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Explainer posts on Yomu, summarised newest first.
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Explainer posts
Seven properties of effective messages - The Intercom Blog
The post identifies seven properties that customer messages must exhibit to engage effectively in an age of fleeting attention. Messages should be personal, using the recipient’s name and a tone akin to leaving a voicemail for an aunt you’ve never met—warm and friendly but respectful. Personalization goes further by including custom attributes like remaining storage space or incomplete orders, while politeness requires respectful language, no shouting, and awareness of cultural and holiday differences. Brevity is crucial to prevent customer disengagement; accuracy avoids errors like wrong names or irrelevant requests (e.g., asking free-plan users for billing info). Relevance involves timing messages properly and using absolute dates like ‘April 5th’ rather than ‘tomorrow,’ and a consistent voice and tone (e.g., a bank vs. coffee shop) must be maintained across all communications.
Lessons learned from scaling a blog - The Intercom Blog
Drawing from nearly four years of running the Intercom blog, John Collins shares eight lessons on scaling content marketing. It provides a slow but compound return: Tomasz Tunguz’s data shows articles tied to principles remain relevant for years, offering lasting value beyond page views. Opinionated, high-quality articles like ‘Why Cards Are The Future Of The Web’ and ‘Growth Hacking Is Bullshit’ outperform generic content, and writing must be practiced as a muscle with company-wide contribution. Not every article needs to sell, but all content is marketing aimed at growing audience loyalty. Scaling requires an editor backed by a clear content strategy that defines topics, depth, and quality bar; not every company should become a publisher.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
3 Questions to Ask Before Scaling Your Customer Service
Companies scaling their customer service should first ask whether their tools are scalable, as legacy channels like phone and email are labor-intensive and difficult to scale. A next-generation messenger-based support solution can improve efficiency by collecting information upfront, enabling reps to handle multiple chats, and using bots for simple queries. Second, teams must maintain high standards as conversation volumes rise by using automation to resolve repetitive questions, freeing agents for complex issues. Third, businesses should adapt to evolving customer needs by incorporating self-serve and proactive support layers, reducing inbox volume and allowing focus on high-value VIP customers. Laying this infrastructure early can result in significant time and cost savings while improving customer satisfaction.
What Is Proactive Support and Why Do You Need It? - The Intercom Blog
Proactive support is a strategic approach to helping customers before they contact support, using tools such as outbound messages, banners, and Product Tours to deliver targeted assistance. By preemptively answering common questions, it reduces inbound conversation volume, frees support teams for complex queries, and improves long-term metrics like customer retention and satisfaction. A commissioned Forrester Consulting study conducted on behalf of Intercom in April 2021 found that 59% of support leaders and decision makers view a lack of proactive support as a barrier to conversational support at scale. Implementing a proactive strategy requires understanding the customer journey and pain points to deliver targeted, non-intrusive help via messenger-based channels at key moments. This approach creates a better customer experience while optimizing support team resources, making it crucial for a future-ready support strategy.
Automation in action: Proven ways to boost the bottom line with self-serve support - The Intercom Blog
Self-serve support combines automation and human expertise to deliver scalable yet personal customer service. The Conversational Support Funnel framework integrates proactive, self-serve, and human support layers to balance efficiency and personalization. Case studies demonstrate significant gains: Stuart reduced support workload by over 2,500 hours weekly using Custom Bots, and in a test with a pharmacy client, 70% of inbound queries were resolved through self-serve. SMARTY saved 7,000 support team hours annually with Resolution Bot, achieving a 99% reduction in median first-response time. Livestorm maintained a 94% customer satisfaction score while automatically resolving one in four queries, and Rugs.com increased support efficiency tenfold by switching from phone to chat. The post notes that 57% of support teams now measure revenue impact, and self-serve support lowers response times, frees agents for complex issues, and drives retention and expansion.
