Train Fin to behave like your best agents

Building a great support team takes time and effort. New team members need to learn about the business, how to interact with your customers, and how to approach resolving and escalating issues. It can take weeks to get a new team member trained and fully up to speed.

But what if the process could take minutes instead of weeks? Just like a new team member, Fin, Intercom’s AI Agent, can also be trained on how to interact with customers. But with Fin Guidance, this training happens instantly.

Fin Guidance is the new way to instantly customize Fin’s behavior to ensure every customer gets consistent, high-quality support. You train it the same way you onboard a new hire – by giving it clear instructions on how to talk to customers, clarify requests, and when to escalate. No technical setup. No complicated rules. Just guide Fin using natural language.

Customize Fin’s behavior in minutes

Every company supports customers differently. You have your own voice, your own processes, and your own internal policies. With Fin Guidance, you can train Fin in all of that – just like you would a new teammate.

You don’t need technical tools or scripts to do it. You simply write natural language instructions that shape how Fin responds. Here are some of the ways you can train Fin’s behavior using guidance.

Define Fin’s communication style

Make sure every reply sounds like it came from your team: on-brand, clear, and high-quality. Just like with a human agent, the more context you provide, the better Fin can represent your team. Here are real examples of how customers are guiding Fin’s language and tone:

• Use the right words: “Use clear, straightforward language and avoid jargon or buzzwords. For example, say ‘easy’ instead of ‘frictionless,’ ‘help’ instead of ‘enable,’ and ‘start’ instead of ‘onboard.’”
• Use the right language: “Always write in British English, using spelling like ‘colour’ instead of ‘color.’ Avoid Americanisms and ensure responses feel natural to a British audience.”
• Avoid promising outcomes: “Never guarantee financial outcomes. Instead, use cautious, factual statements like, ‘Past performance is not indicative of future results.’”
• Add personal touches: “When appropriate, refer to the user’s name or company to make responses feel more personal.”

Train Fin to gather context and clarify issues

Support agents need to ask the right follow-up questions to get a better understanding of the problem in order to reach a resolution. Fin can do that too – with the right guidance.

You can coach Fin on how to clarify vague questions, provide more contextual responses based on details about the customer, or gather key information about the customer’s problem before answering. 

Here are some examples of context and clarification guidance our customers are using: 

• Clarify vague messages: “If a user starts a conversation with only one or two words and their question isn’t clear, ask for more information to better understand their issue. This helps provide more accurate and helpful support.”
• Provide location-specific responses: “If a customer asks about delivery options, check their {{country}} and provide a response that matches the available delivery options for their specific location.”
• Personalize by plan: “If a customer asks about their available features, first ask them to clarify which plan they are on (e.g., Free, Basic, Pro, Enterprise) before providing a response.”
• Ask specific follow-ups: “If a customer reports a bug, first clarify whether they’re using iOS or Android before troubleshooting. Each app has different features, so understanding the platform ensures accurate assistance.”

Define Fin’s escalation rules

Every team member needs to know when to escalate an issue – including Fin.

With Fin Guidance, you can set clear rules that train Fin to identify when an issue should be promptly escalated to a member of the team. These instructions enable Fin to ensure that customers can get the right support at the right time – demonstrating professionalism and care.

Here are a few examples:

• Escalate urgent issues: “If a customer asks about having their data deleted,  escalate the conversation to a human agent straight away.”
• Route sensitive questions, like medical concerns: “If a customer asks for medical advice or indicates they may need urgent medical attention, immediately route the conversation to a human agent. Never provide medical advice.”
• Handle authentication problems: “If a customer mentions that they haven’t received their two-factor authentication code, direct the conversation to a human agent for assistance.”
• Protect against fraud: “If a customer reports a fraudulent transaction, route the conversation to a human agent for immediate review.”

Each instruction can be up to 2,500 characters, so there’s room for detail and nuance. Check out some best practices for writing effective AI prompts here.

If you need some extra help, each of these guidance categories come with templates that you can use as a starting point and easily customize to suit your needs. 

Continuously refine your guidance

Use AI assistance to optimize your guidance

Training Fin doesn’t require writing expertise or weeks of trial and error. To make things easier, Fin Guidance includes AI-powered writing assistance to help you improve instructions as you write them.

Here are some things AI-powered writing assistance can help with, so that your instructions are as clear as possible:

• Ambiguity: “This instruction could be interpreted in two different ways when a customer asks about pricing. Here’s a clearer alternative…”
• Redundancy: “This information is already covered in your previous guidance on returns. You can safely remove this to keep things streamlined…”
• Contradiction: “This approach conflicts with how you’ve instructed Fin to handle refunds. Here’s how to align them…”
• Clarity: “Adding a specific example of what you consider ‘urgent’ will help Fin make better escalation decisions…”
• System limitations: “Fin won’t be able to perform this specific action. Here’s how to reframe this to achieve the same outcome…”

You can compare suggestions with your original text and choose to accept, edit, or refine it further. You stay in control, but the assistant helps you get better results – faster.

Track performance and iterate with confidence

Fin should evolve as your team, product, and customer needs change. With performance tracking on every piece of guidance, you can see how your instructions are working and optimize continuously.

For example, you can see:

• Usage: How often each piece of guidance was applied across conversations.
• Resolved or Routed: What percentage of those conversations were resolved or routed to your team.
• Filters: Advanced filters to identify patterns across channels, customer segments, or time periods.

This helps you identify what’s working, refine what’s not, and turn Fin into a truly dynamic extension of your team.

Deliver human-quality support at scale

Fin Guidance is the simplest, fastest way to bring Fin in line with how your team supports customers – ensuring every response is on-brand and aligned with your policies. Start guiding Fin today and deliver support that’s not just automated – but thoughtful, professional, and uniquely you. 

Response Time: Vol. 43

You satisfy your customers, but can you satisfy our curiosity?

With Lauren Gilbert, Senior Customer Happiness Manager at Memberful.

Please tell us a little bit about your company and what you do there.
I am the Senior Customer Happiness Manager at Memberful. We help independent publishers, educators, and creators sell memberships to their audience and build sustainable businesses.

What’s the most valuable thing that working in customer service has taught you?
One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned from working in customer service is the importance of staying calm and not jumping to conclusions. It’s easy to react immediately when faced with a problem, but I’ve found that taking a step back to investigate thoroughly often reveals that things aren’t as broken as they seem.

Doing your due diligence before acting not only leads to better solutions, but also helps build trust with customers because they appreciate you taking the time to truly understand the issue instead of rushing to a quick (and sometimes incorrect) fix.

Describe the essence of great customer service using only three words.
Prompt. Personable. Clear.

What can you do that a bot will never be able to replicate?
Human support shines in areas where empathy, creativity, and nuanced understanding are key.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever said/done to a customer?
I was jumping into a chat that was started by one of my teammates, and wrote, “Lauren, humping in!” instead of “jumping in!” (The “J” and “H” are side-by-side on the keyboard.)

