What we shipped: 2017 year in review

They say if you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward. At Intercom, we’re moving forward faster than ever before.

In 2017, we set out to make it faster and easier to acquire, engage and support your customers with Intercom. We shipped faster (over 100 times a day, regularly) and grew the total number of businesses that use our products across their sales, marketing and support teams (25,000 paying customers and counting). We now power more than 500,000,000 conversations for our customers every month.

Before we speed into 2018, let’s look back at the highlights of what we shipped in the past year.

Helping sales and marketing teams grow their businesses

In September we shipped 15 new features – our biggest update ever – to help sales and marketing teams get more leads and convert more of them into paying customers. Here’s what happened next:

• One customer captured and automatically qualified over 5,800 new leads in the first two months with our bot, Operator.
• Seven customers generated more than 1,000 new leads in the first month.
• Tradeshift increased qualified sales opportunities from their website by 32% and shortened their sales cycle by a whole 18 days.
• Salesloft increased their demos booked by 40%, an 8x improvement over their previous live chat tool.
• Plobal Apps drove a 400% increase in product demos.

Among those new features you’ll find the ability to…

Capture more leads with more targeted messages

The old world of forms and craftily placed buttons to capture leads resulted in single digit conversion rates at best. Instead of hoping your best leads convert on your page themselves, Intercom allows you to proactively engage them with targeted messages based on their browsing behavior and data from Clearbit like their industry, company size, revenue and more. You can also A/B test messages to constantly improve their performance, and capture more leads then forms ever could.

Qualify leads automatically with Operator

Our bot, Operator, will automatically qualify leads you capture on your website by asking for information that’s important to your business. Depending on how your leads respond, you can route the conversation straight to the right salesperson based on their location, company size, which page their on and more. You can also automatically create a new lead in Salesforce, or tag them to be added to automated email nurture campaigns.

Evenly distribute new leads across your team

New leads can now be routed “round robin” style, with additional sophistication to route to specific teams and teammates based on location, data captured by Operator, keywords in their messages, or only to online admins, to ensure leads get a timely response.

Record and keep track of lead data with Qualification profiles

Every lead in Intercom has a customizable qualification profile so you’ll see the information Operator bot already collected and additional information that’s important to your business to collect and qualify them.

Control chat volume by setting who, when and where people can chat with your team

We know you don’t want to speak with everyone who visits your website, so now you can control when chat is available, where on your website, and to whom, based on browsing behavior and Clearbit reveal data like company size, industry, revenue and more. This means you spend more time chatting with the right leads.

Seamlessly connect Intercom with Salesforce

Our improved Salesforce integration does a lot. You can (deep breath): automatically send qualified leads to Salesforce, view Salesforce data in Intercom, sync data between the tools, automatically assign Intercom conversations to the right lead owner, and send targeted nurture campaigns using Salesforce data.

See the ROI of live chat for sales and marketing

With our improved reporting for sales and marketing teams, you can now see how many leads you’re capturing in specific time-frames, how many leads are sent to Salesforce and which messages are capturing the most leads.

Export message performance data

We’ve added the ability to export data on the performance of your messages to a CSV file for more granular insight into performance.

Support that’s better for customers and teams

After speaking with more than 200 of our customers and analyzing feedback from our own support team, it’s clear that people seeking help appreciate faster support when they have a burning question, and like to have a little unexpected fun throughout their day too.

For customer support teammates and managers we found that everyone gets more done when they have the chance to work together, and when they have the information to answer questions quickly and to help them improve over time.

So what did we do with that intel? We shipped more than 20 powerful new features to help customer support teams big and small make a strategic leap forward. Along the way…

• Expensify cut its customer response time in half.
• Moz reduced its median response time by 70%, all while holding a higher number of conversations.
• Keen saw a 60% reduction in time to resolution for support conversations and improved its customer satisfaction score by 30%.

Here are just a handful of highlights:

Improved Reporting: Monitor, optimize, and improve performance over time

We’ve completely rebuilt Insights for Respond. An all-new Reports section makes it easy to track your individual teammates, teams and organizational performance, so you can see what’s happening and where you can improve. Managers and teammates can now track key stats like First Response Time, Time to Close and Leads Generated.

Get quality feedback with Conversation Ratings ? ?

https://intercom.wistia.com/medias/6mw2z1m64h

Conversation ratings are a more effective way to survey, measure, and act on customer satisfaction. Positive feedback is delivered straight to the team inbox. And when teammates receive an excellent rating, a burst of virtual confetti rains down their screen. ?

Quickly see recent conversations in the team inbox

You can now see the three most recent conversations a user or lead has had with your team when you’re chatting to them in the team inbox. Now you’ll always have context on their recent or ongoing conversations, which in turn helps you provide them with a better experience.

Add multiple people to the same conversation

In the team inbox and in our mobile apps you can now add and remove people to a conversation and communicate with them as a group via email and the messenger so that teams can resolve customer questions together.

Create more engaging saved replies with a new composer

Our new rich text editor makes it easy to personalize your canned responses by adding, emojis, gifs and images.

Scanning conversations is a whole lot easier

New indicators that tell you when a conversation is new or unread make it easier for you and your team to prioritize conversations in both our web and mobile apps.

Set better expectations with an improved automatic reply time

The calculation for automatic reply time has been refined for accuracy. With this calculation, your app’s Office Hours are taken into account.

If you haven’t tried Intercom before, or haven’t checked it out in a few months, we’d encourage you to take another look. You’ll find our new features can help your business acquire more customers, shorten your sales cycle, better engage them, and provide faster, friendlier service that will lower response times and increase customer satisfaction scores.

If you use Intercom already, we’d love your feedback. What do you think of this year’s features? And what would you like to see in the year to come? Please leave a comment below, or start a chat with our team using the messenger on this page or in Intercom.