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IntercomProblem & solution
Does your support team know more about your product than you?
Summary
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.
Approach / What changed
Tag every support conversation with team and category tags. Product teams use dashboards to spot trends and explore conversations. Specific tags like ‘product confusion’ identified onboarding issues, leading to a pop-up that reduced those conversations. Tags like ‘unaware’ help improve feature discoverability. Bug reports are tracked via a GitHub integration that syncs issues with support conversations. Feature requests are compiled into quarterly ‘customer voice reports’.
Takeaways
Unsolicited feedback from support conversations reveals blind spots that survey feedback misses because it is workflow-driven and open-ended.
Tagging support conversations with team and category tags allows product teams to create dashboards, spot trends, and make data-driven decisions about what to build next.
Closing the feedback loop by using support data to iterate on shipped features improves both the product and the product team’s understanding of customer needs.
FAQ
How can product teams use support conversation tags?
Product teams can create dashboards to view unusual spikes and consistent trends, explore conversations, and get insights into what to work on next. Tags like 'product confusion' and 'unaware' help identify onboarding issues and feature discoverability problems.
What is the difference between survey feedback and unsolicited feedback?
Survey feedback is context-free, closed, and asks about known topics. Unsolicited feedback from support conversations is workflow-driven, open, and hits blind spots that surveys wouldn't ask about.
How does Intercom track bug reports from support conversations?
Intercom uses a GitHub integration that syncs support conversations with GitHub issues. When a developer closes the issue in GitHub, the conversation automatically reopens in Intercom, allowing support to follow up with customers.
Source and freshness
- Source
- intercom.com
- Published
- Added to Yomu
Summaries are generated from the original by a language model. Check the original before relying on it.
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