What’s your greatest productivity hack?
Work with your natural tendencies! If you’re a morning person, get your most brain-taxing tasks done in the morning and do the easiest tasks in the afternoon.

What book are you reading at the moment?
Hyperbole and a Half  by Allie Brosh.

What’s the best thing a customer has ever said to you?
“Memberful customer service is what you wish all customer service was, but you rarely find. Fast, reliable, and always extremely helpful.”

Conversation closed… for now 😏

If you’re interested in being featured in our Response Time series, you can share your insights on customer service with us here.

Gaming support economics: A guide to maximizing ROI in the AI agent era

In the high-stakes world of gaming, support teams face a unique set of challenges. With global player bases across all time zones, dramatic volume spikes during tournaments and launches, and the expectation for instant, personalized assistance, traditional support models simply can’t keep up.

For too long, gaming operators have been forced to choose between three competing priorities:

• Speed: Providing fast responses to keep players in the game.
• Quality: Delivering exceptional experiences that build loyalty.
• Cost: Maintaining reasonable support expenses that don’t erode profit margins.

Today’s players demand all three. They expect immediate resolution when stuck in a game, encountering a bug, or having account issues. Any delay can mean the difference between keeping them in your player base or losing them forever. At the same time, the unpredictable nature of support volumes makes staffing efficiently nearly impossible.

Traditionally, scaling support meant simply adding headcount, creating a linear relationship between business growth and support costs. This approach has significant limitations:

• It’s increasingly expensive as staff costs rise.
• It requires ongoing recruitment and training, which is costly and time-consuming.
• It’s difficult to scale quickly for unexpected surges.
• It can’t economically deliver effective 24/7 multilingual support.

Now, there’s another way. With AI agents like Fin, you can break free from these constraints. Taking an AI-first approach allows you to handle massive support volume fluctuations while providing always-on global support, and keeping costs predictable. The results are game-changing – not just for your support team, but for player experience, retention, and ultimately, revenue.

Quantifying the hidden costs of traditional player support

Before examining the potential ROI of AI-first player support, it’s critical to understand the true costs of traditional player support models. These models carry significant expenses that directly impact your bottom line but often remain hidden.

1. Limited growth and scalability

In the gaming world, support volume can spike dramatically during game launches, tournaments, or seasonal events. Most operators handle these surges by temporarily adding contractors, paying staff overtime, or simply accepting lower-quality service levels during peak periods. All of these options are costly: you either overspend on “just-in-case” capacity, or risk damaging player experiences during your most critical periods.

Not only that, this reactive approach always leaves you one step behind, scrambling to add resources when you’re already in the thick of it instead of scaling proactively ahead of demand.

The real cost: Slowed-down business growth, player churn due to poor experiences, damaged brand reputation.

2. Less effective budgeting

Traditional support costs increase over time even when volume remains stable. As your agents develop specialized knowledge of specific games, platforms, and technical issues, their value and salaries naturally increase – yet their capacity to handle conversations remains fixed.

In contrast, AI costs typically decrease over time as the technology matures and adoption grows. This fundamental difference means that AI-augmented support becomes increasingly cost-effective compared to human-only models, creating a widening economic advantage for early adopters.

The real cost: Increasing budgets that don’t correlate to increased results.

3. Poor player experiences

Our 2025 Customer Service Transformation Report shows that 91% of support professionals say customers’ expectations of support have increased in the past year, with 85% saying they think AI customer service tools are responsible for this shift.

For gaming operators, failing to meet these elevated expectations carries significant costs:

• Negative reviews impacting new player acquisition.
• Increased churn when frustrated players abandon games.
• Reduced in-game purchases from dissatisfied players.
• Damaged brand reputation affecting future releases or new offerings.

Without AI-first support, it’s a struggle to provide the immediate, 24/7, personalized support players now expect. And not meeting these needs leaves you in a vulnerable position, as players may leave for competitors who can deliver better experiences.

The real cost: Low player satisfaction, damaged brand reputation, player churn, lost revenue.

4. Reduced competitiveness

In today’s hyper-competitive market, customer service has evolved from a cost center to a strategic differentiator. As leading gaming operators implement AI-first support, they’re creating a widening competitive advantage by:

• Resolving player issues in seconds rather than hours.
• Maintaining consistent, high-quality during high-volume periods.
• Decreasing their cost-to-serve over time.

This creates a compounding effect where players gravitate toward games offering superior support experiences. The operators who adapt early benefit from higher retention, stronger word-of-mouth recommendations, and ultimately, greater market share – while those who delay adoption increasingly fall behind.

The real cost: Player churn, damaged brand reputation, lost market share and revenue.

5. Agent burnout and attrition

Support agents in the gaming industry are tasked with mastering complex product knowledge, handling emotionally charged player issues, and managing repetitive queries during high-volume periods.

The overwhelming volume of repetitive queries, especially during peak periods, creates an unmanageable workload that leads to burnout and attrition. This burnout cycle creates substantial hidden costs that go beyond just salaries:

• Continuous recruitment and hiring expenses.
• Repeated onboarding and training investments.
• Productivity loss during transitions.
• Valuable knowledge loss when experienced agents leave.

As conversation volumes continue to rise, teams trying to manage it all on their own will quickly burn out, accelerating the attrition cycle and its associated costs.

The real cost: Agent burnout and attrition, recruitment costs to replace lost staff, onboarding and training costs to bring new teammates up to speed.

By quantifying these hidden costs, you can better understand the true economic impact of sticking with a traditional support model. Now, let’s explore how an AI-first approach can transform these challenges into opportunities for growth, efficiency, and elevated player experiences.

The new economics of AI-powered player support

AI agents are fundamentally reshaping the economics of player support by breaking the linear relationship between support volume, quality, and cost. For gaming operators facing unpredictable demand and high-stakes player interactions, understanding how to evaluate the true ROI of these solutions is critical to making the right investment. Here are four ways to understand its real value – and its impact on your bottom line:

Purchase price vs. long-term value

When evaluating AI agents, companies often focus too narrowly on the upfront price per resolution. However, the greatest ROI comes from the tool with the best resolution rate and performance quality – not necessarily the lowest sticker price.
Consider this example of a company handling 10,000 monthly support conversations:

As illustrated, investing in a powerful AI agent with superior resolution capabilities delivers greater cost savings even with a higher per-resolution price. For gaming operators facing massive volume spikes during tournaments or launches, these economics become even more favorable as the gap between AI+human and human-only approaches widens.

Total cost of ownership

Beyond just the per-resolution cost, gaming operators must consider the total cost of ownership (TCO) when evaluating AI solutions. Key factors include:

• Implementation: Does the solution require extensive setup and specialized expertise that might delay deployment during critical game launches, or can it be operational in minutes?
• Gaming-specific usability: How easily can support teams configure the AI to understand game-specific terminology, in-game mechanics, and player account systems? Solutions with intuitive interfaces minimize training costs and accelerate adoption.
• Integration capabilities: Gaming support involves multiple systems – game platforms, user accounts, payment processors, and tournament infrastructure. AI solutions that integrate seamlessly with these systems avoid costly custom development work.
• Scalability costs: Watch for caps on resolutions, tiered pricing structures, or other constraints that might impact total cost during peak gaming events when support volume can multiply overnight.

