California-based Intercom was founded in 2011, using the profits from selling a bug-tracking tool called Exceptional to Rackspace. Since then, it has received several rounds of funding – most recently a USD 125 million in Series D with participation from Google Ventures.
Intercom is billed as “the world’s first customer messaging platform for business growth” with a powerful messaging tool. Its messaging platform can be used in several contexts, specifically lead generation, customer engagement, and customer support. Intercom has been regularly mentioned by leading publishers as a business messaging tool to watch out for.
Let’s review the Intercom Messenger app in greater detail.
Inside Intercom Messenger
On the surface, Intercom Messenger looks like any other customer messaging platform with all of the regular functionalities. However, it is the solution’s simplicity and signature look-and-feel that makes Intercom Messenger a standout offering. If you’re looking for a one-stop answer to common communication challenges – both internal and customer-centric – Intercom Messenger is definitely a tool to consider. Here is a review of its many exciting features:
- Experience personalisation – At its core, Intercom Messenger works as a hybrid bot with both human and automation capabilities. Automated messages can be customised based on your target audience – for instance, top-of-the-funnel leads versus existing customisation. The solution boasts of a code-free customisation process that’s remarkably easy-to-use even for business users. Bots can also replace web forms to accelerate the traffic-to-conversion lifecycle
- Customer support – If you’re looking to build a chatbot (or more) for your business, Intercom Messenger is an excellent choice. Building a chatbot from scratch is extremely easy, and you can define business rules and conversation flows without any technical expertise. The collected data can be quickly prioritised and routed to the right contact centre agent
- Integrated apps – This is probably Intercom’s biggest USP – it does for customer communication what Slack achieves in-house. There are 100+ apps already available in the Intercom marketplace including productivity tools, sales & marketing apps, customer support teams, telephony, and analytics. This makes Intercom Messenger a one-stop-shop for virtually all your contact centre needs
- Automated answers – Intercom lets you offer brand-specific response automation, keeping customer experiences consistent. Like any support bot, there’s 24/7 availability to reduce pressures on your contact centre staff. The answering bot leverages machine learning to understand exactly which degree of help it can offer – the rest is promptly delegated to a human agent. Finally, the automation training module is particularly useful, where you can manually control how the bot learns from historical conversations
- Product tours – This is an add-on feature for the Messenger app that lets you onboard new users right from the conversational interface. You can create interactive guides, showcase new updates, and pre-empt customer complaints
- Account-based marketing – By placing an Intercom Messenger bot on your website, you can offer targeted web experiences to existing accounts. Marketing agents will receive an instant update when an existing customer is on the website, enabling timely intervention
Why Intercom Messenger Makes a Difference
Intercom Messenger is deceptively easy-to-use and brings a consumer-like experience to enterprise technology. For example, you can share images, videos, and even emoticons via automated bots, better engaging with customers. And if you don’t want to configure your messages from scratch there’s an array of messaging styles to choose from, tailored for common customer interaction scenarios.
We were quite impressed by the vast selection of apps available in the marketplace – like NPS integrations, and automated Article Inserter. If you’re looking for a messaging app that’s designed to grow your bottom line, your search could end with Intercom.
What We Think
Intercom has over 30,000 paid customers over the world in less than a decade of being around. It comes in four distinct packages starting at USD 87 per month. There’s also a pro version with greater customisation and control. The premium version includes detailed analytics and actionable reports on team performance, and the all-in-one version has nearly everything you could need to optimise customer interactions.
Intercom is clearly eager to carve a distinct space of itself in an ever-growing collaboration-tech landscape. We were drawn by messenger’s robust integration capabilities, and intelligent add-ons such as product tours and help centres – both must-haves for any customer-centric product company, today.
