This will guide you through the key metrics and support tools you can use in Intercom to measure and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

We’ve broken it up into the following sections:

First, you must define what a remarkable experience looks like for your customers. This could include: faster resolutions; better customer satisfaction (CSAT); improved response times; effective self-serve support; or increased rate of automated resolution. A well-defined goal allows you to measure progress, allocate resources effectively, and achieve tangible improvements. It also helps align your team’s efforts, providing clarity on what success looks like and how each role contributes to this vision.

Think about how you want your customers to experience your product or service, and consider the ideal interactions and outcomes from the customer’s perspective. Then work backwards from this vision to identify specific areas for improvement:

Consider which metrics will help measure your success, such as CSAT scores, response times, or rate of automated resolution.

Once you know which objectives you’d like to achieve, segment these into topics or categories and replicate that in your inbox. These topics help you identify and create the inboxes you need, set up conversation tags and attributes which will be used to track them, and assign inbound conversations/tickets using workload management (if you have a big team).

Objective: Improve first response time and customer satisfaction

Topics: Simple support queries, technical troubleshooting, urgent queries

Inboxes: Basic Support, Technical Support, Rapid Response

Conversation tags: Product Feedback, Bug Report, Pricing

Conversation attributes: Product Area, Urgency

Assignment method: Balanced assignment to distribute workload evenly across teammates and ensure the most critical conversations are addressed first

“Remarkable” is a moving target. Once you’ve defined what remarkable means for your specific customers, it’s important to measure their experience and track how you are (or aren’t) raising the bar to meet changing expectations. Tracking the right metrics allows you to identify areas that need attention, measure the effectiveness of your strategies, and make data-driven decisions. Reporting on them helps you prioritize efforts based on the most critical issues and track progress over time.

Determine the most relevant metrics for your customer service goals. As a start, you should focus on:

It all starts with your north star metric: use these metrics to decide which issues are most important and will have the biggest impact on your customer experience.

Start small, scale quickly: approach improvements in phases. Start with a specific period or a small segment of your operations and assess the impact e.g. how NPS has improved since tracking product feedback and passing it to your product team. Then scale the successful strategies across your organization.

There’s one real test of customer satisfaction (CSAT), and that is asking your customers for their feedback. CSAT is a crucial metric that reflects how well your customer support meets customer expectations. It’s influenced by various factors like first response time, time to close, and the quality of interactions. Understanding and improving your CSAT helps maintain high standards, leading to loyal and happy customers.

CSAT score is an indicator of customer satisfaction with your service, and first response time, time to close, and quality of interactions will all impact your CSAT. It’s important to remember that CSAT surveys reach a segment of your customer base and may not provide a complete picture of overall customer satisfaction. Beyond just collecting scores, you should analyze the feedback for recurring themes and actionable insight, particularly for negative feedback.

Regularly review the quality of responses to identify areas where support agents need training or improvement. If resources are limited, focus on a shortlist of agents (e.g. 0 to 6 months of tenure) or specific types of interactions to ensure quality without overextending your team.

Something that CSAT surveys can highlight is that customers expect faster responses and resolutions. Faster first response time (FRT) boosts customer confidence, while a shorter time to close (TTC) ensures issues are resolved promptly, keeping customers unblocked and happy with your service. You can use Intercom reporting to see where your FRT or TTC could use a little work and make the right improvements with messenger, inbox, and proactive support tools.

Use Intercom reporting to keep a close eye on two key metrics: FRT and TTC, and set realistic goals e.g. if you’re currently responding in 15 minutes, set a goal to respond within 10 minutes. These metrics help ensure customers get the answers they need when they need them.

It’s a good idea to use dynamic reply time in the Messenger as this will adjust response time notifications to reflect real-time team capacity and set realistic expectations for your customers.

By using multiple team inboxes and conversation tags you can streamline workflows and identify bottlenecks and demand drivers. You should also keep an eye on your peak inquiry times and adjust staffing accordingly to ensure adequate coverage during high-demand periods. For bigger teams we recommend using workload management to assign queries to the right team members based on their expertise which speeds up resolution and reduces frustration.

More efficient teammates means faster response times and you can save your team hours searching for answers and support with Fin AI Copilot, a personal AI assistant in the inbox. You can also create macros for your most common support queries and known issues. Teammates can use these templated replies to respond consistently to customers and automatically take follow-up actions like tagging or closing a conversation.

Through outbound messaging you can get ahead of support volume and inform customers about upcoming maintenance or known issues, reducing the chance of unusual spikes. But only send critical updates to avoid overwhelming customers with unnecessary information.

Finally, to really level up your customer experience, you need to create an effective self-serve motion. By allowing your customers to self-serve you can significantly relieve the pressure on your support team, so they can deliver timely support to the customers who need their attention. Analyzing how customers interact with these resources can also surface ‘problem areas’ and prioritize impactful improvements. Start by adding public articles to educate your customers and build your help center.

Get quick feedback from customers on the quality of your content with article reactions and use conversation tags to capture and monitor feedback (e.g. which areas of the product or self-serve resources need attention). It’s also super helpful to ask teammates to submit Back-office tickets to suggest self-serve improvements when they notice them.

AI can also use this content to respond to customers and support teammates in the inbox, ultimately saving time while improving FRT and CSAT.