The poor ROI of DIY

Some companies consider building their own AI support solutions to maintain control and save on subscription costs. However, this approach typically results in poor ROI due to:

• Resource diversion: Building an in-house AI solution pulls specialized talent, including product managers, designers, developers, and AI engineers, away from core game development and player experience projects.
• Infrastructure expenses: Data storage, processing, and scaling infrastructure add up quickly when handling the variable load typical in gaming support.
• Ongoing maintenance: Homegrown solutions require continuous development resources to keep pace with rapidly evolving AI capabilities, security requirements, and player expectations.

Instead, you’ll achieve better results by selecting a purpose-built AI solution, like Fin, that works immediately out of the box, integrates with gaming platforms, and includes ongoing improvements – all without diverting resources from core business priorities.

The impact in action

Many gaming operators are already experiencing transformative economic benefits from implementing AI-first support.

Hi-Rez Studios, developer of popular titles like Smite and Paladins, quickly discovered that AI’s value extends beyond cost savings.

This example highlights how the ROI calculation extends far beyond direct cost savings and impacts some of the metrics that matter most in gaming, like improved player engagement, retention, and satisfaction.

Unlocking value-creating opportunities

By freeing support teams from repetitive queries, it’s possible to unlock new value-creating opportunities that directly impact player experience and revenue.

From player support to player success

With AI handling routine queries, support teams can expand their focus from reactive problem-solving to proactive player success initiatives. The fundamental question changes from “How can I solve this problem?” to “How can we help the player get the most value from our game, while also driving business results?”

For gaming operators, this shift enables high-impact initiatives with measurable business outcomes like:

• Proactive player onboarding: Guiding new players through their critical first hours of gameplay to create a strong first impression, improve day-one retention, and significantly increase conversion from trial to long-term engagement across different player segments.
• Churn reduction through early intervention: Support teams can identify at-risk players through early warning signs in their interactions, enabling targeted intervention before they abandon your game.
• Strategic revenue generation: Support touchpoints become opportunities to educate players about relevant features or items, driving in-game purchase conversion at precisely the right moments.
• Community building and retention: Facilitating connections between players strengthens long-term engagement, increases session times, and enhances player loyalty.
• VIP player experience optimization: Offering enhanced support for high-value or longtime players maximizes their lifetime value and creates advocates for your brand.
• Product improvement: Direct player feedback captured through support channels provides valuable insight into how players are interacting with the game, helping shape development priorities and feature improvements.

This transformation benefits both players and your business, while creating growth opportunities for support team members. The result is a powerful alignment between player satisfaction, team engagement, and measurable business outcomes that directly impact your bottom line.

New specialized roles

As support teams transition to more strategic work, new specialized roles emerge that directly contribute to business growth:

• AI conversation designers: Optimize automated interactions to reflect the game’s narrative voice and values in support contexts.
• Knowledge managers: Develop and maintain comprehensive, dynamic knowledge bases that evolve with updates, patches, and community feedback, creating a centralized repository of accurate, up-to-date information for both AI systems and human agents.
• AI customer support specialists: Monitor, evaluate, and continuously improve AI-driven support systems by identifying complex player issues that require human intervention and developing strategies to enhance automated support resolution rates.
• AI trainers: Build and refine AI workflows by analyzing player support interactions, helping AI systems understand gaming-specific language, technical issues, and the way your community communicates to provide more accurate and empathetic support.

These roles represent the future of player support – combining deep game knowledge with strategic business impact in ways that were impossible under traditional support models.

Capitalizing on efficiency gains

For gaming operators, AI can deliver measurable improvements in a number of key areas, such as:

1. Delighting players with fast response times, 24/7

Response time is particularly critical when a player is stuck in a game or encountering an issue during a tournament. Even a few minutes of delay can lead to frustration and churn.

AI agents solve for this by providing instant responses regardless of volume or time of day. If you’re catering to global player bases, this means that you can provide consistent, high-quality support across all time zones and languages, without needing specialized language staff or team members to work around the clock.

2. Empowering every agent to deliver next-level support

With an AI agent handling routine queries, human agents can focus on complex issues that require deeper game knowledge or troubleshooting skills. Tools like AI copilots can also further enhance this capability by providing agents with immediate access to relevant information. In fact, with Intercom’s AI Copilot, Lightspeed’s support agents are closing 31% more conversations daily, compared to agents not using it. This means that even queries that need to be passed to human agents can be handled more efficiently – and result in high player satisfaction.

3. Leveraging AI’s ability to improve

One of the most powerful aspects of AI is its ability to continuously learn and improve over time.

For gaming operators, this self-improving capability means:

• AI resolution rates typically increase over time.
• The system adapts automatically to new game releases and updates.
• Support quality improves as more player interactions are processed.
• The economic benefits compound as the AI becomes more efficient.

This continuous improvement creates a virtuous cycle: as the AI resolves more queries, human agents can focus on increasingly specialized and high-value work, further enhancing efficiency, as well as player – and team – satisfaction.

Redefining success metrics for gaming support

As gaming companies implement AI-first support, they need to rethink how they measure success. Traditional volume-based support metrics like tickets closed per agent and average handle time made sense when capacity was directly linked to headcount. But with AI handling routine queries, the average handle time for human agents naturally increases, because they’re focusing on complex, high-value issues that take longer to resolve. This isn’t a problem – it’s a sign that your AI solutions are working effectively and your team is freed up to tackle the difficult issues that have a much greater impact on the business.

Overall, we’re seeing a shift away from volume-based metrics like ticket numbers to more holistic indicators like customer experience scores, as well as AI-specific metrics like AI agent resolution rate and involvement rate.

Comprehensive satisfaction measurement

Traditional CSAT surveys capture feedback from only a very small percentage of players – and typically only gives you an idea about very positive or negative experiences.

AI enables a more comprehensive approach by analyzing sentiment across all player interactions, inferring scores from every conversation. This provides a more accurate understanding of overall player experience, which will help with:

• More accurate tracking of player sentiment trends.
• Earlier detection of emerging issues.
• Better understanding of different player segments.
• More reliable data for decision-making.

Evolving quality assurance

Traditional QA involves sampling a small percentage of support conversations – a time-consuming process that covers only a fraction of interactions.

AI transforms this by analyzing 100% of conversations, enabling you to:

• Monitor quality across all player interactions.
• Automatically detect potential issues or improvement opportunities.
• Consistently evaluate both AI and human responses.
• Implement data-driven quality improvements.

This allows support leaders to make strategic decisions based on complete information rather than limited samples.

Linking support to business outcomes

Crucially, AI-first support enables businesses to connect support interactions to key business metrics like retention and revenue. With comprehensive data across all support interactions, gaming companies can gain insights into how support quality affects:

• Player retention rates.
• In-game purchasing behavior.
• Game engagement and session time.
• Community participation and advocacy.

