsoft Teams and a new developer dashboard that puts everything in one place. The API added Leads and Companies to the Scroll API, and outbound messaging gained engagement-based targeting, the ability to stop a message once it starts sending, and mobile delivery windows for push notifications. These smaller improvements aim to make support more personal and scalable without requiring major announcements.
Using Intercom to design Intercom - The Intercom Blog
A designer at Intercom explains how the team uses their own product to gather data-driven insights for design decisions, replacing intuition with evidence from real customer interactions. Support team members tag feature requests and confusing conversations, which the research team organizes by topic for easy access. In one example, the designer analyzed 120 conversations about multi-person messaging and found only 33% actually wanted that feature, while others needed handoff or transfer capabilities. In another, an automated message targeting users who sent one-to-one messages via the fully featured editor revealed within hours that the ability to duplicate messages was the missing feature. This approach ensures design solutions are based on real customer needs rather than surface-level requests.
Does your support team know more about your product than you?
Customer support teams interact with customers daily and possess valuable product and customer insights that product teams often overlook. Treating support as an outsourced function or ignoring their conversations wastes unsolicited feedback that differs from survey data. Intercom tags every support conversation with team and category tags to make feedback actionable, enabling product teams to create dashboards, spot trends, and explore conversations for insights. For example, tagging ‘product confusion’ revealed an onboarding issue where customers saw nothing if they only completed one of two setup steps, leading to a pop-up that told customers exactly what they needed to do and reduced those conversations. Product teams also use tags like ‘unaware’ to improve feature discoverability, track bug reports via a GitHub integration, and compile quarterly ‘customer voice reports’ of top feature requests while closing the feedback loop with customers.
Opening up the power of Intercom's platform - The Intercom Blog
Intercom announced the launch of its Developer Program, opening its platform for third-party integrations. The company positions Intercom as the single source of truth for customer data, with data flowing in and out to other tools. It emphasizes flexibility, acknowledging it cannot build every feature customers need, that it is naive to believe every customer uses the product the same way, and that it relies on a developer community to extend its capabilities. The program helps developers build successful integrations and helps customers discover quality tools, with approved members listed on the website alongside built-by-Intercom integrations like Slack, Facebook, and more. The first eight approved members include Aircall, AskNicely, ChargeDesk, FullStory, productboard, SatisMeter, Statbot, and Wootric, and Intercom plans further ecosystem support as the developer community grows.
Your product is already obsolete - The Intercom Blog
Technology products inevitably become obsolete as industries shift, and failing to adapt can kill a business faster than most founders expect. Success breeds complacency, which breeds failure, making paranoia a necessary survival trait for everyone in tech. Historical examples like satnav manufacturers gutted by the iPhone and telcos disrupted by WhatsApp show that customers will abandon an incumbent for a simpler, faster way to achieve their goals. To avoid this fate, Intercom advocates thinking of a product as a flexible system rather than a set of screens or user flows, allowing it to integrate across new mediums. This systems approach enables the product to remain relevant through multiple technology cycles by focusing on helping customers make progress in their lives.
The golden mean of design and engineering - The Intercom Blog
The post draws on Aristotle’s golden mean to argue that great products require a balance between design and engineering, not compromise. Engineers naturally focus on functionality and performance, wanting to ship features and increase speed often without customer requests, while designers aim for optimal user flows and catch subtle interaction details. The OAuth implementation exemplifies this, with engineers building the technical side and designers crafting user flows, each pursuing their own self-interest through daily stand-ups and whiteboard sessions rather than compromising. This self-interest, guided by Adam Smith’s invisible hand, yields superior products than continual compromise, which leads to mediocrity. The post recommends embedding designers in product teams via a hub-and-spoke model, and leaders trusting their teams to find equilibrium rather than imposing rules.
