That sense of solution overload is only becoming more pronounced with the arrival of ChatGPT and the promise of a new generation of AI chatbots<\/a> that can automatically answer many customer questions. The industry is at a turning point in terms of the technology required to successfully provide excellent customer service at internet scale.<\/p>\n In this environment, juggling outdated, disjointed tools is a recipe for team burnout, customer dissatisfaction, and ultimately, churn. With a modern customer support solution, you can combine proactive<\/a>, self-serve<\/a>, and human support<\/a> capabilities, so your team can get ahead of known problems with targeted messages<\/a>, automatically answer repetitive queries with bots<\/a>, and quickly resolve complex issues with automation and a human touch.<\/p>\n Powered by a modern business messenger<\/a>, it scales your ability to answer more questions from more customers without increasing headcount, budget, or hours logged. It also integrates with other tools in your business\u2019s tech stack so you can work seamlessly with other customer-facing teams \u2013 like marketing, sales, and product \u2013 to help, delight, and retain customers all from one inbox.<\/p>\n Below, we\u2019ll share everything you need to future-proof your tech stack for the new conversational support era. You\u2019ll learn the ingredients of a winning modern support tech stack and the key ways to optimize your stack through a proven framework. Let’s dive in.<\/p>\n\n The benefits of future-proofing your customer support tech stack for the new conversational support era are clear. But many support teams \u2013 especially those in the enterprise space \u2013 worry that \u201cripping and replacing\u201d their tech stack will be costly: time-wise, cognitively, and financially.<\/p>\n “Adopting the right strategy will help you scale your personalized support without scaling your costs”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n A carefully considered strategy can help you simplify the process and hone in on the conversational support essentials that will move the needle on your business\u2019s bottom line. Adopting the right strategy will help you scale your personalized support without scaling your costs, which will have the knock-on effect of increasing your customer satisfaction (CSAT) and customer retention. It can also shift the outdated business perception of your support team from a \u201ccost center\u201d to a core value driver.<\/a><\/p>\n “The real value support software offers is in the approach it enables and how it impacts the customer and team experience”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n But here\u2019s the thing: a toolset is not a strategy. Sure, you can compare different software packages by their features, but that\u2019s like marrying someone based on their dating profile. The real value support software offers is in the approach it enables and how it impacts the customer and team experience. So before you begin searching for specific tools, define your goals upfront. Here\u2019s an example of key goals and metrics to consider.<\/p>\n Once you\u2019re clear on your goals, a solid framework can help you pinpoint the exact tools and capabilities your team needs to succeed. With Intercom\u2019s Support Funnel<\/a> framework, meeting and exceeding modern customers\u2019 expectations, increasing your team\u2019s efficiency, and moving the needle on your business\u2019s bottom line all go hand in hand. To achieve this seemingly elusive balance, it connects these three support layers and core capabilities:<\/p>\n With the funnel, no matter how much your conversation volume grows or which resources you have on hand, you can still excel and provide customers with the fast, personal support they deserve. All without burning out your team or budget.<\/p>\n Alone, each layer of the funnel is powerful, but creating a connected support strategy with a flexible, all-in-one customer support solution will help your team future-proof your tech stack and gain a true competitive edge. In the following sections, we\u2019ll show you how to optimize and modernize your support tech stack through the lens of the Support Funnel framework.<\/p>\n Future-proofing your support tech stack to meet both business objectives and the needs of modern customers starts with laying the right foundations. You need an all-in-one customer support tool at the base of your tech stack to power each layer of the funnel and the ability to integrate with your favorite tools to enhance your team\u2019s capabilities as your business grows.<\/p>\n “Your team will have all of the personalized customer data they need across a range of tools \u2013 all in one inbox”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Once your team is free from the shackles of constant tab and context switching, they\u2019ll have more time to better support and satisfy your customers. And they\u2019ll have all of the personalized customer data they need across a range of tools \u2013 all in one inbox.<\/p>\n At a minimum, here\u2019s what your customer support tool should include:<\/p>\n The first step is to lay the right foundation with an all-in-one customer support tool that powers each layer of the funnel. Obviously we\u2019re a little biased \ud83d\ude09\u00a0 so here are some of the top customer support tools as reported by the world\u2019s largest and most trusted marketplace, G2:<\/a><\/p>\n Intercom<\/a> is an all-in-one Customer Communications Platform that empowers you to build better customer relationships through personalized, messenger-based experiences across the entire customer journey. It includes:<\/p>\n HubSpot\u2019s Service Hub brings all your customer service data and channels together in one place, and helps scale your support through automation and self-service.<\/p>\n Front brings email and apps together in a collaborative customer communication platform and drives business impact by scaling the natural conversations that create customers for life.<\/p>\n Zendesk\u2019s Support Suite lets you have conversations with customers on any channel, while keeping all interactions and relevant context in one place for your agents.