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Using case studies to tell your story for you - The Intercom Blog
Case studies help B2B SaaS companies persuade the majority of potential customers who are not technology enthusiasts and are averse to revolutionary change by de-risking the purchase decision. Effective case studies follow a proven story formula with a relatable protagonist from an aspirational company, strong tension depicting pre-product challenges, and a resolution showing how the product replaced the old workflow. Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm prescribes that the only suitable reference for an early majority customer is another early majority member, so you should profile non-innovator customers. Customer interviews should spend most time on tension and resolution, using questions about how they started using the product, what tools they used before, and what jobs the product solves, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Well-crafted case studies can be repurposed across sales, demand generation, events, and communications, and the process deepens the marketer’s empathy for customers.
How to show customers the value of free - The Intercom Blog
SaaS has completely transformed business software purchasing, moving from sales-led demos to self-served free trials where users explore independently. Many trial users fail to experience the full product value, ending the period with objections like “too expensive” or “haven’t had time,” which actually indicate a gap between perceived and actual value. The core problem is not the price but that users receive only partial benefit while being charged for the complete offering. Customer success teams must actively bridge this gap by understanding each user’s unique success definition, auditing feature usage to highlight valuable actions, and tracking engagement to predict and intervene in failing trials. When done correctly, users reach their milestones, leading to successful conversions and feedback like “exactly what I need” instead of price complaints.
Talking tech with non tech people - The Intercom Blog
This post from the Intercom blog tackles the difficulty of explaining technical concepts to non-technical customers, emphasizing that one misinterpreted comment can cause frustration for both sides. The author, a senior lead on customer support, positions herself as an API between developers and customers and has developed four tips from years of experience. She warns against making assumptions about a customer’s knowledge level and suggests using software that provides data like job title, tenure, and past conversations to tailor communication. She stresses using clear language, like discussing site speed instead of Mongo performance, and offering explanations in multiple formats such as numbered lists, images, or phone calls, using Pictionary as an analogy. Finally, she advises thinking like the customer by anticipating follow-up questions within the customer’s workflow rather than answering only the immediate query to prevent future confusion.
Designing our new blog - The Intercom Blog
Intercom invested in its blog by hiring a full-time editor and increasing publishing frequency, but recognized risks such as content calendars forcing lower standards and production focus undermining the insights needed for useful posts. The blog had amassed nearly 200 articles, yet the previous design only allowed reverse chronological browsing, making it hard to find related content. The redesign introduces category pages for six main topics—Business, Customer Success, Design, Engineering, Product Strategy, and Intercom Updates—now in the primary navigation, along with tags for deeper topics like jobs-to-be-done. A search tool was finally added to help readers find specific content, and the design is fully responsive for mobile devices. The redesign, credited to Frantisek Kusovsky with input from Jeff Kriege and implemented by David Barrett and Daniel Husar, aims to improve content discoverability without sacrificing the quality insights that come from doing the work.
What is Customer Service And Why Is It Important?
Customer service is the support provided to customers throughout their journey, aiming to resolve issues and help them get the most from a product or service. The post cites that 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases after excellent service, while 80% stopped doing business due to poor experience. Key traits of good service include personalization, fast response times under 10 minutes, and problem resolution. Support teams providing personalized service are twice as likely to report higher customer satisfaction and retention. Different types of customer service include live chat, phone, email, and self-service, each with varying efficiency and personalization.
5 easy ways to improve e-commerce customer experience
Consumer experience now drives purchasing decisions, as 74% of shoppers base choices on experience alone, and 75% of consumers favor companies that offer rewards. Pandemic-driven online shifts have raised expectations and made loyalty harder to maintain. Improvements include using contextual surveys with rewards such as Rybbon, maintaining consistency across devices via persistent carts and social media response (expected by 65% of users), and personalizing with product tours and data enrichment like Amplitude. Support can be supercharged with Resolution Bot, multilingual articles, and order tracking (desired by 70% of shoppers), while checkout optimization—avoiding forced account creation (a 34% abandonment cause) and redundant data entry, plus integrating Stripe—directly reduces friction. These targeted steps turn customer experience into a powerful competitive edge.
Revealing The 3 Customer Service Trends to Act on in 2022
Klaus 2022 Customer Service Quality Benchmark Report, based on a survey of 300 support leaders, identifies three key trends. First, support teams are measuring impact more than ever: average CSAT rose 14% to 89%, and average NPS increased from 45 to 51; 10% more teams track CSAT, and NPS tracking jumped from 28% to 48%. Second, maintaining quality at scale is the top challenge, with 40% citing reducing repetitive queries; teams use first-party data, chatbots, and automation to deliver personal, fast support while scaling. Third, proactive and self-serve support are growing priorities: 70% plan to invest more in proactive support, and 73% found self-service reduced workload; knowledge bases compound in value over time. The report recommends focusing on the right metrics, collaborating with sales and marketing, and continuously learning and optimizing to elevate support’s business role.