How Every Team Benefits From Conversational Support - Scale by Intercom
Conversational support is a digital-first, messenger-based approach to resolving customer queries, enabling real-time or asynchronous communication and preserving context across interactions. By combining custom chatbots and automation, it streamlines support workflows and reduces repetitive tasks. A 2021 Forrester study commissioned by Intercom found messaging-based support became the second most used channel, with 60% of leaders reporting improved customer retention and 58% reporting increased efficiency. The approach benefits multiple teams: sales and marketing can capture qualifying customer data upfront, such as company size and plan tier, while product teams identify trends from support topics for better development decisions, and customer success teams deliver personalized experiences. For agents, automating low-value tasks like password resets reduces burnout, improves job satisfaction, and lowers turnover costs from hiring and training replacements.
Building Reliable Data Analytics Agents: Lessons from the KDD Cup
The NVIDIA KGMON team placed second in the KDD Cup 2026 Data Agents competition by building a reliable agent system around a small, fixed LLM. The system constrained the agent’s action space through a harness that normalized data access by converting CSV and JSON files into SQLite tables, exposed a limited set of custom functions for schema inspection, SQL queries, and answer writing, and seeded the agent with schema context before analysis. Documents and videos were handled through targeted tools like prose_helper for extracting rules from documents and keyframe extraction with aligned transcripts for video evidence, keeping the main LLM context focused. The team emphasized inspectability by recording execution traces and running repeated attempts, using evaluation and trajectory review to identify failures and refine the harness. The key lesson is that reliability for data analytics agents often comes from the harness design, not the model’s capabilities.
Principles of Bot Design: Successful Chatbot Design in 2021 [+Tips]
The post argues that early chatbot attempts have failed because they over-relied on natural language processing and artificial intelligence capabilities that do not yet exist, often making users feel duped. It presents eight opinionated design principles to guide practical conversational UI development, starting with never pretending to be human. Other core principles include keeping conversations incredibly simple and bounded to particular subjects with linear flows, using structured input like buttons and custom keyboards to avoid parsing errors, and respecting the chat medium by showing formatted card previews instead of raw URLs. The post also emphasizes providing a human escape hatch and optimizing for end-user experience rather than support team convenience, with admin views maintaining full conversation context. Finally, it notes that these principles should be strongly held as a decision-making north star but allowed to evolve as technical possibilities improve.
Product Teams: How to Build & Structure Product Teams for Growth
Intercom shares the process it used to scale its product team from a smaller size to four Product Managers, four Designers, and 25 Engineers over 12-18 months. The process is built on four areas: decision-making guidelines, clear role-based accountability, a lightweight transparent roadmap, and a culture of goal setting. The roadmap has three timeframes: solid releases for the next 4-6 weeks, planned high-level briefs for the following months, and speculative ideas beyond that. Accountability is assigned by role, with the PM responsible for problem analysis and success, the Designer for design quality, and the Engineering Lead for delivery and code quality. Teams set weekly goals tracked in an internal tool called Hustle and daily goals on whiteboards, with weekly demos every Friday to reinforce the cadence of building.
Designing Features Using Job Stories - Inside Intercom
Personas rely on demographic attributes that fail to explain causality behind consumption, and User Stories couple implementation with motivations, obscuring reasons for feature failure. Job Stories overcome this by focusing on the situation, motivation, and desired outcome without prescribing a solution. A case study demonstrates the approach: designing a profile page for a car loan application, using a five-step process starting with the high-level job of helping salespeople secure loans. The team observed customers currently rely on physical proximity to assess trust, and wrote a Job Story about anxiety of sharing sensitive data electronically. The resulting UI featured the salesperson’s photo, title, cars sold, years at company, and contact options, each chosen to ease customer anxiety and ensure safe data sharing.
Intercom's product principles: Start with the problem to achieve better solutions - The Intercom Blog
Intercom’s primary product principle “Start with the problem” guides all its teams to focus on understanding real customer issues more deeply before designing any solutions. The company argues that many businesses fail because they quickly jump to solutions without thoroughly exploring the underlying problem, leading to solutions that often miss the mark, do not match real customer needs, and end up unused entirely. Common pitfalls include insufficient problem comprehension, failing to update problem understanding over time, and solving problems that are too niche, not urgent, or not aligned with customer needs. To counter this, Intercom dedicates about a third of a team’s effort to problem definition before any building begins, using problem statements and customer research. This whole-team approach builds shared understanding, ensures accurate solutions, and allows “porpoising” between problem and solution understanding while defining measurable success metrics upfront to validate impact.
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