New at Intercom: 5 highlights from our virtual launch event

We’ve just wrapped up an incredible day of New at Intercom, our first global virtual launch event, where we discussed our vision for the future of customer engagement and unveiled some incredible new products.

If you were there, you know first-hand how much news we shared throughout the event. If you weren’t, you’re probably wondering what you missed – read on to discover the biggest highlights from New at Intercom.

Karen Peacock, our CEO, officially introduced Intercom as the Engagement OS

For over a decade, we’ve been making internet business personal with our customer communications platform. We enable the most critical component of the modern customer journey – ongoing engagement – throughout the customer journey, from converting prospects to onboarding new customers, activating, providing support, and beyond.

We’ve officially upgraded our brand to reflect the potential of our product to deliver ongoing engagement: Intercom is the Engagement OS. And yes, we’re sporting a refreshed look as well!

Learn more about the Engagement OS.

We shared our vision for the future of customer engagement

During the keynote, our Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Des Traynor laid out our core beliefs guiding the products we’re building and the kind of world we’re building for. Here’s a quick overview:

Delivering an excellent customer experience is a must for all internet businesses.The old world of siloed companies and their siloed tools is breaking down. We believe primary platforms will manage and orchestrate all customer communications.In-context, company-owned messaging is the future primary channel for customer communication.Customer support is undergoing a massive, once-in-a-generation change.The future of customer messaging will be powered by live data and rich context.First-party data about your customers – which your business can legitimately collect, own, and use without privacy concerns – will be critical for businesses to deliver personalized experiences.Businesses demand a next-generation product approach to technology and user experience. Over the past decade we’ve seen many new paradigms emerge – businesses must keep up to be a part of the future of software instead of being labeled as outdated.

Keeping these beliefs in mind will help us to continue building a world-class, next-generation product that solves our customers’ problems.

We unveiled our newest products to the world

We shared news about not one, not two, but three game-changing products at New at Intercom. Here’s a sneak peek.

Switch

Today, people almost always want the option of messaging, and pretty much never want to be stuck on their phone, waiting on hold. Likewise, businesses don’t want their customers to be stuck hold with a long wait time, but they’re struggling to meet internet scale and integrate their legacy phone systems with more modern, efficient ways of communicating with customers. There is a will to move away from phone support, but there hasn’t been an easy way until now.

“The frustration of waiting on hold is replaced with the convenience of sending a message”

That changes with Switch, our new product which makes it easy for customers to switch from phone support to messaging. When a customer calls a business and is told that they are in a queue with a long hold time, the business can now offer the customer a choice to seamlessly and immediately switch to messaging. Just like that, the frustration of waiting on hold is replaced with the convenience of sending a message.

For businesses, being able to help more than one customer at a time gives a major boost to productivity and efficiency, and allows support reps to do more of what they do best: solving customer problems.

Next-generation Inbox

The move to an internet economy with internet scale was already happening, but the pandemic accelerated it massively. We see ourselves as a company building products for the decade ahead, and that means building products that are as fast and smooth as possible. And for us, that meant reimagining the Intercom Inbox, the place where all customer conversations are handled.

“We set ourselves the goal of making the fastest, most efficient inbox for support teams in the world. And we believe we have done it”

Our customers often cite user experience as a key reason for why businesses choose Intercom. But we knew our Inbox could be faster and more efficient – internet scale needs internet speed. And so we set ourselves the goal of making it the fastest, most efficient inbox for support teams in the world. And we believe we have done it. Our new Inbox has consumer-grade design, is blazingly fast, keyboard-first, and highly configurable – we’ll be releasing it very soon, and we think it will set a new standard for the industry.

Surveys

For years, many of our customers have been asking us to build a surveys product. They learn so much about their customers from Intercom already by seeing what they do in their product and chatting with them. But they wanted a way to ask questions directly in Intercom itself because other survey tools were relatively siloed, making difficult to create and target surveys, and to maximize accurate response rates.

With our brand new Surveys product, customers don’t just ask questions, they can also take direct action. Because Intercom is a single connected platform, the responses to survey questions are added to the customer profile, which can automatically trigger workflows elsewhere – now, sales, marketing, and support teams will have far more context and information available when they interact with customers.

“Surveys will become a strategic business tool for our customers, providing them with insight and triggering customer action to drive business growth”

We think Surveys is not only a better solution for asking customers what they think, need, and feel – it will also become a strategic business tool for our customers, providing them with insight and triggering customer action to drive business growth.

We heard from our incredible customers

We were lucky to be joined by four of our amazing customers, who told us exactly how Intercom has helped them to reach a new frontier of communication with their customers, and to scale their businesses. Here are some of our favorite moments:

Coda

Brian Lederman, Head of Sales, Success and Support: “We need to continue to deliver that same level of customer experience at scale, and so we’ll continue to partner with Intercom as we grow. We’re growing incredibly rapidly and we need a tool to really be nimble and agile and grow with us. This year is really important for us to open up more omnichannel experiences and so we’re looking forward to partnering with the Intercom team to provide more ways for customers to communicate with us.”

“We’ve been able to use Intercom to address the customer base, the questions we’re getting from them, at scale. That’s been fantastic” – Wayne Stewart, Atlassian

Atlassian

Wayne Stewart, Head of CSS, Cloud Growth, DevOps & IT: “If you engage with the customers right as they’re asking that question, you keep a very tight initial response time and the experience that that customer has stays with them … we’ve been able to use Intercom to address the customer base, the questions we’re getting from them, at scale. That’s been fantastic.”

Code for America

Arlene Corbin Lewis, Chief Communications & Marketing Officer: “What we love about Intercom is that it’s a next-generation platform that allows us to have those real conversations, in real time – to have that human interaction and actually help people navigate state benefits programs.”

We announced our Premier Services program

We closed the show with a fourth and final announcement. We believe that Intercom can help any company, of any size, to engage people throughout the customer journey. That’s why we’re excited to offer something new: our Premier Services program.

“Premier Services ensures our customers see breakthrough value from Intercom as they evolve and grow their businesses”

Premier Services ensures our customers see breakthrough value from Intercom as they evolve and grow their businesses. Led by experts on our Customer Solutions and Support teams, a dedicated Intercom team will guide customers to optimal usage, from implementation to training and ongoing, world-class support.

Because our customers’ success is our success, with our new offerings of Premier Onboarding, Premier Success, and Premier Support, we’ll be there every step of the way to ensure Intercom is masterfully implemented and our customers are supported to maximize the value they see from Intercom.

This is just skimming the surface of everything that went down at New at Intercom today. Watch the full recording and catch up on more news about our event here.