Switch on the next generation of support – Introducing Intercom Switch
Intercom introduced Switch, a no-code feature that lets businesses move inbound phone call volume to messaging without changing providers, simply by adding an option to their phone menu. When a caller selects that option, Intercom identifies their phone number, matches it to a user profile, and personalizes the conversation flow for a tailored support experience. This shift enables support agents to handle multiple conversations at once, reducing wait times and improving CSAT scores, as 73% of customers value companies that respect their time. Switch integrates Resolution Bot to automate common questions, triage more complex issues, and provide agents with full context, saving team bandwidth. Intercom cites a Forrester report that phone is the most expensive CX channel and messaging the most cost-effective, and early adopter LoyalZoo reported a 50% drop in voicemails and calls after implementing Switch.
4 Ways to Personalize Your Marketing Messaging - The Intercom Blog
Customers increasingly expect personalized marketing, with 66% reporting companies do not understand them despite data showing 80% are more likely to purchase from personalized experiences. However, 85% of marketers believe personalization should be a higher priority. To address this, the post outlines four methods: using first-party data collected directly from customers to enrich messaging; integrating the tech stack for cohesive journeys; reaching people through the right channel at the right moment based on behavior; and building targeted campaigns across multiple channels using a visual campaign builder. Such approaches allow marketers to trigger relevant messages based on custom attributes, actions, and segments without requiring code. The result is more engaging, timely, and measurable marketing that improves customer relationships and business outcomes.
2022 customer support trends: How support leaders are adapting - The Intercom Blog
Intercom’s second Customer Support Trends Report, based on a survey of over 1,200 global support leaders across tech, e-commerce, and finance, outlines five trends reshaping the industry in 2022. Customer expectations continue to rise, with 75% of leaders reporting a widening gap; experts advise blending proactive messaging, self-service, and easy access to human agents. Support teams face increasing pressure: 59% report higher incoming volume, 52% have reduced headcount, and 48% say those cuts hurt the customer experience, forcing leaders to find efficiencies without sacrificing quality. Agent burnout is prevalent, exacerbated by longer hours and disconnected tools that slow down nearly half of teams; leaders are redesigning workflows and rethinking traditional KPIs to better support their staff. Empathy has become a top priority for 73% of teams, but 21% feel they lack the enabling tools; building a sustainable empathetic culture requires a holistic investment in strategy, processes, technology, and people.
Announcing 'The Intercom Customer Support Trends Report'
Intercom announced the second edition of its Customer Support Trends Report for 2022, created from a survey of over 1,200 global support leaders across sectors including tech, e-commerce, and finance, which identifies five key trends reshaping the support landscape. These trends include a growing customer expectation gap where 75% of teams saw increased expectations but only 34% feel confident meeting them, increased team burnout with 64% reporting burnout in the past 12 months, and disconnected tech stacks that slow down 47% of teams every week. Additionally, the report reveals that 73% of support teams prioritize empathy but 21% lack the necessary tools, highlighting a critical resource gap. The findings also point to the impact of the Great Resignation and budget cuts on team attrition and morale. The report concludes by urging support teams to adopt modern technology and strategies to provide empathetic service at scale and thrive in 2022.
2021 in conversation: Learnings from the podcast - The Intercom Blog
In this 2021 year-end compilation, Intercom reflects on insights from its podcast series Inside Intercom, featuring conversations with business leaders and pioneers like CEO Karen Peacock, Hubert Palan from Productboard, and Amanda Renteria from Code for America. They discuss leadership, product strategy, customer experience, and the challenges of running a business during the pandemic, including building world-class customer experiences and addressing diversity gaps. Speakers like Farhan Virji from Later share how B2C support strategies can inform B2B teams, while Will Larson of Calm explores technical leadership careers beyond management. The episode also marks Intercom’s 10th anniversary, with founders Des Traynor and Paul Adams reflecting on maintaining speed as the company scales and avoiding unnecessary processes that slow progress. Zanade Mann and Janeen Uzzell offer insights on allyship, diversity, and ensuring knowledge equity in government services, as well as the importance of advocating for underrepresented groups.
Intercom presents Engineer Chats - The Intercom Blog
Intercom released Engineer Chats, an internal podcast about engineering topics, making its episodes publicly available. The podcast explores disambiguation, described by Senior Principal Engineer Mike Stewart as narrowing a wide solution space based on evidence, applied throughout product development from roadmap planning to coding. Another episode recounts Intercom’s worst outage, where a premature automation command triggered a cascading failure that queued SMS messages incorrectly for hours, revealing risks of automation. The podcast also discusses the importance of speed for startups, advising teams to run and do things this week instead of next quarter. Additionally, a conversation between engineering and legal teams emphasizes that legal is not there to slow R&D but to ensure responsible growth within legal confines through compliance by design.
