Germany-based presentation software Pitch is on a mission to enable every team’s best thinking through beautiful and effective presentations. The team is committed to facilitating better real-time collaboration and empowering their customers to work more efficiently. They use Intercom to stay close to customers and create delightful experiences for them at every stage of their journey.
Since launching in 2020, Pitch and its customer base have grown significantly. To support this growth, the team needed a communications solution that would enable them to maintain a personal touch with their customers at scale. Knowing their customers value communications that balance speed and efficiency with empathy and personalization, they chose Intercom to power their messaging across support, sales, and customer engagement.
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Choosing the right platform to do more with less
Verena Kuhn heads up the Community Support team at Pitch and is focused on ensuring their customers are maximizing their use of the product and set up for success. With a small but growing team, the ability to do more with less was a crucial deciding factor for Pitch when choosing a customer communications platform. When looking at the solutions available to them, Verena notes that they wanted a platform that would mirror their commitment to quality. Pitch champions excellence in its product and the presentations it empowers its customers to create. The team knew they needed a communications experience that would go hand in hand with that, which Intercom provides. "We found Intercom's UI much more intuitive than the other products we looked at,” says Verena. “My team works in Intercom every day and we pay such attention to detail, design, and user experience as a company, so it was really important to us. My team should enjoy the platform they use, and their feedback was that they enjoyed working in Intercom the most."
Pitch adopted Intercom before launching to the public and have used it since the beginning of their journey. They did evaluate other tools, like Zendesk, to power their support, but ultimately chose Intercom for a number of key reasons:
They wanted a solution that would accommodate future growth and liked that Intercom had a wide feature set that they could expand into as the team evolved.
Intercom integrates seamlessly with their web, desktop, and mobile apps and works out of the box, which was a huge help to the team. After the initial implementation, the team was able to configure Intercom to work for them without engineering resources, which was a big advantage.
The team highlights Intercom’s ease of use as being a crucial factor in their decision. They’re able to seamlessly onboard new hires and collaborate smoothly across teams.
The bots and automation capabilities Intercom provides enable Pitch to offer support at scale without having to dramatically increase the team’s headcount.
Intercom’s UI was more intuitive than the other tools they looked at, and it was important to the team that the platform they chose mirrored their own focus on user-centered design.
Verena notes that having come from a ticket-based support platform background, she was pleasantly surprised at Intercom’s functionality and the power of having a holistic customer communications platform. "I hadn't worked with Intercom before Pitch, and I was actually pretty set on bringing on a ticketing system. But after a thorough evaluation, Intercom was our top choice,” she says. “I definitely think it improves the customer experience, and maybe I was coming at it from a bit of an old-fashioned angle of filling out forms to get support. But nobody likes filling out forms, you'd much rather have a conversation with someone instead."
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Unlocking the ability to scale
When Verena joined Pitch in 2019, there were a number of core challenges she needed to solve. The biggest challenge, she explains, was building out the team from scratch and scaling their operation, all while onboarding their very first customers. In order to do this efficiently, Verena needed a solution she could rely on to help her manage rising conversation volumes without having to hire a ton of additional people to meet the demand. "It was important to me that our support platform was set up in a way that's easy for my team to work with in case we ever get overwhelmed with volume — which, luckily, hasn't happened yet because we've set up priority inboxes and use Macros to help us be efficient," she says.
The main things Verena wanted to accomplish when she first set out on her journey to scale Pitch’s support were:
Setting up support intake channels and an internal routing system to manage inbound requests.
Leverage detailed reporting to monitor the performance and drive continuous improvement.
Create a robust help center that was aligned with Pitch’s brand.
Above all, striking the balance between making things efficient for the team and their customers and being empathetic and personal in their replies was of the utmost importance to Pitch, which Intercom enables them to do. The team leverages a combination of Intercom’s proactive, self-serve, and human support features to ensure their customers’ needs are being met at every stage of their journey. And the results speak for themselves. The team has been able to drive down inbound conversation volume with the help of bots and automation, freeing up the support team’s time to focus on complex questions that need a bit of extra help. Something Verena highlights is that leveraging these efficiencies hasn’t impacted the customer experience, which is obvious from the team’s high CSAT scores, which consistently sit between 96% and 100%.
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Preemptively providing support when it’s needed
Verena explains that her team endeavors to proactively offer their customers help wherever they can. They use the custom greeting in the Intercom Messenger to notify customers of any changes to their coverage times, for example, during the holiday season, so expectations are clearly set and there’s no confusion over when they can expect a response. Having an unobtrusive way to let customers know when they can expect a response ultimately reduces possible friction for the customer and results in a better experience.
Looking ahead, Verena plans to leverage more of Intercom’s proactive support capabilities to build out this function. Currently, they’re focused on proactively building out their help center content to ensure customers have access to educational content about new features or product improvements, and they also analyze popular search terms and questions to help them preempt what content customers are going to need. "I'd love to tap more into proactive support – really detecting what they're doing, what they're not doing, and what it looks like they wanted to do so can proactively help them,” says Verena. “I think that would be a really great customer experience."
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Enabling customers to self-serve
For any fast-growing business, the ability to make processes and workflows more efficient and scalable is critical for success. Leveraging Intercom’s self-serve support capabilities, like bots and automation, has enabled the team at Pitch to drive efficiency across multiple areas of their customer communications, as well as operate at scale. They rely on Articles to power their help center, which they invested in early on in their journey with the platform. When customers need support, their first port of call is Pitch’s help center. Here, they can search through all of their help articles to find the answers they’re looking for.
