User Tips

Hello Intercom Community, I’m Des, co-founder of Intercom. Welcome to our new Community platform We’re very excited to partner with you on making this a useful and engaging space where you can connect with Intercom folks and and with peers in your own industry and beyond. We’ll use this space to share tips and tricks, to solicit feedback and ideas from you, to share news and events and provide some member benefits. Feel free to ask questions of, and provide answers to, other members in the Q&A forum and feel free to get involved to whatever degree you’re excited to here. We look forward to seeing this space grow and flourish. Watch out for updates on how we’ll reward you for your contributions to making this Community useful for everyone! Sincerely, Des

Hey there 👋 Milan here✌ For those of you who might not know me from the previous version of the community, a bit about myself: I’m the owner of the Sovaolo.com MarTech agency and a long-time Intercom expert. I’ve been working with Intercom for about 5 years (initially as a Product Marketing Manager in one of Intercom’s clients) and since I started working as a freelancer, Intercom was core of my offering. I have delivered on more than 100 Intercom projects! Enough bragging, I’d like to share some of my tips on how to use Intercom like a Pro. 💪 Tip #1: Preparation is the key to successful project delivery My own drawing of “Touchpoints between Intercom and Visitor/Lead/User during their journey” Explaining what Intercom can do, to all relevant stakeholders, explain it in whole even if relevant stakeholder is not present (as the words might reach them). I have my own drawing of “touchpoints between Intercom and Visitor/Lead/User during their journey” (image above). I have that with the examples of my past work I did, so I can quickly show it if they need more details. Along this pitch, I explain the benefits of using Intercom even beyond the area that I’m asked for (i.e. let’s say the audience I’m talking to is responsible for conversion and sales, not for customer support - I still mention the other areas as they should work along, like when a User is on the website, not recognized as a User, and they want to chat with someone from the support, the Custom Inbound Bot that we will build for conversion and lead gen, should also accommodate those Users, to have a path to the Support team so it does not waste time of the Conversion/Sales team). Setting expectations - mostly people ask me about when I can deliver on some task, but what they are not aware is that usually the bottle neck are them, not me. When they can provide the content (or approve what I came up with), provide visuals (if I’m not creating them), and most often when their devs can complete the work on properly integrating Intercom with their website, app, backend… i.e. if you are a Marketing person and want to target specific group of User, sure you can create the content of that message fast enough (if you are doing all the work) but are you sure you can segment Users the way you need it or something should be additionally synced to Intercom (custom attribute, or to manually tag users based on the list of emails that you need to get from someone, etc.)? It took me a few unmet expectations due to dependencies out of my responsibility to be cautious about setting expectations, especially those on time-frames. Make sure you prepare all the info before setting expectations. Proactive approach from the beginning - make sure you know and reach out to all the relevant people as soon as possible so they have a heads up of what’s coming their way, although you will not have full details on what their engagement will be. With that, you’ll be preparing them for what’s coming and/or they might share info that will be crucial (i.e. freeze on development, so the devs can not sync new attributes). Tip #2: How to manage the Intercom project/tasks (and what tools I’m using) Example of my Miro board for one Intercom project that included Custom bots and Series I usually say that drafting (and documenting it along the line) the things that will be implemented takes more time than actually implementing it in Intercom. In order to do so, I’m using a couple of common tools alongside any kind of project/task management tool that client is using (they usually invite me there). So besides PM tool, I aim to document things in Google Docs (i.e. messages content) and Google Sheets (i.e. attributes and events) so that we can all make changes and comment instead of getting lost in emails or Slack/Teams. There’s one additional tool that I find very important and useful in my Intercom work. And that is Miro whiteboard. Before using it, I used either Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint to create Custom bot and Series flows. Sometimes, client came up with their own drafts in some other tools but they usually do not know about all the possibilities (and limitations) of Intercom Series and Bots, and in Miro I have created some templates that help me draft things pretty fast or even re-use something I did before, which saves a lot of time. Once I show a draft of the Custom bot in Miro (image above) it is easier for a stakeholder to understand what it does and how it works, and also to propose changes as I invite them to the board and allow them to comment and even update the content of the messages. To be frank, Intercom Series and Custom bots builder should learn and take as much as possible from Miro ;) I know the guys working on them already know this and hopefully we will see some improvement. Tip #3: Monitor and follow up! One of the Series I created and launched Once something is implemented in Intercom it is not game over. You think of an “ideal, happy path” that contacts should take but by monitoring you realize that they were not thinking like you did and are taking some different routes and having different than planned activities. Often people I’m working with are thinking about “would this work?” “should we add this?” “how about if we remove this option from a bot” etc. even before we set it live, just loosing some time thinking without actually testing it. I motivate them to launch something even if the content is not fully ready, or not all options covered, as we will see how the contacts behave and that will help us answer those questions above. Luckily, Intercom launched some really good feature under Series - the Performance tab. Before that I had to take out the data for each message manually, take them into Google sheet that I made to calculate the increments and compare if the changes I made are working or not - now with a few click I can choose different time-frames and see it without a lot of work. :) So, those were the things I find very important and I hope this will help you to successfully manage your Intercom work ;) feel free to jump in with any questions, comments, new ideas - would love to hear them and have a discussion!

