Ensuring Intercom’s interoperability for enterprise customers
As companies and their headcounts grow, so do their tech stacks.
The scale of enterprise businesses makes them inherently complex – they rely on a suite of tools tailored for specific workflows. Users spend far too much time jumping from app to app, hindering productivity.
This is the fourth post in a content series exploring Intercom’s investment in supporting enterprises. Explore other articles in the series.
At Intercom, one of the core beliefs guiding our product is that the old world of siloed companies and their siloed tools is breaking down. This belief underpins our commitment to building a product that interoperates smoothly with any company’s tech stack, no matter how large and complex, while multiplying the value that tech stack can offer.
To us, avoiding silos means two things:
- Building a platform that consolidates customer communications: With Intercom, all customer communications happen through a single unified platform and source of data that’s continuously learning, serving, and supporting individual customer needs so you can make the most of every engagement to grow your business.
- Offering integrations so this platform can work seamlessly with other tools in your tech stack: As businesses grow, the number of tools used across teams can quickly become unmanageable. These tools need to communicate and work together to ensure you seize every opportunity to meaningfully engage with your customers.
These may seem like conflicting goals, but together they work towards the end goal of empowering businesses to be there for customers. Intercom offers a personalized experience to every customer your business interacts with, and nurtures these relationships from the very beginning.
“Intercom works alongside your existing support channels – like email and phone – to give customers the choice of self-serve and/or one-to-one support in your app, product, or website”
Intercom works alongside your existing support channels – like email and phone – to give customers the choice of self-serve and/or one-to-one support in your app, product, or website. It’s easy to set up, integrates with your existing support tools, and provides all the workload management tools you need to add messaging without overwhelming your team.
We work hard to ensure Intercom cooperates with our customers’ most important apps, bringing together all the customer data you need to effectively nurture customer relationships and scale your business. Every customer has a unique use case and toolset, and we offer integrations, APIs, and webhooks to enable them to design their ideal workflows within and alongside Intercom.
“Intercom has unleashed the power of conversational support across Medallia’s growing suite of products. What used to be a disjointed customer experience is now unified, consistent, and personalized.”
Kennen Warmack, VP Global Support and Education, Medallia
How can I integrate my favorite apps with Intercom?
There are several ways to integrate Intercom with the most important tools in your tech stack.
The Intercom App Store
Our App Store now contains over 350 powerful apps and integrations which create flexibility and extensibility around Intercom’s existing solutions, allowing you to tailor Intercom to your business:
- One-click integrations with CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot drive faster time to value.
- Integrations with Support tools like Playvox and MaestroQA drive improved KPIs across our support use case.
- Integrations with phone providers like Dialpad and Aircall reduce context switching for agents, and drive improved business efficiencies.
- Integrations with product analytics tools like Amplitude make it easier to understand and measure the impact of customer interactions in Intercom, helping to increase revenue and reduce churn.
“The fact that we’re able to integrate Intercom with other tools like Salesforce enables us to send tailored messages based on where customers are in their journey, if a specific event has been triggered, or if they’ve taken a particular action.”
Victoria Vergnaud, Customer Success Operations, Spendesk
Intercom’s REST API
We make it as straightforward as possible for developers to build on top of Intercom, allowing you to customize our platform to suit your company’s specific needs. Build context-relevant, action-oriented apps directly on top of Intercom with ease – whether you’re publicly integrating your service with ours, or you’re building for your own team’s private usage, our open API allows our customers and partners to build fully customizable integrations with other tools and services. On top of that, our developer hub and robust API documentation mean you’ll be guided through every step.
Wayne Stewart, Head of Customer Success and Support, Cloud Growth, Dev Ops & IT at Atlassian, says that the robust API is one of the team’s favorite features of the platform, as it enriches data for the support engineers, reduces the need for context-switching, and ultimately improves the customer experience.
“When new engineers start to dig into Intercom and the API, they always say things like, ‘Oh my gosh, every product should have an API like this – the things we can do, the data we can extract!’”
Wayne Stewart, Head of Customer Success and Support, Cloud Growth, Dev Ops & IT, Atlassian
The data you store in Intercom can help drive decision-making, but only if it’s accurate and accessible. Our API makes it easier than ever to pull, analyze, and update your Intercom customer and conversation data.
- Measure and improve your support team’s performance by easily analyzing conversation data with new out-of-the-box metrics and more granular timestamps.
- Enhance your decision-making by exporting the exact customer and conversation data you need to the BI tools you use.
- Gain context for more personalized conversations by systematically creating and updating custom data attributes and conversation tags.
Webhooks
A webhook allows third-party services to deliver updates to your app in real time. A specified event or action prompts the webhook provider to trigger an update, and pushes it to your app via HTTP requests. When you receive the request, you handle it with some custom logic, like sending an email or storing the data in a database.
Amplitude supports ingesting event data from Intercom using webhooks. Customers can stream their Intercom campaign data into Amplitude and use behavioral analytics to monitor their campaigns’ success. This bi-directional integration means that Amplitude customers can use Amplitude and Intercom to optimize campaign performance and impact on in-product engagement, conversion, and retention.
“Next-generation software is about helping businesses to scale and nurture their relationships with their customers – a huge part of that is ensuring interoperability with other tools”
Build your own custom app
Intercom’s Canvas Kit allows you to build apps that work from directly within the Intercom UI. This means you can bring your workflows and your product into Intercom, making it easy for teammates and customers to see information or take actions that aren’t specifically to do with Intercom.
Grover is a platform that offers consumers more flexible ways to access tech by enabling them to rent devices such as phones, laptops, and smart watches. When analyzing customer behavior in their product, the team realized that the “Cancel order” button on the order confirmation page was actually prompting customers to cancel who wouldn’t have otherwise.
Removing this button would inevitably have created more manual work for the customer support team as customers reached out directly to cancel their orders. To blend the best of both worlds, the team built an “Order cancellation” app for the Intercom Messenger, enabling customers to cancel on their own with the help of Resolution Bot.
Low-code integrations
With Intercom’s Custom Actions, you can connect your systems with Intercom in an environment that’s quick and easy to set up, using little to no code. Custom Actions lets you use and update data that lives in other tools in your tech stack, making API calls that can present information in bots (e.g. order status) as well as take actions (e.g. customers updating contact details).
Custom Actions offers a frictionless opportunity for your teams to integrate with key platforms that your support team uses everyday.
We will continue to build on Intercom’s interoperability
Building next-generation software is about helping businesses to scale and nurture their relationships with their customers – a huge part of that is ensuring interoperability with other tools. We will continue to prioritize our work to improve and enhance Intercom’s integrations and create a smoother experience for our customers, and their customers.