“When customers get stuck, of course there’s a risk of churn. We want to unblock them as fast as possible, and sometimes the fastest way of doing that is to enable them to find answers themselves.”Verena Kuhn
Head of Community Support at Pitch
The Community Support team creates new content for every new feature and product update the team ships in order to support and educate their customers. In doing this, they’re able to reduce the number of conversations reaching the Support team, as well as enhance the customer experience by offering up answers fast and efficiently. If customers are unable to find an answer or need additional help, they can open the Messenger and start a conversation with the team. “When customers get stuck, of course there’s a risk of churn. We want to unblock them as fast as possible, and sometimes the fastest way of doing that is to enable them to find answers themselves,” says Verena. “I think it’s really powerful to surface that option, but also make it easy to contact my team.”
Verena’s team is using Custom Bots to triage all incoming queries by collecting valuable information about the type of issue a customer is experiencing and any other information that could be useful to help resolve it. The bots help to determine when a customer needs immediate help so they can be directed straight to the Support team, or if their query is something that can be easily resolved through self-serve support. This helps the team categorize incoming queries and prioritize. Being able to categorize incoming conversations by issue and customer type has been pivotal in helping the team manage their internal SLAs, which are individually tracked for each type of query.
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Making the most of a flexible platform
Verena highlights Intercom’s apps and integrations as a huge advantage of the platform. Being able to seamlessly connect the tools in their tech stack has enabled the Support team to save time that would otherwise have been spent switching between tools, as well as work cross-functionally with other teams. Some of the integrations Pitch uses are:
GitHub, which is used for filing bugs for the Engineering team to assess. With the Intercom integration, this can be done directly from the customer conversation, which saves valuable time and enables the support team to respond to customers easily once the issue has been resolved.
Canny, which is used for tracking new feature requests from customers.
HubSpot, which is used by both the Sales and Customer Success teams. Sales leverage the integration to create contacts with just one click, saving them a lot of time. On the Customer Success team, the data sync between Intercom and HubSpot enables them to see which customers have contacted support.
By leveraging tagging in Intercom to help funnel customer queries, requests, and suggestions into these workflows has been hugely helpful for Pitch and enables smooth collaboration between teams. Verena also points to the importance of having everything the team needs in a single platform to reduce the need for tool switching. In the case that a teammate does need to access another resource, they can quickly add them to the “Quick Links” section of their Inbox view to be able to access them in seconds. This is something the team uses extensively and is a big time-saver. “We want to consolidate as much as we can into Intercom — in fact, our next step is to integrate our internal admin tool directly as a widget in the Inbox,” Verena explains.
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Building great experiences across the entire customer journey
In addition to using Intercom for support, Pitch’s Sales and Marketing teams are also leveraging features like Series, Product Tours, and Outbound Messages to engage prospects and customers throughout their journey with the product — from the first interaction through to them becoming a happy customer.
The Sales team is using Custom Bots to prompt website visitors to get in touch with sales if they’d like to learn more about Pitch’s paid plans.
Marketing uses Intercom to collect customer feedback and get a deeper understanding of their customers. By reaching out to target groups of customers with surveys or to schedule research interviews, the team is able to gauge customer sentiment, get real-time feedback about specific product areas, and identify opportunities for improvement. They also use Product Tours to educate customers about the product, which has been really helpful in getting customers set up for success from the get-go.
Verena says that having a single platform for customer communications is very beneficial when it comes to cross-functional collaboration. “Our support and sales email addresses route to Intercom, which allows us to use transfer macros to send conversations between the teams so sales can follow up on a revenue opportunity, or my team can help a customer with a product question,” says Verena.
“I track a lot of numbers. And one thing I pay attention to is the number of support requests versus the number of help center visitors. It's really fascinating to see how many potential questions we're able to deflect by using the help center.”Verena Kuhn
Head of Community Support at Pitch
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Making a lasting impact
Since implementing Intercom, Pitch has seen impressive results in its ability to scale its customer communications without losing the personal touch. "I track a lot of numbers. And one thing I pay attention to is the number of support requests versus the number of help center visitors. It's really fascinating to see how many potential questions we're able to deflect by using the help center,” says Verena. “When I started looking at this at the beginning of last year, one in every five people would reach out to my team, and the other four would be able to self-serve. Now, only one in 12 is reaching out to my team, which saves us so much time. It gives us so much capacity back."
With over 70% of customer queries coming in through the Messenger and a CSAT score that consistently sits at 100%, it’s obvious that Pitch’s customers are happy with the experiences the team is able to create through Intercom. Verena highlights how the platform has helped them to unlock growth opportunities and effectively scale their support without having to sacrifice this experience, which is so important to the team.
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Planning for the future
Verena and the team at Pitch are excited about the opportunity that lies ahead with Intercom. "It was important to me that we had room to grow with Intercom when we started out,” Verena says. “We're not using all of the features available to us yet, but we wanted a product that we could grow into as we expand our team and business."
With plans to further invest in proactive and self-serve support, Pitch is focused on driving increased efficiency, maximizing their impact, and continuing to create the best possible experiences for their customers at scale to boost satisfaction — and, ultimately, retention.
