New at Intercom uncut: Watch our entire virtual launch event
We’re fresh from our first virtual global event, New at Intercom.
We were joined by more than 2,500 customers, partners, and others who wanted to learn more about our product, goals, and the path ahead. Over the course of the event, we explored our vision and beliefs for the future of customer engagement and communications, and heard from Intercom leaders like CEO Karen Peacock, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Des Traynor, and Chief Product Officer Paul Adams, as well as some of our amazing customers.
We introduced Intercom as the Engagement OS, the customer communications platform that enables the most critical component of the modern customer journey: ongoing engagement, throughout the customer journey – from acquiring to onboarding, activating, support, and beyond.
We’re sharing the entire recording of New at Intercom – if you didn’t make it, or just want to experience it all over again, here’s your opportunity.
What to expect:
- Our CEO Karen Peacock introduced Intercom as the Engagement OS, laying out our vision for the future of customer engagement, and the part we will play in helping our customers bridge the gap between customer expectations and customer experience.
- Des Traynor laid out the six unique beliefs that guide our vision, mission, and roadmap here at Intercom.
- Paul Adams shared three incredible new products that will take your Intercom experience to the next level: Surveys, Switch, and our next-generation Inbox.
- You’ll hear from the product managers that led the ideation, planning, and development of these products, and get their unique insights into the ways each of them can uplevel your customers’ experience with your company.
- You’ll meet some of our customers, including Wayne Stewart from Atlassian and Brian Lederman from Coda, as they explore the ways Intercom is helping them scale their businesses.
That’s just scratching the surface – watch the full recording or read through the event transcript to experience New at Intercom, and catch up on all the major announcements, industry insights, and customer stories that were shared at our first virtual event.
What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the event.
Anna Griffin, CMO at Intercom: Hello and welcome to New at Intercom, our first virtual launch event designed to share new innovation and new possibilities with the Intercom platform. To succeed in these times of rapid change for yourself, for your team, for your organization, you’re going to have to be curious and have a hunger to explore new things, new ideas, to encounter new people working in new ways and learn from them.
And that’s exactly why you’re here today; to explore, to be inspired and discover those new ways to create deeper relationships that grow loyalty, brand experiences that grow value, and customer insights that grow the business. Enjoy this time. Imagine what’s possible today and into the future and prepare to grow. And with that, I’d like to introduce you to our CEO, Karen Peacock, to kick off the show.
Karen Peacock, CEO at Intercom: Thanks Anna, and thank you all for joining us at New at Intercom. It is an exciting time for us at Intercom. Last year, we celebrated our tenth birthday and we took the opportunity to reflect on the products and the platform that we’ve built, our incredible customers, the results that we have driven together, the trends that we have set together, and the innovative work that we have done together. And that is what today is all about: innovation.
“We are dedicated to building the best, most innovative products on the market to drive the most impact for you, our customers. Our level of investment in product and innovation sets us apart”
We’ve always made massive investments in our product, our design and our engineering teams, and we are dedicated to building the best, most innovative products on the market to drive the most impact for you, our customers. Our level of investment in product and innovation sets us apart. And I am personally dedicated to continuing to ramp up our product investment to ensure that our pace of innovation, it only accelerates from here.
So today we are excited to announce groundbreaking new products, and we’re going to do more than just talk about them – we’re going to demo them. So you will actually get to see them and see how they will deliver breakthrough value to you. We’re thrilled to be supporting so many of you today. We have over 25,000 customers, and now have over 600 million end users actively using Intercom every month. And we have over 180,000 teammates logging into Intercom every month, using our platform to send over 500 million messages and reply to over 20 million conversations. We are operating at internet scale. We’re growing with our customers and supporting organizations with thousands of employees and millions of users.
We owe our success so far to our customers, to you. So whether you’ve been with us for years, or you’re just getting started, thank you. You are the reason that we’re here. And we know that there’s a massive opportunity to provide the most personalized, the most impactful, the best experiences for both you and your customers. And that’s what we all want.
“Great experiences stand out. We remember the companies that make things easy”
On the other side of that, as consumers, we’re used to not getting that. We’re used to being left on hold, being swamped with irrelevant messages in spam, trying new products or features that are just hard to navigate and use. That’s why great experiences stand out. We remember the companies that make things easy, whether it’s buying furniture from Living Spaces, building games with Unity, or using an Atlassian product that makes you more productive at work.
At Intercom, we believe that in the future, to win, every engagement between successful internet businesses and their customers will be easy, proactive, personal, and effective at scale. We’ve all seen glimpses into that future, especially in the last year. We know the businesses that engage their customers win. The very nature of internet business must and will change to provide these next-level experiences.
Businesses depend on loyalty, and loyalty will depend on relationships, and relationships will depend on ongoing engagement, which is how well you treat your customers, how available you are, how attentive you are, how proactive you are. And strong ongoing engagement will create new opportunities to sell and do more for your customers, to foster loyalty, bring growth at scale in a way that businesses need and customers value.
And that is why we are here. We are here to help you, to help you drive ongoing engagement with your customers and to provide them with experiences that say, “We care. We’ll help. We’re here for you.” And we do this at internet scale with modern next-gen tools that grow with you. So when you see a spike in demand, you can meet it, no matter what size your team is.
“We believe ongoing engagement is the future of internet business, and that demands a new operating model”
We believe ongoing engagement is the future of internet business, and that demands a new operating model, one that unifies and reorients every aspect of your company around your customers and delivering exceptional customer experiences to make the most of every opportunity. And that’s why we are here, to help you make the most of every opportunity.
Intercom is the Engagement OS. Our modern customer communication platform helps you engage with customers to build strong relationships, to drive growth and scale. Our platform is a unified system. It’s increasingly becoming the backbone of all customer communications throughout the customer journey; across sales, marketing, and support. It helps you create powerful in-context experiences that maximize customer acquisition, engagement, retention, and the lifetime value of your customers, building strong customer relationships at every touch point. To talk more about what modern engagement looks like, let me turn it over to Des Traynor, our Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer to discuss industry trends and our core beliefs at Intercom.
Our core beliefs
Des Traynor, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Intercom: Thanks Karen. At Intercom, we’ve been working in the area of customer communications for about a decade. Our core idea, our core mission of “make internet business personal” was with us right from the start, from the first release. Obviously our products started out a little bit different to where we are today, but you can see the core idea there right from the start, true to what you’ll see later on today as well.
Back when we were starting up, we didn’t have to build solutions for the previous eras of technology. We were building Intercom for internet businesses that we knew. Thus, we had the freedom to explore and capitalize on all the trends we saw and all of the tectonic shifts we’ve seen in how internet businesses acquire, engage, and support their customers. And I’d like to talk you through some of the trends we’ve observed since 2011 and some of the beliefs that underpin what we build in Intercom.
“Loyalty comes from a strong relationship, which itself comes from repeated positive experiences. And that’s just not possible if you’re consistently giving disjointed, messy messages to customers”
Firstly, all businesses are becoming internet businesses. And it’s not just project management software, it’s your pizzas, it’s your taxi cabs, it’s your bookstores. They’re all internet businesses, and they’re all obsessed with loyalty, with ongoing engagement, and significant lifetime value. Thus, the overall customer experience and loyalty itself has become so important for internet businesses. Loyalty comes from a strong relationship, which itself comes from repeated positive experiences. And that’s just not possible if you’re consistently giving disjointed, messy messages to customers because of your disjointed and messy communication tools, each with their own medium, each with their own purpose.
