Businesses no longer have to choose between clunky email ticketing systems that work for their team and the modern, messenger-based experience customers demand.
Intercom, the Conversational Relationship Platform that helps businesses drive faster growth, today launched powerful new features to bring enterprise-grade efficiency and scale to conversational support for the first time.
The new tools deliver better efficiency for support teams than email ticketing systems, boosting both team performance and scale. Now support teams can seamlessly manage more complex customer queries and deliver shorter reply times to even the most complex or VIP customer questions. The new conversational support offerings help teams automate manual tasks and processes to scale support to more customers and leverage insights from rich reporting features to optimize their conversational support.
Until now, businesses have had two choices for support tools: old-school, email-based ticketing systems that help teams work efficiently, but treat customers as transactions; or a fast and personal messenger-based support experience that delights customers, but lacks the underlying power and flexibility to keep up with how larger support teams work. Intercom is changing this with powerful new management tools to bring the efficiency, scale and workflow management that large businesses and enterprises need. Businesses are no longer forced to choose between workflow efficiency and the customer experience—a risky decision given companies lose more than $62 billion annually due to poor customer service.
The 20+ new features work across Intercom’s industry-leading Business Messenger and Inbox. Key features include:
- Seamless and faster ticketing workflows: Instead of going back-and-forth with customers via email or filling out a form, Intercom’s bots can now collect the exact information support agents need to route and prioritize an issue in minutes, allowing them to identify, triage and reply to customers quicker than via email ticketing.
- World’s most flexible Messenger: Messenger updates give support teams the flexibility to respond to customer inquiries when the time is best for them – whether that’s real time or later – via Intercom’s industry-leading Business Messenger. The ability to control response times helps teams set clear expectations with customers and frees up support teams to focus on high-impact work.
- Robust reporting insights: Support teams now have access to new reports and 12 new metrics that make it easier to provide best-in-class support. They can see which customer issues are taking up the most time, monitor the team’s workload and track their impact, and optimize day-to-day support efficiency.
The shift to conversational experiences at every stage of the customer lifecycle is undeniable, with 68 percent of consumers preferring to communicate with businesses via messaging. For support, COVID-19 is accelerating this shift. Businesses are experiencing spikes in inbound volume and have fewer resources to manage the influx of queries, especially as providing phone support becomes harder in fully remote environments. Conversational support addresses these challenges and helps businesses quickly adapt to the changes from COVID-19, so they can help and connect with customers in a personal, human, efficient and scalable way.
“Customer support is going through an irreversible transformation and modern support needs to be conversational,” said Paul Adams, SVP of Product at Intercom. “Messenger-first, conversational tools are the best way to build relationships with customers because they’re fast, friendly and personal. These new releases add the power and efficiency larger businesses need to adopt conversational support and position Intercom to be the primary support tool for all sizes of businesses.”
Conversational support is the modern way for business to support customers. The most effective conversational support provides proactive, self-serve and human support in real-time or asynchronously. Intercom’s Business Messenger is the only tool that lets businesses do this in a robust, consolidated way. Intercom’s Conversational Support Funnel, the first holistic framework for scaling and delivering conversational support, was launched in June to serve as a blueprint for how to increase efficiency, improve the customer experience and improve the morale of their customer support teams.
Intercom’s Conversational Relationship Platform helps businesses build better relationships with their customers through messenger-based experiences and is used by sales, marketing and support teams to deliver conversational experiences across the customer journey. Today, Intercom powers 500 million conversations a month and connects over 4 billion unique people worldwide across its more than 30,000 global customers, including Facebook, Amazon, Lyft and more.
Find our more about Intercom’s Conversational Relationship Platform here.
About Intercom
Intercom is a Conversational Relationship Platform (CRP) that helps businesses build better customer relationships through personalized, messenger-based experiences. It’s the only platform that delivers conversational experiences across the customer journey, with solutions for Conversational Marketing, Conversational Customer Engagement and Conversational Support.
Intercom is bringing a messenger-first experience to all business-to-customer communication, powering 500 million conversations per month and connecting 4 billion unique end users worldwide across its more than 30,000 paying customers, including Facebook, Amazon and Lyft. The company was founded in 2011 in San Francisco by Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee and David Barrett, with the mission to make internet business personal. Intercom was valued at $1.275 billion in 2018 and has secured $241 million in funding from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Bessemer Venture Partners and Social Capital.
