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What We Shipped: 7 New Data And Customization-driven Features
Intercom released seven data and customization-driven features to help sales and marketing teams optimize their funnel and personalize customer experiences at scale. The updated Clearbit Reveal app uses Clearbit data for personalized auto messages, routing conversations by company size, and viewing company data in the Inbox. New Revenue Reports, powered by the Salesforce app, show opportunities, pipeline, revenue influenced, and which landing pages and messages generate the most opportunities and conversations. Sales Team Performance Reports provide leaderboards for largest deals closed, response times, and meetings booked. Control groups on the Messages Premium plan enable A/B testing by withholding messages from half the audience to validate performance, while other features include duplicating Custom Bots for experimentation, customizing Operator’s bot identity with a name, logo, and color scheme while keeping it clear it’s a bot, and advanced Messenger security options like blocking GIFs and attachments in emails, available on new Premium plans.
8 New Features To Increase Conversions And Grow Your Business
Intercom announced eight new features aimed at helping sales, support, and marketing teams manage volume and capacity more efficiently to increase conversions and grow their business. Custom Bots can qualify leads automatically, book meetings, and work 24/7 without code, connecting to the tech stack and accelerating sales cycles by delivering qualified leads when prospects are live. The new Intercom App Store offers over 100 apps for acquiring, engaging, and retaining customers, including Zoom Webinars, Content Showcase, Coda, and PieSync, along with a new Messenger framework and Developer Hub for building custom apps. Updated webhooks and APIs provide more flexibility to trigger actions based on conversation tags, check teammate availability with the Admins API, and run assignment rules at any point in a conversation. Other additions include downloadable conversation transcripts for both teammates and customers, and free developer workspaces for safe building and testing.
An Upstanding Brand: How Team Values Influence How We Work
Intercom’s Brand Studio defines core values to guide behavior and decision-making without micromanagement as the team scales. The values answer four fundamental questions about why the team exists, what it does, how it behaves, and how it will succeed, and are written as reflections of who the team wants to be, not platitudes. Key values include building trust through vulnerability and inclusivity, making each other better through accountability and learning from diversity, and loving kind and open-minded people who reject mediocrity and are always kind. The values also emphasize supporting the mission, seeking to understand problems and each other, balancing art and science, and encouraging experimentation with considered risks and acceptance of failure. They are woven into branding, hiring, leveling, process work, and performance reviews to define success in expected behavior, and are intended to be discussed and evolved to help the team do the best work of their careers.
Sales Follow-Up Email: How to Automate in 3 Steps [+ Setup Guide]
Sales teams often struggle to balance chasing large deals (big whales) with nurturing many small accounts (long tail). Intercom addressed this by automating sales follow-up for smaller accounts using Smart Campaigns. The three-step process involves segmenting leads into high-value large accounts with multiple stakeholders and long cycles, and high-velocity small accounts with single stakeholders and quick cycles; personalizing the first two touches using saved replies and product-specific templates; and then automating follow-up with campaign rules, goals, variables, cadence, and exit points, including removing leads who reply, start a trial, or become customers. Results include a nearly 50% response rate among previously unresponsive small accounts, an 8% increase in pipeline opportunities, and five hours saved per account executive weekly. The post also emphasizes keeping automated messages personal with emojis and gifs, and always adding value with case studies and demos.
Try Before You Buy: How Sales Can Maximize the Free Product Trial
SaaS free trials are easy to start but low switching costs mean prospects can leave quickly, so maximizing trial success is critical; typical opt-in conversions are around 25% and opt-out around 60%. Intercom focuses on three pillars: understanding the prospect’s use case quickly, driving frequent and smart usage, and reducing in-trial friction through friendly support and onboarding. Sales reps engage trialists via live chat or in-app messages to learn their reasons and set expectations for the next two weeks, using internal notes to loop in support. Messages should be meaningful and triggered by prospect behavior to avoid fatigue, with in-app messaging preferred over email to keep users engaged in the product. Fast, collaborative communication between sales and support reduces time wasted on support requests and helps convert trials at higher rates, setting up customers for long-term success.
Convert more leads with our new HubSpot and Marketo apps - The Intercom Blog
Intercom announced new HubSpot and Marketo apps that sync customer data to help sales and marketing teams nurture and convert more leads. The apps sync leads and conversations across tools, allowing teams to avoid switching tabs or losing sales opportunities. They integrate with Intercom’s Operator bot to automatically qualify and send leads to HubSpot, Marketo, or Salesforce, or manually send with one click. Users can view lead data from these tools by hovering over external profile links in Intercom Inbox, and basic information updates automatically. Every Intercom conversation is sent to the lead’s profile in HubSpot, Marketo, or Salesforce, providing a complete history of interactions for continued nurture campaigns.
