The Next Chapter of Intercom

Intercom’s mission has always been to make internet business personal. Back when the company was founded in 2011, technology didn’t allow online businesses connect with customers in the same ways they did in person.

Our founders’ goal in creating Intercom was to fix this broken connection. Through innovating how businesses and customers interact for the last seven years, we have changed consumers’ expectations for how they talk with businesses. We now help tens of thousands of businesses of all types and sizes grow faster through better customer relationships.

But despite advances, limitations remain. This week, our CEO and co-founder Eoghan McCabe and product leader Matt Hodges delivered our vision for the future of business messaging and automation at The Next Chapter keynote, which you can watch above. Short on time? Here are our three key takeaways and the full transcript below:

1. In the past century, a number of new technologies have radically transformed how businesses communicate with their customers. But consumer expectations of real-time interactions online are exposing some real human limitations.
2. Bots have the potential to deliver radical efficiencies and help businesses meet consumer expectations. In the face of this technology, businesses have three options – ignore it, see adoption as a box-ticking exercise or embrace it and think long-term.
3. In Intercom’s next chapter, we intend to deeply embrace automation and bots to help businesses dramatically enhance their customer experience and achieve faster growth.

Eoghan: Thank you for coming tonight. Intercom’s done events before. In fact, we’ve done no less than two world tours where we travel the world and spoke at dozens of cities. We spoke about building products, but we never actually spoke about our products before.

Well, tonight we’re going to change that. We’re going to touch on some of the context and the history behind starting Intercom. We’re going to touch on our vision and the mission that got us to where we are today. We’re going to talk about the coming of bots and automation, how that’s evolving our vision, and how it will represent the next chapter for our company. Finally, we’re going to show you what we’ve been building for this new future.

Why we started Intercom

Over the past century, there’s been a small handful of new technologies that pretty much revolutionized how businesses and companies connect. Technologies like the phone, and email, and the world wide web were all transformative for those who use them. For the first time, phones let people reach out to their customers at great distances and instantly in real time. For the first time, email let companies connect with their customers at great scale and in targeted ways, sometimes personal ways, and pretty much for free. And for the first time, the world wide web let companies be open for business around the globe and around the clock without any extra staff.

But as these channels became more popular and the benefits from simply having them started to wane, businesses started to exploit them, much to the great detriment of the consumer. There’s a reason we don’t answer calls from unknown numbers anymore. There’s a reason we don’t read much of the email we’re sent anymore. Or maybe that’s just me and apologies to all my team. And in around 2010, near the end of the growth curve for the world wide web, connecting with businesses online as a consumer started to make for a pretty crappy, spammy and a transactional experience. The channel was over-optimized, maybe even dehumanized.

“Connecting with businesses online as a consumer started to make for a pretty crappy, spammy and a transactional experience”

It was rare, for example, that you could actually connect with a person, and pretty frequent that when you tried to, you’d receive that warm, fuzzy, delightful reply that sounded something like, “Dear valued customer, thanks for your inquiry. You’re ticket number 5,053. Have you read our FAQ? Your ticket will automatically close in 10 days.”

It was around this time we started to think about something new. We were thinking about the idea that evolved into Intercom. Intercom’s co-founders and I were in Ireland at the time and had met a guy called Colin Harmon. He had a coffee shop called 3FE, which stood for “third floor espresso.” Colin can claim credit for being the first to bring hipster coffee to Ireland. And while we came for the coffee, we stayed for Colin. We got to see his appreciation for us and the smile on his face. We got to share in the passion he had for his craft. Because of that relationship we built with him, we found ourselves coming back more often, happily paying whatever he wanted for his overpriced coffee, drinking way too much coffee, referring friends, forgiving mistakes and giving feedback — all things any business trying to create sustainability and profitability would want.

“Was that kind of human connection even possible for online businesses?”

We were running a different Internet business at the time and we had thousands of customers, but had only maybe met 20 of them, maybe 30, incidentally at conferences and other events. We had nothing like the relationship with our customers that Colin had with us. We started to ask ourselves, “Was that kind of human connection even possible for online businesses?” We came to the belief that, yes, it was, but that the tools that were available at the time were the things holding people back. We came to see that there was great, great room for improvement and that there was an opportunity to create tools that could much better support human connection. And so our relationship with Colin became this fascinating and super valuable lens through which we could start to find new opportunities in the market.

