Announcing Intercom's new Inbox: The fastest and most powerful inbox designed for scale

As more and more business moves online, and customer expectations have risen accordingly, the demands on support teams have soared – it often feels like teams now need superhuman speed just to keep up.

Increased volume, higher expectations, and team burnout are just a few of the issues businesses are facing. Ultimately, customer support reps are in need of tools that help them do their jobs more efficiently, effectively, and enjoyably.

The Intercom Inbox is what support and customer-facing teams use to handle customer conversations from the Intercom Messenger, email, or any integrated channel. It has always been one of the main attractions for our customers – but, with our latest upgrade, the next-generation Inbox is now the fastest, most effective, and powerful Inbox built for support at scale.

Empowering teams with our next-generation Inbox

Scaling your business means scaling your support, and scaling your support requires great tools. In our personal lives, we’ve gotten used to incredible tools – yet, at work we’re often let down. Think about the tools you or your team use – are they modern and easy to use, or are they clunky and complicated? All too often it’s the latter, because they weren’t built to provide a delightful experience.

However, we are also seeing newer software becoming more consumer-like and the quality bar is rising. Expectations around user experience are higher than ever – therefore we need fast and impactful tools. We believe that in the future, the experience of the tools we use at work will be indistinguishable from our personal life. That’s why we endeavored to transform the Inbox into a tool that better resembles the world-class tools we use in our own lives – blazingly fast, collaborative, visually stunning, and loved by its users.

“The current generation of customer support solutions is simply not designed for this scale. Businesses and customers need something better – they need something designed for internet scale at internet speed and they need it now”Paul Adams, Chief Product Officer at Intercom

But how exactly do your teams and customers benefit from this makeover?

How our Inbox future-proofs support teams

With this new release, we’ve taken extra steps to create an Inbox that is future-proofed for scaling businesses and meets our customers needs with:

• Intuitive and crisp design: Our next-gen Inbox has a modern, beautiful design that makes it easy for your team to focus on the context they need to have personalized and effective conversations, without any clutter getting in the way. Plus, rich information and actions such as switching to a different inbox, viewing conversation events, or accessing extra context about the customer can be expanded when needed.

• Blazingly fast loading times: When you’re working at internet scale, every second counts. Instantly move between conversations and even between inboxes with tens, hundreds, or thousands of live conversations. Our new Inbox has a 10x performance improvement on the previous version and now works to the highest speed.
• Work at speed: Using keyboard shortcuts is significantly more efficient than using a mouse, and that’s why we’ve designed the whole Inbox experience to be fully controllable with your keyboard. Forget traditional shortcuts that are fiddly and hard to remember – our new command-K feature gives you keyboard control of every action in the Inbox from one place, making our new Inbox so much faster to use.

• Improved Smart Replies: The Smart Reply feature also makes it quicker and easier to reach out to your customers by offering predictive text – based on common greetings used in the past – which you can accept, reject, or alter for personalized engagement at speed.

• Customization that sparks joy: It gives your team the freedom to work how they want – in dark mode, in their language; you name it. Your teammates now have far more control over how the Inbox appears for them, including language preference and introducing keenly awaited dark mode – in fact, the Intercom Inbox is the only support inbox on the market with a native dark mode capability built in.

• A view for managers: A new layout option called Table Layout is designed primarily for shift managers. Ensure conversations are triaged correctly, responses are high quality, and teams are effectively utilized. A bird’s eye view of conversations enables you to scan through key customizable information such as waiting time, SLA, and assignee. You can also combine this new table view with the recently released real-time dashboard, providing live Inbox and agent performance metrics.

The fastest and most powerful Inbox built for support at scale

So there you have it, Intercom’s next-generation Inbox. Simple, easy to use, blazingly fast, keyboard-first, and highly configurable – an extremely efficient tool that can be adapted to different businesses, people, and support team roles. Increase productivity, efficiency, CSAT, and, crucially, team morale.

Want to find out more about our consumer-grade support tool that will help you streamline workflows, better collaborate, and meet user expectations?We have it all wrapped up for you right here.

We look forward to welcoming all Intercom customers to our new Inbox. To start using these next-generation features right away you can learn how to get set up quickly and easily here.

(If you haven’t received the option to opt-in yet, please speak to a teammate in your workspace who has teammate management permissions – they can enable the opt-in setting for your team.) 🙌