No more compromises: How Firsty delivers fast, high-quality support while keeping costs low with Intercom’s AI-first platform

We spoke with Gauthier Thierens, Co-founder of telecom startup Firsty, about the challenges the team faced as a new business trying to differentiate itself in the telco space, and their secret to gaining a competitive edge (spoiler alert: it’s best-in-class customer service).

With Intercom’s complete AI-first platform, Firsty has been able to scale its support to meet the needs of the thousands of new customers signing up daily – without having to sacrifice quality or increase headcount and costs. With AI on the frontlines assisting the support team, Firsty is already saving €10,000 ($11,000) in salary costs each month, and forecasts a sharp increase in those cost savings as the business continues to grow.

Let’s jump in.

Can you tell us a bit about Firsty, what your customer communications setup before Intercom was like, and what challenges you faced?

Firsty is the first global telecom provider that gives free mobile data for travelers all across the globe. There’s no need to buy expensive roaming bundles or switch (e)SIMs – by simply installing the Firsty mobile app, you can be connected to the internet wherever you are.

Firsty is a completely new player and was founded in 2023, so we didn't use any other customer service tools before Intercom. As a fresh entrant in the telecom market, we were keen on establishing a best-in-class support service from the get-go. Our primary challenge was ensuring that our customer service could outperform other telco providers, which are often criticized for slow and subpar support.

Our ultimate goal is to build a humanless frontline support system and we feel that Intercom will be a great partner throughout that journey.

What did you need to solve those challenges?

We needed a robust and efficient third-party platform that would enable us to deliver fast, reliable, and high-quality customer support to differentiate ourselves in the telecom landscape.

Since our mobile application is our core (and for now, only) product, we wanted an in-app support tool through which users could reach us on a 24/7 basis. And to outperform the cost structures of traditional telecom companies that are heavily invested in customer support, we required AI for automated support from day one.

Since we are a global telecom provider, our customers come from anywhere, so advanced and automated multilingual support was a must for us. With AI tools – such as Fin AI Agent and AI Copilot – able to quickly learn from a variety of data sources (web, help center, previous answers, etc.) and provide support in multiple languages, we knew they would be the key to us providing fast, efficient support while keeping costs low.

We were looking for a platform that could integrate with our own tech stack to retrieve relevant data for proactive support, automate manual actions outside of the mobile app environment via API calls, and that would also enable us to conduct user research by offering a way to proactively reach out to a certain user segment to gather more insights about new features and issues.

And on top of all that – it needed to be able to help us scale from zero to millions of users.

Can you please describe how you have implemented and used Intercom to solve those challenges, including the features you have found most useful?

Intercom’s complete AI-first customer service platform checked all the boxes when it came to our needs.

We have integrated the Intercom mobile SDK (via Flutter) into the Firsty application. Through the customizability of Intercom’s solution, it feels like the intercom interface is actually a part of the Firsty application, which is very good for building our own brand (colors, wording, etc.).

In order to scale rapidly and overcome the initial hurdles of the startup phase, we understood that the partnership between human support agents and AI would be very important. Our team rolled out AI gradually and in a controlled manner across our support services, enabling us to monitor and optimize its performance.

Today, we’re seeing huge benefits from a number of Intercom features:

• Fin AI Agent’s multilingual support really helps us to address customers’ issues in their own language and increase automated resolution rates.

• Workflows have helped us a lot in steering conversations in the right direction in order to avoid having open-ended queries. This is particularly relevant in the early days of a company, since there are fewer data points (no track record of solved queries) that can help you with resolving open-ended questions.

• Custom Actions have been very useful for enhancing replies with data from our own database in real time, as well as updating data points in our database directly from customer conversations.

• Fin AI Copilot is very new, but is already helping our external support team to reuse answers that our in-house team has previously given to customers by leveraging conversation history.

The next step for us is to further automate the support process by connecting Fin AI Agent to our internal systems so it can use real-time data in replies to customer queries and update data points in our backend.