It was with these insights that we created Intercom and set out with our mission to make internet business personal. To do this, we innovated on a whole bunch of stuff. For example, when you reach out to a customer as a business, we made it so that it would always have a reply address. They could always reply to you, no more “do not reply.” And when they got your message, they’d see your face and your name. Similarly when they reply to you, you’d see who they were too. So everyone kind of knew each other and there was some familiarity. It was through these innovations, and perhaps a hundred other small ones too, that we created a very differentiated product and experienced tremendous growth.

Business communication today

We now have over 30,000+ paying customers, some incredible companies, ranging from small to not small. In recent Y Combinator classes, 85% of companies who had any kind of messenger use Intercom. We also get to call bigger tech companies, like Atlassian, and bigger non-tech companies, like Sotheby’s, our customers as well.

The awesome thing is that the benefits they’re seeing from using this tool are quite measurable. For example, sales teams are seeing an 82% increase in the conversion rates with their leads when they talk to customers on their sites. Marketing teams double the open rates of their messages when they use Intercom to send messages with the right time and context and in a personalized way. Support teams shorten up to half their response times when they use Intercom’s more fluid, flexible and lightweight way of connecting.

We were the first to champion these changes in the market at the time, and over these past seven years, participated in a massive shift in the industry. Big public companies made big pivots to adopting these types of practices, and perhaps even a hundred small startups blossomed and started to contribute to the cause too. During this time, there was also a massive shift in consumer expectations. This always happens with new tech. Consumers saw how the more forward-looking innovative companies were using these new tools to better respect them as people. They increasingly became unwilling to tolerate having to jump through hoops to talk to a person or being dumped into a ticketing system.

“When a consumer reaches out to a business online, two-thirds of them expect a response in the same day”

In fact, interestingly, a study late last year showed that when a consumer reaches out to a business online, two-thirds of them expect a response in the same day and over 40% expect a reply within an hour. This was not the case in 2010.

These changes in consumer expectations are now exposing some real human limitations. These are thresholds that won’t just go away. There are simple laws of biology that will prevent us from extracting more productivity from humans and simple laws of economics that will prevent businesses from simply throwing more people at the problem. And so the benefits from this more personal way of connecting will start to wane if we can’t break through these bottlenecks.

The promise of bots

We believe that bots are fundamental to solving this problem. Yes, they were hyped to death, nearly, about two years ago and we were super cynical too. But the reality is, as we waited and watched, they now are starting to become useful. We believe that automation in the form of chatbots, or just bots, will make messaging and a conversational approach to business as transformative as phones and email on the worldwide web.

Bots have the potential to deliver radical efficiencies to sales and marketing and support teams. You could imagine how sales teams could use bots to have always on, always available, always consistent, infinitely easy to train reps available to talk to prospects. Or marketing teams could have tailored, one-on-one, white glove service bots that could hold the hand of users as they started to use your products. Or support teams could have bots as the front line of defense to triage inbound inquiries, get more information from customers, or even solve problems.

“We think that people who ignore the potential for automation will suffer the same fate as those who ignored the web”

We built our first bot over a year ago and we called it Operator. It was designed to grease the wheels between the humans on either end of the interaction. It could perform very simple tasks. For example, it could ask questions about the person reaching out to best route them to the right team in the organization.

We built it, in part, as an experiment to see if this squishy, personal-loving company could get comfortable with these automated, icky things called bots. And it created some pretty understandable discomfort in the organization. We have an all-hands meeting across the company every two weeks. And I got a great question earlier this year: “If we’re trying to make internet more personal, what are we doing building a bunch of bots?”

These questions had us think a little more about the motivation behind being personal, and try to better define it. Did being personal mean people on the other end of the line? Or was it more about what only people could do thus far? We started to define personal recently as treating the customer as an individual, respecting their time and dignity and ultimately getting them to their ideal outcome.

“We started to define personal recently as treating the customer as an individual”

By this measure, we believe bots have a key role to play in being personal too. Bots are here and we think it presents you with three options.

1. You could do nothing. You could wait. You could ignore this like you have to ignore so many fads and trends that have come and gone. We just don’t think you should do that this time. We think that people who ignore the potential for automation will suffer the same fate as those who ignored the web.
2. You could check a box. There are some tools out there in the market today that offers some pretty big promises via automation, but they’re designed with a short-term view. They’re built to deliver KPIs like emails captured or leads created and they’re creating some pretty crappy experiences for any customer who wants to do anything other than talk to sales. We deeply believe that using bots in this way will be the hallmark of a shitty brand.
3. The third option is to think a little bigger, a little longer-term. Use bots across the entire customer lifecycle, not only to deliver great efficiencies for your business, but to massively improve the customer experience too. Providing you with this third option, allowing bots to accelerate growth at every stage in the lifecycle, is what we’re dedicated to in this next chapter of our company.

