What we shipped: 10 new features and updates to make using Intercom even easier
Over the past few months, we have released a number of new features and updated older ones to make the experience of using Intercom even more intuitive for you and more streamlined and effective for your visitors and customers.
Over the past few months, we have been hard at work updating and creating new features that make Intercom even more effective for everyone.
From new navigation features and refreshed product names to several brand new apps, there’s definitely something for everyone. Let’s take a look at some of the top releases of the past few months.
Introducing Outbound
There are a lot of different ways to interact with your visitors and customers using Intercom, and we know from your feedback that sometimes it could be hard to choose the most appropriate variety of message to use. That’s why we made a number of changes and updates to make everything much more intuitive for you.
“Messages is now called Outbound because it’s home to more than just messages”
Most significantly, Messages is now called Outbound because it’s home to more than just messages. For instance, this is where you will now find Product Tours. Operator and Reports have moved to the main group of options in the left menu, so the features you use most often are all together in one place. Your outbound content is now grouped by type as well, so you can view tours and messages together for a clear picture of what you send your users.
There are no longer “visitor auto messages” or “user auto messages.” Auto messages are now simply called “ongoing messages,” and manual messages are called “one-off messages.” Just create your message, and then select the types of people you’d like to receive it under “Choose your audience.”
You will also notice that the sidebar and menu has been updated to create an easy-to-navigate, consolidated Outbound home. This update brings your outbound content into a single place, makes it easier to send tours and messages, and offers more flexibility in how you organize your content.
And finally, organization is key, so folders have been upgraded to tags. Instead of putting messages and tours in a folder, you can simply tag them. Plus, a single tour or message can have multiple tags, instead of being limited to a single folder. This allows you more flexibility to organize your outbound content.
Bot updates
As well as making your Outbound home more intuitive and streamlined, we also made a ton of updates to our bot capabilities in recent months. So let’s take a look at some of the significant updates to bots and what this means for you.
Resolution Bot for ongoing messages
We know that, when it comes to support, having a fast response time makes for a much better customer experience. But helping customers faster can be difficult when you’re strapped for resources.
“You can now increase Resolution Bot coverage by using it to reply to new conversations from your ongoing messages”
That’s where Resolution Bot comes in. With the latest update, you can now increase Resolution Bot coverage by using it to reply to new conversations from your ongoing messages. This will allow Resolution Bot to cover the most common questions, freeing up your time for more complex customer support needs.
Answer targeting for Resolution Bot
We know that you have a ton of different kinds of customers and, naturally, those customers can have a wide range of questions. But the answers you provide will vary based on the language you’re responding in, whether your customer is using iOS or Android, subscription levels, and much more.
“You can now make responses to your customers even more personal by limiting answers to specific audience segments”
We want to give you more power and control over Resolution Bot, so we’ve added our second new Resolution Bot feature – answer targeting. You can now make responses to your customers even more personal by limiting answers to specific audience segments when using Resolution Bot. To get started with answer targeting, all you have to do is add the unique criteria or set of attributes to each answer you create.
Mid-path actions for Custom Bots
We knew Custom Bots needed to be more flexible, specifically when it comes to taking actions like tagging or assigning conversations before the user has reached the end of their interaction. Drop-off happens, and not everyone reaches the end of a bot flow, so we wanted to let Custom Bots take action as soon as the right information was collected.
To do so, we added mid-path actions, which are designed to help Custom Bots guide people to the right outcome, faster.
For example, you can now qualify a lead and assign them based on how they respond, or you can send the meeting scheduler app and then follow-up with a thank you message or more relevant content to keep the lead warm.
Custom Bot path analysis
Path analysis allows you to see how people are flowing through your Custom Bots and where they’re dropping off to better understand performance.
Use these new insights to make optimizations to further drive engagement. Just navigate to any live Custom Bot and click on the new “path analysis” tab to check it out for yourself.
Inbound Custom Bots
We recently released the ability to triage new conversations with Custom Bots before your customers are passed to a member of your team. We’ve now expanded that release even further to enable you to decide whether all visitors and users must go through triage before they can initiate a new conversation. This lets you collect helpful information for every conversation and route it to the right team or teammate.
For example, you can have users select between wanting to get in touch with support, sales, report a bug, or request a feature before they’re able to compose and send their message. After their initial interaction with the Custom Bot, the message composer will re-appear.
Tagging and reporting
It’s now easier than ever to draw better insights from your conversations through our latest tagging and reporting updates, so you can improve your product and business.
Tags settings
We’ve created the new tags settings page, which is now the central location for you to view and manage all of your tags. You’ll even be able to see how many times your tags were used from here.
Tag rules
We’ve also introduced new rules to help you automatically tag new conversations. This will help you ensure your tag reports are more accurate while also reducing the manual effort for your teams
Tagging for Custom Bots
Finally, we’re also extending tagging to Custom Bots, so you can now gain insight into the content in your conversations.
Reports for response times and closed conversations
Now you can get a breakdown of both first response and close times for any team or teammate that you select. You know that your team’s time to resolution will directly impact how customers rate your conversations, so having these details helps you to optimize your performance or even just understand what is happening in your inbox.
If your company has been using SLA targets for first response and next response times, we have also updated SLA rules so that you can set a time target as low as 30 seconds. You can set this up by going to your inbox, selecting automation, and then setting your SLA rules there.
Apps
Here are some of our favorite apps other people have been building on Intercom:
Chili Piper
Book more sales meetings with advanced routing and scheduling.
The Chili Piper app makes it easy to schedule meetings with your prospects and customers, right from your Intercom inbox. Plus, Chili Piper’s advanced routing and scheduling ensures that meetings are routed to the right teams and fairly distributed across team members – giving your prospects and customers a seamless experience.
Install Chili Piper app from the Intercom App Store, or find out more here.
Prodsight
Automatically tag conversations and run sentiment analysis.
The Prodsight app makes it easy to stay on top of customer issues and requests by automatically analyzing your conversations for topics and sentiment and producing a continuously updated report on the most common user issues.
Install Prodsight app from the intercom App Store, or find out more here.
SessionStack
Speed up support with interactive co-browsing.
The SessionStack app lets your support team initiate an interactive co-browsing session with a click of a button directly from Intercom. You can view, guide or take control of your customer’s screen to see exactly what the problem is – cutting the back-and-forth and giving you the context you need to provide fast, personal assistance.
Install SessionSlack app from the Intercom App Store, or find out more here.
Rybbon
Delight your leads and customers with digital rewards.
The Rybbon app enables you to send digital rewards and gifts directly via the Intercom Messenger. Recognize customer milestones, reward prospects for attending sales demos, offer “thank you” gifts to survey respondents, and more!
Install Rybbon app from the Intercom App Store, or find out more here.