@Ana_stas Welcome! Very interesting question and conversation -- would love to jump into a conversation about this in more detail anytime… I’m often exploring new ways to automate and optimize business for myself and consulting clients.
I would say the #1 thing to do if you haven’t already for optimizing chat and email for sure is enable Fin AI -- we’ve been helping teams with this and it’s been a huge improvement especially if you’ve got some rich history in Intercom conversations, help center articles, website and internal documentation. One of our recent customers in just a month or two has gone from 35% self service support to flipped it around to 75-80% self service support now. This is thanks to a variety of things but a lot of it is Fin AI both over chat and Fin over Email we’ve been using the beta during after hours times with them to handle requests when the team isn’t available and it’s been a big win.
I’m also very interested in making sure that support is meaningful and doesn’t make people feel like they are being forced to get help through channels they don’t feel supported by in a human way -- AI actually is the first time this type of automation feels personal and as it gets better, it’s really fun to see how people interact with AI and even thank Fin for the help :D
When I was at Focusmate, our team was focused on creating ‘compassionate macros” a term my wife and business partner used to help me lean into more automation we were able to schedule various messages to go out at key times because we looked at how can we meet people where they are at in that moment and make it feel intentional and supportive. We started with transforming the payment failed messages because we knew those could sometimes feel harsh and insensitive, we had people replying to the billing issue messages feeling good instead of feeling bad, that was real win!
Whenever you are putting automations in place, I believe it’s key to go into it with this approach not just business operations but thinking of how we can optimize the user experience in the process too.
Fin has been very interesting to do this with because each time it answers you can go through the improve workflow to tweak it and feed more info into the knowledge base to make it better at the next answer.