Hi Support Leaders!

I’m Andrew, a Customer Support Manager here at Intercom

When was the last time you or your team revisited how you follow-up with customers reaching out to your team? Following up on support requests can take up a lot of time and bandwidth for you and your team - however Intercom has a number of features you can leverage to automate this process & streamline it when a human touch is needed. This not only opens up your team’s bandwidth to focus on customers waiting to hear from you, but can also help reduce your team’s time to close metric for customer interactions. 

One of the first things I recommend to teams looking to streamline their follow-up workflows is to use Intercom’s Snooze feature. This is great because when your team sends a reply to a customer, they can ‘snooze’ the conversation for a set amount of time which doesn’t necessarily close the conversation but rather keeps it in an ‘open but not visible’ state in your team's inbox. This means that only those conversations that need action are shown in your ‘Open’ inbox, helping your team focus on what’s truly actionable. Snoozed conversations re-open automatically if a customer sends you a new reply on them, and if those snoozed conversations re-open without a customer reply, you can use macros to send saved replies following up with your customers in a seamless manner helping close these conversations efficiently. 

When it comes to automation, you can also leverage Intercom’s Workflows to automatically take action on a conversation once a customer has been unresponsive for a certain period of time. Let’s say a customer hasn’t replied to you in a few days - you can set up a rule to close that conversation automatically for you and your team without any manual action needed to be taken - freeing up your team to chat with customers waiting to hear from you. Intercom also has the ability to send auto-replies to inactive conversations as well - a really helpful feature to help fine tune this experience.