AI implementation roadmap

Successfully implementing AI-first player support requires a strategic approach. This roadmap provides you with a practical framework for getting started and scaling effectively.

Start with the right level of adoption

You don’t need to transform your entire support operation overnight. There are levels of adoption, and you can start slowly and work your way up. AI has compounding results, so every small improvement builds toward larger gains.

The AI adoption spectrum looks like this:

• Level 0: All human support, no AI.
• Level 1: AI handling simple tasks, like account lookup or basic troubleshooting.
• Level 2: Workflow-level automation with AI managing common player issues.
• Level 3: AI handling complex workflows with escalation to the human team only happening occasionally.
• Level 4: AI transforming the entire player support function.

For most gaming operators, it makes sense to start at level 1 or 2, focusing on specific use cases where AI can make an immediate impact. This might include:

• Answering frequently asked questions about gameplay.
• Providing basic account support with things like password resets, etc.
• Directing players to relevant resources.
• Collecting initial information before human handoff.

Starting with these focused applications allows teams to gain confidence and demonstrate AI’s value before expanding its use to other more complex areas.

Trial, test, and iterate

Success with AI-first support comes through continuous refinement. Test the technology in ways that work specifically for your company, learning from your team, and gradually rolling out improvements.

Implement a structured approach:

• Start with a limited scope, trialling AI with only specific query types or game titles.
• Gather feedback from both players and support team members.
• Analyze performance data to identify improvement opportunities.
• Make incremental adjustments to workflows and knowledge content.
• Expand to additional use cases as performance improves.

This measured approach minimizes risk, while setting the foundation for broader adoption.

Share the predicted cost benefits

To get buy-in from your exec team, focus on the cost benefits of AI-first support, as well as other indicators of the real-world impact it can have.

Develop projections that show both immediate and long-term benefits:

• Direct cost savings compared to scaling human-only support to meet demand.
• Efficiency improvements for existing team members.
• Quality enhancements that impact player satisfaction and retention.

Take a data-driven approach

Presenting clear, data-backed insights early and often is key to building momentum and confidence with any new technology. Regularly monitor key metrics like resolution rate, player satisfaction, and response time to demonstrate AI’s impact and share your successes with the rest of the company.

Bring your team along with you

While exec buy-in is essential, so is getting buy-in from your team. After all, they’re the ones who will be working with these new AI solutions on a daily basis.

Make your team feel like they’re really part of your AI adoption journey by:

• Involving agents in planning and implementation sessions.
• Addressing job security concerns by highlighting new opportunities.
• Showcasing how AI eliminates some of the manual, repetitive aspects of support work.
• Creating clear pathways for career development.
• Recognizing and rewarding contributions to AI improvement.

The most successful implementations position AI as a tool that enhances the support team’s capabilities, because after all, the best support comes from humans and AI working seamlessly together.

The competitive advantage of AI-first player support

The economics of customer service have been completely transformed by AI, making it possible to provide exceptional player experiences that were previously impossible at scale. This creates both opportunity and urgency for game operators: those that adopt AI-first customer service today will be best positioned to win tomorrow. Those that don’t will fall behind.

Scale your support without scaling your team

Fin is a new generation of AI agent that resolves up to 86% of your support volume with human-quality, personalized, conversational answers. By automating your frontline support with Fin, you’ll free up thousands of hours that your existing team can now use to focus on the most complex issues or transition into other high-value roles like player success.

Built For You Spring ‘25: The future of customer service is calling

Our vision is for Fin to answer any question, on any channel, across any platform. With our latest Built For You announcements, that vision is now a reality.

We believe that AI is on the path to resolving the majority of customer questions, creating a dramatically improved support experience. Here’s what’s new:

• Any question: With new breakthroughs like Fin Vision, Fin Guidance, Fin Tasks, and AI Inbox Translation, Fin can now answer any question no matter the language, format, or complexity it’s faced with.
• Any channel: Fin Voice brings Fin’s intelligence to phone support, enabling natural conversations and expanding Fin’s capabilities beyond text.
• Any platform: Fin now integrates seamlessly with Zendesk, Salesforce, and other major helpdesks. For custom built experiences, Fin over API lets you use AI-powered support exactly where you need it across your product.

Want to see these features in action? Watch the full broadcast here.

Answer any question

Truly resolving a customer’s question requires understanding their needs completely – no matter how they express themselves or the complexity of their issue.

Fin Vision: Fin can read and understand images

Customer conversations often take far longer than they should, with both sides struggling to troubleshoot or describe an issue that a simple screenshot or photo can unblock. With Fin Vision, Fin can analyze key details like text, reference numbers, or product information to diagnose the problem instantly – cutting down on lengthy explanations and reducing resolution times.

How to access: Fin Vision is available to all Intercom customers. If you’re using Fin, it already works for you – no setup required.

Fin Guidance: Train Fin to behave like your best agents

Every business has its own unique policies and a distinct brand voice. With Fin Guidance, you can train Fin in minutes to follow your specific guidelines. Simply tell Fin what to do in plain language – whether that’s how to address customers or how you’d like to handle escalations. With the one-click “Improve AI” button, you can refine Fin’s responses instantly.

How to access: Fin Guidance is available to all Intercom customers.

Fin Tasks: Teach Fin how to handle specific tasks

With Fin Tasks, you can lighten your team’s workload by automating processes like refunds, ID verification, and appointment rescheduling. Simply describe the task in natural language, and Fin builds the workflow for you, ensuring every step follows your business rules.

How to access: Fin Tasks is currently in a closed beta. If you’re interested in getting access, speak to your Intercom relationship or customer success manager.

AI Inbox Translation: Real-time translation, built into the inbox

AI Inbox Translation allows agents to speak with customers in any language without switching tools. Messages are instantly translated into the agent’s preferred language, and replies appear in the customer’s language – ensuring smooth, effective communication.

How to access: AI Inbox Translation is in open beta and available for all Intercom customers.

Available on every channel

Seamless communication means customers can reach you however they prefer – whether by phone, chat, or email.

Fin Voice: Human-quality AI support, now on phone

Long wait times and frustrating phone menus are a thing of the past. Fin Voice enables natural, real-time conversations, adapting to multiple languages, handling interruptions smoothly, and keeping interactions efficient and engaging.

How to access: Fin Voice is in early testing with a small set of customers today. Join the beta waitlist. We’re working to expand availability soon.

On every platform

Great customer experiences happen when businesses can improve their support without having to switch platforms or disrupt existing workflows.

Fin for Platforms: Use Fin on your current helpdesk – no migration needed

Fin for Platforms makes Fin available to any business on any customer service platform – starting with Zendesk and Salesforce – with no migration required. Fin takes less than an hour to set up. It learns from your existing knowledge base, follows your automation rules, and integrates directly into tickets, cases, live chat, and email workflows.

How to access: Fin for Platforms is available now. Pricing starts at $49 for 50 resolutions, plus $0.99 per additional resolution. You can also contact our sales team for a custom plan.