Secondly, we believe the old world of siloed company departments under siloed tools is going to break down. We believe primary platforms will manage and orchestrate all customer communications. This is the only way we’re going to move away from this discombobulated experience of, “Fill in a form. Oh no wait, file a ticket. Oh no, it’s a sales issue. No wait, it’s a success issue. It’s actually a sales issue. No, it’s a general inquiry.” It’s a mess. Customers and businesses demand and deserve better.
“The best time to talk to a shopper is when they’re in your store, not with a follow-up two days later. So we created in-context messaging as a way to do just that”
Thirdly, we believe that in-context, company-owned messaging will be the primary channel for customer communications. We built the first Business Messenger in 2011 because we saw so many new requirements emerge. First was obviously the rise of messaging itself as the dominant human-to-human channel. But secondly, we saw other companies would need to communicate in-context, not out of context, to maximize the impact of the messages you’re sending. After all, the best time to talk to a shopper is when they’re in your store, not with a follow-up two days later. So we created in-context messaging as a way to do just that.
And then lastly, companies need to be able to iterate and build on their channels to build unique workflows. And that’s why we built our Messenger to be customizable and made it itself a developer platform. And this is why we’re seeing so many folks continue to integrate with it. Ultimately, we believe the future of customer engagement will depend heavily on in-context messaging, but also the ability to orchestrate all your messaging for all your channels from one primary platform.
Fourth, we believe that customer support is undergoing a massive once-in-a-generation change. We’ve seen customer support move away from pure tickets towards conversations, from being disconnected, third-party products to being deeply integrated and customer-aware solutions. We’ve seen the standard customer support inbox, which was designed for static ticket deflection and rejection, fail to adapt to a world of messaging and a world of multiplayer support. We’ve also seen the nature of support itself splice into many worlds. There is human support, automated support, self-serve support, proactive support.
“Incremental tool creep has meant that your help docs, your help desk, your chatbots, your proactive support messages can all be spread across a dozen different disparate tools”
Incremental tool creep has meant that your help docs, your help desk, your chatbots, your proactive support messages can all be spread across a dozen different disparate tools, and we believe that that’s just not sustainable. There will be a primary platform for all your customer communication for support. And that’s what we’ve been building all along as well.
Fifth, we believe the future of customer messaging will be powered by live data and with rich context. All messaging will need to have dynamic content and dynamic sending and to be easily connected across channels. Additionally, modern messaging will include actions for users versus just being a one way blast. It’ll be able to trigger workflows way beyond clicks and opens, resulting in much better experiences for your customers and much better results for your business. The live nature of in-context messaging means that live data and rich context is actually essential to avoid sending messages that just make your business look clueless when talking to customers.
Des Traynor speaks about our core mission to “make internet business personal” at New at Intercom
A lot of this is really only possible when you’ve strong first party data, which is actually my sixth point. As the third-party cookie has crumbled, businesses can no longer rely on ill-gotten data. The rules and the regulations regarding consent of data sharing, regarding the legality of data holding, have torn up so many of the marketing playbooks out there. We believe first-party data, data that your business can legitimately collect, own and use about your customers to improve their experience without any concerns from them, is going to be essential.
Now, the difficulty of collecting user information in a form where you can meaningfully use it to improve an experience has led to so many businesses just not doing it or delivering substandard experiences or using inconsistent data from inconsistent sources. Intercom was built from the start on first-party data, and you’ll see more work that we’re doing today all about that.
“Over the past decade, we’ve seen so many new paradigms emerge that businesses simply must be able to keep up with to be a part of the future of software as opposed to being labeled as an incumbent”
Lastly, software always improves. And over the past decade, we’ve seen so many new paradigms emerge that businesses simply must be able to keep up with to be a part of the future of software as opposed to being labeled as an incumbent. An area we obsess about in Intercom is our product itself, and keeping it at the forefront of modern tech stacks. We believe that anything Intercom builds should feel future-facing. So we observe the trends, modern best practices for product in UI that we see and we’ve been working on bringing more and more of them into our releases, again, starting with what you’ll see later on.
Let me walk you through some of these trends that we observe. We’re seeing a shift towards designing for end user productivity. The web 2.0 era was obviously characterized by ease of use. And then when we started Intercom in the sort of 2011 era, it was defined by bringing social software norms such as likes, comments, emoji etc. into B2B software. This next era is all about simplicity and power combined with no trade-off.
A good example of this is something like Superhuman, the next-generation email tool. Beautiful design, heavily focused on productivity and on power. Linear is another example of this, a ticketing and project management solution designed to remove all of the work as possible out of the UI. And indeed height.app is a third one. Again, information density is the key idea. It’s a product that maximizes user productivity.
Something else that has become table stakes is the idea of multiplayer design. Tools like Pitch show you not only do you have teammates, not only that they’re online, but actually what are you doing right now? Miro is a virtual whiteboard company, again, designed to create a multiplayer experience instead of having a host of behind the scenes chats to try and work out who’s doing what, where, when.
A third ingredient we’re seeing is the return of the command line in a sense. It’s a new, easier, more powerful way to search and to take actions without having to browse through endless menus. You just tap the first few characters of what you’re trying to do, and this type of menu will take care of it all. We see this in Figma, we see this in Superhuman, and we see it so many more.
“Creating a campaign that blends bots, apps, messages, emails, in-apps, and banners across your products, across third-party products via webhooks, is something that has become incredibly easy to achieve”
We’re seeing the rise of no-code as well. We’re seeing easy drag and drop UI, like we’ve been adding in Series and will be continuing to add, where you have this beautiful asymmetry of simplicity in creation and power in execution. Thousands of complex campaigns have been created through Series that previously would’ve fit into that category of yes, it’s technically feasible, but there’s no way I’m going to do all that. I have a job to do. Creating a campaign that blends bots, apps, messages, emails, in-apps, and banners across your products, across third-party products via webhooks, is something that has become incredibly easy to achieve, thanks to this.
Now, I can’t cover everything that we define as next-generation in Intercom, but things like dense UI, designing for power users, fast action switching, dark mode, no-code, usage of AI/ML, designing for multiplayer experiences, this is all what your products will look like in the future if they don’t already today. At Intercom, we believe in constantly delivering a better product experience and you’ll see these themes emerge more and more in our future.
Speaking of our future of opinions and trends, none of this matters unless it’s manifested in code and in a product that you can all use. So I’d like to handle over to Mr. Paul Adams who’s our Chief Product Officer at Intercom.
Paul Adams, Chief Product Officer at Intercom: Thanks, Des. It is very exciting to be here. Thank you all for tuning in for us. We are announcing three brand new products today. We’ve been working hard on them, we’ve had customers use them in beta, and now we’re excited for lots more people to try them, hopefully lots of you to try them. Hopefully you can use them to create better relationships with customers and help drive business growth.
“In the future, we think business will depend on ongoing relationships, not on transactional ones. And so the winners will be those businesses that focus on truly, genuinely building personal relationships”
First though, I want to set the scene. You’ve seen our vision for the Engagement OS from Karen. You’ve seen our vision for next-generation customer engagement and support solutions from Des. And you’ve seen that our mission is to “make internet business personal.” We do not believe it’s personal today. We sort of have ticketing queues, we’ve got ‘do not reply’ emails, you’ve to call to cancel contracts. These things are still the default. But in the future, we think business will depend on ongoing relationships, not on transactional ones. And so the winners will be those businesses that focus on truly, genuinely building personal relationships. We believe that ongoing engagement is the future of all customer relationships.