<\/p>\n As cutting-edge as most modern customer support software is, it\u2019s unlikely that your tool will do everything your business needs. This is especially true as your customer base grows and your team\u2019s needs evolve accordingly. So it\u2019s important to choose a solution that\u2019s flexible and that will integrate seamlessly with other tools in your tech stack. If you\u2019re looking for inspiration, here are some of our favorite apps that will supercharge and enhance each layer of the funnel. Integrating your customer support solution with the right proactive support apps can help you better understand your customers\u2019 needs and empower your team to preemptively resolve more known issues ahead of time.<\/p>\n Quantitative data is meaningful. But it won\u2019t help you fully understand all of the context behind your customers\u2019 pain points. Often, you\u2019ll be left with questions like: \u201cWhy do they have these issues?\u201d, \u201cHow do they feel?\u201d, and \u201cWhere are the stumbling blocks?\u201d Typeform<\/a> connects with Intercom to empower your team to quickly gather key qualitative data from customers in the Intercom Messenger.<\/p>\n For an even more personal touch, you can send customers video surveys with VideoAsk.<\/a> Then, armed with eye-opening customer insights, you\u2019ll know the exact questions to address in your proactive messages and the precise words to use (yes \u2013 your customers\u2019 words).<\/p>\n In today\u2019s customer-centric world, listening to and responding to voice-of-the-customer feedback will give your proactive support a competitive edge. InMoment<\/a> helps your team to keep an ongoing pulse on how your customers feel about your product or service so you can proactively drive retention, engagement, and advocacy.<\/p>\n You can connect InMoment with Intercom to empower your team to send NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys directly in the Messenger at relevant moments in your customers\u2019 journey. For example, when customers close a conversation or use a specific feature, you can check in to see how they feel. You can also proactively follow up with detractors to resolve their issues or reach out to happy customers to turn them into brand advocates and retain them for life.<\/p>\n Improving the quality of your proactive support hinges on gathering meaningful insights. Analytics tool Heap<\/a> connects with Intercom to analyze how effective your messages are at driving key actions in your product and improving long-term customer retention.<\/p>\n Your team can view graphs, funnels, retention curves, and other visualizations to answer meaningful questions like: \u201cDo customers start conversations more often on certain pages than others?\u201d and \u201cWhich messages are most effective?\u201d Then, brimming with these insights, you can improve your proactive messages, inform your product roadmap, and more.<\/p>\n Answering the same repetitive queries over and over again can be draining for your support team and a misuse of their time and expertise. Even when these questions are covered in your knowledge base, not all of your customers will want to abandon the page they\u2019re on to find an answer to their query.<\/p>\n To protect your support team\u2019s inbox and help your customers get faster resolutions, you can integrate the Article Inserter app<\/a> with the Messenger. Then, your team can proactively deliver relevant help articles via an outbound message at key moments when customers appear to be struggling, like when they\u2019re stuck on your shipping page.<\/p>\n As your conversation volume grows, it can be harder to see which issues your customers are struggling with most and what feature requests are most important to them. Business intelligence tool Prodsight<\/a> connects with Intercom to surface the most critical topics you should be tracking, help you identify underlying issues, and provide an automated sentiment analysis for every message so you can understand how customers feel about certain topics or features. These insights empower your team to create more valuable proactive support messages and proactively inform your product roadmap.<\/p>\n Ever felt the frustration of a cryptic support ticket or a poor feedback rating submitted without comment? Digital experience intelligence platform FullStory<\/a> integrates with Intercom to show you exactly what happens when a customer visits your site or app, and how to proactively improve their experience. You can also send proactive outbound messages to your customers in real time to help them preemptively resolve issues when they\u2019re experiencing friction on your site or in your app.<\/p>\n Your support team knows your customers\u2019 pain points, questions, and desires better than anyone else in your company. They\u2019re in a unique position to partner with your product team to help proactively improve your product roadmap.<\/p>\n You can connect the Productboard<\/a> app with Intercom to capture valuable product feedback in Intercom conversations and send it to a centralized repository. From there, your product team can categorize interesting insights to understand what customers really need, prioritize what to build next, and ensure it gets built in the right way.<\/p>\n The right self-serve support apps can empower your customers to help themselves and resolve their own queries right inside your business messenger, without ever leaving your website or product.<\/p>\n No matter how diligent your business is, day-to-day issues can occur with your product or service that can affect your customers, like product outages and website downtime. But these mission-critical issues don\u2019t have to frustrate your customers and wipe out your team\u2019s entire day.<\/p>\n Instead, you can connect the Statuspage<\/a> app with Intercom to proactively surface critical outage information in the Intercom Messenger. Customers can also subscribe to automatically receive proactive status updates via email or text so they don\u2019t need to constantly check in with your team \u2013 significantly reducing your inbound conversation volume.