Let’s show you what we’ve been building for this future. Here’s our product leader, Matt Hodges.

What we’ve been building for the future

Matt: There are three core components of Intercom that are critical to this future we’re building for.

The first is the messenger, the primary channel that the world’s fastest growing businesses are choosing to connect with their customers because it’s the channel that their customers want to connect with them.

The second is our growing ecosystem of apps and integrations that help the sales, marketing and support teams using Intercom get their jobs done faster and deliver a better customer experience at the same time.

And the third is Operator, our first bot that has since evolved and become the automation technology that powers our growing family of conversational bots. Operator works seamlessly with the messenger and with these apps to automate workflows and help both your business and your customers achieve their desired outcomes. I say growing family because we’ve got a brand new product to share with you.

The redesigned business Messenger

But first let’s talk Messenger. We released our first business Messenger back in 2011, and it’s come a long way since. It now powers more than 500 million conversations every month. And we’re always looking for ways to make it better and give you more flexibility and control in the ways that you can use it for your business.

So we went back to first principles and we looked at how you were using the Messenger, and we found that one in every seven of those 500 million conversations every month included a link to another business tool that you were using to book meetings or share knowledge base articles or even jump on video calls.

We thought, “Wouldn’t it be better if you could do all of those things inside of the Messenger? Wouldn’t that be a better experience for everyone, not just for your teams, that also for your customers?” So earlier this year we released an entirely new Intercom Messenger and for the very first time, business messaging is now way more than just chat.

It has a completely new area called to the Messenger Home, which acts like a front desk for your business. You can customize what the visitors to your website see here and, separately, what the users logging into your product see to help them achieve the fastest outcome, whether that’s starting a conversation with your team or helping themselves.

You can fill your Messenger Home with apps that let people do things like search your knowledge base, discover important news about your company (maybe an upcoming new product), sign up for a demo with your sales team, subscribe to your marketing newsletter and of course, start a conversation with your team. We’ve loved seeing how our customers are customizing their messages and truly making them feel like their own.

Our growing ecosystem of apps

It’s been exciting to see the apps that people using to encourage the right actions that make the most sense for their business. Like Airtable, who are using the article search app so that people can help themselves. And Pinpoint, who are advertising new positions that they’re actually hiring for right now, using the Content Showcase app. And Disqus, who is surfacing the availability of their own product using the Statuspage app.

You can find these in a library of more than 100 other apps on the Intercom App Store. We’ve partnered with some of the best and most popular technology companies out there to ensure that Intercom works well with your existing tech stack and that your sales, marketing and support teams can use Intercom in entirely new ways and streamline workflows.

Your sales team can keep their customer data in sync with apps from Salesforce and Hubspot, which can automate the manual tasks that no one likes doing, like creating leads. With Clearbit Reveal, you can choose which visitors on your website you want to be able to see the Messenger so that your team can focus on only the highest value conversations. When your team members are having live conversations with valuable leads, they can accelerate things by inviting them to jump on a video or a voice call with apps from Aircall and Google Meet — right inside the Messenger. Those are just some of the apps available for sales teams.

Customizing messages with Clearbit Reveal

Let’s take a look at some of the apps for marketing. For instance, Typeform lets you send targeted surveys to people who’ve just signed up or made a purchase. They can complete those surveys right inside the messenger, which is going to drastically improve your completion rates and give you a much better understanding of your customers. There are also apps from Survicate, AskNicely and Wootric, which will help you get way more responses to your net promoter score surveys because they can be sent inside our timely in-app messages to your most active users, like this one that I got a couple of weeks ago when I logged into Sunsama.

And what about support teams? They can use apps from Cobrowse, Upscope and Median to invite customers to share their screen, to better troubleshoot an issue and accelerate a resolution.

“Business messaging is now way more than just chat”

Those are just some of the hundred plus apps available on the Intercom App Store, and we’re adding more all the time. Here’s a sneak preview at three apps that are coming to the App Store very soon. The first is from Pipedrive, which is going to help you keep your leads and conversations in sync. There’s a new app from Calendly that’s going to make it even easier for you to book meetings directly in the messenger. And lastly, there’s an app from Google Analytics that will help you see how people are actually interacting with the messenger, which is great for marketing attribution and reporting.

