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Messaging
13 posts about Messaging. Every summary links to the original.
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- 2 companies
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Behind the messenger: making messaging human - The Intercom Blog
Intercom redesigned its messenger to make business communication personal, moving away from the anonymity of the early internet. The post argues that sharing real names, faces, and job titles builds trust, as user testing showed customers repeating the names of the reps they messaged. System-generated text like active status, location, and local time that cannot be changed adds authenticity and helps users understand the asynchronous nature of the system. The post recounts an incident where a customer doubted a rep’s real name, highlighting the need for transparency, and notes that job titles prevent white lies like claiming to pass feedback to a product team when the rep is on that team. The post concludes that these small details together build trust, leading to customer loyalty and forgiveness when things go wrong, and that users initially don’t expect this information but quickly come to expect it everywhere.
Design is a conversation - The Intercom Blog
Conversational interfaces represent the next step in removing abstraction between humans and machines, moving from punch cards to command lines to multitouch and now to dialogue. Bots are software agents that run inside messaging apps, performing tasks like ordering a taxi through simple text commands, and are straightforward to write as simple scripts. This shift is compared to the Web 2.0 API revolution, where bots become a platform for building new user experiences, similar to how APIs transformed websites into services. Designing conversational UIs draws inspiration from interactive fiction and text adventure games, which used branching conversation trees, but the post notes these are only starting points. The post argues that conversation as a user interface creates new opportunities and challenges for designers, with messaging apps becoming the layer through which daily life is conducted, as evidenced by six of the top ten apps being primarily for messaging.
How to Educate & Persuade Customers - The Intercom Blog
The post presents a framework for product messaging that categorizes user tasks by ease of execution and user desire, using a quadrant to determine whether to educate, persuade, or nudge. Tasks that are desirable but daunting require education to simplify the concept, while easy but low-value tasks need persuasion to highlight benefits, and tasks in between may only need a nudge. The author warns against simplifying tasks users do not want, citing failed startups, and references Ev Williams’ formula of removing steps from long-standing human desires. The post also discusses the cost-benefit trade-off in user decisions, distinguishing honest growth hacks that alter the trade-off from dishonest ones that deceive users or move goalposts. It advises against building a business around complex unwanted tasks and notes that Intercom itself uses this approach by teaching customers about drip-feed marketing.
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.
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.
Crafting feature announcements that spur action - The Intercom Blog
A feature’s value depends on showing customers how it solves their problem, not on development effort. Intercom recommends targeting the right customers using message filters, such as those with access, those without (upsell), those who requested the feature, or those taking related actions, while excluding recently contacted (within 3 days) and new users (signed up less than 30 days ago). Choose the medium based on context: in-app for active users on relevant pages, email for re-engaging inactive users, and time announcements between 10am-2pm on weekdays for best open rates. The message should focus on customer benefits, be concise, include visuals, and stay personal. After announcing, track usage via events and gather feedback to inform future iterations.
What we shipped: 20 new features and counting - The Intercom Blog
Intercom shipped over 20 new features in the first half of 2017, reflecting its philosophy that shipping is the beginning of iteration. Support enhancements include office hours and away mode, an Articles autoresponder that guides customers to the help center while they wait with localization in 38 languages and a link back to the website, animated GIF support, and mobile app additions for articles, images, GIFs, and saved replies. Inbox improvements let teams sort by longest waiting, group conversations, and snooze conversations for follow-up, while integrations added Microsoft Teams and a new developer dashboard that puts everything in one place. The API added Leads and Companies to the Scroll API, and outbound messaging gained engagement-based targeting, the ability to stop a message once it starts sending, and mobile delivery windows for push notifications. These smaller improvements aim to make support more personal and scalable without requiring major announcements.
Announcing the new Intercom Messenger - The Intercom Blog
Intercom announced a new messenger after a year-long development effort, its biggest project ever, taking ten times longer than typical releases, during which the team explored bots and machine learning. The messenger addresses the gap between consumer messaging trends and outdated business methods like email and live chat, which customers find impersonal. It offers three message formats (Chat, Notes, Posts), different delivery modes (interruptive or discreet), and lightweight replies with emoji reactions. The messenger supports customization like color and wallpaper, provides native experiences on web, iOS, and Android, and integrates with multiple channels like web, push, in-app, and social media. Built on the Intercom platform, it uses customer data to personalize messages for 13,000 businesses, with future plans for conversational UIs, bots, and AI to invent the future of business communication.
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.
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.
Prioritize your messages at scale with the Twilio Traffic Optimization Engine
Twilio’s Traffic Optimization Engine is a new suite for global messaging deliverability and prioritization, tackling carrier network strain from soaring volumes like the 6.9 billion messages during Cyber Week 2025. The suite automates months of manual planning, working across networks, senders, geographies, and use cases to deliver high-priority messages on time. Real-time Routing uses patented algorithms to optimize traffic across 4,800+ carrier connections every 75 seconds, while Market Throughput manages rate limits at the country and sender-type level to prevent throttling. Traffic Shaping creates dynamic lanes to prioritize one-time passwords over promotional messages, and Multitenancy fairly distributes throughput among ISV teams. Insights provides real-time analytics on deliverability and capacity allocation, and the overall system uses traffic shaping and priority queueing based on carrier, sender, and message type capabilities.
How to Build an RCS Business Messaging Campaign with Twilio
Rich Communication Services (RCS) upgrades SMS with branded conversations, images, carousels, and read receipts delivered through the default messaging app. Twilio Programmable Messaging supports RCS as a first-class channel, reusing the same API as SMS. This tutorial covers building an RCS campaign in Node.js, including RCS Sender registration (a manual review process with test device support), creating a twilio/card content template with dynamic variables, and broadcasting personalized messages from a JSON list. Delivery status is tracked through a status callback webhook exposed via ngrok, and replies are captured through an inbound webhook when users tap suggested reply buttons. The guide also includes troubleshooting for common issues such as messages falling back to SMS, error codes 30001 and 63001, and webhook configuration errors.
How to Build an RCS Business Messaging Campaign with Twilio in PHP
Twilio’s tutorial explains how to build an RCS Business Messaging campaign in PHP, reusing the same Programmable Messaging API used for SMS. RCS turns standard text messages into branded conversations with images, carousels, verified sender logos, suggested replies, and read receipts delivered through the recipient’s default messaging app. The walkthrough covers registering an RCS Sender, attaching it to a Messaging Service, and designing a rich card template in the Twilio Content Template Builder. It then shows how to broadcast the campaign to a recipient list, track delivery status via a status callback webhook, and capture replies through an inbound webhook. Troubleshooting guidance addresses common issues such as messages falling back to SMS, senders pending approval, and missing status callbacks.
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