Over the past decade, we’ve been helping our customers, many of you, with just that. For over 10 years, we’ve been helping you build your customer relationships, helping your website visitors sign up and connecting them to your sales team, onboarding your customers, deepening their product usage, and allowing you to answer all their queries, sales queries, support queries from simple to complex. And finally using the Intercom Messenger, in-app messaging, bots, omnichannel, and much, much more.
In conversation with Wayne Stewart, Atlassian
We have six company values at Intercom. One of them, maybe our favorite one, is that we obsess about our customers’ success. Everything we build is in partnership with our customers. We obsess about their problems. We listen to their feedback, especially as they grow and scale. So I want to bring in one of our customers, Wayne Stewart, from Atlassian. Wayne, thanks for joining us. Let’s start with your role and your responsibilities at Atlassian.
Wayne Stewart, Head of CSS Cloud Growth – DevOps & IT at Atlassian: Thanks, Paul. My role at Atlassian is as a Support Manager of the DevOps IT Cloud Products team. So for those of you who aren’t too familiar with Atlassian, we’re the organization that produces products like Confluence, Jira, Trello. In my specific support function, there’s two main products that my team is focused on and that would be OpsGenie and Status Page.
Paul Adams: We are big Atlassian fans at Intercom.
Wayne Stewart: Glad to hear it.
Paul Adams: So why don’t you tell us how you first started using Intercom’s platform and why?
Wayne Stewart: This goes back a ways. I first started using Intercom back before OpsGenie got acquired by Atlassian, and 2018 was when the acquisition occurred. When I came to OpsGenie, a small startup company trying to grow, we were looking for a product that would allow us to scale to be able to support customers worldwide. And we were also looking for something that was very flexible. So I ended up running a customer success management team, a support team. We had a pre-sales team. We had an inbound sales team as well, basically quite a few groups. And we all gravitated around using Intercom to be able to engage with our customers in order to grow the business. And fortunately, it was quite successful for us and ultimately led to the acquisition by Atlassian.
Paul Adams: Nice. Yeah. Very cool to hear, thanks Wayne. So earlier today we talked about how the organizational silos between sales, marketing, and support are breaking down. What does that evolution look like for you at Atlassian?
Wayne Stewart: Yeah. So I’ll actually try to do this in two parts because as I was alluding to a moment ago, when we were the small startup organization, we had every team and any team getting access through Intercom to engage with the customer. So if a billing question came in and we needed somebody from finance, they were there. If it was a legal question that came in, if it was a security question that came in, everybody was in Intercom and using Intercom in order to deliver that resolution to the customer.
Atlassian is a much larger organization, it’s a bigger ship. So there are established processes at Atlassian that we basically just had to fit into. The great thing about it is a lot of the same teams are still using the Intercom product, but the way that we engage with those teams might be different. So for instance, product management still engages directly with customers and puts cohorts together, ask questions, ask about features, those types of things. Support, obviously we’re still using it to engage and respond to customers directly. But for teams like sales, it’s more integrating through your wonderful API in order to extract the data that we need to send over to them so that they can participate as well.
Paul Adams chats to Wayne Stewart of Atlassian about the ways Intercom is helping them provide a world-class customer experience
Paul Adams: I know Atlassian’s customer-facing organizations have high standards when it comes to providing the best experiences for your customers, and we’re proud to help you uphold those high standards. So tell us about how you’ve differentiated there.
Wayne Stewart: Yes. This one’s an interesting one. One of the lessons we learned very early on is if you engage with the customers right as they’re asking that question, you keep a very tight initial response time, the experience that that customer has stays with them. It’s a great experience, they walk away with it, they remember it. They might end up remaining a customer with you for a long time, and we’ve seen that. So we have a three minute initial response time when we’re engaging with customers through Intercom.
Interestingly enough, we’ve also observed that as a result of being so focused on this initial response time, we have an average close time of just about two hours for most of the cases that we open up with customers. They ask the question, we give them the answer, maybe a little banter back and forth every now and again, and the issue gets closed. So the way that we are working with Intercom is making a difference in the service that we’re delivering to customers.
On the scale side, as you can imagine, when I came in, we may have been getting 500 cases across our customer base per month. That grew to 700, to 1000, up to 1400. We’ve been able to use Intercom to address the customer base, the questions we’re getting from them, at scale. That’s been fantastic. Customer satisfaction, your little smiley face icon that’s there, we love that thing. I want to know how are my people actually doing when they’re engaging with customers, and 95% of what we get back basically says, customers are happy with what we’ve got. We’ve got an incredibly high, sustained CSAT as a result of using Intercom. So the SLAs that we’ve got, they may sound aggressive, but being able to use Intercom to deliver them six years in, and we’re still happy with what we’ve got.
Paul Adams: Yeah. That’s cool. Seeing your success, our customer success is really important to us, so it inspires us to try harder. So last question for you Wayne today, what’s your vision for the future of Intercom at Atlassian?
Wayne Stewart: Can I sum it up by saying grow with us, please. All right. I put that out there because part of my team’s objectives inside Atlassian is to incubate products. There are products that we’ll be developing that we’ll be putting to market. They might go out the door with zero customers or maybe a couple hundred from our existing customer base. I mean, after all, we’ve got 200,000 customers. So whenever we put something out, usually a couple will pick it up. But we’ve got everything from those brand new products that we’re putting out the door to products like OpsGenie and Status Page that have been around for years.
And to date, we’ve been able to leverage Intercom for all the nuances to be able deliver those high KBMs and SLAs that I’ve been talking about, those great customer experiences that’s there. So what I’m looking for in the future is continue to grow with us. The good news is that we’re not the only organization in Atlassian using it. It’s not just my support team that’s using Intercom. We’ve branched out. There are other products, other product management teams that are using it in order to engage their customer cohorts. There’s an internal team at Atlassian, our internal IT team, that’s actually using Intercom as a part of their service delivery. So at the end of the day, six years has been great, I want another six.
Paul Adams: Yeah. Thanks, Wayne. We also want another six years and more. Thank you so much.
Wayne Stewart: You’re very welcome. Great talking to you.
Paul Adams: Likewise.
“Internet scale, the idea that there are many more online customers than ever before, millions and millions, and it is growing like crazy. And internet speed, the idea that the internet evolves in real time”
You’ll hear me talk a lot about internet scale and internet speed today. Internet scale, the idea that there are many more online customers than ever before, millions and millions, and it is growing like crazy. And internet speed, the idea that the internet evolves in real time. It’s an instantaneous platform. It evolves more rapidly than any preceding technology, and you must evolve as fast as the internet evolves or you fall behind. So internet scale is this massive opportunity, and internet speed is the requirement to meet that opportunity. That is why we obsess at Intercom with speed, obsess as a company. We work hard on executing our vision and making the product better consistently in line with internet speed.
We shipped over 150 product improvements last year, and we fight to maintain speed as the company grows and scales. Last year, within that 150, we shipped lots of stuff, new channels like WhatsApp, new capabilities like transactional messaging, big data and reporting improvements like custom reports, and powerful Salesforce integrations. We also shipped products using the latest machine learning technology like conversation topics, and efficiency improvements like macros. And now we offer European data hosting.
“We focus on improving the product in two equally important ways. One, differentiation, and two, industry standards”
When we’re road mapping and deciding what to work on, we focus on improving the product in two equally important ways. One, differentiation, and two, industry standards. What do these things mean? Differentiation, the attraction of the new solution, the reason to buy Intercom. We look at customers’ problems, we look at existing solutions in-market, and we work to create new, better solutions. We want to give customers more reasons to choose Intercom because we’ve got the best, most powerful next-generation solution.
