The Support Funnel is the most effective, efficient way to provide personal support, at the scale your business needs as it grows.
There are three stages in the funnel:
Proactive support — Getting ahead of known problems before customers reach out.
Self-serve support — Answering repetitive questions automatically, with bots and articles.
Human support — Quickly resolving complex issues one-on-one.
With the Conversational Support report, you can see the impact you’re having at each stage of the funnel:
View the Conversational Support report
You'll find the Conversational Support report in Reports > All reports > Intercom reports.
Note: This is a legacy report and isn't customizable.
Open the report and use the filter at the top to see data for a specific time period:
This article breaks down the different metrics in the report, and how they’re calculated.
How your customers get support
The first, and most important chart in this report shows you exactly where in the funnel your customers are finding support. It’s broken into three colour coded sections.
On the left you’ll see the total count of “Proactive support” messages that you sent:
By default, this count includes all outbound messages. Define which messages are counted towards proactive support in the usage breakdown.
Proactive support is characterized by the messages you send your customers to support them before they need help, for example:
Letting them know there’s an outage, or planned maintenance.
Informing them of errors or limits in their account.
Sharing help articles for common areas of confusion.
Note:
This metric is the number of messages sent, not the number of individuals who received them. There may be customers who received multiple proactive support messages.
The recipients of proactive support messages, may or may not be in the next section “Seeking support”
People Seeking support are those who have viewed or searched for an article (in the Messenger or on your Help Center), or started a conversation in a session.
What is a session?
A session is a 24 hour period in which a customer seeks support.
Each session begins with the first action to seek support, like landing on the Help Center.
Each session’s current status will be visible in the report. It will either be:
Stopped seeking support.
Resolved with self-serve support.
Served by human support, either:
From the start.
After attempting to self-serve.
Self-serve support
Self-serve support is the support your customers receive from articles in the Messenger, the Help Center, or answers provided by Custom Answers. You’ll see this here in the pink section of the report:
This does not include articles viewed in the content showcase app.
This section is divided into two groups of people:
Tried to Resolve - Those who attempted to resolve their question with self-serve support, by viewing or searching for articles in the Messenger or your Help Center.
Resolved - All those who successfully found support. — This is anyone who didn’t start a conversation within the 24 hour session after they began seeking support.
The customers not represented in pink, those who began with self-serve content but ended up needing human support, are shown in the final section, Human support. 👇
Human support
Human support is all the conversations your teammates have with your customers in the Messenger, or via email. It’s represented in this report in yellow:
This section is also divided into two groups of people:
Those who started with an attempt to self serve, then ended up speaking with a member of your team:
Those who received human support from the beginning. — They started a conversation without viewing or searching articles in the session, and weren’t answered by Custom Answers.
You’ll also see the total number of customers who stopped seeking support on the bottom left. These customers are not counted anywhere else in the report. — These include those who searched for articles in the Help Center or Messenger but did not end up viewing an article or starting a conversation in a session:
Difference between customers who are "seeking support" and "unserved" customers:
Seeking support | Unserved |
Seeking support includes customers who have searched for articles and also tried to reach out to you by opening a conversation. Seeking support involves some form of engagement, either through searching for help or initiating a conversation. | Unserved customers are those who may have visited your Help Center or searched for articles in your Messenger but did not view any articles or start a conversation. They did not engage with the content or seek direct assistance from your support team. |
Hover over any section of this chart to see a comparison with the previous time period:
Sessions supported by self-serve and human support
This chart shows the split between sessions that were resolved by self-serve, and those supported by your team (human support):
Self-serve sessions resolved — Sessions where a customer viewed articles, or received support from a bot, and didn’t start a conversation with a human.
Human support supported sessions — Sessions where a customer received support from a teammate, either from the beginning or after attempting to self-serve.
What is a session?
A session is a 24 hour period in which a customer seeks support.
Each session begins with the first action to seek support, like landing on the Help Center.
Each session’s current status will be visible in the report. It will either be:
Stopped seeking support.
Resolved with self-serve support.
Served by human support, either:
From the start.
After attempting to self-serve.
Proactive messages delivered
This chart shows you how many proactive support messages you delivered to your customers, and how many of them were opened, clicked on or reacted to.
This is also where you can filter for which messages you consider “Proactive”. Click Manage proactive messages.
There are many ways to filter your messages. Here's an example:
Tag — Outage.
Content type — Tooltip groups.
Sender — Messages from your Support team.
You can also use different filters in combination.
The filters you apply here will also affect the first chart. In this report.
Pro tip: Applying a tag or updating the sender of a message retroactively will allow you to filter for it in this report, even if it was already sent previously.
Self-serve support resolved sessions
This chart shows you a split of those conversations resolved entirely by self serve (in pink), and those which were served by a human after viewing articles or engaging with a bot (in yellow):
Below the bar, you’ll see three other metrics:
Self-serve resolution rate — The number of resolved sessions which were resolved by self-serve support divided by the total number of resolved sessions seeking support. - Users who stopped seeking support are not included in this calculation.
Articles resolution rate — The number of article views that didn’t result in a conversation being started divided by the total number of article views.
Automated resolution rate — The number of conversations closed by Custom Answers divided by the number of “Seeking support sessions” where Custom Answers delivered an answer. This does not include Fin AI metrics.
Served by a teammate
Finally, the report shows you the outcome and details of the conversations that received human support:
Those that were served by a teammate after self-serve.
Those served by a teammate from the beginning.
You’ll be able to compare:
Total volume.
Conversation ratings.
Median first response time.
Median time to close.
These charts show the often-missed impact of self-serve content on your human support conversations. You may find that conversations with a combination of support methods (self-serve and human) have noticeably different ratings, or time to close.
You can not only compare the metrics side by side, but also with the previous time period to see if you’re improving, or need some additional support.
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