Fin over API: Bring Fin into any platform or product

Fin is no longer limited to the standard customer service channels. With Fin over API, you can integrate AI-powered support into just about any platform or part of your product – whether it’s a custom search experience, a community forum, or an internal help system.

How to access: Fin over API is coming soon. Get in touch with your Intercom relationship or customer success manager to learn more about our upcoming release timeline.

Experience the future of customer service first-hand

AI is transforming customer support, and businesses using Fin are already seeing dramatic improvements in efficiency, resolution rates, and customer satisfaction. And with each update, Fin is getting even better.

Want to see these features in action? Watch the full broadcast here.

The future of customer service is here. Let’s build it – together.

Response Time: Vol. 42

You satisfy your customers, but can you satisfy our curiosity?

With Harry Spence, Director of Customer Support at ScreenCloud.

Please tell us a little bit about your company and what you do there.
I’m the Director of Customer Support at ScreenCloud, a leading digital signage provider with over 10,000 customers worldwide.

What word or phrase in customer service jargon should be retired?
“That’s not our process.”

Which celebrity would be really great at your job, and why?
Henry Cavill because he’s down to earth and smart.

What’s the most valuable thing that working in customer service has taught you?
Working in support has given me a wider appreciation for people and their struggles, and shown me how we need to take as much stress as possible out of their lives through the CX we offer.

Describe the essence of great customer service using only three words.
Empathetic, proactive, preemptive.

Which movie robot would you choose as your AI sidekick, and why?
Optimus Prime because he’s a great leader (and intimidating.)

What can you do that a bot will never be able to replicate?
Provide real life human experience and emotions.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever said/done to a customer?
I sent an email saying “incontinence” instead of “inconvenience.”

Do you identify more with the title “customer support,” “customer service,” “customer success,” or “customer experience,” and why?
“Customer support” or “customer experience” depending on what role you’re in. Both give you the ability to be involved and make a difference to the whole customer journey, instead of just reacting to issues.

What’s the one piece of advice you would give to your peers in the customer service industry?
Design your processes, principles, and strategy based on what is best for your customers, not what’s easier for you or internal staff. Don’t implement something just for the sake of it. Do your research and due diligence to help you make the right decisions.

What’s your greatest productivity hack?
Delegation.

What book are you reading at the moment?
Game of Thrones.

If customer service was an Olympic sport, what would be the main event?
The ultimate competition would be seeing who customers would shop with just for the customer service, regardless of price or other factors.

What’s the best thing a customer has ever said to you?
“You should be promoted.”

What gif best describes your mental state right now?

Where do you get your support leadership news?
LinkedIn.

What do you wish people knew about working in customer service?
It’s rewarding if you have the right mentality. You get out what you put in.

If you wrote a book about your experiences in customer service, what would the title be?
“There’s Always Light at the End of the Tunnel.”

What’s the strangest thing a customer has asked you?
“How did you get that scar on your face?”

What’s your most used emoji in customer chats?
😄

Conversation closed… for now 😏

If you’re interested in being featured in our Response Time series, you can share your insights on customer service – and what your greatest productivity hack is – with us here.

Evolving Intercom’s database infrastructure: Lessons and progress

A few months ago, we launched an overhaul of Intercom’s database architecture with Vitess and PlanetScale. Already, we’re seeing transformative results: zero-downtime maintenance, 90%+ performance improvement for our most demanding queries, and a more resilient infrastructure that scales in days, not months.

In our previous post, we shared how we’re overhauling Intercom’s database architecture to scale better, reduce complexity, and improve reliability. We are moving away from Amazon Aurora and our custom sharding solution, and adopting Vitess, managed by PlanetScale. We outlined why we made this shift, the challenges we faced in our legacy setup, and the benefits we expected.

Since then, we’ve migrated critical databases, optimized query performance, and tackled some of our toughest infrastructure bottlenecks. Most significantly, we’ve adopted PlanetScale Metal, a new storage architecture that has improved performance, reduced costs, and simplified our operations.

This post is a status update on where we are today – what’s working, what we’ve learned, and what’s next.

Recap: Why Vitess and PlanetScale?

Our decision to adopt Vitess and PlanetScale was driven by five key goals:

1. Improving availability
2. Eliminating downtime during maintenance.
3. Reducing engineering complexity
4. Streamlining table migrations.
5. Achieving straightforward scaling.

To achieve this, we needed a database that could scale seamlessly while keeping things operationally simple. Vitess solves this by bringing built-in sharding, connection pooling, and zero-downtime migrations and upgrades, all while remaining MySQL-compatible.

Running Vitess ourselves would have required a massive investment in building operational expertise. PlanetScale, with its managed platform and deep Vitess expertise, offered an exceptional developer experience and handled the heavy lifting of infrastructure management.

Progress so far

Over the past few months, we’ve successfully migrated several of our most critical databases, including those powering Intercom’s AI infrastructure, Contacts, and our Inbox – one of the most latency sensitive parts of our system.

Each migration has validated our decision and reinforced the benefits of the new architecture. These migrations apply to our US hosted customers region. Our EU and AU hosted regions will follow soon, but since they are not currently affected by database scaling performance issues, we are prioritizing the US migration first.

Key successes and optimizations

Despite some initial challenges outlined in our original post, we’ve seen numerous successes and optimizations:

Sharding in days, not months

Previously, sharding even a single table took months and required careful coordination, manual data migrations, and application-layer changes. With PlanetScale, we’ve sharded multiple databases in a matter of days, freeing up resources and dramatically improving query performance.

Massive query speedups with materialized views

Some of our most expensive queries on Aurora were rewritten using Vitess materialized views, leading to 90%+ performance improvements. These improvements especially benefit our largest customers who generate the most data.

Connection management is no longer a headache

Vitess’s VTGate component has simplified connection management, eliminating the 16,000 connection limit per MySQL host imposed by Aurora and removing the need for ProxySQL, our connection management middle layer.

This has reduced complexity and potential points of failure. For example, the database that powers the Inbox would routinely require 135,000 active connections – we can now do this without additional infrastructure.

Zero-downtime maintenance

Vitess’s failover mechanisms have enabled us to perform maintenance without any customer downtime. Almost all scheduled maintenance operations in Intercom in the past have been for critical database maintenance on Aurora, so being able to make these changes without disrupting our customers is a huge win.

We’ve been upgrading databases every couple of weeks, and no one has even noticed. That’s exactly how it should be.

PlanetScale Metal: A game changer

Early in our migration when we were migrating a database critical to the Inbox, we ran into a major performance bottleneck: disk I/O saturation on database replicas. This led to incidents in June and July 2024 where we had degraded or slow performance of the Inbox.

We originally used EBS-backed storage (GP3 volumes) for our PlanetScale databases. But at peak load, replicas maxed out their IOPS allocation, causing increased CPU wait times and degraded performance. Scaling out was an option, but provisioning new replicas and catching them up with replication took hours. During this time, core operations like Inbox performance or Load Balanced Assignment suffered.

