Built for you: Powerful updates to Series, Banners, Resolution Bot, and more to help you stay personal at scale
A lot has happened in the last 12 months. The world experienced exponential change and began navigating its way towards the “new normal,” and the way that companies support and engage their customers has rapidly evolved.
Here at Intercom, we doubled down on building and shipping features across our conversational support and engagement solutions that would fundamentally shift how our customers communicate with their own. As businesses were forced to quickly pivot to remote working early last year, these features proved crucial in helping teams to stay aligned, while maintaining the seamless, personal experiences their customers expected.
As the year went on, we continued to build on these features, releasing powerful updates to make them work harder for you – based directly on your feedback. Our latest updates to Series, Banners, Articles, and Resolution Bot, to name but a few, empower you to streamline your messaging workflows, improve team collaboration, and most importantly, create better experiences to meet your customers’ evolving needs.
Want to see these features in action? Check out our latest Built for you webinar.
Efficiently scale your messaging with new additions to Series
We released our visual campaign builder, Series, last year to empower you to design the most effective multichannel messaging campaigns. Since its launch, we’ve been working tirelessly behind the scenes to make the product even more powerful, releasing several new features that make Series that much more effective at helping you reach your customers in the right place, at the right time – and with the right message.
Split test messaging flows to find the optimal path
Knowing which messages to send – and when – can be tricky. To help you narrow down what’s resonating most with your customers, we’ve added split testing to Series so you can test up to five different message types, message content, CTAs, timing, and more. When you accrue enough data to determine the most effective path, you can select the winning variant and direct any new users that enter that Series flow to follow that path.
Collaborate seamlessly with handy annotations
With so many campaigns running simultaneously, it can be difficult to keep track of everything that’s happening. We’ve added annotations to Series so you can leave notes for yourself or collaborate with teammates directly within the campaign builder to ensure everyone’s on the same page.
Reach next-level milestones with new goal-setting capabilities
Up until now, goals in Series have been based on individual data in Intercom, enabling you to see how each of your customers is taking action from your messages. We’ve added new goal-setting capabilities to Series so you can now set goals based on company data, giving you a broader view of how your Series are performing at a company level.
Streamline workflows with tag management
Tags in Series are helpful for identifying where customers are in the user journey and what actions they have, or haven’t, taken up to that point. To ensure your messaging flows run smoothly, it’s important to manage these tags, which is why we’ve made it possible to remove any that you no longer need. Use this to streamline workflows, automate subsequent message sending, and more.
Get in front of your customers with new and improved Banners
We only launched our Banners feature a few months ago, but we’re already hearing that it’s one of your favorite ways to reach your customers in a meaningful yet subtle way. Since then, we’ve released a few additional updates to give you more control over how people see and engage with your banners. We’ve also integrated them with our other message types so you can create a seamless customer experience – wherever the conversation takes you.
Make Banners non-dismissible to stay top of mind with customers
If you’re looking for customers to take specific actions from a message, it’s important that it stands out from the crowd. To help ensure your customers never miss a message, we’ve introduced new non-dismissible Banners. You can also choose whether the banner should be dismissed when the action is taken, or if it should persist regardless of whether or not the customer performs that action.
Show customers around your product directly from a banner
Bringing customers on a personalized walkthrough of your product or a new feature is a surefire way to increase engagement, reduce confusion, and create a great in-product experience. But sometimes, customers want to explore at their own pace. To help you give your customers the best of both worlds, we’ve integrated Banners and Product Tours so you can now trigger a tour directly from a banner, empowering your customers to be shown around at a time that suits them. Announce new features and then take customers on a guided tour, or welcome new customers and show them around your product.
Supercharge your conversational support with more coverage from Resolution Bot
We’ve added new features to Resolution Bot to give you even more support coverage. Set Resolution Bot to answer multiple questions with new looping mode, and have it introduce itself to customers with Bot Intro. It can also automatically close inactive conversations to prevent them from reaching your team, so they can stay focused on what they do best.
Keep the conversation going with our new Looping Bot
Looping mode in Resolution Bot is your key to resolving more customer conversations. Up until now, Resolution Bot has been set up to answer one question in a conversation, but will now attempt to answer multiple questions within the same conversation to keep your inbound conversation volumes low – and customer satisfaction high.
Let Resolution Bot introduce itself with Bot Intro
Resolution Bot is a powerful way for you to provide support at scale, but it’s important that your customers know they’re not talking to a human. With Bot Intro, you can now give customers more clarity that they’re speaking with a bot while looping is enabled, so they can ask clearer questions and increase your team’s resolution rate.