We also look at industry standards, the things that buyers expect the product to have. We talk to our customers daily. We look at all the reasons they can’t adopt Intercom, or they can’t expand their usage. Often it’s because their customers are growing and scaling themselves just like us and they’re becoming bigger companies. And so these industry standards, they’re things that they’re missing that these bigger companies need and expect. So we work hard to close these as fast as possible.
The majority of the 150 things were industry standards, making Intercom great for bigger size customers. And most of the time we’re listening to customers, most of the time we’re working hard to ship the 150+ features. Today though, today is different. We’re launching three big new next generation products. First thing, a brand new product called Intercom Switch. It joins together phone contact centers and modern messaging. We hope Switch will make long call center phone queues a thing of the past.
Second, a complete redesign and a complete rebuild of our Inbox. We believe what we’ve built is the fastest, most efficient inbox ever created for customer communication teams. And last but not least, the next-generation Surveys product. It makes new things possible that are simply just not possible with any older generation surveys tool.
So first, Intercom Switch. Remember internet scale? The idea that business is fundamentally changing because of millions and millions of potential customers all over the world, and that number is growing. Now, also true is that these people, these millions of people have questions. They have many, many questions, and solutions designed and built in the last two decades are no longer fit for purpose. One example is the phone channel. One-to-one voice conversations with customers to answer questions and fix issues.
“Phone is a fantastic way to communicate … but phone does not work at internet scale. If you are on the phone, you’re on the phone to only one person, making you wholly unavailable to anyone else”
Phone is a fantastic way to communicate. It’s an important one, and sometimes, phone’s the best channel. People just need to talk. They need empathy or to be heard or need that urgency that only phone could provide. But phone does not work at internet scale. If you are on the phone, you’re on the phone to only one person, making you wholly unavailable to anyone else. Phone is also a channel that we’re using less and less in our personal lives. Think about our friends, our family, our colleagues, people we play sport with, do hobbies with. How often do you call them? Not very often.
How often do you message them? Messaging has taken over as the primary way our species communicates. And it’s been a complete transformation within a decade. Why? Because messaging is very often a superior channel to voice. It supports rich media, GIFs, bots, apps, the direct exchange of data. Messaging works in real time or any time. You’ve no missed calls with messaging, and it works anywhere. A loud place, a quiet place. Messaging works everywhere all the time. People prefer messaging and businesses need to adapt to this change. Many want to, by the way.
Many businesses have big call centers, big phone teams, and they’re expensive. When you get stuck in a queue, businesses don’t want that. They don’t want customers stuck in a queue frustrated. They know that’s not a good experience. But these businesses are struggling with internet scale, struggling to integrate legacy phone systems with modern efficient ways of communicating. There is a will to move off phone, but it is not easy until now. Switch is a new product that makes it easy for customers to switch from phone support to messaging.
When a customer calls a business and are inevitably told that they’re in a queue, that the hold time is long, now with Switch they’re offered a choice. They can stay on the call or seamlessly and immediately switch to messaging. All they’ve got to do is simply press a key number and they will get a choice to switch. They’ll get an SMS. The SMS will have a link. They tap on the link and that opens the Intercom Messenger. So that is the first advantage of Switch, no queues.
The second advantage is faster answers. The Messenger has many powerful ways for customers to find their answers themselves, searching content, chatting to bots, chatting to support agents. And because Intercom recognizes their phone number from their customer record, they can get a personalized experience. They can be immediately routed to the right team or offered options specific to their circumstance. Because it is messaging, agents can answer more than one customer at a time. It is simply much more efficient than phone. Switch means businesses can provide faster support at lower cost and customers can get immediate answers.
Finally, because of its simplicity, Switch works with any phone system in the world. So we’re excited about Switch. We hope it’s going to usher in a new generation of solution, one that works at internet speed and at internet scale. So let’s take a look at the product in more detail. Jasmine, over to you.
Product demo: Intercom Switch
Jasmine Jaume, Director of Product Marketing at Intercom: Thanks, Paul, and hi everyone. I’m very excited to show you Switch in action. To set the scene, let’s imagine I’m a customer of a national consumer bank. Let’s call it Exemplary Bank. Exemplary Bank has over a million customers. They provide support across a number of channels, including phone, email, and Intercom’s Messenger. As Paul touched on a moment ago, in some situations, phone is a great and necessary channel. However, it is also the most expensive channel for Exemplary Bank and they want to move more of their support volume to the Messenger because it’s more efficient and more scalable and it avoids them having to leave their customers waiting on hold.
Jasmine Jaume demonstrates Intercom Switch – Intercom’s answer to long on-hold times
With Switch, Exemplary Bank can give their customers the choice. If they call in, they can wait to speak to an agent, or they can move their conversation to the Messenger and get a faster answer. This is particularly valuable during busy periods when wait times might be longer than usual. So, let’s take a look at what that experience is like. As I said, I’m a customer of the bank and I recently opened a savings account with them. Now, lucky me, I’m buying a new car. I need to know what my transfer limit is on my account to make sure I’ll be able to transfer the money to the dealer for the purchase. I can’t find a clear answer to this on the website or my account page, so I call the customer service number to ask.
Exemplary bank automated phone message:
Thank you for calling Exemplary Bank. Your estimated wait time is 17 minutes.
Jasmine Jaume:
As you might expect, I get placed on hold, an experience I’m sure many of you have had to. But because Exemplary Bank is using Switch, I have a new option. I’m now given the choice to move my conversation to the Messenger simply by pressing 1. I immediately get a text with a link, which takes me straight into the Messenger. I’m greeted by a bot that knows I came through Switch and asks about my request. I type a question: “What is my transfer limit?” And then the bot gives me my answer right away. This only took a few seconds and I’ve already got what I needed. It was quick, convenient and lets me get on with my day. Before Switch, I’d still be waiting on hold, getting more and more frustrated.
But let’s say my car purchase is going to cost more than my limit and I need to up it temporarily for this purchase. The bot gives me the option to raise the limit and asks me to input the amount. As raising my limit requires support agent authorization, my conversation is now triaged to a rep. It can even be prioritized automatically because I came through Switch. What’s more, because Intercom recognizes my phone number, the rep who answers my query would be able to see my name and account details so they can provide me a personalized response. I can wait for the rep to respond right away, or I can come back to the conversation later when it’s convenient for me.
As you can see, Switch makes it absolutely seamless to move my query to the Messenger and get the help I need much quicker than waiting on hold. Yep, I’d still be on hold without it. I might have even given up without even getting my answer. If you want to experience this flow for yourself, you can. Just dial the number onscreen to try it out (1-877-SWTCH-IT). The great news is that Switch is also really easy to set up and works with all phone systems, including modern platforms like Aircall and more traditional phone providers. We’ll talk more about setup in our breakout session later today. So that’s Switch. I hope you’re as excited as we are about what this will enable for businesses and their customers. Handing back over to Paul now for another exciting announcement.
Paul Adams: Thanks Jasmine. Switch is available now. Just visit intercom.com/switch to learn more. Next, let’s look at our new next-generation Inbox. We’ve already talked about internet scale, millions of potential customers, many with questions. Not only do we have this wave of inbound customer volume, we’ve got change in customer expectations. Customers expect responses fast. And if they don’t get them, they become dissatisfied, which is really bad news for any business in the internet era who depends on customer loyalty.
