Tips from the Intercom Team

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

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 Real-time 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

Proactive Support 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

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, Custom Answers and Workflows. 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 Custom answer immediately jumps in to help, offering a brief overview of best practices for implementing X product as well as a link to a Help Cen

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

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 Workflow. Once they follow the steps in the Workflow to ensure that their question is routed to the correct On-Call team, they’re presented w

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 t

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