No more compromises: Announcing 20+ new features to supercharge your customer support

Today we’re announcing Intercom’s biggest ever launch, with more than 20 new features built to ensure you can provide prompt, personal support without sacrificing power or efficiency.

These new features come in the midst of an epic revolution in the way business is being conducted. Multiple industries are suddenly forced to move operations online, and support teams are at the forefront of this transformation – battling every day to deliver excellent, fast customer service, while facing an unprecedented volume of enquiries and issues. As a result, having the right customer support tool is more critical than ever – it can be the difference between winning or losing for many businesses.

Up until now, companies have had to choose between two broad schools of support tools:

• Traditional email-based ticketing systems that prioritize efficiency for the business over the quality of the customer experience.
• Fast and personal messenger-based conversational support tools that offer a high-quality, delightful customer experience, but which can lack the underlying flexibility to accommodate the complexities of every type of business.

That painful choice ends today as we unveil an array of new features that range from advanced ticketing workflows to new Inbox views, from beefed-up Reporting dashboards to sophisticated asynchronous support. These are deep, powerful features that significantly uplevel the Intercom experience across the Inbox, Messenger, Reporting, and more.

Collectively these features transform Intercom’s ability to handle the most intricate customer issues. This means that complex, multi-day support conversations are no longer a problem in Intercom: you can track ownership and status of a conversation, build custom agent workflows to improve your team’s efficiency, and analyze detailed reports that shed light on every aspect of your team’s performance.

This launch represents big advances in three broad areas:

1. Advanced ticketing workflows for handling complex queries
2. Unrivalled flexibility around when you provide support – whether that’s real-time or over several days
3. Sophisticated reporting for valuable insights

And everything we’re launching today has been built to work holistically together to unlock even more value. Let’s dive in and explore each of these areas.

1. Handling complex queries

When it comes to quickly handling simple queries we know Intercom beats competitors hands down, with our customers enjoying higher CSAT scores after adopting Intercom. But we know that conversations can often be really complex – and that you need sophisticated ways to manage those conversations behind the scenes, seamlessly dealing with them as a team.

“We’ve made it immeasurably better than the experience offered by traditional email-based ticketing systems”

So without compromising our exceptionally personal, conversational support experiences for your end users, we’ve now added powerful new ticketing workflows on the teammate side to help you manage your conversations in a more rigorous way.

Advanced ticketing workflows to drive efficiency

• Exponentially increase the variety of ways you can categorize, track, and interact with conversations with new conversation data attributes. These new features, which include custom attributes, conversation titles and more prominent conversation IDs, allow you to structure your conversation data more rigorously, plus quickly find conversations and share context, greatly improving the ease of collaboration between teammates as they resolve conversations.

• Automate 4x as many tasks than before with our new rules and assignment features, enabling you to trigger rules on a wider set of events and conditions, complete multiple actions and use improved assignment logic in order to dynamically triage conversations and drive up resolution rates.

• Automatically collect the exact information you need using new Bots in the Messenger to help you prioritize a conversation and route it to the right team. A brand new support triage Task Bot will quickly start collecting useful information, while enhancements to Custom Bots allow for sophisticated targeting.

More powerful Inbox

• Organize your Inbox with powerful new views to give you the real-time oversight you need – instead of jumping through multiple inboxes you can now set up views using any criteria that’s important to you to quickly see where to focus.

• Spot when customers start up multiple conversations with your team with the new duplicate detection Task Bot – ensuring that your teammates aren’t all working on the same issue, improving overall team performance.

Ticketing meets the Messenger

So does this mean we’ve introduced ticketing? Yes we have, and we’ve made it immeasurably better than the experience offered by traditional email-based ticketing systems.

We have long spoken about our belief that customer support has to be personal and that customers should never feel like they’re just a number in a queue, one “ticket” in a sea of many.

“For the first time, you can truly reap the benefits of both approaches – the convenience of conversational support for your customer and the flexibility of ticketing for your teammates”

But we also believe that behind the scenes, some ticketing workflows are useful, critical even – and that without them it’s hard to handle complex queries. That’s why we’re excited to launch these powerful and flexible workflows today, without compromising all the benefits of the amazing end user experience that you get with our industry-leading Business Messenger.

For the first time, you can truly reap the benefits of both approaches – the convenience of conversational support for your customer and the flexibility of ticketing for your teammates. Not only is there no longer any need to compromise, now you can use a solution that is better than either.

2. Support in real-time, or any time

It’s no secret – as soon as you put a Messenger live on your product, your customers often have high expectations around how quickly you’ll respond to them. Naturally, you might be nervous about how to meet those expectations, or wondering how to keep them in check.