What results have you seen since you implemented Intercom? Any hard metrics you can share?

Because we started with Intercom before we had any users, and we’re still in the early days of Firsty, the most important metrics for us are:

• Conversation volume managed: we saw our user base grow by thousands of users per day and therefore had to handle up to 200 support tickets on a daily basis. For that, we need a very flexible and scalable setup that we can easily customize to our needs with a variety of features – which Intercom provides.

• Average response time: since we are a B2C application that focuses on connectivity all across the globe, users are usually reaching out whenever they are facing connectivity issues. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that they are served a response in the shortest time frame possible. With Intercom, our median response time is under 90 seconds, and 70% of our total support questions are answered within five minutes.

• Automated resolution rate: throughout our journey with Intercom we have been able to narrow down the amount of different issues that a user can have, which allows for further optimization of the automated resolution rate. This is particularly useful because our users are all in different time zones and speak all kinds of languages. The higher our automated resolution rate, the less cost-heavy our customer support center is. Right now, our automated resolution rate stands at 43%, which saves our team a ton of time and means we can manage increasing support volumes without having to drive up costs.

• CSAT: in order to increase the word-of-mouth promotion, we’re focusing on a high CSAT.

Intercom's platform (and specifically, Workflows and Fin) has saved us around €50,000 ($55,000) in salary costs over the past five months, which is crucial at this point of our startup. And we know that the headcount costs we’ll save with Intercom’s automation will scale exponentially the more that we grow.

Please share any specific tips, tricks, or strategies you found helpful to achieve these results.

Don’t wait too long to experiment with different features, and take a step-by-step approach to automation. For certain issues, it’s better to set up workflows that automatically steer your customers in a specific direction. For other issues or queries, it’s easier to really give the stage to the user and let Fin AI Agent reply to their questions.

In a startup, where features are constantly being added to your product and sometimes new bugs are introduced into a live environment, it’s key that you take a very iterative approach to customer service. Intercom offers the tools to do so, which is a must-have for a dynamic business like ours.

As a B2C startup, it is crucial that you try to embed a reliable and efficient customer service platform into your solution from day one. Not only does it help you rapidly deal with all kinds of support cases, it also gives you a tool to stay in close touch with your customers. Building a user-friendly product can only be done by listening to your customers. Intercom has the tools to proactively reach out to specific user segments in order to gain fast insights while building features.

How does Intercom fit into the rest of your tech stack? What tools have you connected to Intercom?

We have integrated the Intercom mobile SDK into our internal systems so that when a user starts a conversation with Firsty via the in-app support chat on mobile, all information about the user’s account is immediately retrieved from the backend to make sure that the conversation can be guided in the right direction.

There is no longer a need for the user to enter any account details, because we know exactly which state the user is in. This avoids lengthy “preliminary ” questions and allows us to go straight to the point and identify the issue.

What do you think is the biggest benefit of Intercom?

I believe Intercom is the perfect tool to scale your support services very rapidly – and without compromises. It’s possible to plug and play with the wide variety of features that Intercom has to offer in order to define your preferred level of automation.

For each step of the way from fully human to fully automated support, there are features that will meet your needs.

Human conversation > Workflows > Custom Actions > Fin using predefined content > Fin enhanced with data from internal systems.

Another great thing about Intercom is that everything is self-service, with clear and concise documentation so there is no need to wait for Intercom to approve or set up anything for you to get started. For a startup, where time is the most important resource, this is absolutely crucial.

What advice would you give to others considering using Intercom?

I would definitely recommend that startups try and automate their support processes from day one by making use of the variety of AI-powered tools that Intercom has to offer.

Investing early on in automating support processes will drastically decrease the amount of support resources needed down the line, because with Intercom, you have a central place to collect, store, and process information about all issues from the beginning. From there, you can build in as much automation as you want, and Intercom’s tools are there to help you along the way!

To achieve the best possible user experience, customer support should be your number one priority. That is why we chose Intercom.