Ensuring Intercom’s business continuity during uncertain times
As the COVID-19 situation continues to impact people, businesses, and communities everywhere, we know it is more important than ever to stay in touch with your customers, and Intercom is committed to helping you stay connected.
We have robust plans in place to ensure we continue to deliver the highest levels of technical and business service.
Health and safety
In this unprecedented and uncertain time, our first priority is the health and wellbeing of our staff and their loved ones, the communities we work in, and the customers we support. Our leadership team is fully engaged in the active management of our response during this challenging period. We encouraged our global staff to work from home starting March 5th and extended this to a mandatory work-from-home policy on March 13th. By taking this deliberate path to working in a remote environment, we have minimized any potential impact to our employees and our business operations. In addition to our temporary work-from-home policies, we suspended business travel and visitors to our offices beginning on March 5. We are conducting interviews and onboarding new employees remotely.
“We have announced a program to provide Intercom services for free for non-profits and organizations involved in the fight against COVID-19”
We are also maintaining our commitments to our employees’ and partners’ livelihoods, including full-time pay for our employees in hourly roles, and a flexible paid time off policy that allows employees to take any time off they need if they get sick. We also donated all N95 masks we had on hand to local hospitals. In addition, we have announced a program to provide Intercom services for free for non-profits and organizations involved in the fight against COVID-19.
Our cross-functional task force managing our internal response meets regularly to assess new information and to recommend and execute policies that take appropriate precautions for individual wellbeing and do our part in contributing to public health.
Infrastructure services reliability
Intercom’s products and services are fully operational throughout the world. We are dedicated to supporting you and your customers at all times, and we are confident in our ability to continue delivering the highest levels of performance, availability, and security.
All of Intercom’s production infrastructure is provided as a service to Intercom by Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is the leading cloud provider in the industry, and we leverage their portfolio of globally redundant services to ensure Intercom runs reliably. This means that Intercom benefits from the ability to dynamically scale up, or completely re-provision its infrastructure resources on an as-needed basis, across multiple geographical areas, using the same vendor, tools, and APIs. Our infrastructure scales up and down on demand as part of our day to day operations, and will do so in response to any changes in our customers’ needs. This includes not just compute resources, but storage and database resources, networking, security, and DNS. Our business has been growing significantly over many years, and responding to extra demand is business as usual for us.
“We have designed Intercom with resilience in mind”
We have designed Intercom with redundancy and resilience in mind. Intercom is deployed across several different AWS data centers and can deal with many types of failures quickly and automatically. All of our recovery and resilience mechanisms are tested regularly, and we update processes as required. We do not expect any disruption to AWS services, and we maintain a strong partnership with them in order to ensure the security, reliability, and availability of the Intercom service.
We also operate a dedicated 24×7 on-call incident management function, ready to immediately respond to, and mitigate, any customer impacting issues. This is supported by our broader internal Availability program which is dedicated to ensuring we maintain our system availability. During this time we are encouraging over-escalation to our incident management function while our team adapts to working exclusively from home.
Intercom has no direct reliance on specific office locations to sustain operations. All operational access to production resources can be exercised at any location on the Internet. We currently leverage a range of best-of-breed technologies and other critical cloud tools to deliver uninterrupted remote work for all employees.
Business continuity
Intercom has always operated as a cloud-native company working across multiple offices and time zones. Based on our years of experience managing a dispersed workforce, we are well-positioned to lead and conduct our business fully remotely.
We are dedicated to helping you and all of your customers. If you are experiencing higher volumes of customer inquiries, or need any other support, please contact us so that we can help, share best practices and automation tools to deliver personal support at scale.
“We are online and available to support you via the Intercom Messenger”
We have published a help document with some best practices on using Intercom to handle increased volumes of support queries, and our own support team have shared how they are adapting to remote working.
Please know we want to hear from you and are here to help you. Our global team of Customer Support Specialists and Engineers has moved to a remote working environment and are online and available to support you via the Intercom Messenger.
We continue to ship new and innovative products. Building and shipping is the heartbeat of our company, and we have seen continued excellence from our teams in the time since we implemented work-from-home policies. We see continued signs of health in our business. We have large capital reserves and are confident we can navigate these uncertain economic times.
Moving forward
The COVID-19 situation is changing rapidly. We are closely monitoring the global situation and updating our plans and operations to respond effectively. We remain fully committed to the success of our customers during this time. We’ll continue to update you with any meaningful changes.
Our hearts go out to everyone directly or indirectly affected by the virus, and we wish our customers and entire global community health and safety during this time.