The Ultimate Customer Support Tech Stack for 2024
Customer support teams face inefficiencies from outdated and disconnected tools, with 54% unable to personalize support and 50% wasting time switching between applications. The modern support tech stack should be built around a connected framework like Intercom’s Support Funnel, which integrates three layers: proactive messaging to preempt issues, self-serve bots and knowledge bases for repetitive queries, and human support with automated workflows. An all-in-one platform such as Intercom provides the foundation, offering live chat, chatbots, a team inbox, integrations, and reporting capabilities. The stack should also integrate with specialized tools like Stripe for subscription management, Aircall for phone support, and RemoteHQ for co-browsing, as well as automation tools like Zapier. This approach aims to scale personalized support without proportional cost increases, improving customer satisfaction and retention while shifting support from a cost center to a value driver.
Upgrade your support: Announcing Intercom’s WhatsApp integration
Intercom has partnered with WhatsApp to offer an integration that lets businesses manage customer support conversations directly from the Intercom Inbox, reaching WhatsApp’s 2.5 billion users across over 100 countries. The integration simplifies omnichannel support by bringing WhatsApp messages into the same tool where teams already handle other channels, eliminating the need for separate software or new processes. Customers can initiate a conversation through the Intercom Messenger and then seamlessly switch to WhatsApp by scanning a QR code, making it easier to receive support on their preferred platform. Support teams continue using their existing workflows because core inbox tools such as rules, SLAs, and macros work with WhatsApp conversations, and messages appear directly in their usual inbox. Additionally, reporting features allow businesses to compare WhatsApp’s conversation volume, response times, and customer satisfaction against other channels to optimize their omnichannel strategy.
How Support Leaders Can Empower Their Teams - The Intercom Blog
Human support remains critical for customer satisfaction even as automation improves, especially for complex or emotionally charged issues that bots cannot handle. The Conversational Support Funnel framework helps companies balance proactive, self-serve, and human support layers to route only the most impactful queries to live agents. Automating repetitive tasks and integrating support tools frees team members to focus on meaningful problem-solving. Support leaders should rethink traditional metrics like CSAT to account for the difficulty and emotional toll of complex work, and provide clear escalation paths for difficult situations. Investing in team development and well-being through these practices improves retention, morale, and long-term customer loyalty.
Building bots for success: The custom bot that saved logistics platform Stuart over 2.5k hours per week - The Intercom Blog
Stuart, a logistics platform owned by GeoPost, faced the challenge of scaling support for its delivery partners without slowing response times or losing the personal touch. After analyzing their support journey, Head of LiveOps Andrew Baylis and Program Manager Marina Alejo identified that manual handling of every conversation was inefficient and implemented an Intercom Custom Bot, the courier bot. The bot operates across four delivery stages, resolving common queries automatically and collecting context before routing complex issues to agents, reducing manual intervention to 55%. As a result, the bot saves over 2,500 support team hours and automatically resolves 55,000 chats per week, with response times under 30 seconds and resolutions four times faster. Additionally, handling time per case is two minutes faster and delivery partner satisfaction has increased by 4%, with plans to further expand self-service capabilities.
Announcing The Ultimate Modern Support Tech Stack Guide
Intercom announced a new guide titled ‘The Ultimate Modern Support Tech Stack,’ addressing the need for support teams to move beyond outdated, disconnected tools. The guide cites a Forrester study finding only 37% of support leaders are satisfied with their current tools, highlighting widespread dissatisfaction. It promotes the emerging conversational support category as a solution that balances personal and efficient customer service. The guide provides a framework for optimizing support tech stacks and recommends integrations with tools like HubSpot, Zapier, and Stripe. Internal research predicts conversational support will capture over a third of the support software market in coming years.
Tactics to stay ahead of the curve and boost efficiency with proactive support - The Intercom Blog
Customer support is shifting from a reactive cost center to a proactive value driver, with leaders adopting conversational, messenger-based approaches to meet rising customer expectations. Proactive support uses targeted messages, banners, and custom bots to address known issues before customers ask for help, reducing inbound volume. Tanda doubled its client base while keeping its support team the same size, achieving better first-response times through proactive communication. TrueCommerce cut contact rates for temporary issues by nearly 80% by sending outbound alerts to affected users. These tactics help companies scale support, improve efficiency, and maintain customer satisfaction scores above 90%.
Intercom turns 10: Highlights from our first decade - The Intercom Blog
Intercom marked its 10th anniversary by reflecting on major milestones from its first decade. The company was founded in August 2011 by Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, David Barrett, and Ciaran Lee, who sought to make internet business personal. Intercom released the world’s first in-app messenger in 2011, which later evolved into a full-fledged Business Messenger with a homepage and embeddable apps. The company also published a series of books on product management, customer engagement, and Jobs-to-be-Done. In July 2020, Karen Peacock became CEO, succeeding Eoghan McCabe, who moved to Chairman.
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