How to Keep Your Customers at the Center During Turbulent Times with Intercom

Hello. So my name is Shane Murphy Reuter. I run marketing over at Intercom. Despite the Irish accent, I am not one of the co founders of the company. Much to my mother's disappointment. I'm not a multimillionaire but I do have the, you know, I have the fortunate opportunity that I get to a front row seat into a lot of the thinking that we've been doing over the last few years really to put the customer at the center of everything that we do. And then obviously more recently all of that changed. You know, our jobs as businesses and particularly in marketing is to understand the customer, understand what makes them tick, understand their hopes, their dreams, their desires, and build a product that adds value to them and obviously also market it in a way that communicates that value in the context of what is happening in their lives. And obviously with the current crisis hitting in the last two months, all of that dramatically changed, our customers lives changed dramatically. And as a result the things that we were doing internally had to change as well. And so I'm going to walk you through some of the things we've been doing around this over the last couple of months. One of the internal sort of mantras that we've been sharing quite frequently at all hands, I'd say it's a little bit cheesy, but I actually think it's really, really relevant is this one which is it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives it. It is the one that is most adaptable to change. I said things have changed dramatically. You know, didn't just change one time and suddenly okay, there's a new normal. We now need to just do one change to our plans. The situation has been changing on a daily weekly basis and frankly will likely continue to change over the coming, maybe even year or two depending upon the knock on economic impacts. And so this isn't just about changing once. This is now a philosophy that we have to hold dear to our hearts as we go after every single day of work. And so I really, you know, I think this is really critically important for us all to think about. And so you know, what I want to talk about today are like three core areas that Intercom specifically has been thinking about in this overarching theme of how do we adapt to changes to our customers lives. Usually when I give these types of talks it is on a topic that I've spent 15 years of my career thinking about, have developed a blueprint for, have many examples of how I've worked through challenges there this stuff is pretty, pretty raw. I hope that I speak for most people on the line when I say that this is pretty new for all of us. And certainly we can lean on some of the lessons from other types of situations like crisis comms and those sort of things. But this is definitely fresh. And so what I want to walk you through is definitely the things that we as Intercom have been thinking about. But I think the main lesson is not so much these specific examples, but more that overall, because your customer situation has changed so much, all of the things that you are doing as a business will need to change and adapt. And as I said, on a continuing basis, given that the situation is changing so fast and so regularly. So I'm going to kick off now with one of the core areas that we jumped on first, which was like communicating business continuity and goodwill. So this is one of those things that I think every company recognized that they needed to do. But, you know, one of the things that at Intercom, we tried to get ahead of was really taking as early action and as decisively as we could. On March, Started encouraging work from home, and then on March 13, we made it mandatory. And at that time, obviously, we also started communicating that to our customers. And you can see an example of a blog post here that we did to communicate that. It's fair to say that in all of my time working in marketing, in situations where there are sort of crises, that acting early and doing it decisively is critically important. And so this is an example of one of the things that we've been doing, but just as importantly is taking that action is communicating it proactively to our customers and in a mindful way. We've all received those hundreds of emails from services that we, like, maybe used once 10 years ago. And oftentimes I've received ones in companies where they're using those emails as opportunities to sell. And so, you know, I think on this one, it's critically important that you are communicating to your customers that, hey, we're here. This is how you can get in touch with us. And if you need support and any other things that you might want to communicate, if your business has been impacted, that you need to communicate those things, that you do it proactively and mindfully. One of the things we did to try and be mindful was a couple of things. One, we didn't want to obviously spam all of our users. And so we used our own data to identify, like, dormant users and didn't message those. We used our IN App messaging capability to message them in the app so that we weren't adding to the sort of inbox fatigue. And so the little things like that I think that you can do to make sure that the content that you are sharing is done in a mindful way and not in a spammy way. And then, you know, the third one on this one is really where you're trying to get into the adding value to your customers. For Intercom specifically, we actually have a product that our customers now needed to use in a potentially different way. We have some customers that are seeing 10x an increase of 10x of their inbound support volume. And so we hustled to create a bunch of content that gave best practices on how to set Intercom up to handle high volumes of inbound queries, particularly using things like automation. And so you can see like we created a video, this is Phil and anybody knows has probably seen Phillies in our products and things walking through how you can use it. We also created in app messaging, as I said, for customers to promote this stuff so that customers can get access to it, create a blog post, help center articles and so to really communicate, hey, if you're struggling with this, this is how you can use our product. And I'm sure for all of your businesses there are ways that you can use content and product education to help customers through this time. And then the final one is a little bit more, I don't want to say sensitive or difficult, but social responsibility right now is critically important. We are all part of a community of businesses and I think there are loads of examples of companies stepping in to help where they can in these situations. From an Intercom perspective, we obviously wanted to offer Intercom for free to any companies that actually were trying to fight COVID 19 or the impact that it's having on society, such as like the Andorran government are using us their website. And you know, when we actually originally rolled this out and didn't say anything about it because we didn't want to come across as kind of like selling it, we decided to actually write a blog post to at least communicate that we are doing it. So people are looking for it, that they can find it, but try to do it in a way that wasn't too self promotional. And so definitely again for your businesses, if there are ways that you can support the community out there, they're always appreciated by customers and the broader community. And trying to find that balance of like not being overly self promotional about is critically important. I say that knowing that I'm now promoting it to A bunch of people. So I probably come across as hypocritical there, but sure you'll forgive that. So moving on. So that section was all about how do you in the early days quickly communicate the key things to your customers around, hey, we're here, here's how we can help and here's how you can use our product differently I think is critically important. The second section is a bit like longer term thinking around how does the gene customer landscape impact your product or marketing plan is customer insight. It is absolutely what should drive everything that we're doing and if that customer context changes, obviously your