“The current generation of customer support solutions is simply not designed for this scale. Businesses and customers need something better – they need something designed for internet scale at internet speed and they need it now”
The current generation of customer support solutions is simply not designed for this scale. Businesses and customers need something better – they need something designed for internet scale at internet speed and they need it now. Things have accelerated massively. We’ve moved to an internet economy with internet scale and the pandemic has accelerated it even further. So six to nine months ago, we looked at our Inbox product and knew we could make it better. Customers already like using it and user experience is cited as the reason why businesses choose Intercom, but it was designed in the 2010s. We knew it could be faster, more efficient, something designed for the 2020s. So we set ourselves a goal of making it the fastest, most efficient inbox for support teams in the world. We believe we’ve done it. Here it is.
We think, we hope this new inbox is going to set a new standard, where the apps we use at work are just as good as the apps we use personally. It not only looks better, it feels better, it works better. It works way better because it was built for internet speed and designed for internet scale. It’s got four main benefits that make it next-generation. One, as you heard from Des, it is modern. It has modern consumer-grade design. It is not from the 1990s like all the tools we use today. It is for the 2020s. It’s got the latest technology from the cutting edge.
It uses that technology to be blazing fast. No loading screens, no spinners, no waiting. It is immediate. Faster customer answers, higher customer satisfaction. It is a full keyboard-first experience, something for the 2020s. Using Command K, agents can find anything, any information within seconds, and take immediate action – 1, 2, 3 key presses and they are done. It’s also highly configurable. Managers, teams, agents, they can set the Inbox up just the way they want, which makes them even faster. So let’s look at the product in more detail. Patrick, over to you.
Product demo: Intercom’s next-gen Inbox
Patrick Andrews, Director of Product Management at Intercom: Thanks, Paul. Hello everyone. It’s a pleasure to introduce you to Intercom’s next-generation Inbox. As I show you around, I want you to imagine that I’m a support rep at Exemplary Bank who answered Jasmine’s query in the previous Switch demo. Support reps handle hundreds of conversations like Jasmine’s every day. And customers often expect responses within minutes or even seconds. Multiple conversations need to be worked on concurrently. And the quality of the response has a direct impact on business performance. This all adds up to a high pressure environment where rep efficiency and speed is critical. And this is the exact environment that our new Inbox has been designed for. Let me show you around.
“We’ve heard from customers that support inboxes are typically complex, noisy, and clunky to use, which slows down responding to customers. We’ve worked extremely hard to make our Inbox simple, familiar, and easy to use, and easy to learn”
The Intercom Inbox is what support and customer facing teams use to handle customer conversations from the Intercom Messenger, email, or any integrated channel. The first thing I want to highlight is the completely new design and user experience. We’ve heard from customers that support inboxes are typically complex, noisy, and clunky to use, which slows down responding to customers. We’ve worked extremely hard to make our Inbox simple, familiar, and easy to use, and easy to learn. It feels more like the tools we use in our personal lives than complex business software.
Conversation lists and the thread are simple by default, making them quick and easy to scan and understand. But rich extra information and actions like viewing and switching to a different inbox, viewing conversation events, or accessing extra context about the customer or conversation can be expanded when needed.
The second thing I want to highlight is how fast the Inbox is to use. We’ve invested big in loading time performance. And this is because when you’re working at internet scale, every second counts. Moving between conversations is instant. It enables you to view and action conversations at lightning speed. Even moving between inboxes with tens, hundreds, or thousands of live conversations is instant. Our new inbox has a 10x performance improvement on the previous version and is now blazingly fast. And that’s even for our biggest customers operating at a huge scale.
“When you’re working in an inbox day in, day out, saving time on every interaction adds up to have a big impact on efficiency and your experience”
This improvement is significant. When you’re working in an inbox day in, day out, saving time on every interaction adds up to have a big impact on efficiency and your experience. But speed alone isn’t just about loading times. It’s about how fast you can take actions too. We know that reps who use keyboard shortcuts are significantly more efficient than those using a mouse. And that’s why we’ve designed the whole Inbox experience to be fully controllable with your keyboard. J and K moves you up and down conversations, square brackets to quickly show and hide the sidebars, R to start a reply, N to add a note.
And as traditional shortcuts are fiddly, easy to make mistakes with, and hard to remember, we’ve built a new feature called Command K that gives you keyboard control of every action in the Inbox from one place. Simply press Command K or Control K on Windows and then search for what you want to do. Command K can be used to find and set a macro, to add a GIF to the conversation, to assign to another teammate or team, to snooze the conversation, close the conversation, expand context sections in the right hand sidebar, and even jump to a different part of the Inbox like the ‘all’ list or to a specific inbox. And all of these actions have a direct hot key too. For example, M for macro, Z for snooze, and G to go to another part of the inbox. It’s the full power of the Inbox at your fingertips, making the new Inbox so much faster to use.
Finally, I want to talk about inbox configurability. Our Inbox is used by many different types of businesses, people and roles, each with unique preferences that are important to working efficiently. With this in mind, we’ve designed our new Inbox to be highly configurable. The right hand side bar can be fully customized per rep. You can pick what context to show and can install apps from the hundreds of apps in our public app store that can power four workflows. For example, Jira, Statuspage, and Salesforce. You can even build fully bespoke apps for your own unique use cases. For example, Exemplary Bank has their own security verification app.
Also configurable at the rep level is inbox language, making Intercom great for global teams. At launch, we’ll support French, German, and Brazilian Portuguese, with many more coming soon. And of course, you can use the Inbox in either light or dark mode. We’re actually the only support inbox that has a native dark mode capability built in.
Patrick Andrews demonstrates some of the most exciting features of Intercom’s next-gen Inbox at New at Intercom
And last but definitely not least, we’ve introduced a totally new layout option called Table Layout, which is accessible through the toggle in the bottom left hand corner. And of course, through Command K too. Table Layout is designed primarily for shift managers and the critical role they play in handling support at internet scale through ensuring conversations are triaged correctly, responses are high quality, and teams are utilized most effectively. Table Layout gives a much denser view of conversations, enabling you to quickly scan through key customizable information such as waiting time, SLA, and assignee.
You can quickly preview conversation content, and if needed, take a quick action like ‘reassign’, ‘mark as priority’, or ‘leave a note’. And this, like the rest of the Inbox, is all built with keyboard-first control too. When you combine this new table view with the recently released real-time dashboard that gives you live inbox and agent performance metrics, our new Inbox has a really rich set of tools to ensure managers can do their job fast and effectively too. So that was Intercom’s next-generation Inbox with simple, easy to use design that’s blazingly fast, designed to be keyboard-first, and is highly configurable, ensuring it’s extremely efficient to use for different businesses, people, and support team roles. That’s a wrap from me. Back to Paul.
Paul Adams: Thanks Patrick. Really great work there. So we’re already seeing some great feedback from customers using Inbox as part of our beta. The technology company and food delivery platform Vault is using Intercom to support its 10 million plus customers. The 3000-strong support team handles over one million conversations a week in Intercom, and they achieve a first-response time of under 60 seconds, which is pretty incredible service at that scale.
“This kind of design is next-level – and critical for a fast paced company like ours” – Vault, food delivery platform
They were kind enough to share this quote with us. “The thing I noticed the most about the next-gen Inbox is the speed. I really like that. It’s minimalistic and makes it clear where my focus is supposed to be. This kind of design is next-level – and critical for a fast paced company like ours.” So that’s our next-gen Inbox. It’s currently in beta. It’s going to be available to all Intercom customers in Q2, and our existing customers can join the waitlist today from a link that you’ll see in your current Intercom Inbox.
