Built for you: Banners, Series, and more features to create a conversational experience

Customers expect a seamless and personalized experience at every point of their journey, but managing all of these interactions across different channels, teams, and tools can often be difficult and inefficient.

According to research, more than two-thirds of people waste up to an hour a day navigating between apps at work – which equates to almost 32 days a year. With a vision to simplify this process, Intercom combines conversational support, marketing, and engagement into a single platform, enabling you to create and deliver great conversational experiences – wherever your customers are. Now, we’re making it even easier to have conversations with your customers, with powerful updates to our management tools for marketing and support teams. Here are a few highlights from this quarter.

Want to see these features in action? Check out our latest Built for you webinar.

Get in front of your customers – without disrupting their flow

Getting your customers’ attention can be hard, and doing it in a way that doesn’t distract from your product or website is even harder. That’s why we built Banners – an unobtrusive, effective way for you to reach your customers with announcements, promotions, proactive support messages, and more. Like other Intercom message types, Banners come packed with tons of customization and targeting capabilities, without the need to write any code.

You can style Banners to match your brand, as well as personalize the content by adding data attributes or actions for your customers to take. To ensure that your Banners only appear when it’s optimal for customers and your team, you can schedule them to send at specific times, such as during your office hours.

Design cohesive messaging flows across multiple channels with our new visual campaign builder

Intercom enables you to have conversations with your customers across a wide variety of channels and message types – from email, Mobile Carousels, Product Tours, bots, and Banners, to chatting directly through the Intercom Messenger. Our new visual campaign builder, Series, makes it possible to build all of these message types into carefully orchestrated, behavior-based messaging campaigns to engage your customers in a contextual way – at the right place and at the right time.

Offering a single place to map out your campaigns across channels and an easy way to visually spot any holes or inconsistencies in the customer journey, Series is a powerful tool for creating seamless customer experiences. No more bouncing between whiteboards, Post-It notes, Intercom and other tools to map out your messaging campaigns.

Its powerful targeting capabilities also allow you to segment your audience based on how they’ve engaged with prior messages or behaved in your product, making it easier to optimize campaigns and drive customer action – whether your goal is activation, retention, or re-engagement.

Get more leads with less effort with new A/B testing and retriggering rules for Custom Bots

We’ve made several enhancements to Custom Bots to make them more effective and efficient for your team to use.

• A/B testing and goal setting: It’s now easier to understand which bot messages are performing best so you can optimize them to drive more leads. A/B test messages sent by your bot and set goals to see which version is most effective.
• Re-engage returning website visitors: You can now trigger Custom Bots to appear more than once for website visitors. Using our rules, you can customize when you want your bot to be seen: once per user, until it’s opened, engaged with, or dismissed.
• Streamlined bot management: While your bots will also continue to live in Operator, you can now manage them directly in the Outbound section of Intercom, where all of your other outbound messages live. We’ve also merged bots for visitors and users to make it even simpler to keep track of all your Custom Bots.

Improve email performance with new targeting and reporting capabilities

We’ve added two new features to Outbound Messaging in Intercom to help you better engage your customers via email:

• You can now target emails based on your customers’ website behavior so that you’re reaching them at just the right moment. When setting up your email, you can choose to send based on visits to specific URLs, or time on a specific page.
• With new reporting trendlines, you can better understand email performance over time. If you have versioning in your plan, you’ll be able to keep track of changes that were made and the impact different versions have on your messages.

Optimize your Mobile Carousels by understanding where users dropped off

We’ve updated reporting for Mobile Carousels to include data on views for each screen. If you have message versioning, you’ll also be able to drill down into version data for each screen of your carousels. With this granular insight, you can improve your carousel performance by testing new content or having fewer screens.

Efficiently scale your conversational support with new and improved Inbox management capabilities

Automatically close unresponsive conversations, and more with our rules updates

Our new rules enable you to automatically close conversations where a customer hasn’t replied in a specific amount of time. This means your team can spend less time hunting down and closing conversations that have gone silent, and more time helping customers that need support.

To make rules work the way your team does, we’ve also made the inactive teammate trigger event more flexible. You can now choose a longer delay (up to 14 days) before the rule triggers.

Prevent tags from getting unwieldy with new permissions

Alongside conversation data, tags play a crucial role in understanding and categorizing the types of requests your team is handling. But, without the right controls, it’s easy for your list of tags to balloon and become inconsistent.

With our new tagging permissions, you can restrict the ability to create, edit, and archive conversation tags to specific teammates. You can also use tagging permissions with custom roles to ensure that teammates have consistent access to the right privileges.

Keep your SLAs organized by removing unused ones

As your support needs evolve, you may have SLA targets that you no longer need. To help you easily manage your SLAs, we’ve added the ability to archive or delete targets from your list.

Get the exact conversation data you need with CSV export improvements

In addition to the out-of-the-box team performance and operational effectiveness metrics we provide, we’re making it easier for you to calculate your custom metrics outside of Intercom.

For more sophisticated reporting needs, you can now choose which fields and conversations to include in your CSV export, instead of having to wade through rows of irrelevant data. And to save you even more time, you can schedule recurring exports to be delivered directly to you via email.

Manage customer conversations more efficiently and securely with API v2.2

Our latest API updates give you more powerful ways to assign, manage, and report on your customer conversations. The latest API version enables you to:

• See the title of a conversation.
• Assign conversations to both a teammate and a team, including the ability to show and search for these separately in the conversation object.
• Redact specific parts of customer conversations, including the source message.
• List all segments associated with a contact or company.

Proactively resolve customer conversations before they start

With new predictive answers in Resolution Bot, you can answer your customers’ questions before they even start typing in the Intercom Messenger.

When a customer opens the Intercom Messenger to start a new conversation, Resolution Bot will detect relevant context – like the page in your app or on your website they’re on – and suggest the answers most often useful in that context. To ensure that Resolution Bot is suggesting the right content, you can also exclude specific answers from being sent.

Do more from Intercom with new apps for more efficient human support and improved data syncing

Bring the tools and data you need in Intercom so your team has the context they need, and they can spend less time switching tabs. Here are some of the latest updates to apps in the Intercom App Store:

• Supportman: Surface Intercom metrics and ratings in Slack to better understand your team’s performance and customer satisfaction.
• DataScope: Create forms to issue NPS and CSAT surveys, report incidents, and more to capture and analyze key information about your business.
• Blaze Verify: Validate and sync customer or prospect email addresses by connecting your Blaze Verify account to Intercom to improve the deliverability of your email campaigns.
• Pipedream: Create sophisticated, event-driven workflows by connecting the external tools your team uses to Intercom.

Our powerful new features enable your team to focus on delivering great conversational experiences, instead of switching between multiple, disparate marketing and support tools. By managing your entire customer journey from one single tool, you can ensure that you’re truly engaging your customers at the right time, in the right way, and in the right place.

We’re always looking for more feedback on how Intercom can make this easier for you, so be sure to share your thoughts with us! You can also check out what other customers and teammates from across Intercom are saying about these new features and updates over in Interconnected, our customer community forum. See you there!