We learned the hard way: scaling under pressure is slow, expensive, and disruptive. Our immediate fix was to overscale and upgrade to high-IOPS EBS io2 volumes.

“We needed a better way. That’s where PlanetScale Metal changed the game”

This experience made it clear that our storage layer was an expensive bottleneck. We needed higher throughput and lower latency, but without the operational headaches of constantly tuning IOPS provisioning.

We needed a better way. That’s where PlanetScale Metal changed the game. PlanetScale Metal uses locally attached NVMe drives and removes the need for the slower network-attached storage (EBS).

This has translated into immediate and substantial benefits for Intercom.

Dramatic performance improvements

We saw immediate and significant improvements in tail latency. This performance boost has benefited all customers, with queries running faster and more consistently, even during peak load.

This heat map shows the moment Metal went live, showing the speed of loading conversations in the Intercom inbox – Metal significantly reduced tail latency.

Operational stability

Simply put, every database we’ve migrated to PlanetScale Metal has run smoothly. We’ve had no availability issues caused by the migrated databases.

Significant cost reduction

By switching to Metal, we’ve achieved a 60%+ reduction in cost compared to our previous EBS io2 volumes. Metal provides even greater IO capacity and improved latency at a fraction of the cost.

Here we can see the moment Metal went live reflected in the hourly cost of the database.

Smooth database migration

The database that powers Contacts is one of our highest throughput databases. So much so that when we had to upgrade it from Aurora 1 to Aurora 2 in 2022, it took six months of engineering effort for that single database. With PlanetScale Metal supplying the throughput, and the lessons already learned, we were able to test and then migrate it safely with no impact to production in a couple of weeks.

Ensuring durability on PlanetScale Metal

PlanetScale Metal databases offer exceptional durability through semi-synchronous, row-based MySQL replication to a minimum of three replicas spread across three availability zones, ensuring every write is securely persisted before acknowledgment.

All databases that have been migrated to PlanetScale now run on Metal. All databases we’re actively moving across will only ever use Metal.

The road ahead

While we’ve made huge strides, the biggest challenge is still ahead: migrating our two largest legacy databases, which powers nearly every part of Intercom.

These databases still run on our custom-sharded Aurora setup where we’ve had an unacceptable increase in availability issues in recent months. A significant driver of that has been us stretching the limits of what Aurora is capable of delivering for us. This migration to PlanetScale will move hundreds of terabytes of customer data.

Based on everything we’ve learned, and extensive testing already performed, we’re confident this transition will be smooth and result in a step-change in performance and stability.

We’ll share more updates as we move forward.

Response Time: Vol. 41

You satisfy your customers, but can you satisfy our curiosity?

With Ehsan Rishat, Head of Customer Success at REsimpli.

Please tell us a little bit about your company and what you do there.
At REsimpli, we’re all about making life easier for real estate investors. We provide the tools they need to scale efficiently, close more deals, and focus on what really matters. As the Head of Customer Success, I get to connect our product’s potential with our customers’ goals.

What word or phrase in customer service jargon should be retired?
“Let me reach out to the backend.” It makes it sound like there’s a huge divide between the customer service team and the technical team – like we’re passing the buck.

Which celebrity would be really great at your job, and why?
Keanu Reeves, hands down. He’s cool under pressure, incredibly humble, and always puts others at ease. Plus, his calm and collected vibe would be perfect for handling tricky customer situations with grace.

What’s the most valuable thing that working in customer service has taught you?
It’s taught me that empathy and patience can work wonders. Even the toughest situations can turn into trust-building moments if you approach them with care and understanding. It’s not just about fixing problems – it’s about showing customers they matter.

Describe the essence of great customer service using only three words.
Listen, solve, delight.

Which movie robot would you choose as your AI sidekick, and why?
Baymax from Big Hero 6. He’s smart, resourceful, and deeply empathetic – everything you want in a sidekick. Plus, who wouldn’t want a robot that can solve problems and give big warm hugs when needed?

What can you do that a bot will never be able to replicate?
Connecting with people on a personal, emotional level. Bots can provide answers, but they can’t celebrate a customer’s success or genuinely empathize with their frustrations. Those human moments are where the magic happens.

Do you identify more with the title “customer support,” “customer service,” “customer success,” or “customer experience,” and why?
I identify most with “customer success” because it’s all about being proactive. It’s not just about solving problems but about helping customers achieve their goals and get the most out of our tools. It’s a mindset shift from reactive to impactful.

What’s the one piece of advice you would give to your peers in the customer service industry?
Track your team’s performance and celebrate their wins. Recognizing achievements – big or small – keeps your team motivated and engaged, and that positivity translates directly into better customer experiences. A happy team that feels valued will always go the extra mile for your customers!

What’s your greatest productivity hack?
Time blocking for specific tasks is my secret weapon. By dedicating focused time slots for emails, project planning, and team check-ins, I can get more done and stay sharp throughout the day.

What book are you reading at the moment?
The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch. It’s a fantastic deep dive into how 20% of efforts often drive 80% of results. It’s changed how I prioritize everything – focusing on what truly makes an impact instead of getting stuck in busy work.

What’s the best thing a customer has ever said to you?
One of our customer support agents, Jay, received this feedback recently, and it really stuck with me: “Jay was great – super helpful and ready to bring the solutions I was looking for. [They] went above and beyond to make sure everything was resolved. The support REsimpli has is unmatched!” Hearing something like this reminds us why we love what we do – creating experiences that truly make a difference.

What gif best describes your mental state right now?

Where do you get your support leadership news?
I’m a big fan of CSM Practice newsletters by Irit Eizips. Her insights into customer success strategies and leadership are incredibly practical and always relevant. They’ve helped me refine how we deliver value and stay ahead of industry trends.

What do you wish people knew about working in customer service?
It’s one of the most creative and rewarding roles out there. You’re not just answering questions – you’re solving puzzles, building relationships, and shaping how customers see your company. It’s a dynamic mix of strategy, empathy, and execution.

If you wrote a book about your experiences in customer service, what would the title be?
“Guiding with Value: How Customer Support Drives Smart Decisions.” The book would focus on how support isn’t just about fixing issues – it’s about guiding customers toward smarter choices, building trust, and ensuring their success every step of the way.

What’s the strangest thing a customer has asked you?
Someone once dropped into our live chat and casually asked, “What’s your churn percentage?” They might’ve been curious, a competitor, or just trying to keep me on my toes!

What’s your most used emoji in customer chats?
🙌 because it’s perfect for celebrating wins, big or small. Whether it’s a customer closing a deal or resolving a tricky issue, it’s my go-to for spreading positivity!

Conversation closed… for now 😏

If you’re interested in being featured in our Response Time series, you can share your insights on customer service – and what your greatest productivity hack is – with us here.

Transform gaming support: Give every player VIP-level service with Fin

In the world of online gaming, keeping players engaged is crucial. To keep the game going – and maximize revenue opportunities – operators need to provide players with instant, personalized, 24/7 support on any channel, and in a way that feels completely seamless.