So let’s talk about our final new product announcement today. Our next-generation Surveys product, the surveys product that can do things no other surveys product can do. Many of our customers have been asking us to build Surveys for quite a long time. They already learn so much about customers using Intercom, seeing what they do in the product, talking with them in the product, but they also wanted a way to ask questions directly using Intercom. All the survey tools they were using were disconnected from Intercom, disconnected from the tech stack, which made creating targeted and tailored surveys difficult with low response rates versus engaging customers using Intercom.
So let’s be honest about surveys. How often do we see a poorly targeted broad blast email asking us to take a survey? For those of us who do open the email, how many do we even click to fill in? And of those, where they open this new webpage with many questions page after page, how many do we accurately and diligently fill in? Not very many. So when we looked into building a solution, we could see it was going to be a better way. And that is the first way this Surveys product we’ve built is better. The surveys are embedded directly in your product. So when you ask your customers about the product, they’re in the product. There’s no need to ask them to remember a load of stuff to get high quality answers.
“Businesses don’t just ask questions using the Surveys product, they can also take direct action”
But the biggest difference with our Surveys product is not just that, it’s what it can do later. Businesses don’t just ask questions using the Surveys product, they can also take direct action. Because Intercom is a single customer communication platform across sales, marketing, and support, we can do more with the responses. The responses to the survey questions are written directly to the customer profile, which can then automatically trigger workflows anywhere.
For example, as shown here, a survey from a B2B company is asking a customer what their role is in their company. That gets written to the customer record, which then becomes an entry criteria for all sorts of communication and action. For example, triggering an in-app message with content that is specific to the role. So if you work in marketing, here’s a product tour just for people like you who are marketers. Or you can send a follow-up email, again, that’s customized to them based on the survey response. Or you could trigger a product tour in the product, again, specific to the answer someone gave in a survey. So you can set a survey live and then set up workflows that drive direct action in the product based on the responses. It’s automatic, it’s in real time, it’s at internet speed and it’s at internet scale.
Historically, with other survey tools, it’s just not easy to set up these connected business workflows. Typically, the surveys product is different to the marketing automation product, which is different again to the digital adoption product. They are not connected together. But because Intercom is one connected customer communication platform, this is all easy to set up, it’s possible in minutes, and it’s obviously got a no-code, easy-to-use interface. These workflows, though, are not limited to just marketing. You can use survey responses to route future inbound support queries or use them to trigger sales team workflows. And because Intercom is integrated with other parts of our customers’ tech stacks, you can trigger workflows in other tools you use, any number of tools. For example, sales workflows in Salesforce triggered by an Intercom survey.
“Companies with the best first-party data in the future will have huge competitive advantages. They will be able to deeply personalize the customer’s experience, and this gives Intercom Surveys the potential not just to be a surveys tool but to be a critical strategic business tool”
Surveys obviously collects first-party data. It asks customers questions directly, and that’s just not easy. It’s not easy to collect additional first-party data about customers typically. We know too well at this point increased privacy is common to the internet. Companies with the best first-party data in the future will have huge competitive advantages. They will be able to deeply personalize the customer’s experience, and this gives Intercom Surveys the potential not just to be a surveys tool but to be a critical strategic business tool. Because the survey is asked in the context of the product, response rates are much, much higher and the quality of those responses is more accurate because people aren’t getting the survey out of context, like in their email, and trying to remember the answers to the questions.
And lastly, because Intercom is a single platform, surveys work seamlessly across web and mobile. You can target to whichever platform you want. Finally, if you do need to do email, email still has a role to play. For example, targeting customers no longer using your product who don’t come back to the product to take your survey – you can do that too. We’re really excited about Surveys. We think it is not only a better solution for asking customers what they think, need, and feel, but it will also become a strategic business tool for our customers. It’s going to provide them with insight. It’s going to trigger customer actions, which will help drive their business growth. So I wanted to pass to Zoe now to take a look at the product in more detail.
Product demo: Intercom Surveys
Zoe Sinnott, Senior Product Manager: Thanks Paul, and hi everyone. Zoe here. For the purposes of this demo, imagine I’m part of the success team at Exemplary Bank and we’re currently struggling to help new customers who open a savings account with us to activate it quickly. The best way to approach this would be to design a highly personalized onboarding experience, but our customers have different goals and needs, which makes this hard to do at scale.
However, with Intercom Surveys, this is now not just possible but actually easy. Our old onboarding campaign tried to address this problem with a simple set of messages sent to educate customers and give them pointers to get started. However, campaign engagement was low and our activation rate was poor as a result. What’s more, we knew the problem was that our onboarding process was ineffective because customers were telling us so.
Thankfully, Intercom released surveys which are quick and easy to set up and can be beautifully styled to match our product. They can also be sent seamlessly across web and mobile apps to catch customers when they’re engaged, or alternatively sent via email and other channels to reach those who are not active in the product if need be. So a simple survey like this one to identify the savings goals of our customers and understand how confident they are with their current savings plan will provide the insights we need to power a personalized onboarding experience. So let’s take a look at how to put this together in Intercom now.
“I’m able to save the responses to questions as an attribute in Intercom, which makes this feature insanely powerful as it means I can use the data to power follow-up messages and workflows”
Here you can see I’ve created a short and sweet onboarding survey with just those two questions that we’ll send to any customer who opens a savings account. You’ll notice here that I’m able to save the responses to questions as an attribute in Intercom, which makes this feature insanely powerful as it means I can use the data to power follow-up messages and workflows. You can see that customers will get this nice thank you message once they complete. And I can also check how this will look on mobile too.
So before I set the survey live, let’s take a look at how I’m going to use the data collected to trigger follow up actions. I’ve created an onboarding campaign in Series that will trigger whenever a customer completes the survey and their primary savings goal match is “house”. Next, it’ll check to see if their experience level is lower than four as we’re going to consider them to be fairly novice savers who need more guidance and help. And based on this criteria, these customers will receive more in-product education along with extra email touchpoints to help get them started. And all the content is personalized towards their goal of saving for a house.
And for our more sophisticated house savers, they will receive condensed in-product guidance and advanced tips to help them maximize their savings pot quickly. This will give our customers a far more personalized onboarding experience than what we have today and it’s going to massively improve our activation rate.
Okay. The survey’s now live, so let’s take a look at what our customers will see. So after a customer opens their savings account, they’ll receive the survey and can start filling out straight away. I’m going to go ahead and say that I’m saving for a house and admit that I’m not so confident with my current savings plan. As you can see, these surveys are low friction and very much in keeping with the style of our brand, which is great because it means our customers won’t feel like they’re being surveyed and we’ll get better response rates. And by the way, as you can see here, I would’ve received the same seamless experience had I have logged in through the mobile app too.
Now, because my survey responses have been recorded, I’ll next receive one of the product tours from the Series with personalized guidance on how to set up my new savings account to start saving for a house. As a new customer, this is a super cool way for the business to show me that they’re paying attention to my needs, and it all happened in a matter of minutes.
Zoe Sinnott demonstrates Surveys, Intercom’s new tool that enables businesses to collect customer insights and immediately act on them
Let me now put my business hat back on and show you what we’re seeing in Intercom now that responses are rolling in. So I can check on the performance of my survey directly in Intercom and easily see how many people have received the survey and how many have responded. I can also dig deeper into each question and see a breakdown of what our customers are saving for. And I could, of course, easily explore all of this data for deeper analysis if needed.
