Tips from the Intercom Team

17 Topics

Ivan Branimir
Ivan BranimirEmployee
posted in Tips for Developers

Copying your articles from US to EU/AU workspace

Hey everyone 👋 My name is Ivan and I’m a Customer Support Engineer here at Intercom. You might’ve seen my face around if you messaged our support via the Messenger 👷🏼‍♂️ Here’s a sample Python scrip you can use to copy your articles from your US to your EU workspace 👇import requests# set parameters for US and EU endpoints/headersintercom_token_us = "<YOUR US TOKEN GOES HERE>"intercom_token_eu = "<YOUR EU TOKEN GOES HERE>"intercom_us_url = "https://api.intercom.io/articles"intercom_eu_url = "https://api.eu.intercom.io/articles"# header used to get the articles from US workspaceintercom_headers_us = { "Authorization": "Bearer " + intercom_token_us, "Accept": "application/json", "Content-Type": "application/json",}# header used to create the articles in EU workspaceintercom_headers_eu = { "Authorization": "Bearer " + intercom_token_eu, "Accept": "application/json", "Content-Type": "application/json",}# store all articles in a listarticles = []# get all ar

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Ivan Branimir
24 days ago
Brian Branca
Brian BrancaEmployee
posted in Getting started with Intercom

Trigger One Product Tour After Another

Hi, I’m Brian, a Customer Support Engineer in Chicago 👋A common question: “Is it possible to create two Product tours where the second tour shows immediately after the first one finishes?” The answer is yes! There are a few ways to achieve this.   Note: #2 and #3 will require the help of your dev team 1) Using SeriesPerhaps the simplest way to do this would be to create a Series which sends out the Tours. Then, you can configure it so when the User has completed the first Tour, the second one will be sent automatically.2) Utilize the Intercom(‘update’) methodAn alternative to using a Series would be to refresh the Intercom page after the first Tour is displayed. When you call the Intercom('update') method using some new user data, Intercom will look for new messages that should be shown to the user and will display the second Product Tour. 3) Use the Intercom(‘startTour’) methodAn alternative method would be to display the second tour when a button or a link is clicked on your s

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Brian Branca
1 month ago
Brian Branca
Brian BrancaEmployee
posted in Getting started with Intercom

Add Product Tours to your Messenger Home

 Hi, I’m Brian, a Customer Support Engineer in Chicago 👋 Product tours are a great, interactive way to drive adoption of your product. Product Tours can be shown automatically, shared via a link, or triggered with an Intercom JavaScript method. But did you know it’s possible to add Product Tours to your Messenger Homepage using our Content Showcase app? It’s a great way to make sure that interactive and engaging information about your product is front and center and always a click away.The Content Showcase App allows you to drive engagement by featuring announcements, articles, and Product Tours on your Messenger home screen or in your conversations. Let’s walk through how to add Product Tours to your Messenger Homepage.First, copy the link to your Product Tour from the Show tour everywhere section of your Tour builder  Note: Adding a tour to Content Showcase doesn’t support dynamic URLs (add attributes to the URL). See below for a workaround!  Next, navigate to your messenger s

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Brian Branca
1 month ago
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Brandon S13Employee
posted in Intercom for Human Support

How we manage low-touch forecasting and scheduling (partnering with Assembled)

I’m Brandon, the Workforce Manager on the Customer Support team at Intercom. My primary responsibility at Intercom is to ensure that we have the right people, at the right place, at the right time in order to answer our customers’ queries in a timely fashion - and we’ve partnered with the workforce management tool Assembled to make this process easier for myself.With Assembled, we are able to connect Intercom directly to the tool through API integration. In doing so, Assembled is able to ingest and track the number of conversations that flow through all our specific inboxes. The tool then uses this historical data, along with configurable inputs I provide, to generate future short-term forecasts. I then apply manual adjustments within the tool to fine tune a forecast that is most aligned to our business model. Once we input the team’s weekly schedule and time off into Assembled, the staffing timeline updates to display our projected supply versus our forecasted demand. I then schedule

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2 months ago
Pavel Kozlov
Pavel KozlovEmployee
posted in Intercom for Automated Support

Using Apply rules step in custom bots to tag conversations based on specific keywords