marketing product plans need to change. And so here, you know, I'm going to walk you through some examples of how we've been doing that. At Intercom we first off did a bunch of research into our customers through surveys, through, you know, working with the sales teams to understand what was on our customers minds, what were the pain points they were having. So try to understand the changing landscape. The examples here aren't Intercom specific. I think these are examples of just generally changing consumer behavior such as like community traffic just dying off. And so if in your marketing plan you've got radio advertising, you know, the effectiveness there is going to obviously drop considerably. But you know, even things like Zoom obviously exploding mean that maybe you want to move to virtual events like Saster probably have. But really understanding and working either with your sales team or working through direct customer surveying to understand what are the changing needs of your customers is really, really important. And Intercom we then used that. To do things like reprioritizing our product strategy. There's a lot of words on this slack. Essentially this is our head of product explaining how we had a feature that we planned to build in future quarters which essentially allowed mobile customers turn off the ability to directly message a human and use bots to handle all of the inbound queries. And for certain companies, when you see a 10x increase in inbound volume, that's actually important that the messenger can do that. And so in two short business days managed to bring that forward and build it and ship it. And so great example of that. Using the insight to reprioritize things and deliver value to the customer. From a marketing perspective, really everything changed for us. We had to review every single part of our marketing plan. We had to pause most of our content marketing that we had planned because it would have been tone deaf. We had a big above the line what we're going. Our hero marketing campaign set to go live in a few weeks. That we're pushing until September because again, it would be tone deaf. And then even things through a copy on our homepage that we want to update to make sure that it was talking more about what's happening these times. There is not one, there's not a line on our marketing plan that has not been adjusted to reflect the current situation. And so I'm sure any of the marketers on the call are doing a similar thing. And you know, my heart goes out to you. It's a lot of work, but really critically important that you do that work. This is one of the few non intercom examples I wanted to give because I just think it is the most amazing example of product strategy changing quickly, which is Airbnb, because obviously revenue is gone, core revenue is gone. They launch these experiences. And last week I was on a meeting listening to my wife and mother in law singing and dancing while making sangria with drag queens from Portugal, which I just thought was an incredible example of moving fast and changing product strategy given the environment we're in. And also very tasty sangria. And so finally, the other area that we've been thinking a lot about is how do we communicate to our customers and also how do we help our customers communicate with their customers? The need for customer communication has changed dramatically for most businesses since this situation started. You know, 47% of support teams have seen an increase in the volume of their inbound queries since the outbreak of COVID 19. Here's a graph that shows overall the weekly conversations with, you know, support agent within intercom. And so you can see that very clear uptake. Now that's a, that's a tale of two very different worlds. Obviously we have a chunk of customers who've not seen much change if they're in relatively unimpacted industries. And then some customers who have seen a 10x increase in their inbound volume. And so how do you communicate with your customers when you're going through that type of change? So one of the things we hold dear internally within intercom is thinking about our communication strategy very much as a, as a funnel, starting at the top with proactively. How do you identify problems that you think your customers are going to have? Proactively communicate with them in a way that cuts out the issue at the root cause so that it never turns into a potential question. There will be things that you don't proactively, obviously educate your customers on that turns into a question. And we use internally and I know that actually saster for this event use automation and bots to get customers answers immediately to the common questions. And so we call self service. And then finally there will be certain things like queries that are very much more sort of challenging to answer that require a human to step in and to answer those questions with obviously empathy. You know, we very much think about this similar to, you know, with banks, the self service is the ATM which people just want to get out the cash and then but there is the need to go and sometimes talk to the bank manager. And so, you know, from, from proactive again, here is an example of a message that we sent out to our customers in app, essentially trying to educate, you know, that we're still here to help and how they can use Intercom to handle the current situation. But we use in app messaging and things like product tours in a wide variety of different ways to educate our customers proactively before any issues arise. This is an example of shipbob who you can see the quote here where they're using in app notifications to help their merchants understand their changes to their operating procedures. And it's made a big impact on their ability to cut out inbound queries before they even turn into questions. And then, you know, from a self service point of view, this is an example of a company called accurx who've seen a 10x increase in inbound queries and they've been using bots to handle that. And so they've been able to manage the effective resolution of that massive increase in questions without drowning their support team because of bots and automation. Another example here is Get Cal Fresh who facilitate the food stamp program and they've seen a 4x increase in weekly applications from 1500 to 6000. And using bots they've been able to effectively manage that again without draining their support team. So again, the only thing that you can do to use automation to handle those sort of common questions mean that you can really scale the experience for your customers even in times like this. And then finally human and absolutely there is a place and an important place for human support, especially for those tricky situations. And that's where kind of live chat for an intercom perspective comes in. But you can manage human support across other media as well. You know, just an example of Monday.com who empowered their customer experience team to handle one on one any questions that were coming from their customers around financial assistance and you know, empower their team to handle those questions and deal with them in a human way. And they've received really great feedback from the customers from doing that and so there is absolutely that appropriate place for those tougher conversations to happen one to one and to get your great customer support staff handling them. And so yeah, that's it. It's a bit of a whistle stop tool or handle the currency. In summary, I think top the biggest lesson for us is that the situation is changing constantly and that we need to as a result constantly adapt what we are doing. I talked through three core areas that we're doing that but there will be many, many more for your business. My biggest sort of advice if you're not already doing this is understand the customer, open up lines of communication so that you understand the changing, you know, world that they are in and then make sure that you are internally creating the space for quick iterations of things like your mark product plans and make sure that your teams are aware that you're going to fast on some was asked to leave time for some questions and I think some have come in so I will stop there and hand over for questions.