Empathy: the key to better support content - The Intercom Blog
As businesses scale, they risk losing touch with customer problems, which becomes apparent in support content. The post argues that empathy—both cognitive and emotional—is essential for creating effective help content. Cognitive empathy involves understanding customer perspectives by surrounding oneself with customer information, as Harley Davidson does with bike trip photos, and by staying informed about product evolution through conversations with design, support, and engineering teams. Emotional empathy requires experiencing the frustrations customers face, such as imagining a world without the product’s key features or actively finding and reporting bugs to understand user pain, as encouraged by Intercom’s “if you find something broken, you now own fixing it” poster. By combining both types of empathy, support writers can produce content that resonates with users and addresses their real needs, as shown in Intercom’s Smart Campaigns and User Map documentation.
Announcing the new Intercom Messenger - The Intercom Blog
Intercom announced a new messenger after a year-long development effort, its biggest project ever, taking ten times longer than typical releases, during which the team explored bots and machine learning. The messenger addresses the gap between consumer messaging trends and outdated business methods like email and live chat, which customers find impersonal. It offers three message formats (Chat, Notes, Posts), different delivery modes (interruptive or discreet), and lightweight replies with emoji reactions. The messenger supports customization like color and wallpaper, provides native experiences on web, iOS, and Android, and integrates with multiple channels like web, push, in-app, and social media. Built on the Intercom platform, it uses customer data to personalize messages for 13,000 businesses, with future plans for conversational UIs, bots, and AI to invent the future of business communication.
How we redesigned our blog, Inside Intercom - The Intercom Blog
Intercom redesigned its blog, Inside Intercom, because the volume of articles, podcasts, books, and videos had outpaced the old design’s ability to help readers discover and consume content. The new homepage employs a magazine-like hierarchy on a solid grid, featuring a lead article with secondary and tertiary items, while podcasts now have their own category with an inline player for seamless listening. Two new categories for Startups and Marketing, along with reading enhancements like estimated reading times and progress bars and the removal of the pop-up newsletter signup, improve the user experience. Typography pairs Tiempos serif with Akkurat Pro sans-serif to create an editorial feel, and custom illustrations by a diverse range of artists plus hand-painted author portraits by Jon Stich add a personal touch. The redesign, led by designer Maria Gonzalez and developer Daniel Husar, aims to make content discovery simpler and reflects Intercom’s design-led culture.
Ways to think about customer onboarding - The Intercom Blog
Customer onboarding is critical, yet most apps lose half their new users by the second day because it fails to deliver real value. Instead of focusing on feature adoption like creating a to-do list, onboarding should help users achieve their ultimate goal, such as delivering a project on time, turning them into superheroes. The Jobs-to-be-Done framework reveals the motivations driving sign-ups, enabling segmentation and tailored onboarding flows for groups with similar needs. The four forces model adds context by showing push and pull factors when users switch, maximizing forces for change like long email trails and minimizing resistance like switching anxiety. Finally, behavior-based messaging should be scheduled by time with a priority list rather than predefined sequences, avoiding the complexity of N-dimensional decision trees, as implemented in Intercom’s Smart Campaigns.
Content as a growth engine for your business - The Intercom Blog
Content marketing advice often focuses on promotion rather than the substance of the content itself, leaving businesses without a clear strategy. Drawing on his experience leading Intercom’s content team and two decades as a journalist, John Collins argues for evergreen content that addresses timeless themes like filing a good bug report rather than news events. Evergreen content decays slowly and provides a compound return, with analysis showing it grows traffic three times faster than news-focused blogs over a year. He applies a journalist’s 5W and 1H framework—who, what, where, when, why, how—to plan content strategy, emphasizing that specialists should write, topics should help customers solve problems, and content must be relevant to the business. Collins concludes with four key takeaways: stay committed for the long term, make content relevant, impose a high editorial bar, and embrace unexpected benefits like easier hiring.
