We spoke with Russell Mitchell, Head of Customer Success at trumpet, about how his team uses Intercom to meet customers where they are, provide proactive support and product education to set them up for success using the trumpet platform, and create stand-out experiences that result in increased product adoption.

I’m Russell Mitchell and I’m the Head of Customer Success at trumpet. trumpet allows you to create auto-personalized, collaborative, and interactive microsites to close more deals, quicker. From cold outreach to onboarding, trumpet offers deep analytics to help you understand what “good” looks like and enable your team to speed up deals – with happier buyers.

Previously, all of our customer communications were managed via email lists and our CRM. It was difficult to get insights into adoption within our platform and provide an easy way to automatically onboard and educate our users.

On the support side, prior to using Intercom we just had a single support email address that routed to a Gmail inbox. It was difficult to manage for a couple of reasons – we had no way of knowing which tickets were open, closed, or high priority, and we couldn’t easily loop in the development team to collaborate on customer queries.

We integrated Intercom into our tech stack so that we can ensure all data is shared across our key systems. We also use Intercom’s custom data attributes to pass specific fields across from our app and attach them to the user record in Intercom, so we can use this data to send appropriate messaging based on a user’s actions in our platform.

We have Intercom connected to the following tools:

• trumpet: To share our platform data with Intercom so we can track the adoption metrics that we care about.

• HubSpot: To pass information like user details and platform actions between the Intercom and HubSpot, which is our CRM.

• Slack: To receive instant notifications about support requests.

• Canny: To easily share and collect product feedback directly from Intercom.

Having a central source of user and adoption data – it is so valuable to be able to immediately search for a user's name and see all their relevant data and metrics.

We will start exploring Intercom’s chatbots in the future, which should save us more time on the support side. We're so excited about the advances in AI tech and how we can use that at trumpet. A tool like Intercom’s new AI-powered chatbot, Fin, would allow us to feed in our help articles and answer customer queries instantly, provide true 24/7 support, and enable our teams to focus on value-add activities for our customers – as well as saving costs on a bigger support team. As a byproduct, I also think it would encourage us to consistently ensure our help articles are up to date.

Intercom is at its best when you make full use of all of its features and not solely focus on using it as a reactive support tool. Its conversational and omnichannel messaging capabilities enable you to both proactively and reactively help your customers.

For example, being able to create a personalized product tour for someone who has asked a question about a certain feature, and then track how their platform usage changes off the back of this – and being able to have automations trigger based on the subsequent actions taken – is so much more valuable than just giving text-based support to a user. It does involve exploring these additional features and investing the time to get them set up, but it’s worth it.

So my piece of advice would be to think about the ideal journey you’d like your new users to take, and then work backwards from that, utilizing a variety of Intercom features to provide an omnichannel, interactive experience (instead of just emails or chat).