{"id":24742,"date":"2020-09-23T17:24:36","date_gmt":"2020-09-23T16:24:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/?p=24742"},"modified":"2024-10-22T19:15:32","modified_gmt":"2024-10-22T18:15:32","slug":"designing-series-customer-messaging-tool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/designing-series-customer-messaging-tool\/","title":{"rendered":"Designing Series: How we built our customer messaging orchestration tool"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week we released Series<\/a>, a brand new way to orchestrate customer messaging campaigns in Intercom.<\/p>\n

Series<\/a> is a visual campaign builder with a very flexible and interactive design \u2013 you can easily build out sophisticated customer journeys using the intuitive drag-and-drop interface, making your customer engagement<\/a> campaigns much more powerful and effective.<\/p>\n

“Series is so intuitive that it feels natural and obvious \u2013 and yet, the design was not inevitable at all”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Indeed, Series is so intuitive that it feels natural and obvious \u2013 and yet, the design was not inevitable at all, as we considered numerous different approaches to solve the problem of orchestrating customer messaging.<\/p>\n

Here, I\u2019ll explain how we weighed up those different approaches and how we arrived at our final design \u2013 and I\u2019ll share some of the lessons we learned along the way.<\/p>\n

Our first customer messaging solution<\/h2>\n

In 2016 we released Smart Campaigns<\/a>, which addressed the same problem of message orchestration.<\/p>\n

We took a very opinionated approach with Smart Campaigns, putting simplicity at its core and hiding the underlying logic of the messaging customer flow \u2013 as such, we eschewed the visual builder approach. You could just craft each message, put them into a campaign and relax, as we\u2019d automatically determine how to send those messages to the right person at the right time.<\/p>\n

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This approach resonated with a number of customers<\/a>. But with time, we found out that for many others, instead of making things easier, it made them more complicated \u2013 we had hidden too much of the logic behind the flow of messages.<\/p>\n

When describing the process of creating their campaigns, many customers mentioned that they start by planning out their orchestration visually in digital tools or on a physical whiteboard.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Some of the visualizations our customers shared with us<\/em><\/p>\n

This visual approach would give them confidence in how the orchestration should work, but afterwards they had to spend painstaking hours trying to \u201ctranslate\u201d those visual flows back into a non-visual Smart Campaign.<\/p>\n

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Customers were getting lost in implicit logic and struggling to understand their orchestration, which led to problems with adoption and churn. We knew something had to be done.<\/p>\n

Exploring the future of orchestration<\/h2>\n

After many deliberations, we decided to go back to square one and think about the future of orchestration in Intercom and what it could look like instead.<\/p>\n

We ended up evaluating a number of key directions:<\/p>\n

Direction 1: Evolving Smart Campaigns<\/h3>\n

It seemed the simplest thing we could do was to spend time addressing each problem with Smart Campaigns.<\/p>\n

In theory, if we could make things easier to understand in some places and more explicit in others \u2013 the idea being we would be able to fix everything with evolution, instead of revolution.<\/p>\n

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Direction 2: Creating a rigid visual builder<\/h3>\n

Alternatively, we could start looking beyond non-visual flows and provide a visual builder, but limit its level of flexibility.<\/p>\n

By being visual, a rigid builder should be more understandable, but, similarly to Smart Campaigns, by not providing a lot of freedom of interactions, it would make the setup quicker and more straightforward.<\/p>\n

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