Intercom Transforms Customer Support With the Introduction of the Conversational Support Funnel

By AIT News Desk On Jun 26, 2020

The first-of-its-kind, proven framework shows businesses how to deliver modern, next-generation customer service with conversational support

Intercom, the Conversational Relationship Platform that helps businesses drive faster growth, announced the launch of the Conversational Support Funnel, the first holistic framework for delivering and scaling modern, next-generation customer support through a messenger-first experience. The Conversational Support Funnel combines best-in-class proactive, self-serve and human support capabilities to get ahead of known customer problems before they arise, automatically answer repetitive questions with bots and quickly resolve complex issues with the right support agent.

According to PwC’s Future of CX Report, 59% of all consumers feel companies have lost touch with the human element of customer experience and nearly 80% of American consumers say that speed, convenience, knowledgeable help and friendly service are the most important elements of a positive customer experience. 77% of customers believe it takes too long to reach a live agent (Harris interactive / RightNow).

“Customer support is undergoing an irreversible transformation, and antiquated support systems just don’t cut it anymore,” said Jane Honey, Senior Director of Product, Intercom. Phone and email don’t meet the needs or expectations of modern customers and businesses have to find a new way to deliver customer support. Conversational support is the answer. Intercom’s business Messenger is the best way to build amazing relationships with customers because it’s personal, real-time, and fast. Businesses that don’t deliver conversational experiences will be left behind.

Businesses can’t afford to not deliver great experiences to their customers. According to PwC, 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience, while 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions. New Voice Media reports that U.S. companies lose more than $62 billion annually due to poor customer service.

Conversational support is the modern approach and the most effective way to meet customers where they are, with the personalized, convenient experience they expect, at scale. Intercom’s Conversational Support Funnel, developed after working with thousands of customer support leaders, shows businesses how to strategically scale conversational support beyond just live chat to improve the customer experience, increase business efficiency and boost the morale of customer support teams—effectively transforming these teams from cost centers to revenue-driving engines for businesses.

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The three key support capabilities within Intercom’s Conversational Support Funnel include:

Proactive support: Known customer questions can be answered proactively using tools like a business messenger for in-app and outbound messages or interactive product tours.
Self-serve support: Common or repetitive customer questions can be answered and resolved automatically using chatbots and help center content, like knowledge bases.
Human support: Complex or VIP customer questions are routed to human agents, who are equipped with management tools like an easy-to-use team inbox and powerful teammate workflows for greater efficiency and shorter reply times.

While many businesses are already doing parts of the Conversational Support Funnel, the framework connects these three pieces together for the first time. With this framework, businesses now have a proven approach to move beyond the customer support status quo and achieve better customer satisfaction and improved team efficiency and morale—all leading to stronger ROI. Businesses looking to align with the Conversational Support Funnel will find that Intercom can do it all—real-time and asynchronous chat, conversational bots, contextual help content, targeted outbound messages, a team inbox with advanced rules and workflows for complex queries and more. No more cobbling together multiple tools to achieve what Intercom offers in a singular platform. Intercom can also be used by sales and marketing teams, so that conversational experiences at every part of the customer journey can be managed from one platform.

“We’ve seen companies who adopt conversational support successfully scale their support activities to meet and often exceed customer expectations—even during the COVID-19 pandemic when they faced an unprecedented volume of queries” said Jane Honey, Senior Director of Product, Intercom. “There’s no doubt that conversational support is the future, and Intercom is focused on empowering businesses with the very best tools and ways of working to evolve support to succeed in the new, modern era.”

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. Business demand for conversational support and strong upmarket growth is driving business growth for Intercom and the company surpassed $150 million in average recurring revenue (ARR) at the end of last year. 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 Atlassian, New Relic, Shopify, Aer Lingus and Sotheby’s