Intercom, the Engagement OS, today is launching the company’s biggest updates to the Messenger, the heart of its customer communications platform and a cornerstone for more than 25,000 businesses’ customer support and engagement strategies. The next-generation Messenger will have the best user experience design on the market, the ability to handle more business-critical actions all within the Messenger, and is customizable and configurable to match any company’s brand experience.
Intercom is also announcing several additional new features, including messenger-first tickets—a highly-anticipated launch that delivers the future of customer support ticketing. Tickets enables businesses to funnel the most complex support requests through the Messenger and into the Intercom platform, eliminating the need for additional support workflows and tools. For a business’ customers, it delivers a more personal, modern and richer support experience.
“Intercom has earned the loyalty of our customers because we provide the solutions they need to increase customer retention, which is a challenge facing every business,” said Paul Adams, Chief Product Officer at Intercom. “We believe the answer is better customer communication, which is why we pioneered the Messenger eleven years ago. Today we’ve reinvented it for the next decade, when in-product messaging will become the primary channel for businesses to engage with customers.”
In this time of economic uncertainty, the relationship between businesses and their customers is paramount. It determines how fully engaged customers are, and whether or not businesses can retain them and grow. Today’s launches give Intercom’s customers, including industry leaders like Amazon, Atlassian and Microsoft, stronger and more advanced features to build and nurture these relationships through messaging within a product, app or website. Messaging is the best channel to communicate with customers and helps decrease costs and increase customer satisfaction and engagement.
The Next-Generation Messenger
Redesigned from the ground up to be able to do more within the in-product channel, Intercom’s Messenger features a new user experience that companies can tailor to their customers’ journey including:
- Visual customization and new designs with a variety of styles, colors, sizes and more, so companies can fully customize the Messenger to make it feel native to their product.
- Full configurability so customers can set up and target the Messenger for different parts of the customer journey, depending on who the customer is. For example, companies can offer different versions of the Messenger for free users and paid users.
- Spaces such as home, messages, help, news, and tasks makes it more intuitive for end-users to navigate conversations, self-serve help resources, company news and more in the Messenger.
- News tab to share product launches, feature updates, company news, events, promotions, and more directly in the Messenger.
- Enhanced machine learning-driven article suggestions for businesses to give customers more relevant article suggestions within the Messenger.
- Checklists to onboard and activate users by guiding them through a set of actions.
- Compact Messenger that lets customers provide just the right level of information to their users.
- Web and Mobile Messengers, thoughtfully designed for the best user experience across web and mobile.
With these updates, Intercom’s Messenger is not only customizable and configurable, but it is versatile, flexible, fast and designed for modern businesses.
“We use Intercom to power our customer communications, from driving checkout conversions to ongoing customer engagement and delivering personalized support,” said Geronimo Chala, Chief Consumer Officer at Rebag. “The Messenger is the heart of this strategy and will become even better with the revamp and new features. We’re excited to be able to fully customize the Messenger to match our brand’s look and feel, which will have a huge impact in delivering a consistent and personalized experience to meet our customers’ needs and grow our business.”
Basic customization, Messenger spaces, machine learning article suggestions, and updated settings are all available now, with the rest to follow over the coming months.
Messenger-first tickets
Today’s standard ticketing solution is often a form for a customer to fill out, followed by email back and forth to solve the issue—a slow and impersonal customer experience. Intercom tickets offers the only messenger-first, native customer experience for both live and asynchronous support, enabling companies to handle their customers’ most complex issues within the Messenger without switching to a separate channel. With tickets, companies can deliver a faster and stronger customer experience, setting a new industry standard for customer support.
Tickets also lets businesses:
- Use bots to collect customer information, removing back and forth steps to collect information.
- Clearly set customer expectations and show ticket progression through a transparent and personal experience, reducing new inbound queries.
- Send customers proactive notifications to keep them up to date and let them know when further information is needed.
- Continue to leverage industry-standard support channels, like email, but with the flexibility to meet customers in their preferred channel.
“At Copper, we’re all about helping our customers build authentic business relationships with their own customers—and this is mirrored in how we operate as a support team,” said Erik Wantland, Director of Support at Copper. “We were previously using Intercom for support chat and Zendesk for support ticketing, but have now moved all support requests and workflows into Intercom since participating in their tickets beta program. We’re not only saving both money and agent time by consolidating to one support platform, but we’re also delivering a faster and more personalized experience to our customers.”
Intercom built messenger-first tickets to work within its new, next generation Inbox, which launched earlier this year. The feature is available now.
Lastly, the company is announcing two additional new products:
- Visual bot builder: an intuitive and frictionless way for businesses to build more powerful bots and workflows within Intercom. This easy-to-use builder will help increase the amount of customer questions that businesses can resolve through automation, give customers faster answers, and enable more powerful automation. Visual bot builder is the next iteration in the evolution of Intercom’s bots, following the launch of Custom Actions and Custom Objects, which enables customers to integrate bots within the Messenger to other back-end systems. Visual bot builder is available to most customers today.
- Tooltips: non-disruptive and contextual messages that serve as a layer of help within a business’ product, triggered by the customer at the time that makes most sense to them. Businesses can apply Tooltips to any part of their product to help educate customers and drive adoption, and they are code-free so they can be designed and managed by anyone, not just product or engineering teams. Tooltips is available today.
Intercom is seeing increased demand for its platform as more businesses look to build relationships with their customers through messenger-based experiences. Forrester recently recognized Intercom as a Strong Performer in The Forrester New Wave™: Conversation Automation Solutions, Q3 2022. According to the report, “Intercom offers differentiated capabilities in native delivery channels including product, producing rich first-party intent signals.” And in August, Intercom was included in the Forbes Cloud 100 list for the sixth consecutive year.
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