Another exciting update that’ll be launching soon is the ability to slice and dice our survey results by all the other customer data that we’re already storing in Intercom, such as their age, profession, location, you name it. This will allow us to easily access absolutely killer insights that we wouldn’t have been able to get outside of Intercom. But that’s not the only cool thing we can do with the responses stored in Intercom. Because they’re stored as an attribute on the customer record, simple survey questions can automatically turn into powerful workflows like we’ve seen with the onboarding journey in series.
We could slice and dice existing reports in Intercom using this data. For example, I could see how a customer savings goals affects the number of support conversations we receive so that we could zoom in on specific areas of our self-serve support to improve. Or I could configure the Messenger home screen to show helpful content that’s personalized to their goals like these articles to help them learn more about buying a home. And this is all happening off the back of one simple survey that I created to better understand my customers. There are tons of other questions I could ask and take actions based on.
“The first-party data that you collect can be used across the Intercom platform in really powerful ways to help build lasting relationships with your customers”
I could use a survey to understand what our customers think of our brand with an NPS-style question, and then use the responses to segment them into advocacy and detractor campaigns. Or I could use a survey to capture visitor intent and generate new leads. For example, I could collect mobile numbers or email addresses and ask them what their savings goals are and then use this data to enter them into a more personalized nurture campaign. Or I could use the survey to find out why customers turn from our product and use the data to enter them into a churn save campaign. These cases literally span the full customer journey and we’ll be sharing more of these in the breakout session later, so stay tuned.
That’s all from me for now. As you’ve seen here, Intercom makes it incredibly quick and easy to send targeted surveys to your customers seamlessly across web and mobile, which means you’ll get much more responses that are also of better quality. Plus, the first-party data that you collect can be used across the Intercom platform in really powerful ways to help build lasting relationships with your customers. So join us in the Engage breakout session later where we’ll show you how to create surveys to better understand your customer sentiment and how to take even more actions with the data collected. Now back to you, Paul.
In conversation with Brian Lederman, Coda
Paul Adams: Thanks so much, Zoe. Now that you’ve seen Surveys in action, let’s hear from a customer who can talk about the power of Surveys firsthand. Brian, thank you so much for coming. It’s great to have you here. Maybe as a start, why don’t introduce yourself and tell us about Coda’s vision for our customer engagement.
Brian Lederman, Head of Sales, Success & Support at Coda: Yeah. Thanks Paul. Really happy to be here. I’m Brian Lederman. Thanks for having me. I head up Sales, Success and Support at Coda. Coda, as you know, is an all-in-one doc for teams. We take together the best components of documents, spreadsheets, and applications, and we present it in one unified surface. And Coda is a very horizontal product. We can do a lot of things for a lot of different people, and that means that we have no one-size-fits-all approach to the customer experience. We have a very key operating principle to ensure that support and the customer experience is a really big differentiator for Coda, and Intercom plays a really big part in that. It’s been working so far. We actually haven’t had a single quarter where our CSO was below 90%. So thanks for helping us power it.
Paul Adams: Yeah, absolutely. That’s amazing, amazing scores. We are big Coda users, big Coda fans at Intercom. Well, let’s talk more about that. So how are you engaging your customers today? How does Intercom fit into your vision?
Brian Lederman: Yeah, Intercom’s really been a big part of the customer experience since day one. I’m pretty sure we had Intercom before we had any customers actually. And of course it powers our entire customer support experience. It’s plugged heavily into our product to ensure that’s really powering our user journey. We also use Intercom to engage with our customers in one-to-one and one-to-many marketing interactions. That’s been really helpful in the pandemic when we had to switch to new ways to communicate to customers. But now we’re moving back into the real world and we’re actually using Intercom to drive messaging into in-person events as well. So that’s been really fun to use Intercom to power those types of marketing interactions.
“Intercom really helps us understand our user personas and where they are in their journey with Coda so that we can continue to provide a really rich and personal experience based on who that user is, and where they are in their experience with our product” – Brian Lederman, Coda
Brian Lederman: One of the things about having a very horizontal product is that it’s difficult to provide a very contextual experience for each individual user. And so Intercom really helps us understand our user personas and where they are in their journey with Coda so that we can continue to provide a really rich and personal experience based on who they are, who that user is, and where they are in their experience with our product.
Paul Adams: Yeah, that’s great. Really, really cool. Obviously Intercom is not the only tool or system you use. And so what are the ones you’re using alongside Intercom?
Brian Lederman: Coda absolutely runs on Coda. We rely really heavily on the Intercom Pack, the integration that we have with Intercom to pull in a lot of really rich user data and customer experience data into Coda. That gives us the ability to really synthesize and analyze this information, and of course, collaborate and share it across the rest of the company. We also use Salesforce on the sales and marketing side so that we have Intercom integrated really seamlessly into our CRM. This enables us to really provide all the necessary user detail and customer information all in one place. So regardless of the system engagement you’re using, we still have that same single source of truth with Intercom and our other tools.
Paul Adams: Yeah. It’s great to hear that you’re using it that way. That’s the way we intend it to be used for lots of different types of customer communication, and then obviously connecting with customers’ tech stacks as well.
Brian Lederman: Yeah. We really want to be able to provide all of our different teams the tool that they to use to do their job, but certainly not sacrifice the data integrity and really provide that fast time to value add of information.
Paul Adams is joined by Brian Lederman to discuss the ways Intercom is helping Coda to scale alongside its customers
Paul Adams: Yeah. Cool. Another thing called Surveys. We launched Surveys in beta. You’ve been using it in beta. Tell us about your experience there. Where is it providing the most value?
Brian Lederman: Yeah, it’s been a really great beta to be a part of. Thanks for having us included in it. We use Surveys for two main reasons. One is to measure NPS, and another is to understand the onboarding journey in a more meaningful way. So we really want to enhance that user persona and try to provide a more contextualized and personal experience space on the user feedback. So we really get these rich attributes now that will help enhance our understanding of our customers. We’re, of course, delivering the surveys right in the product, which is a really seamless and elegant experience for our customers and we feel like we’re getting really good responses with really relevant information.
So once we capture the information, we can then synthesize it for our teams and use that data to then power downstream behavior. As an example, if we have a survey result that maybe was a bit of a detractor, somebody who was having a negative or not so great experience on their onboarding journey with Coda, we can then take that information and get it in the hands of a CSM or someone on the support side to really step in at the right moment.
“The idea that we can provide the right level of interaction to meet the customer in their moment of need and turn that moment of frustration into a moment of light has been really powerful” – Brian Lederman, Coda
The idea that we can provide the right level of interaction to meet the customer in their moment of need and turn that moment of frustration into a moment of light has been really powerful. At the same time, we of course have really great survey responses. We have very happy customers as well. We want to take those moments of delight and really amplify it, or maybe drop that person into more of a sales engagement, get that information to the hands of the sales team. So it’s been a really powerful tool for us and a really fun beta to be a part of.
Paul Adams: Yeah, it’s exciting for us, honestly, because when we designed Surveys, our intention was that, yes, you can do NPS, yes, you can ask customers questions, but the real power is in what happens afterwards. And so seeing some of that thinking validated in the beta with companies like yourselves doing things downstream, it’s just really, really great.
