Announcing new next-generation bot capabilities to uplevel your automated support

Today we’re delighted to announce new next-generation bot capabilities that will boost the power of your bots so that your customers get the help they need, faster.

Bots are transforming the way businesses support their customers. At Intercom, we’re striving to make our automation bots as powerful as possible, offering companies the fastest way to resolve queries in the face of ever-increasing inbound volume and customer expectations.

The exciting new features launching today – Custom Actions and Custom Objects – are no-code capabilities that will help boost your self-serve resolution rate by allowing your bots to access external information and answer more questions than ever.

“Increasing automated resolution rates and self-serve capabilities guarantees a faster, more seamless customer experience”

How do they improve the support experience? Increasing automated resolution rates and self-serve capabilities guarantees a faster, more seamless customer experience – lower time-to-resolution translates to a higher customer satisfaction rate. Not only that, these features will boost support rep efficiency by removing the need to access multiple systems to find the answers your customers need.

Boost self-serve rates for a more seamless customer experience

Before today, our bots couldn’t easily access data living outside of Intercom. And while Custom Apps are available, we know that they require technical expertise to build and maintain. Today’s product release marks a big step forward towards a future where the majority of queries can be resolved by automation. And, there’s no technical expertise required to install these features.

Custom Actions

Connect your systems with Intercom in a no-code environment that’s quick and easy to set up. Custom Actions lets you make API calls that can present information in bots (e.g. order status) as well as take actions (e.g. customers updating contact details).

“These features introduce a frictionless opportunity for your company to boost self-serve rates, reduce inbound volume, and integrate with key platforms”

Custom Objects

A flexible way to import and model your data in a way that makes sense for your business, giving you brand new flexibility and control over your data, resulting in better end-user experiences and more powerful capabilities for teammates using Intercom.

Custom Actions and Objects in bots

Build powerful self-serve experiences in Resolution Bot and Custom Bot with ease.

These features introduce a frictionless opportunity for your company to boost self-serve rates, reduce inbound volume, and integrate with key platforms that your support team uses everyday.

Little effort, huge impact

These three features work together to uplevel Custom Bots and Resolution Bots’ ability to solve common customer queries, and allowing customers to self-serve – offering a faster, more effective support experience and reducing inbound volume.

“Now our bots can resolve even more of your customers’ questions by using customer data from your other tools”

To truly explore the impact of these features on your support offering, we’ve dived deeper into the benefits:

• Increase rate of automated resolutions: Now our bots can resolve even more of your customers’ questions by using customer data from your other tools. Watch your self-serve rate and customer ROI climb, giving your support reps more time to focus on the complex queries they so expertly handle.
• Ensure better end-user experience: End users can resolve more of their own queries, resulting in a lower time to resolution, more satisfied users, and a more personalized experience.
• Set up in minutes: You can set up Custom Actions within 5-10 mins.
• Eliminate context-switching: Offering your customers more opportunities to self-serve means your support reps save time. For those more complex queries, using Custom Objects and Custom Actions enables support reps to reduce tab-switching when seeking information for their customers.

Custom Actions and Custom Objects will provide a whole new layer of context to your customer interactions, facilitating a more personalized support experience and strengthening customer engagement.

How can Custom Objects and Custom Actions help your business to upgrade its customer service offering?

There are endless ways Custom Actions and Custom Objects can create a more seamless customer and support team experience, and you can make these features work for your business in any way you can think of. Here are some industry examples:

E-commerce: Getting an update on the status of an order

Imagine one of your customers wants to find out the status of their order. By opening the bot, they instantly get presented with any live orders, and can see the delivery status in real time. If they’d like to make a change to the order, they can do so without speaking with an agent.

SaaS: a customer’s invoice is now available

A customer logs into their account, visits the payments page and starts a conversation in the Messenger. The bot presents a set of support options, including invoice status. When the customer selects invoice status they instantly see the latest invoice amount, referencing the invoice ID along with a message confirming that the invoice has been paid and processed.

Utilities: Checking a meter reading

A customer of an electricity provider wants to check their latest meter reading. They visit the company’s website, open the Messenger, and enter their account number. They can then see their latest meter readings for both gas and electricity, and can choose to either contact agents for further support, or manage their account directly in the bot.

Are you ready to boost your company’s rates of self-serve support and customer satisfaction with Intercom? It takes less than ten minutes to set up Custom Actions and Custom Objects within Intercom – try it now. If you’re not yet an Intercom customer, learn more about our automated support offering here.