“With the significant updates we’ve made to our Messenger, you now have the tools and flexibility you need to provide real-time support or respond later, if need be”

Having live conversations with customers is important, but not always possible or efficient. With the significant updates we’ve made to our Messenger, you now have the tools and flexibility you need to provide real-time support or respond later, if need be.

Set even clearer expectations

• Set clear expectations with your customers from the outset with more prominent reply times in the Messenger and a clearer launcher icon that signals self-serve support.

• You can control who can start a conversation with your team or show different reply times based on the urgency of a customer’s question with improved Messenger targeting so that you can adapt the support experience you offer for different types of customers or conversations.

• Dynamically let your customers know when and where they’ll receive a follow up from your team with enhancements to the reply time Task Bot. If you can’t reply quickly, this will ensure your customers feel confident you’ll be in touch soon and know the channel you’ll contact them on.
• Plus you can show returning customers a list of their previous conversations, letting them pick up where they left off, instead of starting a new conversation with your team.

Ultimately, these features and our robust targeting capabilities give you the ability to fine-tune the messaging experience your team delivers. With this granular control, you can easily determine how hands-on you want to be with various customers, using criteria such as customer spend, business type, and more.

3. More knowledge brings more power with advanced reporting

The final area that has been supercharged with these new releases is reporting – we’ve completely redesigned our reporting experience to give you the insights you need to provide best-in-class support.

“Having access to thorough, accurate reports is fundamental as you seek to provide efficient human support to ever-larger numbers of customers”

Rich, insight-filled reporting is crucial at every stage of the Conversational Support Funnel. Having access to thorough, accurate reports is fundamental as you seek to provide efficient human support to ever-larger numbers of customers. It is also a vital ingredient to ensure your self-serve support is comprehensive and to help you know how to provide proactive support, pre-emptively answering known issues using targeted content.

Reporting upgrades

• Optimize your support team’s performance with three new reporting dashboards – conversations report, effectiveness report, and a team performance report – with 12 new metrics to ensure you can monitor your team’s workload, improve your support effectiveness, and see what type of issues are taking up the most time based on conversation data you’re tracking.

• Dig in to your reports with several new filters – including the new conversation data – so that you can find the exact insight that matters to you most.
• Easily find all your relevant reports in one place with our redesigned reporting navigation structure – this will mean it’s even faster to get the insights you require.
• Keep track of how your team’s doing and share your impact with others by downloading or subscribing to the reports that matter to you. You can even set them up to go straight to your leadership team if you want.

Needless to say, we’ll keep building out our reporting experience from here – we’ll be releasing even more powerful reporting capabilities in the months ahead so that you can explore your data more deeply and customize everything you see.

Meet our brand new side navigation

But wait, there’s more. All these improvements to Intercom make it a dramatically more powerful tool for all your support needs. But as well as those 20+ features, we have taken the opportunity to fundamentally rethink the navigation in Intercom, further improving the app’s famous ease of use.

• Today, we’re unveiling a new, redesigned side navigation bar – we have changed the order of the icons denoting the main areas of the product, bringing a new logical clarity to the app. Now, the Inbox, so much more powerful with today’s suite of new features, appears at the top of the list.
• We are also unveiling new icons, a range of carefully considered designs that more closely evoke the sections of Intercom that they represent.
• Finally, we’re renaming one of the core sections of Intercom – the Platform section is from now on known as Contacts, to be more aligned with the job of that part of the product.

Say goodbye to compromise

These new features represent a meaningful step change in the way you can take care of all of your support conversations in Intercom – helping you be more efficient and ultimately deliver more market impact and commercial value for your business.

“The way forward is here, now. These features we’re announcing today are, collectively, Intercom’s most significant launch ever”

It can be tempting, when faced with ever-increasing numbers of customers seeking help with ever more complex issues, to prioritize your internal processes over the experience of your customers – as if delighting your customers only counts when they are using your product or service, but becomes optional when they need help to resolve an issue.

Too many traditional, ticketing-based support systems pay scant attention to the customer experience and instead focus entirely on the behind-the-scenes processes involved in resolving complex queries.

The way forward is here, now. These features we’re announcing today are, collectively, Intercom’s most significant launch ever. We’ve always concentrated on delivering a delightful customer experience, and now we’ve significantly uplevelled the Intercom experience across the Inbox, Messenger, and Reporting to delight teammates too.

By thoughtfully designing and building a solution that combines the power of ticketing at the back-end and the sheer usability of conversational, Messenger-based support at the front-end, we have done more than merely present the best of both worlds. We are offering a leap forward in customer support – the days of compromise are over.