You can build your own apps too, apps that you can list publicly on the Intercom App Store, or private apps that are available to just your business. Everything you need to get started is available on the Intercom Developer Hub, and you’d be surprised at how easy it is to build an app. One of our partners, Coda, went from a concept on a whiteboard to a working app in a single week.

Custom Bots

We’ve covered how the Messenger, thanks to apps, is so much more than just chat. All of this gets even more powerful when you add bots to the mix. When you combine the Messenger with apps and with Operator, you can create these entirely automated but personalized customer experiences that will help you accelerate growth at every stage of the customer lifecycle. We’re continuing to invest a lot in Operator and allow you to do even more with it with bots for sales, marketing and support.

As Eoghan mentioned, it was only a year ago that we released Operator, our first bot. And it’s since evolved to become a set of task bots that can automate the manual tasks that your sales and support teams used to have to do. Instead now they can focus on only the things that humans can do.

There’s a bot that automatically sets expectations based on your team’s availability when people write in. There’s another bot that will intelligently suggest help articles that might help resolve a problem while someone’s waiting for a response. There’s a bot to help measure customer satisfaction right in the moment, as soon as your sales and support reps have closed conversations when people are most likely to respond. Those are just a few of the task bots that are included free with every paid subscription of Intercom.

“When you combine the Messenger with apps and with Operator, you can create these entirely automated but personalized customer experiences”

You’ve told us that Operator is helping save your sales and support teams a ton of valuable time, but you want to do even more with them. So earlier this year, in August, in fact, we released Custom Bots which allow you to create entirely customized chatbots that can proactively engage the right visitors on your website and then guide them down the right path to help them achieve the right outcome, both for your visitors and for your business.

So you could create a bot that proactively engages people on your pricing page, that are from a specific industry and have shown some signal of intent. That might be the time spent on page, but it could be anything. It could be the ad campaign that they clicked through from or the total number of visits to your site.

It’s completely up to you who your bots engage with and when. Your bot can ask a simple set of questions to help you understand if this visitor is the right fit for your business. For example, we can use team size as an indication of fit — the bigger the team, the better the fit.

All this data is captured in Intercom, and most importantly, your bot can take action on it, like help that lead with a larger team book a demo with sales. It does all this without anyone in your business having to lift a finger. You can create as many of these Custom Bots as you like, each with their own set of personalized paths for you to guide people down.

What’s super powerful, something that we’ve seen no other bot builder allow you to do, is ensure that every lead has an actionable outcome, and then automate a set of follow-up actions that just happened seamlessly behind the scenes. One path might encourage leads that aren’t a great fit to go and start a trial on their own, and then tag them so they’re sent the nurture campaigns that you’re sending via Marketo. For leads that are a better fit, your bot can automatically create them as a lead in Salesforce for you and then directly route them to your sales team. You can engage them in a live conversation and better understand their needs.

It’s easy to see how your Custom Bots are performing for your business with reports that show you how many people they’re engaging and how many emails they’re capturing and how many leads they’re creating on your behalf.

But they’re not just useful for SaaS businesses. They’re useful for any type of business. For example, a Volvo dealership over in Germany is using a Custom Bot on the homepage of its website to help new buyers get a quote and existing customers book a service appointment.

We’re already seeing that customers using Custom Bots are seeing 3x engagement rates. That’s three times the engagement rate of those that are just using simple targeted messages to engage the visitors to their site. And to further increase the likelihood of Custom Bots engaging the right visitors and then driving those right actions, we’re giving you even more control over how your bots look and how they interact with the people visiting your site. For starters, just a few weeks ago in late September, we made it possible for you to customize Operator’s identity. Now you can give it its own name and custom avatar so it truly reflects your brand and feels like your own bot.

“Customers using Custom Bots are seeing 3x engagement rates”

And then tomorrow, we’re releasing Video Bots out of private beta. They allow you to create even more personal and engaging experiences that help develop those relationships we know are so important to sustainable growth in the long term.

For example, Apply Pixels is using Custom Bots and video to welcome every new visitor to their site and then guide them down the right path based on what they’re trying to achieve. Video is arguably the most effective medium to welcome people and create that instant human connection, and this is just the first of a series of steps towards making video available across the entire Intercom platform. We’re really excited to see how you use it, especially as we expand the sets of things that you’ll be able to use Custom Bots for in the future.

