Using your Support team to proactively help customers get the most out of their plan 💡

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!