Brian Lederman: We’ve actually been able to take it really far with the Intercom integration as well because we’re bringing this information in and then sharing it across the organization. I mean, our engineers, our product team, everybody wants to know what our customers are saying. And so Intercom Surveys and then the Coda Pack really enables us to provide that voice of the customer across the whole organization. It’s been really fun.
Paul Adams: Cool. That’s really, really good to hear for us. So you obviously use Intercom a lot in Coda across all the teams, like you said, in deep ways. What’s next? Like where do you go from here? What’s the future hold for Coda’s partnership with Intercom?
Brian Lederman: Yeah. We need to continue to deliver that same level of customer experience at scale. And so we’ll continue to partner with Intercom as we grow. We’re growing incredibly rapidly and we need a tool to really be nimble and agile and grow with us. This year is a really important year for us as well to open up more omnichannel experiences. And so we’re looking forward to partnering with the Intercom team to provide more ways for customers to communicate with us.
Paul Adams: Yeah. Great. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for coming and thanks for all the great input.
Brian Lederman: Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Paul Adams: Not at all.
Surveys is available today. For existing customers, we’re offering a 14-day free trial. And if you’re new to Intercom, just visit intercom.com/surveys to learn more about how to get started.
One more thing, because Intercom is one connected platform, everything works with everything. All three new products work together. So Exemplary Bank can use one unified platform across sales, marketing, and support to deliver better experiences and ultimately business growth. As you just saw, Exemplary Bank can trigger a survey to capture info on a new customer. And based on the survey responses, their team can create a personalized onboarding experience, helping the bank’s customers save money.
Imagine then that a customer, let’s say it’s Jasmine, she wants to buy a new car. She doesn’t know her transfer limit and calls in to find out. Of course, she gets put in a queue, stuck on hold. Now though, rather than just having to wait it out, she can seamlessly move to messaging using Intercom Switch. And when she moves to Messenger, she’ll receive quick personalized support because Intercom helps Exemplary Bank know it’s Jasmine. They know Jasmine has been saving. They know she has a great credit score and all that rich data makes it easy for Exemplary Bank to approve her transfer.
This is also better for the bank. Their support team can quickly and efficiently solve Jasmine’s request far faster than ever before, thanks to the new Inbox. Jasmine’s act of transferring money could also trigger a survey, helping the bank know how Jasmine thinks they’re doing and giving them important customer data for the future. No other product in the market can enable this joined up experience. But with Intercom, because we are a single customer communication platform where everything is connected, it’s not only possible but it’s easy. And with that, I want to hand over to Leandra to share a final exciting announcement.
Introducing Intercom’s Premier Services program
Leandra Fishman, Chief Revenue Officer at Intercom: Thanks, Paul. What amazing innovations. I know how thrilled our customers will be, and I can’t wait to see the value that these new products will deliver. And now I’m so happy to share our final exciting announcement, which will help us continue to be true strategic partners to our customers. Customer success is at the heart of everything we do here at Intercom, and we’re proud to offer many options to support our customers to ensure they’re successful with Intercom, from self-serve online resources to guided support from an Intercom expert. Whatever level of assistance you need, we’re here to deliver.
“Because your success is our success, with our new offering, we’ll be with you every step of the way to ensure Intercom is masterfully implemented so you and your teams are supported to maximize the value you see from Intercom”
And starting today, we’re excited to offer something new, our Premier Services program. Premier Services ensures our customers see breakthrough value from Intercom as they evolve and grow their businesses. Led by experts on our customer solutions and support teams, your dedicated Intercom team will guide you to optimal usage from implementation to training and ongoing world-class support. Because your success is our success, with our new offering, we’ll be with you every step of the way to ensure Intercom is masterfully implemented so you and your teams are supported to maximize the value you see from Intercom.
So what’s included? You get to decide. Each program is customized to fit the specific needs of your team and your business with exclusive Intercom assistance to guide you all along the way. We’re excited to offer three different services that you can pick and choose from, starting with Premier Onboarding. Premier Onboarding increases the time to value by getting your teams up and running with Intercom. We’ll first walk you through the installation process from data implementation to adding apps and integrations. Then based off your business goals, we’ll recommend and guide you through the best configurations and workflows, settings and automation for your team. We’ll also hold ongoing and customized training sessions for your key users, all to ensure you’re trained in Intercom’s best practices and get the fullest value from the platform.
Next is Premier Success. Premier Success optimizes your Intercom usage and ensures your implementation adapts as you grow. You’ll get personalized recommendations to keep your Intercom setup running smoothly with ongoing project management of your Intercom configuration and full workspace audits and reviews. You’ll also have ongoing engagements with our product and R&D teams with access to beta programs, tailored security reviews, feature requests straight to our product team and so much more, all to ensure you are getting set up with the right workflows and seeing continued value from using Intercom.
And finally, we have Premier Support. Premier Support gives you faster help exactly when you need it. You’ll have access to a dedicated support team with advanced technical skills and the option to schedule video support calls with the fastest response time that our team has to offer, even in as little as 10 minutes. We pride ourselves in providing the best possible customer support, and Premier Support truly follows you to ensure you are able to maintain your day-to-day workflows.
Whether you choose one service or all three, your Intercom team will work with you hand in hand to ensure you see tangible breakthrough success. You can get started with Premier Services today by talking to your relationship manager or chatting with sales on the Intercom Messenger on our homepage.
This new offering is just one exciting example of how we’re continuing to support our customers in new ways. We’re also making huge investments in our platform to meet your growing needs. Here are a few examples. We now offer European data hosting with our world-class data security and privacy compliance. Customer trust is so important to us at Intercom and localized hosting along with many of our industry certifications help you engage with your customers safely and securely. Keep an eye out for localized hosting coming soon in Australia. We’re very excited about that.
And as you’ve heard today, we’re also continuing to innovate to better serve your global teams and most complex use cases. We’re continuing to scale our platform and you’ll see bulk features and permission releases coming soon. We’re so thrilled to bring these new updates to you today, and we are here with you every step of the way, whether you’re a team of 5, 500, or 5000. Thanks for trusting us as a partner. And Karen, take us home.
Karen Peacock: I am so excited about the future and everything we just announced today. We talked about Switch. No more waiting on hold. Now you can switch to messaging with a single tap. We talked about our next generation Inbox, helping you and your support teams be blazingly fast. We talked about Surveys, to capture customer insights and act on them in real time to build personalized experiences. And Premier Services, to maximize the value that you’re getting from Intercom with dedicated onboarding and success and support.
As you can see, we are investing deeply in our products and innovation and delivering breakthrough value to customers. I want to thank Wayne Stewart from Atlassian and Brian Lederman from Coda for joining us a few minutes ago. And we have folks from 2U and Code for America who I want to thank in advance for joining our breakout sessions coming up next. We believe ongoing engagement is the future of internet business, and Intercom is your Engagement OS. We are honored to work with you and to be your partner as you build strong relationships with your customers, drive growth, and scale. Thank you so much.
Anna Griffin: Thank you, Karen, and a genuine thank you to everyone involved at New at Intercom: our presenters, the demo team, our customers and partners, and the folks behind the scenes who listen and learn from you to build our new products, and the team who made all this happen today. After today, I hope you’ll agree that the moment of engagement when prospects and customers are in your product, on your site thinking about your brand and open to what you have to say, to share and sell, is your very best opportunity to form a human connection. Building engagement is your business, your bottom line, your future, and we’re here to help you make the most of it. Thank you for sharing your time, and most of all, for inspiring us.
Ready to learn more about Intercom, the Engagement OS? Click here for more details.
