Hey there Support aficionados across the globe!

I’m Franka, one of the Support Managers here at Intercom. Apart from managing people who are my first responsibility and passion, I also act as an interim Conversation Designer and manage support Workflows and Workflow performance day to day.

Anyone following the world of chat and automation has surely heard of ChatGpt shaking up the slightly sleepy world of support in the past couple of months. This event served as a trigger for us at Intercom Support to start thinking deeper about our automation strategy. First question we asked ourselves was “How do we currently present ourselves to our customers and how would we like to improve this in the future?”

While we were not surprised with our state of automation, our main learning was that the past few years of ad-hoc strategising has brought us to quite a complex overall state. We noticed we ask a lot of questions right off the bat, but don’t necessarily always help customers self-serve at the beginning of their interaction with us.

Going forward our main goal is to keep our automation simple and utilise self-serve options at the very start of the customer facing flow. Customers will only be asked for more specific information about their issue once we have defined and classified it, so that our support team gets all they need up front and get quicker in providing the right resolution. These questions will also be targeted specifically at the issue at hand and absolutely relevant to what the customer is experiencing. Yes, our automation can be that detailed.

In the months ahead we will be overhauling our current automation setup. If you are as excited as we are, don’t forget to follow along and share any feedback you might have!