Where there’s no answer, there’s an article
In the case that Resolution Bot doesn’t have the answer to a customer’s query, it can now be set to automatically surface relevant articles to help answer their questions.
Prevent inactive conversations from being routed to your team with auto-close
Having inactive conversations constantly routed to your team can be a time sink. When looping mode is enabled in Resolution Bot, you now have the option to automatically close conversations that have been inactive for more than three minutes. The default setting will be to route the conversation to a team member, but you can amend this in your Operator settings.
Filter Resolution Bot reports by mode settings
With our new reporting filters in Resolution Bot, you can break down performance metrics for Resolution Bot based on its mode settings – whether you want to see results for just looping, just one-time, or both.
Empower customers to self-serve with bot-only mode in Resolution Bot
You can now enable customers to choose a self-serve path with bot-only mode in Resolution Bot. If chosen, Resolution Bot will send customers a link of your choice and close out the conversation.
Increase support efficiency with updates to Inbox and Articles
We’ve made powerful updates to our conversational support features to make supporting your customers that much simpler. Our new Articles capabilities provide an easier and more streamlined way to create help center documentation, and more granular inbox permissions give you increased control over who can access which inbox.
Make it easy for customers to find information with new content formatting tools
You can now add anchor links, tables, alt text, and text dividers to your help center docs to make it even easier for customers to find the information they need.
- Anchor links: Add links to multiple sections of articles in your Help Center in order to direct customers to specific pieces of information.
- Tables: Avoid huge walls of text by formatting your articles with tables to break down more complex information.
- Alt text: Add alt text to images in articles so screen readers can have more access to help content. This change will make your content WCAG compliant.
- Dividers: Separate different sections of your articles by inserting a horizontal divider.
Keep sensitive information secure with new inbox permissions
With our new inbox permissions, you can keep sensitive information under lock and key by limiting which conversations a teammate can access in the team inbox. You can restrict access to a subset of teammates, entire teams, or you can set this permission in bulk using custom roles.
Protect your team’s time with the ability to prevent replies to certain messages
We’ve introduced several new messaging features to give you more control over your conversations. You can now prevent customers from replying to certain message types so that your team isn’t overwhelmed with inbound conversation volume, protecting their time and allowing them to focus on sensitive and complex issues.
Create a fully automated experience by disabling the message composer
When designing a Custom Bot path, you now have the option to disable the message composer when the conversation has ended and create a fully automated experience by preventing customers from replying.
Customize or prevent replies to post messages
With our new no-reply post messages, you can choose whether your posts can be responded to with text or emoji reactions – or prevent replies altogether.
Create a seamless mobile experience with new additions to Mobile Carousels, Articles, and universal links
Our latest mobile enhancements enable you to trigger messages and articles based on user behavior, prevent you from having to update your iOS push certificates on a yearly basis, and keep customers engaged and in your app with universal linking.
Trigger Mobile Carousels and Articles from buttons – right inside your app
You can now launch Mobile Carousels or Articles directly from content in your mobile app. Set buttons to open up an article or carousel, or have them trigger based on specific customer actions. Some examples of this could be:
- Triggering an article or mobile carousel when a payment has failed.
- Surfacing an article on your orders screen that outlines shipping and return policies.
- Including a list of tutorials that open up individual carousels.
New changes to mobile push notifications certificates
Remembering to update your iOS push certificates each year can be tricky. Luckily, you can now switch to using a .p8 certificate instead, which doesn’t expire every 12 months. Once you make the switch, there’s no need to worry about upgrading again.
Keep customers in your desired platform with newly supported iOS universal links
Intercom now supports universal links in iOS apps, enabling you to send your users to your iOS app or web page, depending on a customer’s context. For example, if they tap a universal link on their mobile device, it can open a mobile app, but if they click it on their desktop, it can open a web page. From version 9.3.0, the iOS SDK is able to handle the universal links that you use in articles, conversations, in-product messages (like Mobile Carousels and posts), and push notifications. This keeps customers in your app and lets you direct them to the right screen.
More sophisticated reporting with the Intercom API
Last, but certainly not least, we’ve added new functionality to our API to give you more sophisticated reporting and workflow power. With API version 2.3, you can now access conversation data in your external analytics tools or use it with automation platforms to build out more custom workflows. As part of these updates, you can now:
- See the data attributes of a conversation
- Update a conversation’s data attribute
- List all data attributes associated with conversations
With big plans for the year ahead, we’re focused on continuing to build products and features that help you to create stellar experiences across the entire customer lifecycle, based directly on your feedback. If you’re interested in hearing what other Intercom customers are sharing, or want to chat to us about feedback that you have, we’d love to hear from you over in Interconnected – our customer community forum. Come say hi 👋