5 new Intercom Messenger apps for seamless workflows
Intercom launched a Messenger apps framework in April 2018, opening its Messenger to third-party developers for the first time and enabling quick actions inside conversations. Over 600 companies are now in the early access program building apps, and nearly 100 apps are available in the Intercom App Store. The post highlights five new apps: Daily.co enables video calls with no downloads or account required, Pinpoint lets candidates apply for open roles from the Messenger homescreen, Sherlock uses engagement scores to send more targeted messages, JustCall Direct provides one-click phone calls logged in customer profiles, and Upscope offers one-click co-browsing with screen drawing. These apps integrate directly into the Messenger, reducing friction by bringing external tool actions into conversations, as 1 in 7 conversations already included links to other tools. Intercom encourages customers and partners to build their own apps using the Messenger framework, providing developer docs and early access.
Want Your Support Team To Drive Revenue? Go Real Time.
Investing in real-time customer support can drive revenue and satisfaction, but scaling it requires careful operational planning. The team found that new customers were 30% more likely to start a trial after a swift first response, and they defined two key metrics: first response time (target under 2 minutes) and subsequent response time. They started by offering real-time support to 50% of new customers, recruiting tenured top performers as Project Leads to help roll out the experiment and identify effective workflows. Operational success depended on four elements: scheduling (using heatmaps of conversation volume and dedicated tools), tools (Intercom’s Messenger and Inbox), workflows (shifting from pass-back to 100% ownership), and communication (Slack channels for handovers and feedback). After refining qualification criteria based on rep feedback to exclude customers with previously activated apps, the team scaled real-time support to 100% of new customers within six months.
Product thinking: behind our new Messenger home screen - The Intercom Blog
Intercom launched a new Messenger home screen that replaces the previous utilitarian conversation list with a customizable app-based interface. The idea originated from observing customers building their own front-desk solutions and from internal experiments with knowledge base links that showed strong traction. The redesign was further motivated by data showing that 95% of conversation interaction occurs within 24 hours, making the old conversation list less valuable for returning users. The home screen hosts apps for self-service, sales, and support—such as article search, demo booking, Mailchimp subscriptions, Shopify order tracking, and Statuspage updates—and can show different apps for visitors versus signed-in users to avoid hard sells. This app framework was originally built for in-conversation use but was extended to the home screen, allowing businesses to tailor the Messenger as a versatile front desk that can be updated in under a minute.
Your Privacy Ecosystem Is Crucial In The Age Of GDPR - Inside
GDPR is a major regulatory change affecting all companies with EU customers globally, standardizing data handling and requiring legal justification for processing and user data rights. A privacy ecosystem includes all vendors and integrations sharing customer data, and the weakest link determines overall security, as a breach anywhere damages trust. Companies must invest in security programs with penetration testing, continuous monitoring, vulnerability disclosure, staff training, and a healthy paranoia about risks to protect against external attacks and data breaches. They should track and reduce unnecessary data access, choose vendors with contractual assurances and mature security, audit third-party providers regularly, and establish developer guidelines for integrations. Active communication and transparency about data storage, retention, and deletion are crucial for customer trust, and properly trained sales and support teams can turn GDPR compliance into a marketing differentiator.
A new dawn for the business messenger - The Intercom Blog
Intercom released the biggest update to its Messenger, completely rethinking how a business messenger should work beyond chat. With over 500 million conversations per month, the company observed that in 1 in 7 conversations people shared links to other tools, prompting the redesign. The update introduces a customizable Home screen that acts as a front desk, directing prospective and existing customers to the best outcome, whether talking to a person or self-serving. Messenger apps integrate third-party tools like Stripe, Shopify, and Google Calendar directly into conversations, and businesses can build custom apps for their own workflows via a new App Store. Intercom believes messengers will become the primary communication channel for internet businesses, combining personal conversation with intelligent automation to scale communication, diverging from personal messengers in important ways.
How Live Chat Can Warm Up Your Cold Outbound Leads
The post describes a technique that combines cold email outreach with live chat to avoid spammy follow-ups, based on research that leads are 82% more likely to convert after a chat. When a prospect clicks a link in a cold email, they receive a proactive Visitor Auto Message personalized with a unique UTM code, such as the author’s initials ‘?nml’. This turns outbound emails into inbound conversations, with near 100% open rates and over 25% reply rates, and allows scheduling demos in under five minutes. The post includes an example email citing Tradeshift’s success with live chat, reducing lead qualification days from 21 to 3 and increasing sales by 32%. It provides a step-by-step guide on setting this up in Intercom by creating UTM codes and triggering Visitor Auto Messages based on URL matches.
Need for speed: how to address leads faster with live chat - The Intercom Blog
A Harvard Business Review study of 1.25 million sales leads found that responding within an hour makes a deal seven times more likely to close than a two-hour response. Live chat on a website is the fastest way to achieve that speed, bypassing the delays of contact forms and email follow-ups. The first tactic is to offer live chat only to prospects matching an ideal customer profile, using tools like Clearbit to filter visitors so SDRs focus on qualified leads. The second is to combine a bot for collecting contact information with human sales development representatives for personalized conversations, avoiding over-automation that annoys prospects. The third is to set proper expectations by stating office hours, displaying average response times when unavailable, and hiding the chat outside business hours, which allows reps to be more thoughtful in their responses.