Traditional support systems have struggled to meet such high-pressure demands at scale, which causes frustration for players and potential drop-off as they move on to find better experiences elsewhere. But the limitations game operators face are increasingly becoming a thing of the past as LLM-powered AI agents like Intercom’s Fin transform support operations and enable VIP-level service for every player at scale.

“With Fin AI Agent, we’re streamlining players’ support experience”

This is something the team at Hi-Rez Studios, the video game developer and publisher behind popular titles like Smite, Paladins, and Rogue Company, has experienced since implementing Fin. “We’re always looking to make player experience as seamless as possible,” shares Ashley Schultz, Customer Support Team Lead at Hi-Rez Studios. “With Fin AI Agent, we’re streamlining their support experience. Players can get answers instantly, reducing the need for them to reach out to the human support team.”

Thousands of global companies use Fin to deliver industry-leading customer service. Here, we explore the key areas that make Fin the standout AI agent for gaming operators in both regulated and emerging markets.

Provide VIP support for every player, all the time

Nothing makes a player more frustrated than having to wait for a response – especially in a high-stakes environment where timing is everything. Making it as easy as possible to get help when it’s needed goes a long way towards building trust and securing player loyalty.

Whether you’re dealing with someone who needs immediate in-game support, or someone who’s setting up their account for the first time, Fin makes it easy to provide everyone with VIP-level attention. By personalizing interactions using real-time player data and adapting responses across all your channels, Fin helps maintain consistent, high-quality support that builds trust and keeps players engaged.

Here are just a few ways Fin helps provide the best experience:

• Instant localized support: Deliver real-time responses in 45 languages, ensuring every player receives support in their preferred language with region-specific knowledge of gaming regulations and policies.
• Omnichannel brand consistency: Maintain your brand voice and support quality whether players reach out through live chat, email, social media, or in-app messaging, creating a seamless experience across all touchpoints.
• Data-driven personalization: Tailor support using player history, preferences, and account status to provide relevant assistance, from deposit handling to bonus eligibility and gameplay questions.
• Around-the-clock availability: Ensure players receive immediate assistance at any hour, across all time zones, maintaining response quality during peak gaming periods, tournaments, and major sporting events.

Engage players and drive revenue

In such a competitive market with endless options and decreasing player loyalty, passive support is not enough anymore – gaming operators need to proactively engage players at every step of their journey, anticipate their needs, and create personalized experiences that keep them coming back.

“This proactive approach doesn’t just improve the player experience – it drives measurable business results too”

Fin can help deliver proactive, personalized support that actively keeps new and established players invested through:

• Smart onboarding journeys: Guide new players with interactive walkthroughs, personalized setup tasks, and in-app highlights that help them get started with confidence.
• Proactive engagement: Reach out to players at key moments with relevant promotions, game suggestions, and recommendations tailored to their preferences and history.
• Cross-channel communication: Maintain consistent messaging across web, email, and in-app channels, ensuring players never miss important updates or opportunities.
• Targeted promotional support: Help players understand and activate relevant bonuses, special offers, and promotions that match their interests.

This proactive approach doesn’t just improve the player experience – it can drive measurable business results too. As Tony Jones, Lead Producer, Player and Customer Experience Strategist at Hi-Rez Studios notes: “We’ve been experimenting with feeding Fin AI Agent specific product data – not just for support, but to help players engage more with our games. Now, Fin can answer gameplay questions like, ‘What god should I pick for this type of battle?’ It also pulls in the latest updates from our site and app, saving time for our community managers.”

Stay compliant and protect your reputation

In the gaming industry, maintaining compliance isn’t just about following rules – it’s about protecting players and your brand’s reputation.

Traditional support systems often struggle to balance rapid response times with proper handling of sensitive situations. When a player shows signs of distress or risky behavior, every moment of delay or misstep in escalating the problem can have serious consequences, potentially affecting both the player themselves and your operating license.

Fin helps you maintain this crucial balance by adapting to evolving regulations and policies, and treating delicate conversations with care. It also automatically implements compliance requirements by region, so you can be confident that you’re consistently applying responsible policies across all of your support channels.

Here’s how Fin helps protect your players and reputation:

• Intelligent escalation protocols: Automatically identify and route sensitive conversations to your human team, ensuring players who need it receive appropriate care and attention immediately.
• Region-specific compliance: Apply the right regulations and policies based on player location, maintaining compliance across different jurisdictions and regulatory frameworks.
• Documented player interactions: Maintain detailed records of all player communications and escalation procedures, helping you demonstrate compliance during audits.
• Adaptive policy implementation: Stay current with evolving regulations through regular updates to response protocols and compliance requirements, ensuring your support always meets the latest standards.

Seamlessly manage multiple brands and regions

For gaming operators, managing support across multiple brands and jurisdictions can be a logistical nightmare, making it hard to maintain consistent quality. Fin helps solve this challenge by providing intelligent support across your portfolio, adapting its responses and approach to match each brand’s specific needs.

Here’s how Fin helps with multi-brand management:

• Brand-specific responses: Adapt tone and responses to match each brand’s unique voice and requirements.
• Intelligent routing: Automatically identify and escalate conversations to the right team based on brand context.
• Consistent quality: Maintain high-quality support standards across all your brands and markets.

Scale effortlessly during peak periods

In gaming, support volumes can spike dramatically during tournaments, game launches, or special events. When this happens, gaming operators using traditional support systems have a difficult choice to make: spend on additional headcount to handle the surges, or risk player satisfaction and retention with long wait times.

“Fin is helping us deliver faster responses while keeping our team focused on high-value interactions”

Fin prevents this dilemma by scaling instantly to meet demand. It handles volume spikes across all channels while maintaining consistent quality and compliance standards – no matter how busy things get.

This was a benefit the team at Hi-Rez Studios experienced instantly after turning Fin on. “With Fin AI Agent handling between 3,000 to 5,000 resolutions per month, we’ve been able to scale efficiently without adding extra agents,” says Ashley Schultz from Hi-Rez Studios. “It’s helping us deliver faster responses while keeping our team focused on high-value interactions.”

Here’s how Fin helps you scale effectively:

• Peak period management: Handle support surges during tournaments, game launches, and promotional events without adding team members or compromising service quality.
• Consistent performance: Maintain rapid response times and accuracy even during the highest-volume periods.
• Resource optimization: Free up human agents to focus on higher-value issues that require deeper investigation while Fin handles the bulk of support queries.
• Smart queue management: Automatically prioritize and route conversations based on urgency.

Mebit, the company that provides critical services like customer support, VIP hosting, know your customer (KYC), and compliance to the largest online casino, Stake.com, has enjoyed a similar experience to Hi-Rez Studios since they started using Intercom. As Milan Jovancevic, Director of Operations at Mebit for Stake.com, shares, “Our performance has jumped significantly since we started using Intercom. Previously, each of our agents could handle a couple of emails at a time. Now, they can handle 10 conversations simultaneously. That’s a huge jump and means we can help many more customers – faster.”

