What we shipped: 2018 year in review

In 2018, we doubled the size of our R&D teams to continue building best in class products with non-stop innovation. We strive to let our product do the talking.

We opened our new office in Sydney and expanded our presence in London to broaden our coverage and attract new talent. We also raised $125M in a Series D to fuel the next chapter of Intercom.

In 2018, we set out on our own path to make our mark where we felt others had fallen short. Bots and more specifically chatbots have been around for years; however, most offerings still manage to fall short of the hype surrounding them. Bots had failed to deliver good customer experiences, were painful to setup, and hadn’t been able to truly drive real results across an entire customer journey. Most are focused on solving on a small task, like, booking a meeting. We set out to do more because we knew more was possible.

This next chapter has already begun, with our new automation technologies like bots and the ability for our customers to connect Intercom with more of the other tools they use every day. In doing so, they have been able to unlock new efficiencies for their teams and their customers.

Read on to hear more about what we shipped in 2018:

Get instant resolutions and happier customers

Answer Bot (now even more powerful and called Resolution Bot) learns from the questions your team is asked most by intelligently grouping similar queries. The bot highlights these questions so your team can provide on-brand, pre-formatted answers. The bot can respond and close conversations for your team, automatically, giving customers an immediate resolution and your team more time to focus on the questions that really need them. We’ve seen the bot resolve 33% of our customers’ common questions, on average.

Drive growth and revenue with bots for marketing and sales

Next, our Custom Bots add-on for sales and marketing teams allows them to create completely unique, automated flows to engage more website visitors and drive more of them to take action, automatically. When combined with video, our customers have seen 4x the engagement rates of email and up to a 36% increase in conversions. Whether it’s driving webinar signups, newsletter subscriptions, qualifying leads and booking demos, Custom Bots enable marketers and sales teams to supercharge their pipeline and capture new revenue.

One Messenger to power all customer communications

Our brand new Messenger goes beyond just chat to help teams accelerate growth across their entire customer lifecycle. The Messenger has enabled new efficiencies that chat alone could not provide. The Messenger home screen enables teams to give their customers a way to find answers to their questions, book a sales demo, subscribe to a newsletter, learn about new features, and so much more, all without having to chat. Teams can even customize the appearance of the home screen for leads and users, so they can ensure they’re showcasing the right actions and resources for each audience.

Helping partners and customers continue to grow

In 2018, we also launched our public Intercom App Store, which has over 130 apps and integrations that help you streamline your workflows and increase your productivity.

We know that you use a lot of different tools to succeed in your work and managing those tools can lead to wasted time. In fact,a 2017 study found that of the marketers, salespeople, and business owners surveyed, 82% lost up to an hour a day managing different technologies. In addition, one in seven conversations in Intercom in 2017 included a link to another tool or website and added friction to the customer experience.

So, we launched the Intercom App Store to help you automate manual tasks, keep your tools in sync, and drive action in the Messenger. We have apps that let your leads book demos or your customers get help without starting a conversation; apps that keep your CRM up to date; apps that help you survey your users; and even apps that automatically translate live chat.

Currently, 60% of our customers are using apps to acquire, engage and retain more customers. In fact, a Volvo dealer has tripled the number of leads generated on their website by using the Typeform app.

In addition to all of the capabilities and tools available in the Intercom App Store, you can also build your own apps on the Intercom platform. In 2018, we released a brand-new Developer Hub with powerful, backwards-compatible APIs, comprehensive docs, a developer forum and free developer workspaces. You can build private apps just for your team or company, or public apps that anyone can use and that you can submit to the Intercom App Store.

Here are just a few of our favorite apps from 2018:

Apps to engage your visitors and users without starting a conversation

Whether you’re in sales, marketing or support, the Intercom Messenger home screen gives you an opportunity to engage with your visitors and users without draining your resources. You can add apps to your home screen that help your visitors learn more about your product and your customers self-serve – all without even starting a conversation.

For example, if you’re in marketing, you can use the Content Showcase app to feature popular blog posts, important announcements and other relevant content on your Messenger. If you’re in sales, you can use the Get a Demo app to let leads request a demo of your product, or even let VIP leads book a demo right into your calendar. And, if you’re in support, you can use the Article Search app to enable customers to search your Help Center and read articles right inside your Messenger.

Apps to drive actions in your conversations, messages and bots

Beyond the Messenger home screen, you want to make sure your conversations, messages and bots are productive for both you and your visitor or user. Apps can make your communications more efficient, personal and effective.

Here are some of our most popular apps for conversations, messages and bots. The Google Calendar app makes it easy for leads and customers to book meetings with you. The Google Meet app allows you to start a video call right from a conversation, so you can conveniently demo your product or resolve a customer issue. The Ask a Question app helps you collect visitor or user information – like job title, company size or product use case – and take action based on responses. Lastly, the Article Inserter app lets you share the right help article with the right customer at the right time, such as when a user has been stuck on a tricky part of your app or website for a while.

Apps to measure data and keep your tech stack in sync

No matter your role, you probably use multiple tools to complete your workflows and measure your impact. We have apps that are designed to help you sync your data across tools and track your progress against your goals.

Our Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo and Pipedrive apps enable you to send leads and conversations from Intercom to the other tools in your tech stack, as well as view and act on external data from within Intercom. This means that you can keep all of your tools up to date as you capture and qualify leads with Intercom. Plus, you can measure the impact that Intercom has on your funnel with the Google Analytics app, so you can maximize its effect on your revenue goals.

To see all of our apps and integrations, check out the Intercom App Store, and for tips about how to use apps and the most recent releases, see our webinars: Increase Your Productivity with Apps and New in Intercom.

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? Let us know by commenting below, sending us a tweet or start a chat with our team using the Messenger on this page or in Intercom.