{"id":20851,"date":"2019-07-10T16:30:41","date_gmt":"2019-07-10T15:30:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/?p=20851"},"modified":"2020-07-30T12:54:36","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T11:54:36","slug":"announcing-three-new-features-to-scale-your-support","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/announcing-three-new-features-to-scale-your-support\/","title":{"rendered":"Announcing three brand new features to help scale your support"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today we’re launching three huge updates to our Articles<\/a> and Custom Bots<\/a> products to help you scale your support with Intercom<\/a>.<\/p>\n

These days, great customer support isn\u2019t a nice to have \u2013 it\u2019s table stakes. Giving your customers fast, personal support is essential to customer retention<\/a>, transforms customers into advocates for your business and delivers a competitive advantage. Live chat has been instrumental in helping businesses achieve this, allowing them to build better relationships by delivering fast, highly personalized support.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a problem.<\/p>\n

As a business grows, so does the number of inbound conversations they receive, often exceeding their real-time capacity to support. For businesses who get thousands or millions of people visiting their website every year, delivering prompt, personal support to their customers quickly becomes a daunting task.<\/p>\n

Moreover, growth challenges aren\u2019t always just about volume. Supporting customers on a global scale brings additional complexity. A worldwide customer base is diverse, as are their questions, needs, and requests. Offering real-time support in multiple languages and across time zones can become costly, whether that\u2019s by hiring a team of polyglots, or outsourcing your support to a translation service.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve witnessed these challenges first hand in our own growth<\/a>, so we thought it was high time someone built a product that delivered the fast, personal customer support that all customers now expect, but that works at the scale<\/a> that your business wants to reach.<\/p>\n

So today we\u2019re launching three important features that we think will do exactly that.<\/p>\n

Increase self-service with Articles Pro \u2013 a multilingual knowledge base<\/h2>\n

Did you know that close to 75% of people search<\/a> online using their own language? And that 42% of people<\/a> would never buy a product or service in a language other than their own? It goes without saying that restricting your customer support to a single language won\u2019t help your business grow.<\/p>\n

The fact is, as your business grows into new markets and geographies, you\u2019ll need to engage with customers across different time zones and languages. The blunt force solution is to hire dozens of multilingual customer support<\/a> reps to work across time zones, but you\u2019ll quickly blow your support budget.<\/p>\n

We think we\u2019ve found a better way..<\/p>\n

Using Articles Pro<\/a>, you can build a multilingual knowledge base to provide self-service support that\u2019s available 24\/7 in 38 languages without having to hire a single extra rep. In a few easy clicks, you can create and serve up help content to customers in their native language, wherever it\u2019s needed.<\/p>\n

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Multilingual articles are also accessible in the Intercom Inbox<\/a> making it easier for your team to resolve questions from different audiences, faster.\u00a0 Because Articles Pro fully integrates with our Inbox product, teammates can provide consistent, real-time answers to customers of all different shapes and sizes \u2013 paid users, visitors or those speaking another language. When chatting to customers, teammates can add multilingual or private articles to conversations, without leaving their inbox.<\/p>\n

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Additionally, a common refrain we\u2019ve heard from other fast growing companies is that there are instances where you don\u2019t want your help content to be visible, especially to visitors or competitors. Articles Pro lets you publish private articles for logged-in users, and serve it to them in product, on your Messenger, Help Center and more.<\/p>\n

Automatically triage customer issues for faster resolutions with Custom Bots<\/h2>\n

While a knowledge base is great for helping customers to get their answers in real-time, on-demand, the reality is that there are always going to be situations where a customer needs to talk to a human.<\/p>\n

This is especially important as you scale. As your customer base and product suite grows, you will have an ever-widening range of queries and customer issues to resolve. A system that helps you triage these conversations is of fundamental importance.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where automation comes in.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve built our latest addition to Custom Bots<\/a> to help support teams handle incoming conversations as efficiently as possible. One area in particular we see inefficiencies is at the start of a conversation. When customers first write in seeking support, your reps often need to draw out more information to understand the issue and gather the information necessary to support them. This lengthy back and forth wastes time for your support team and<\/i> your customers.<\/p>\n

Now Custom Bots can help you resolve customer issues faster. They act like an extension of your support team, asking your customers the right questions to automatically prioritize and route new conversations for more efficient support. Custom Bots surface high priority requests right away, route conversations to the right teams, and ensure teammates have context when they jump in to help. As your business scales, automatically triaging inbound conversations is a key piece of the puzzle.<\/p>\n