Hello Intercom community, Pavel here, Engineering manager from Automation group here at Intercom.  We recently shipped the “Apply rules” step to our Custom bots. This step is essentially a “case” statement that allows to apply multiple sets of actions based on specific conditions for each set.What I wanted to share in this post is how well this step handles a very popular use case of tagging conversations based on keywords.Before this release you could do it only in Inbox Rules, and you had to create a rule per each keyword. Now you can do the same work in custom bots using just one bot.Here’s how it works:  Go to custom bots and find “After a customer sends any message trigger”   Add the “Apply rules” step​ ​​​​​​  Set up keywords/tags pairs   Set your bot live!  Hope it helps! Cheers,Pavel 

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Pavel Kozlov
5 months ago
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DulceEmployee
posted in Intercom for Human Support

Partnering with R&D on Bug Management

Hello Intercom Community! I’m Dulce, a Customer Support Manager here at Intercom 👋🏽 I also happen to be the newest addition to the NORAM manager crew based in the Chicago office. One of the things that has impressed me about our Support department is the partnership we have in place with the R&D team. As Support leaders, we know the bridge between R&D and Support is a critical one to maintain for many reasons… To ensure the product is evolving in a way that strives to meet customer demand To internally prepare for new product launches and equip our team with the knowledge & resources to enable customer success To enable Support to be an efficient link between the customer and R&D on bug identification and software maintenance One of the recent projects I undertook was to do some “spring cleaning” in the bug management space. My 2 key objectives were to A) improve how we communicate with our customers on bug prioritisation & resolution time and B) provide clear

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5 months ago
Declan I
Declan IEmployee
posted in Intercom for Human Support

Using Inbox Dashboards for a bird’s eye view of your team’s backlog

Hi everyone, Declan here, leader of our Support team at Intercom. I’ve worked with many Support tools throughout my career and one of the most important features is a real time view of the state of the queues (or “the inboxes” as we call them at Intercom). The inbox dashboard feature within Intercom is my go-to space every morning and throughout the day to understand how many conversations are waiting, for how long and for which sub-teams within my organisation. This gives me the high level overview I need and helps me pinpoint where I need to follow up with my team to re-allocate resources or strategise around further capacity planning. You can learn more about the feature here and you can use whatever filters make sense for you and your team, but I would recommend always keeping an eye on Waiting for First Reply. This shows you how many customers have opened a conversation but have not had anyone from the team respond to them yet, which we refer to as our backlog.  How manageable the

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Declan I
6 months ago
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Ruth KEmployee
posted in Tips for Developers

Converting visitor to lead by passing anonymous email

Using our JS API, it is not possible to update the email field of a visitor type contact with the standard Intercom('update', {"email": "rk.test@testing.com"}); Doing so will result in a 403 error. However, using a parameter in the JS API called anonymous_email will allow you to convert a visitor to a lead via the JS API without running into any issues. Use the update method to pass through the email of the visitor without needing to set up REST API calls to achieve the same result. Intercom('update', {"anonymous_email": "test@example.com"});

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6 months ago
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Ruth KEmployee
posted in Tips for Developers

Targeting mobile screens for outbound messages

Outbound Messages can be set to only display on a specific URL in the Where to send section of the settings. This is really useful for delivering content to end-users on the page that is relevant to the message. However, this can pose an issue for users on mobile devices where the Intercom SDKs are installed as there is no specific URL that can be targeted. As a workaround for this, a custom attribute can be set up for tracking the screen that the mobile user is currently viewing. By sending this data to Intercom and storing it in an attribute, it's possible to send messages targeted to mobile users on a specific mobile screen that they are currently viewing. To do this -  Create a custom attribute - for example, called 'current_screen'. This will be used to store the data which is sent to Intercom each time the user navigates to a new screen in your mobile app. This can be done for all screens in your app or just the ones that require targeted Intercom messages.  Implement a method

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R
6 months ago
Jordan S11
Jordan S11Employee
posted in Intercom for Automated Support