Which begs the question, what’s coming next for Custom Bots? Well, we’ve heard you loud and clear. You want to create Custom Bots that not only proactively engaged the visitors on your website, but also those people once they sign up and start using your products and are logged into your products. We’re working on this right now.

Here’s an example of what you’ll be able to do. Let’s say you have a free plan that has a cap on the number of seats that people can add. You could create a Custom Bot that proactively engages people once they add their final free seat. It can find out how many seats they’ll need in the future and see if they’d be a fit for your paid plan. If it’s a smaller team and they’re ready, great, your bot can drive them to start a trial and send them some useful resources to help them get started before tagging them so they’re added to the right nurture campaigns.

Alternatively, if they’re not ready just yet, you can invite them to register for your next webinar using the Zoom Webinars app, which they can complete right here in the Messenger, before tagging them and then closing the conversation for you. Now these bots are also going to be useful for guiding new signups to pick the right plans and then personalizing their onboarding experiences based on what they’re trying to do with your product. So that’s Custom Bots for proactively engaging the people inside your products, and we’ll have this in your hands by the end of the year.

Last but not least, we know that Custom Bots can also be really valuable to help manage and triage your inbound support requests and lots of you are asking for this. Our own support team internally really wants it too. Here’s an early look at how it could work. When a user starts a conversation with you inside your product, a bot can be there waiting for them. It can ask them to describe the nature of their request. In this case, someone’s just having trouble getting set up. It can then ask them to provide some more details, like screenshots to help describe the problem they’re having, which will help your support team later once they do get to helping with the problem. It can even send relevant help articles that might resolve the problem while they’re waiting for a human to respond. And once the user has sent over the details of their problem, the bot will set the expectation with them, it will tag the conversation to help with your future reporting and then automatically route the person to the right team or teammate that’s going to be able to resolve their problem for them.

Now, let’s just say the user didn’t have a problem but instead had some product feedback, which happens all the time. No worries, the bot can handle that for you too. It can ask them to share the feedback using an app. For example, we can use the Coda app, available on the Intercom App Store. It’ll send that feedback directly to your product team and then close the conversation for you. In both cases here, the customer gets their ideal outcome and the support team accelerates the resolution to the problem. We’re exploring multiple ways that Custom Bots can be used to help manage and triage inbound support requests. We’re working on this now and we’ll have an update for you in the New Year.

Introducing Answer Bot

Now onto what we’re most excited to share with you. We’ve been working on a brand new product for a full year, and it’s been in private beta for the past few months. Based on the results we’re seeing, we believe this product will fundamentally change the sales and support landscape. It’s called Answer Bot, and it’s the newest addition to our growing family.

This is the newest addition to our growing family of conversational bots powered by Operator. And using machine learning, it can instantly answer your customer’s questions before your sales and support teams even see them. We love this product and we think you will too. Based on the beta results that we’re seeing, on average, Answer Bot can instantly resolve 29% of your most common customer questions and reduce your response time by 44%. With Answer Bot, you’re going to see instant resolutions. These are real numbers, I promise. So that’s what you’ll see, instant resolutions, happier customers and happier sales and support teams.

We’ve been using it ourselves for the past few months. For instance, at Intercom, we get asked at least 20 times a week, “Where do I find my invoice?” Now, wouldn’t it be great if we never had to answer this question again? Well, thanks to Answer Bot, we don’t. It jumps in immediately and provides a precise answer and then automatically closes a conversation. And as a result, we haven’t had to answer this question for the last three months. So let’s just take a moment to think about what happened here.

“On average, Answer Bot can instantly resolve 29% of your most common customer questions and reduce your response time by 44%”

Your customer’s trying to get something done. Maybe they’re trying to make a purchase or find out the status of their order or pay their bill. So they reach out and they’re probably thinking that they’re not going to get a response for a while but then they get an instant answer and an instant resolution to their problem and your support team didn’t have to do anything. So they’re happy and your support team’s happy, it’s a win-win.

Now, that was an easy question, I’ll be honest. What about the times when you’re asked questions where you don’t really know what the customer is even asking Thankfully, Answer Bot can handle those too. No more back and forth trying to figure out what’s being asked. Answer Bot is smart enough to work directly with the customer to hone in on their exact question before providing the right answer and it can even send relevant help articles that can be viewed in the Messenger to help the customer understand exactly what they need to do next.

Now, let’s say Answer Bot couldn’t answer this question, which will happen, there’s always an option to wait for your team and talk to a human. Unlike other bot products on the market, there is never a dead end for your customers when you’re using Intercom, and that’s so important because that’s what builds trust and better relationships in the long term.