Build your customer relationships around consistency and trust - The Intercom Blog
The Industrial Revolution scaled business reach but separated owners from customers, forcing service through mail or phone, a pattern that the internet initially continued. Now, consumerization of technology provides tools for human interaction at scale, enabling businesses to return to building personal relationships online. Amazon exemplifies this by minimizing customers’ total cost beyond price—time, mental energy, and uncertainty—through frictionless purchasing, easy returns, and proactive resolution of issues. To build trust, businesses must help customers succeed, invest in relationships by being generous and never transactional, and be available on customers’ preferred messaging apps like Messenger or WhatsApp without requiring repeated context. Consistent behavior over time builds brand reputation, and businesses should engage on review sites and social media to shape their message and earn trust, as perception eventually matches reality.
Inside Intercom New York startup panel - The Intercom Blog
At an Intercom World Tour panel in New York, founders from Augment, an AR platform; Greenhouse, recruiting software; and Hello Alfred, on-demand home services, shared lessons on building emerging technologies. Mike Boufford of Greenhouse described fixing bugs by chatting with customers and deploying fixes within minutes, demonstrating how product and support intertwine. Christian Bjelland of Hello Alfred explained that their service must advocate for customers when real-world problems like lost laundry occur, requiring quick reactions. On growth, Boufford advised proving product-market fit before raising money, while Bjelland stressed dense, sustainable growth in specific zip codes to maintain quality. Lindsay Boyajian of Augment noted that no AR platform existed before, so constant user feedback and rapid iteration are critical to building a useful product.
Design in the age of entanglement - The Intercom Blog
The post argues that product design has entered a fourth era, the age of entanglement, following three earlier phases: augmentation, the PC era, and the web era. The author claims that three overlapping technology trends that made innovation predictable are ending, creating uncertainty. Designers now face a complex web of interconnected ideas, technologies, and systems that no single person can fully grasp. The post advises designers to think in systems, build one thing at a time from the center outward, and observe and iterate based on real-world reactions. It suggests that this uncertainty may be a return to a more natural state, where technology takes its rightfully uncertain place in the world.
Get To Know Your Users - The Intercom Blog
Startups need a comprehensive view of their users, but customer information is often scattered across separate systems like databases, support apps, and emails, creating data silos. Intercom today launched a unified user profile screen that aggregates profile data (e.g., company role), business data (e.g., plan), activity data (e.g., login frequency), and communication data (e.g., past conversations) into one authoritative view. This screen answers key questions such as who the user is, how often they use the app, whether they have seen announcements, and if anyone has spoken with them recently. When customer data is siloed, companies may email inactive users or ignore influential signups, costing them customers and leaving them clueless about churn. By simplifying user research by an order of magnitude, the tool enables proactive, targeted communication that improves loyalty and changes how products are designed.
Inside Intercom London startup panel - The Intercom Blog
At the first Inside Intercom World Tour stop in London, startup founders Bridget Harris, Will Swannell, and James Blackwell shared insights on building great products. On pricing, James advised setting it at the high end you think you can get away with, while Bridget regretted offering a free product that forced later price increases; Will argued simplicity is key, with the cost answer in two words. For hiring, Bridget uses a process of elimination to avoid bad hires and recommends remote options; Will noted HR’s importance is often underestimated. On funding, Will said crowdfunding builds a community of buyers, while Bridget warned VC funding changes priorities. The panel also stressed measuring customer acquisition through each interaction to profit, treating every interaction as a sales opportunity, and ensuring the product solves a real problem; James added that great products create moments of delight when things just work.
How users understand new products - The Intercom Blog
Users form different mental models of the same product based on their experiences and assumptions, as illustrated by the “draw toast” exercise where people depict the process in diverse ways. When a product’s system model—how it actually works—aligns with a user’s mental model, the interface feels intuitive; a mismatch causes confusion. To discover these mental models, product teams should talk to users, ask them to draw how they believe the product works, and listen to the nouns and verbs they use. Designers can bridge gaps by employing standard interface patterns (e.g., buttons that behave like buttons), using customers’ own language, and leveraging metaphors like Apple Wallet’s ticket-like appearance or Nest’s dial-based thermostat interface. When a product cannot mirror existing mental models, teams can educate users through tutorials and walkthroughs, similar to video game onboarding, helping customers learn new concepts and quickly grasp the product’s value.
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