Yeah, thanks so much Shane. You have a few that come in. One that I wanted to ask. Obviously you mentioned, you know, Sasha's been on Intercom for years. For those that are like starting with Intercom because we sort of like have our own scoring system. Like what do you recommend in terms of tying like live chat, especially if it's new for those adopting right now, right to working from home and like getting up a live chat. How do you measure that? Back to roi.

Yeah. So you know, this is kind of why we like to think of support as a funnel. Much like sales. Sales teams have been used to managing. Areas of funnel for a long, long time. And the same is true for support. And what you are trying to do is balance costs with sort of the return in support world. The return is customer satisfaction. And so you want to make sure that you're measuring customer satisfaction that you are holding if not improving that. But you want to do that obviously in an efficient way. You could hire a thousand support people and have very good CSAT scores but that's not realistic for the vast majority of businesses. And so what you're trying to do with the funnel is essentially ensure that the queries that are sort of common are handled quickly and efficiently which actually improves csat. We find that like for common questions, people actually don't want to talk to a human, they just want to, it's like the atm, they just want to get the money out and leave. And so you can analyze, you know, what are the, your common questions and make sure that you have bots to handle those, which actually does increase your CSAT for the ones that then that are more unique, let those through to a human and then ensure that you maintain your CSAT there. And so essentially what you're trying to do is the ROI comes from being able to scale your customer support team in a cost efficient way.

No, definitely. For sure. And then just one last question before we have to hop. Have you seen a super interesting use case from any of your customers of what they're doing with Intercom now? Like given everything that's going on?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think some of the more advanced customers are the likes of Shipbob and I'm going to skirt the interesting. It's not like revolutionary like the content necessarily that they're sharing, but they're a really good example. A company really leaned into that idea of the support funnel and I kind of use the example there of where they are using proactively in app notifications to get ahead of questions that they know that are going to be coming in and as a result cutting them out, even upfront. Then they have the bots that come in and then the humans that come in after that. So I think that they're probably a really good example of just a company that have leaned in heavily to the idea of a support funnel and have been doing it very well.

Yeah, that instant feedback loop on Intercom is so powerful. Sometimes if we forget something, people will tell you right away or if there's a link missing, obviously we're using it today. People sign up for summit on it, which I think is super cool. So people sign up for Intercom on Intercom. Thanks so much. We're big fans of Intercom. Thanks for joining and sharing your insights with Saster. Stay safe and see everyone at the next one.

Thanks very much. And if anybody has any questions, I'm on Twitter if you want to follow up at Shane Murphy with an F in the Murphy. So hopefully continue the conversation.