“There is never a dead end for your customers when you’re using Intercom”

Let’s take a look at how this all works under the hood. We’ve built a best-in-class machine learning engine and combined that with an incredibly powerful, but deceptively simple, curation tool that automatically scans all of your Intercom conversations and helps identify the most commonly asked ones. Each of the colors that you see up on screen here represents a cluster of related questions. The bigger the cluster, the more common the question. When you look at a cluster, what you’ll see is that Answer Bot is smart enough to identify the same question that’s just being asked in different ways by different people.

So when you go to use Answer Bot for the first time, all of your commonly asked questions from your customers are going to be right there in Intercom waiting for you to write answers to. Writing an answer to a question is as simple as writing a message and you can control exactly what it says and include links, so you’re always on-brand. You can also include emoji, images and GIFs. Basically, you can include anything that you need to provide the best answer to the customer’s question.

And just like you can do with messages and Custom Bots, you can add apps to your answers – apps that show people the status of their orders, help them book a demo with sales, subscribe to your marketing newsletter or register for that next webinar. Now just imagine what you could do if you built your own apps. Maybe you could allow the customer to reset their password without having to leave the messenger in the first place. We’ve got extensive reports that’ll show you exactly how many conversations it’s instantly resolving on your behalf and then how much time that’s saving, not just for your customers but also for your sales and support teams.

You can add Answer Bot to any paid subscription of Intercom and we’ve got special introductory pricing. It starts at $49 a month and it’s free for your first 14 days. It’s been saving a ton of time for our beta customers, like Cleo, who are seeing Answer Bot instantly resolve 20% of all of their inbound conversations, and that’s incredible because they get 2,600 per month.

We can’t wait to see what Answer Bot will do for your business. So that’s what we’re building across the Messenger, App Store and Operator. We’ll continue to improve them and make them work seamlessly together so you can accelerate growth at every stage of the customer lifecycle.

The next chapter

Eoghan: We’re excited. It’s so cool to see this thing evolve and to see it in action. We watch all the little conversations our little Answer Bot’s been involved in, and it’s working. It provides real value and we’re excited for you to all play with it and try tomorrow.

We believe that you can bet on us as the company to most quickly move in this automation space. We’ve dramatically accelerated product development over the past twelve months, nearly doubling our R&D teams. In fact, now a whole third of the company works in research and development, which is really big for a company at our stage. During this time, we’ve shipped 102 new major features and improvements. I did the math – that’s two per week. That’s a ton of work.

“You can bet on us as the company to most quickly move in this automation space”

But while we are innovating on sexy things like video and building new bots, please know that the majority of our time and energy is put into maturing the products you already use and trust, and adding the sophistication you need. In fact, recently a lot of the work has been shipping your biggest requests, like Messenger visibility and conversation tag reports. Through revenue reports, you can see Intercom does indeed pay for itself like we promised that it does. We’re now also SOC2 Type 2 compliant, which is something I never thought I’d be so excited to shout about on stage, but it’s increasingly important for the bigger companies we’re selling to. And we just shipped pointer messages in beta, which I’ve wanted for about seven years and so have our customers. It means that when you send a message in Intercom, you can reach out and point to specific parts of the app and it’s going to be so useful to help onboard new customers into your products.

“We believe automation is going to transform business–to–customer communication”

As Matt showed you, we’re already starting to make pretty great strides in building Operator bots for each stage of the customer lifecycle. And in the quarters and years ahead, we’re going to continue to fill out all of those stages. We believe automation is going to transform business–to–customer communication. We think it will upend industries and make new kings in them. We’ve studied our history and we believe through no great malice that people will tend to use these things with a short term view, much to the detriment of the consumer and the business in the long run.

But we know it doesn’t have to be so, and not only do we intend to lead the industry in the development of these tools, but to do so the right way, with the very natural inclination we’ve had from the start to help our customers achieve faster growth through better relationships. The platform we’ve started to work on for our first chapter, to let people work together to connect with their customers in this new personal way, will work seamlessly with the automation tech we’re now betting on in this next chapter. This will place Intercom uniquely as the only platform to help growth in sales, marketing and support teams, and that lets bots and humans work side by side.

Thank you to all of you who have supported us over the years. Thank you for your love. You’ve motivated and inspired us. Thank you also for your patience when we have messed up. I hope you will join us in this next chapter.