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.

Hey everyone, I’m Beth, Help Center Manager here at Intercom. Besides creating articles, one of the most important duties of managing a Help Center is making sure those articles are kept up-to-date and helpful. Our articles are not only used by our customers, but are also seen and shared by our support reps. Equipped with their deep knowledge of Intercom’s products and features, they’re often the first ones to spot content that looks stale or inaccurate, so who better to flag it than our own Support team, and what better place than from the article itself? By setting up an inbound Workflow from our Help Center, support reps can make article update requests or submit new article ideas, straight from the Messenger. Their request details can either be captured in the conversation thread, or by sending a ticket . These requests are automatically triaged into a specific Workflows, where I can easily pick them up. Tickets are great for capturing all the details needed to action the request, and the Inbox makes it super easy to continue the conversation if it requires further clarification. Once you’ve got it working well for your Support team, you could let your customers submit article requests exactly the same way. Good knowledge management is integral to providing a solid self-serve experience for our customers. Through using our own articles internally, we can share the responsibility of continuously improving their content and manage that knowledge effectively. If you’d like to chat more about managing your Help Center using the right workflows, let me know in response to this post as I’m happy to share more details!

Hey Support Leaders 👋 I’m Michelle, and I’m a Support Manager here at Intercom. I wanted to share some insight into something we’ve been working on within our Support team over the last few months that I think might be useful to others across the industry. With customers all over re-evaluating their tech stacks and looking to minimise costs where possible, it’s more important than ever to ensure that they are getting the most out of your product, and really getting to see the value it has, to help inform their decision making. At Intercom, we spotted an opportunity to utilise our own Support team (who are speaking with hundreds of customers every day), to proactively flag with customers when they are not using features within their subscription (that they’re paying for!), so that they can see the full power of what they can do with Intercom. The problem we faced, like most Support teams, is that we did not have a tonne of capacity to spare for our team to take on the additional workload this could bring (checking a customers subscription, what’s included in that plan, compare that against what has been activated on their workspace, along with typing up individual messages), so to solve for this we created a private Help Desk app (shout out to our Support Engineer Kyle Farmer for building this!) using custom attributes to showcase what features in the customers subscription had been enabled, and those that had not. We then created Macros for each feature that share some information on what benefits said feature has, as well as help to get them started with it. This way when our team is chatting with a customer, they can easily see what features they aren’t utilising, and give them a heads up about it, all within a matter of a few seconds. Whilst this is a fairly new workflow we have been trying out, we’ve seen some great results so far, both from the impact our proactive support is having on customers setting up these features (measured using the tags in our Macros), along with the feedback we have gotten from customers through CSAT appreciating us going that extra step. Leave a comment if you have any questions or are interested to learn more!

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!