Hey,

David here 👋

I’m the product manager for Conversation Topics, the new reporting feature in Intercom. We’ve been using this feature for the last few months, so just wanted to share an example of how it has worked well for us. 

The problem: 

Recently when working with our security team to identify areas for improving customers’ app security, a support lead wanted to understand how frequently we received conversations on 2FA and how long our team took to solve these queries (a proxy for complexity). 

The old way:

Before Topics, our team would have had to create a new tag ‘2FA’, then have our support team start tagging relevant conversations. After a month or so, they’d check our reports for the tag, and then extrapolate that volume out over 12 months and budget for a margin-of-error for conversations that might have been missed.

If the question was critical and no reporting existed, they might ask around or make an informed guess backed off a trend analysis from last quarter that had some connection to the issue.

The new way:

With conversation topics, we were able to take a much more consistent approach to this, by creating a topic with the following settings:

• Keywords like 2FA, verify 2fa, MFA, recovery code, locked out etc.
• Participant type to User messages only (so teammates mentioning the same were not included)

Once we entered our keywords we were then immediately able to see the matching conversations below, a quick examination of these confirmed that we had the right keywords. 

For more complex topics you might want to add or exclude keywords once you’ve reviewed some conversations.

Once we were happy with the topic and had saved it, we were able to answer how long do we spend resolving these, by clicking ‘median first response time’ to automatically filter the Responsiveness dashboard with this new topic.

Solution:

Using topics like this meant we didn’t have to wait weeks for tags to apply, or extrapolate any data manually. We were able to answer the question there and then during a meeting. Providing instant context our support lead could use to:

• Prioritize where the teams could best collaborate to improve our customers’ own app security 
• And learn where product improvements would be most impactful in reducing future conversation volume.

We’ve since had several new topics that have begun to be used and recorded in Intercom, enabling teams faster access to insights without increasing support team effort.

Feel free to chime in below, I’d love to hear examples of how you’re using conversation topics and any questions you may have!