Supporting Customers When Releasing New Products

Hello Intercom Community! Jordan here - first time poster, long term Community fan. I am a program manager on our Support Operations team. I am currently heading up our new product introduction (NPI) program, specifically helping our Customer Support team plan for inbound volume and supporting Customers with their adoption of Intercom’s new products. When preparing for new releases, one of the most important things we prioritize are self-serve resources. These resources allow Customers to find the answers they are looking for without being required to talk to a human. Intercom allows us to create a cohesive suite of self-serve resources using the Help Center, Resolution Bots, and Custom Bots. How this might look: Your Customer writes in via your messenger wanting to learn more about how to set up X new feature using recommended best practices. A Resolution Bot answer immediately jumps in to help, offering a brief overview of best practices for implementing X product as well as a link t

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Jordan S11
6 months ago
Andrew R12
Andrew R12Employee
posted in Getting started with Intercom

Fine Tuning The Customer Follow-up

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 t

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Andrew R12
6 months ago
Michelle F12
Michelle F12Employee
posted in Tips for Developers

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 wor

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Michelle F12
6 months ago
Eric Fitz
Eric FitzEmployee
posted in Intercom for Human Support

How we use Tickets for our internal On-Call team

Within Intercom’s Customer Support team, we have an “On-Call” team made up of tenured teammates who have the responsibility of helping their colleagues answer more complex customer questions. Previously, these questions were raised through a different instance of the Messenger and funnelled into an entirely separate Intercom workspace, apart from our Support team’s main Intercom workspace. With the launch of our Tickets feature, we saw a unique opportunity to funnel these inquiries into our main Intercom workspace, streamline the process and remove the inefficiency of having two workspaces. To raise a Ticket with our On-Call team, our Support team simply opens the Messenger in their Intercom workspace (the benefit of having our Support team work from “our” instance of Intercom!) and start a new conversation, where they’ll be greeted by an Inbound Custom Bot. Once they follow the steps in the bot to ensure that their question is routed to the correct On-Call team, they’re presented with

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Eric Fitz
6 months ago
Franka
FrankaEmployee
posted in Intercom for Automated Support

The importance of a long-term bot strategy

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 bots, bot flows and bot 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 bot 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 beg

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Franka
6 months ago
Sean Reid
Sean ReidNew Participant
posted in Intercom for Human Support

How we manage Quality Assurance for teammates at Intercom (in partnership with our friends over at Klaus)

Hey there everyone, I’m Sean, Customer Support Manager here at Intercom! One of my key responsibilities in my role here is to ensure the day to day and overall running of our Quality Assurance team. In order to monitor our customers' experience with our support team, we use the amazing Quality Management tool Klaus! The Customer Support team is constantly looking to deliver and provide our customers with world class support. This approach needs to be present and active in every interaction we have with our customers in order to provide a best in class product experience. Klaus allows us to do so much in order to solidify this with Customer Support Specialists and Engineers!  The first way we do this is through a system we call CSAT Guardian. We have set up Klaus in such a way that any time any of our specialists get a negative survey, it is sent straight to our Managers specific view for them to review. This allows us to see customer pain points, areas of improvement and try to get an

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Sean Reid
6 months ago
Leanne H
Leanne HEmployee
posted in Intercom for Automated Support

Setting expectations and answering frequently asked questions during your team’s down time 🏝️

Hey everyone 👋 I’m Leanne and I’m one of the Senior Managers on the Customer Support team here at Intercom.  For the past few years, I’ve been the driver of our End of Year Break coverage and workflow planning. During the holiday season, we want to ensure our Customer Support team get a well earned break to spend time with their family and friends, but we also have to ensure we’re still on hand to help our customers - some of whom will find that the end of the year is their busiest period of the year.  We have a few strategies that we use to organise the right coverage for each day of the End of Year break, but we also use some of Intercom’s handy features to pre-empt some of the frequently asked questions we receive during this time of the year, and to set expectations with customers that we have a smaller team online so it might take a little longer for replies.  When we get close to the December holiday season, we get a lot of questions from customers asking about how they can set

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Leanne H
6 months ago
Beth-Ann
Beth-AnnEmployee
posted in Intercom for Automated Support

Enabling a culture of knowledge management in your team

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 Custom Bot 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 inbox using rules, where I can easily pick them up. Tickets are great for capturing all the details needed to action the

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Beth-Ann
6 months ago
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