Using Intercom to design Intercom - The Intercom Blog

Summary

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.

Takeaways

1. 1

   Customer feedback should be analyzed for underlying problems, not taken at face value; only 33% of requests for multi-person messaging actually wanted that feature.

2. 2

   Automated messages triggered immediately after a user action can provide timely insights into why users behave in certain ways.

3. 3

   A significant portion of users may use a feature in unintended ways (30% of messages through the fully featured editor were 1:1), revealing unmet needs.

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