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Customer Service
17 posts about Customer Service. Every summary links to the original.
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Our biggest releases of 2022: A next-generation Inbox, our most powerful Messenger yet, and the introduction of tickets - The Intercom Blog
Intercom’s 2022 releases include a fully customizable Messenger with no-code design, brand matching, and a News section for proactive announcements. The company introduced a messenger-first ticketing solution that allows teams to collaborate without switching tools, reducing costs and improving response times. The next-generation Inbox features faster load times, shortcuts, improved Smart Replies, dark mode, and a manager-specific view. A visual bot builder enables no-code creation of sophisticated automation flows, while Custom Actions and Custom Objects let bots access external data for higher self-solve rates. Other releases include Switch for moving phone calls to chat, in-product Surveys, and Instagram message management within the Inbox.
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.
Does your support team know more about your product than you?
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.
Empathy: the key to better support content - The Intercom Blog
As businesses scale, they risk losing touch with customer problems, which becomes apparent in support content. The post argues that empathy—both cognitive and emotional—is essential for creating effective help content. Cognitive empathy involves understanding customer perspectives by surrounding oneself with customer information, as Harley Davidson does with bike trip photos, and by staying informed about product evolution through conversations with design, support, and engineering teams. Emotional empathy requires experiencing the frustrations customers face, such as imagining a world without the product’s key features or actively finding and reporting bugs to understand user pain, as encouraged by Intercom’s “if you find something broken, you now own fixing it” poster. By combining both types of empathy, support writers can produce content that resonates with users and addresses their real needs, as shown in Intercom’s Smart Campaigns and User Map documentation.
Build your customer relationships around consistency and trust - The Intercom Blog
The Industrial Revolution scaled business reach but separated owners from customers, forcing service through mail or phone, a pattern that the internet initially continued. Now, consumerization of technology provides tools for human interaction at scale, enabling businesses to return to building personal relationships online. Amazon exemplifies this by minimizing customers’ total cost beyond price—time, mental energy, and uncertainty—through frictionless purchasing, easy returns, and proactive resolution of issues. To build trust, businesses must help customers succeed, invest in relationships by being generous and never transactional, and be available on customers’ preferred messaging apps like Messenger or WhatsApp without requiring repeated context. Consistent behavior over time builds brand reputation, and businesses should engage on review sites and social media to shape their message and earn trust, as perception eventually matches reality.
Get To Know Your Users - The Intercom Blog
Startups need a comprehensive view of their users, but customer information is often scattered across separate systems like databases, support apps, and emails, creating data silos. Intercom today launched a unified user profile screen that aggregates profile data (e.g., company role), business data (e.g., plan), activity data (e.g., login frequency), and communication data (e.g., past conversations) into one authoritative view. This screen answers key questions such as who the user is, how often they use the app, whether they have seen announcements, and if anyone has spoken with them recently. When customer data is siloed, companies may email inactive users or ignore influential signups, costing them customers and leaving them clueless about churn. By simplifying user research by an order of magnitude, the tool enables proactive, targeted communication that improves loyalty and changes how products are designed.
Give Your Customers Best Practices, Not Just FAQs - The Intercom Blog
Most companies invest heavily in acquisition content but neglect post-signup support, leaving customers with poorly written FAQs and contributing to high churn rates. Intercom advocates replacing isolated how-tos with best practice content that teaches customers how to get the most from a product. The approach includes giving the entire lesson, using real-life customer examples, writing about how the team uses the product, mirroring customer language, and revisiting content often. Practical techniques include breaking tasks into quick wins, using bullet points and screenshots, embedding videos, and leveraging a bot for automated answers. The goal is to empower customers to self-serve, reducing support contacts and building long-term loyalty.
More Than Support Tickets: You Need Customer Conversations
Outdated support ticketing models depersonalize customer experience, treating them like they are waiting in line at the DMV. The article by Ruairí Galavan advocates for conversational support where every interaction is a personal one-to-one conversation that builds relationships. Ten guidelines are provided: talk like a human using first names, personalize saved replies, explain with gifs or phone, never blame the customer, use emoji, employ an invitational exit, know the product thoroughly, make resolution the goal, never assume technical knowledge, and proactively answer follow-up questions. Agents should show rather than tell using gifs, maintain a human tone even after the issue is resolved, and never make customers feel like a support ticket. Businesses that do not adopt this personal approach risk losing customers to competitors who already have.
Our new book: Intercom on Customer Support - The Intercom Blog
Intercom published its third book, Intercom on Customer Support, sharing principles used while scaling to over 8,000 customers across 85 countries. The book examines customer support from three angles: starting and scaling a team, planning the quality of support, and ensuring support has positive relationships with other teams. It argues that quality customer support is a competitive advantage, not a cost, aligning with Forrester’s “age of the customer” concept from 2011. Two key macro trends—all businesses becoming internet businesses and the shift to recurring revenue—place the future lifetime revenue of the customer at the center of every support discussion. As boundaries between sales and support dissolve, the book addresses challenges like supporting free users, scaling the team, and controlling costs, while remaining tool- and tactic-agnostic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Transform fintech customer service with Fin - The Intercom Blog
Fintech companies handling savings, credit, and investments require customer service that builds trust and meets strict regulatory requirements. Intercom’s Fin AI agent, powered by large language models, uses existing knowledge content to automatically resolve over half of customer queries on average. Fundrise reported Fin handled over 50% of support cases within three months, while Sharesies achieved an almost 70% resolution rate over email in 12 weeks. Fin delivers real-time personalization by pulling live transaction data from external systems, supports over 45 languages with real-time translation, and scales during peak periods like tax season. It includes compliance safeguards such as automatic escalation of regulated activities to licensed agents and integration with KYC and AML processes.
Your Step-By-Step Guide To Switching Customer Service Platforms
The article provides a step-by-step framework for support leaders considering a switch to a modern, AI-powered customer service platform. It begins by guiding readers to identify push factors, such as an incomplete platform or low ROI, and pull factors, like speed and advanced AI capabilities. The guide then covers how to address team resistance by generating excitement and demonstrating how the new tool solves pain points. It details planning steps including securing executive sponsorship, planning data migration for user information and conversation history, and communicating the change internally. The final step focuses on monitoring the switch by evaluating which traditional KPIs remain relevant and how AI impacts metrics. The framework aims to equip teams to transition successfully to a platform that enables a seamless human-AI partnership.
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