Transform your player support with Fin

Exceptional player support is no longer a “nice-to-have” – it’s essential for gaming operators to survive and thrive. Fin helps you deliver the kind of fast, personalized, and reliable support that turns players into loyal fans while protecting your brand and optimizing your operations.

Whether you’re looking to scale your support during peak periods, ensure compliance across multiple jurisdictions, or provide every player with VIP-level service, Fin has you covered. Join the thousands of companies already using Fin to transform their support and drive business growth.

Ready to level up? Get in touch with our Sales team to learn how Fin can help you deliver exceptional service at scale.

Trust issues: How to help customers believe your AI agent

While scanning through conversations in our team inboxes recently, I realized that there are times where customers don’t believe the responses from our AI agent Fin, even when Fin is correct.

These folks all asked to speak to a human team member, just to have the team member reiterate what Fin said.

In pretty much all of these cases, this human-to-human exchange was enough to resolve the query, which got me thinking: what is it about Fin that the customer doesn’t trust? And how can we bridge this gap?

 This post originally featured in our CS newsletter, The Ticket.

 

👉 Subscribe and join the 27K+ customer service professionals who receive industry news, tips, and career guidance every two weeks in their inbox.

Building trust in something new is never an easy thing to do. Getting customers to warm up to an AI agent is particularly challenging because customers are still influenced by years of frustrating experiences with chatbots that (let’s be honest) have been pretty rubbish.

Because of this, support teams today face two key challenges:

• Dissolving that historic distrust and changing how customers think and feel about interacting with AI.
• Learning a new way of providing support using an AI agent and configuring the technology in a way that makes customers confident enough to trust the AI agent off the bat.

While this is tricky, it’s a challenge that excites me because it shows how AI is pushing us to learn and think in entirely new ways. I’m still very much figuring this out alongside all of you, but here are some approaches that are working for my team.

Simplify, simplify, simplify

Support processes are by and large pretty robust. We’ve been conditioned to think that the more information we provide the better, but actually, I’d say this approach has discouraged people from reading what’s in front of them because we’ve hit them with so many things.

“If the interaction with your AI agent is too complicated, of course the customer is going to tune out and automatically assume it can’t help them”

Think about when you call phone support you’re familiar with. You don’t want to hear all the automated messages at the start, you just want to press the button and get through to whatever you need.

If the interaction with your AI agent is too complicated, of course the customer is going to tune out and automatically assume it can’t help them. We need to stop having so much stuff that customers have to read and do, and make it easy to get them their answer.

The good news is that the technology is evolving to make the full interaction between customers and AI agents more conversational and less clunky, while still collecting all the information your support team needs if the query ends up being routed to them.

Here’s some insight into how we’re working towards this with Fin Guidance and Workflows.

A snapshot look at how Fin Guidance can help facilitate more seamless interactions between customers and AI agents.

Fine-tune how your AI agent communicates

On the topic of information overload, it might be the case that your AI agent is providing your customer with the right answer to their question, but it’s getting buried in a verbose or poorly structured response.

There’s a real nuance here. You want to get to a point where your customer is getting the right amount of information to feel like their query is being resolved by the AI agent without needing a human to dig deeper, but you also don’t want to overwhelm them.

How you structure content in your knowledge base has a direct impact on the quality of your AI agent’s answers, so honing in on this is important. How can you make your language sharper? How can you tweak your wording?

My best advice here would be to choose an AI agent that allows you determine if it answers in a concise or robust fashion to suit your unique business needs.

With Fin, you can customize how comprehensive its answers are.

Get your human team to validate your AI agent

The situation I described earlier, where customers have requested to speak to a human only to have the human give the same response as the AI agent, is absolutely fine. Reassure your team that building trust is a gradual process and something we have to be patient with.

Emphasize to your team that they are the people that your customers already trust, and hearing them confirm what the AI agent has responded with is what will build their trust in new AI-powered support over time.

“Keep your focus on making it as easy as possible for your customers to get the help they need”

Here’s a tip: Have your team be mindful of the exact wording they use to confirm your AI agent’s solutions and get a satisfied response from the customer. We’ve found that being specific works better than generic validation. Instead of just responding with something like, “Fin was correct,” instead try something like, “The workflow steps Fin outlined are exactly what I guide customers through when setting up their first automation – what Fin suggested will get you up and running.”

At the end of the day, there’s no shortcut to earning trust – whether that’s trust in your team, your product, or your AI agent. Keep your focus on making it as easy as possible for your customers to get the help they need.

Proving that this is your priority, whether customers are engaging with your AI agent or human team, is what will build genuine trust over time.

Response Time: Vol. 40

You satisfy your customers, but can you satisfy our curiosity?

With Kostas Sveronis, Technical Support Manager at Yodeck.

Please tell us a little bit about your company and what you do there.
Yodeck is a digital signage company that helps you display any content you want on a TV screen. You can manage the content and the screens remotely with a few simple clicks. As the Technical Support Manager, I ensure that all of our clients – paid or free – are treated in the best way possible.

Which celebrity would be really great at your job, and why?
Tom Hanks because he inspires calmness and trust. This is what a customer needs when they are in a challenging position.

What’s the most valuable thing that working in customer service has taught you?
Empathy and patience! Those two values are the alpha and omega when you work in this industry.

Describe the essence of great customer service using only three words.
Empathy, patience, and awareness.

Which movie robot would you choose as your AI sidekick?
Sonny from i, Robot.

Do you identify more with the title “customer support,” “customer service,” “customer success,” or “customer experience,” and why?
I identify most with “customer experience” because it focuses on the customer’s entire journey with our company. It’s about creating positive, seamless experiences that build trust and satisfaction at every step.

What’s the one piece of advice you would give to your peers in the customer service industry?
Listen to your customers, and do what’s possible to support and solve their problems in a timely manner.

What’s the worst customer service you’ve ever experienced?
One of the worst things is being unable to reach a company’s support. I had an issue with one of my devices, and the warranty ended in 15 days. I tried to reach their support for 15 days and was still waiting for a response. After one month, they came back to me saying that the warranty had expired and that they could not do much about it. After a lot of back-and-forth emails, they made an exception and replaced my device.

If customer service was an Olympic sport, what would be the main event?
A marathon for sure! The customers never end, and you need to keep performing day after day.

What’s the best thing a customer has ever said to you?
“Your dedication and professionalism make a significant difference in our daily operations, and it’s truly appreciated. Thank you for your outstanding support and for always going above and beyond to ensure everything runs smoothly.”

What gif best describes your mental state right now?

Where do you get your support leadership news?
Support Driven and LinkedIn.

What’s the strangest thing a customer has asked you?
Someone asked if we could schedule a second call to talk more about our personal lives. 🤷 As a support team, we are also responsible for providing wellness support for our customers.

What’s your most used emoji in customer chats?
😅

Conversation closed… for now 😏

If you’re interested in being featured in our Response Time series, you can share your insights on customer service – and what your greatest productivity hack is – with us here.