Make Sales & Product meetings a win-win
Fortnightly sales-product meetings at Intercom use a structured feedback loop to align product strategy with market needs. Sales teams first meet internally, using a shared Google Doc to categorize recent feedback and prioritize three to five items backed by concrete data such as the customer’s job title, revenue at risk, and competitor presence. The cross-functional sync includes representatives from each sales segment (SMB, Mid-Market, Enterprise) plus product owners, who ask context-gathering questions and share roadmap progress. This method replaces ad-hoc feature requests with evidence-based discussions, helping product understand customer impact and sales set realistic expectations with prospects. The process has resulted in popular features like automatic conversation routing to the right team and stronger cross-functional collaboration between sales and product teams.
Intercom on Marketing - the marketing book for startups
Intercom has released a new book, Intercom on Marketing, aimed at helping startups overcome marketing challenges. The book addresses the difficulty founders face in knowing where to start with marketing, especially without a background in it. It emphasizes that strong brand and go-to-market strategy can differentiate startups in a commoditized software landscape. The book collects lessons from Intercom’s own marketing team, which grew from one to over forty people. It covers 14 chapters including getting first customers, choosing tactics, aligning product and marketing, and launching products, and is available for free in PDF, Kindle, or epub formats with original illustrations.
Behind the design work of Building Intercom - The Intercom Blog
For the ‘Building Intercom’ event page, the design team aimed for an ‘unapologetically nerdy’ aesthetic to appeal to engineers without resorting to tired clichés. The author discovered the Hershey fonts, originally created in the 1960s by physicist A.V. Hershey, and revived them into functional font files using FontSelf and then Glyphs for weight variations. A small Python script automated placing outlines into a .glyphs file, and Paper.js enabled interactive vector animations. Testing revealed issues such as event details being overlooked, Paperscript’s JavaScript evaluators forbidden by Intercom’s security team, and poor mobile browser support for Paper.js. The project reinforced the value of taking meaningful risks in design and development, reminding the author that overcoming fear of consequences is part of the work.
The pains of growing a platform - The Intercom Blog
Many SaaS companies aspire to become platforms, but building a true platform is far more complex than offering APIs and integrations. Intercom, despite having over 250 third-party integrations and nearly 40% of customers using its APIs, acknowledges that this alone does not constitute a platform. The post identifies three common mistakes: trying to become a platform too early, expecting others to build integrations, and focusing on adoption metrics instead of developer success. Intercom emphasizes that platforms are governed ecosystems requiring extensibility and distribution, and that companies should start by building for their own customers before third parties. Building a lasting platform takes years of deliberate planning and long-term investment, as demonstrated by Salesforce’s gradual evolution from a point solution to a platform.
Why you should have skin in the engineering game - The Intercom Blog
The post compares the high-stakes feedback of professional cycling to engineering, noting that engineers in growing companies often become disconnected from customers through support teams and product managers. The author, a former cyclist, advocates for engineers to maintain ‘skin in the game’ by personally connecting with customers. Intercom enforces regular customer days for all employees to give first-hand exposure, uses GitHub integration to easily dig into real customer conversations, and encourages direct outreach for complex issues. Working through a subtle bug caused by a feature update, the author iterated directly with a customer for a week, restoring their broken workflow. This personal investment in outcomes motivates engineers and ensures their work has real impact, while the post encourages others to seek similar practices.
The right way to respond to feature requests - The Intercom Blog
Customer support teams frequently encounter feature requests that reveal gaps between a product and user goals, and responding effectively requires a rigorous framework. The post categorizes these requests into three types: unresolved problems with existing features, improvements to existing features, and brand new feature requests. For each type, it recommends a tailored response: educate customers on workarounds for problems without promising specific fix dates, suggest alternative existing functionality for improvements, and honestly decline new requests while acknowledging the gap and offering third-party solutions like Zapier or YouCanBookMe, sharing context about limited engineering resources. Prioritization should also consider customer lifecycle, high-value users, implementation difficulty, and feedback volume to balance satisfaction with engineering resources and long-term strategy. Closing the loop by tagging conversations in Intercom and sharing monthly customer voice reports with product managers ensures feedback drives roadmap decisions and builds long-term customer success.
Understanding the customer success pyramid - The Intercom Blog
The post introduces the Customer Success Pyramid, a framework modeled on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, to help businesses understand and meet customer needs. At the base is providing precise and accurate support, which builds trust and must be maintained as the product and team grow. Above that is promptness, meaning being fast when it matters, such as using real-time chat during a customer’s early days. The middle levels focus on being personal to build rapport and personalized by using customer data to tailor interactions without being intrusive. Higher levels include preemptive support, where businesses identify problematic patterns and intervene before the customer notices, and prescience, where AI and machine learning automate this proactive guidance; the post notes that operating higher on the pyramid increases the likelihood of successful outcomes.
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