What we shipped: 20 new features and counting
One of the values we live by here at Intercom is shipping is our heartbeat. This encapsulates our belief that shipping is just the beginning; that getting features in customers’ hands is the quickest way to get feedback so we can continue to iterate.
It’s easy to get excited about shipping big, shiny new things – last year we launched three of those (our new knowledge base product Articles, our new Messenger and Smart Campaigns) – but there’s also lots of value in shipping regular, smaller improvements and features too. They may not justify a big splashy announcement, but these smaller improvements can add up to a significant impact for our customers.
We’ve already shipped over 20 new features this year. We still have a shiny thing or two up our sleeve, of course, but here are some of the highlights of what we’ve shipped so far in 2017.
Making support frictionless and personal
We’re all about making it easy for you to deliver a personal, frictionless support experience for your customers – so we’ve released a series of enhancements that help you manage your customers’ expectations of when they will get a reply, and make it easier for them to find help themselves if they can’t stick around.
Office hours & away mode
You can now better manage customer expectations with office hours and “away” mode, which let your customers know when to expect a response and make sure they aren’t left hanging.
Articles autoresponder
Let customers get answers quicker with our Articles autoresponder, which guides them to your help center while they wait for your reply.
We’ve also made it easier to make your Articles Help Center more “you” no matter your size, with localization in 38 languages and the ability to add a link back to your website.
Moar gifs
Nothing cheers us up more than a well-timed GIF, so we added animated GIF support to the Messenger to inject more fun and personality into your conversations.
It’s also now possible to add articles, images, GIFs and saved replies to messages from our Android and iOS mobile apps, so you can still delight customers while on the move.
Helping you help customers at scale
We’re always working to make it easier for you to support your customers at scale, so that as your business grows, Intercom grows with you.
We’ve added several new features that make it easier to manage your inbox and still provide personal customer support in larger teams:
Inbox enhancements
Prioritize customers who’ve been waiting for an answer the longest based on their first message with the “Waiting longest” ordering in the team inbox.
Group conversations
Add teammates into conversations so that you can communicate as a group, making conversations easier to manage and quicker to resolve.
Snooze conversations
Keep your inbox tidy without losing track of conversations that you want to come back to later. For example, if you want to chase up a lead who hasn’t replied in x days, or need to follow up with a customer once you’ve investigated an issue further.
Making integrations easier to find and build
We know how important it is that Intercom plays nicely with the other tools you use, which is why we’ve continued to focus on building our own integrations as well as making it easier for others to build on our platform.
We added Microsoft Teams to our roster of Intercom-built integrations and have continued to expand our Platform Partner program, adding several new integrations as well as making it easier to discover them from our in-app integrations hub.
For those building on our platform, we launched a new developer dashboard so everything you need to build on the API is in one accessible place. Plus, we added some new features to our APIs such as adding Leads and Companies to our Scroll API. You can read more about those on our developer blog.
Improving outbound messaging
As well as helping you provide personal support, we’ve also worked to make proactively reaching out to your customers – whether it’s onboarding, promotions or announcements – easier and more targeted:
Target users based on engagement
You can now target users based on how engaged they are, with filters for whether they opened or clicked links in your previous emails.
Stop manual messages
Hit send on manual messages with a little more confidence, as you now have the option to stop a message once it’s started sending – for those times when you send too soon, or have a time-specific message.
Optimize for mobile delivery
Be sure you’re notifying mobile users at the optimal time (and not in the middle of the night) with new delivery windows for push notifications.
As you can see, we’ve been pretty busy so far this year and there’s plenty more to come. We can’t wait to share even more things with you over the rest of the year. Watch this space (or our changes page!)