It was the end of 2024. Intercom was already all-in on Fin, and our customer support organization was deep in its own transformation. Resolution rates were strong, efficiency was improving, and for the first time, something new was emerging: capacity.
Having more time available for everyday work was great, but it also opened the door for a completely new approach to how we operated. As we became less and less reactive on a daily basis, we started to see how we could take advantage of the unique intersection support sits at – deeply connected to customer needs and closely aligned with company goals – to perform a more consultative role and actively drive value for both customers and the business.
This is the story of how we built consultative support at Intercom. I’ll walk you through how we got started, results we’ve seen, and some lessons we’ve learned along the way that others might find helpful.
Take guidance from your team
Finding ways to proactively engage customers was not something entirely new for our support team. A few years ago, we collaborated with RAD (Intercom’s research and data science team) to drive product adoption. As part of a project called “next best step,” we focused on providing proactive next steps for customers in an already established conversation. This worked well, but as Fin continued to progress the way we worked, things shifted and we found ourselves ready to explore new opportunities.
Instead of prescribing a solution, we decided to openly discuss ways we could proactively engage customers as a team. We ran a support town hall and asked everyone to weigh in on one simple question: “how can support help drive Intercom’s goals?”
We were flooded with good ideas that we could turn into campaign concepts on the spot. Things like an always-on in-product banner offering a call with a member of our team to help customers set Fin up to the best of its ability. Or the “Fin upsell campaign,” where, once a customer had a positive interaction with Fin and they clicked on the “that helped” button, a new message would trigger that shared details about our own success using Fin and offer customers the chance to book a call with our team to hear more and ask questions.
The energy that came out of the town hall made it obvious that the support team had clear ideas about how to help customers get more out of the product, and all that was needed was a space to share them.
Start small and be intentional
Once we’d settled on a few ideas to trial, we got started with a small group of volunteers who dedicated part of their time every week to exploring how we could provide new, more proactive support. We kept the group tight on purpose for two reasons:
- While Fin had freed up significant capacity, the team still played a big role in managing day-to-day support work.
- This was very much an experiment, and until we could prove that it worked, we weren’t going to overhaul everything for our 100+ person organization.
One of our first campaigns focused on proactive engagement with self-serve customers – those without a dedicated sales or success touchpoint. Our goal was to give this group the ability to talk directly with members of our team who had first-hand experience with AI transformation and help them see the value they could get from Fin.
Some early use cases we got involved with included helping customers through Fin trials, working with mature customers to get more out of Fin through optimization, and identifying high-potential accounts that looked ready for Fin and reaching out proactively. None of this required a new team or a big budget, just attention and intention.
On top of our standard support training, we helped our volunteers navigate this new approach by encouraging a deliberate move away from just solving the immediate problem at hand and instead probing deeper to better understand customers’ unique contexts. Our sales and success teams were helpful to lean on here as we figured out how to proactively approach customers and catch their attention at the right moment, instead of waiting for them to come to us.
Track your impact
To validate our approach, we needed data to confirm if what we were doing was actually working or if it just felt like a success.
To find out, we built a simple but rigorous comparison: accounts we engaged with vs. accounts we reached out to, but didn’t hear back from. Over a six month period, we tracked feature adoption, Fin usage, and expansion revenue across both groups.
The result was clear: engaged accounts grew roughly twice as fast in both usage and expansion.
To further prove the value of proactive support, we also tracked direct Fin resolutions generated after consultative interactions, resolution and automation rate improvements across engaged accounts, and influenced expansion ARR across everything we worked on over the year.
Seeing the numbers was a real turning point for us. It made it clear that what we were doing wasn’t an experiment anymore, but something that could drive measurable business impact.
Grow through partnerships
As results became visible, other teams started paying attention.
Over time, we started to partner with teams across the business to expand the impact of proactive support: self-serve engineering teams recognized the value of deliberate human touchpoints, customer lifecycle marketing found a partner for handling responses to their campaigns, and product teams started identifying high-impact engagement opportunities alongside us. We also built close working relationships with our digital, scale, and high -touch success teams by stepping in with human touchpoints where they lacked capacity and offering deep technical guidance on how to get the best out of Intercom.
What started as simple outreach evolved into highly targeted, strategic initiatives tied directly to business goals.
Over the course of a year, our group of volunteers has grown to ~16 teammates across regions who are all curious and motivated to try new things. We’re continuing to expand what our consultative support function looks like and getting involved in new projects across the board. As a recent example, we’ve taken over the new “sales assist” team with the goal to drive self-serve trial conversions and help new Intercom customers get the most out of the experience.
Key learnings for other support teams
If you’re considering trying something similar, here are my key takeaways from what I’ve learned:
- Start with your team, not a strategy doc: The best ideas come from the people closest to customers. The town hall we hosted shaped the initial direction of our program, not predetermined solutions decided by leadership.
- Don’t scale before you’ve proved it: A small group of motivated people moved faster and produced clearer results than a large rollout would have, and when you need organizational buy-in, a small rigorous proof point is worth more than a promising concept.
- Train for a different mindset: Consultative work requires curiosity, commercial awareness, and the ability to hold broader context (not just product knowledge). Getting this right requires a different kind of training worth investing in deliberately.
- Measure against a control group: Without it, you have a story. With it, you have a business case, and the difference matters enormously when you’re trying to scale.
- Lean into being different: While it’s helpful to take guidance from sales and success on how to approach this new type of work, don’t feel like you have to operate in exactly the same ways. There’s power in being different.
At Intercom, spinning up our consultative support function has changed how we think about what we do entirely. Support is no longer just there to respond. Now, it drives adoption, influences retention, generates expansion revenue, and, in many cases, acts as the primary touchpoint for self-serve customers.
In an AI-first world, where Fin handles all of the transactional work, this kind of work becomes even more important. Because the question for support leaders is no longer “how do we handle more tickets?” but rather, “how do we use support to grow the business?”