<\/p>\n Modern customers are busy with a capital B. They won\u2019t always have time to search and sift through a knowledge base to find the answers they need. Connecting the Article Search app<\/a> with Intercom gives a new home to your help center right inside the Intercom Messenger.<\/p>\n This empowers your customers to search and view articles anywhere on your site or in your app so they can help themselves without having to start a conversation with your support team. As a result, your support team will be freed up to tackle the more complex support queries that truly impact your business.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen is my order going to arrive?\u201d \u201cWhy is my delivery late?\u201d Answering simple, repetitive queries like these can feel like Groundhog Day for your support team. Asking these questions is no fun for your customers either \u2013 study after study reveals that many customers would rather self-serve than talk to a support rep at all.<\/p>\n If you work for an e-commerce<\/a> store, you can connect the Shopify<\/a> app with Intercom to empower your customers to self-serve and check their order status right inside the Messenger, without ever having to reach out to your team. It\u2019s a win-win! The right human support apps supercharge your team\u2019s efficiency and make it seamless to work with key teams in your organization, like sales, marketing, and engineering, so you can deliver an even more personal, efficient conversational experience<\/a> for your customers.<\/p>\n When a sales-ready conversation \u2013 like a billing query from a high-value prospect \u2013 pops into the Intercom Inbox, you\u2019ll want to ensure a seamless transition from your support to your sales team. Instead of copying and pasting details into your sales CRM, you can connect Salesforce<\/a> with Intercom to empower your team to easily create leads and route them to your sales team or individual reps.<\/p>\n Once a lead or customer is logged in Salesforce, both your support and sales teams will have all of the data they need \u2013 like the status, opportunity stage, and account owner \u2013 to better support, nurture, and upsell prospects.<\/p>\n When a customer spots a bug or website error, their first port of call will often be your support team. Ditch the copying and pasting between tools and pinging your engineering team to help out. Instead, connect issue tracking software Jira<\/a> with Intercom to empower your team to create Jira feature requests and bug reports in the Intercom Inbox.<\/p>\n When a Jira issue is created, it will automatically be linked to the relevant conversation, so your engineering team gets the full context they need to resolve the issue. Your support team will also get live updates when the status of an issue changes, so you can let your customer know as soon as the bug is resolved.<\/p>\n No chatbot can help calm an angry customer quite like your support team can. Some complex conversations, like tricky troubleshooting issues, emotionally-charged complaints, and VIP issues may require a quick call with a customer to smooth out the details.<\/p>\n In cases like these, you want to ensure a seamless transition from chat to call. Cloud-based phone support tool Aircall<\/a> connects with Intercom to empower your agents to make a call right from the Intercom Messenger. Call activity also gets logged directly in the Inbox so you can keep track of every interaction with ease, like when a customer leaves a voicemail or when they last answered a call from your team.<\/p>\n When a customer wants to change or upgrade their subscription plan, they\u2019ll often reach out to your trusted support team. Forget logging into multiple platforms to find payment details or to adjust a customer\u2019s plan. Instead, you can connect Stripe<\/a> with Intercom to ensure a seamless end-to-end payment process.<\/p>\n Your team can initiate subscription upgrades and accept secure payments via the Messenger, which empowers them to boost trial and upgrade conversions with ease. They can also view Stripe data \u2013 like what subscription a customer is on, the date they signed up, and the last time they reached out to your team \u2013 all in one Inbox.<\/p>\n Switching tabs and checking for messages across multiple tools is a huge time sink for your support team. Social media platform Twitter<\/a> connects with Intercom to automatically route your Twitter messages right into the Inbox.<\/p>\n Instead of your team spending large chunks of their day frequently checking social media channels, they can read, manage, and respond to Twitter messages all from one Inbox. They can also track all of your customer data in one place, giving you a clear picture of your customer base.<\/p>\n \u201cAre you sure you\u2019re on the right page?\u201d \u201cWhat can you see?\u201d \u201cCan you share a screenshot?\u201d When high-priority customers report critical issues or have pressing queries, getting on the same page shouldn\u2019t require a time-consuming, back-and-forth question marathon.<\/p>\n Make the troubleshooting process more streamlined and personal by connecting RemoteHQ<\/a> with Intercom. Your team will be able to escalate an Intercom chat into a live co-browsing session where they can control your product and web pages hand in hand with that customer to resolve their issue interactively. Need to set up a very complex or custom workflow? Integrating your customer support solution with the right automation tools helps streamline and supercharge your support operations behind the scenes to ramp up your team\u2019s efficiency and eliminate time-consuming, manual tasks.<\/p>\n Zapier<\/a> lets you connect Intercom to the apps you use every day to automate manual actions and save time. You can connect any of the 1,000+ integrated apps on Zapier together to make your own custom automations.<\/p>\n With Automate.io<\/a>, you can connect Intercom to your marketing and sales platforms, project management and collaboration apps, and more. It\u2019s easy to set up a simple one-to-one integration, or a workflow spanning across multiple apps in minutes \u2013 without any technical help.<\/p>\n Work for an enterprise or fast-growing company? The Tray<\/a> platform empowers you to easily integrate your entire cloud stack with Intercom and build powerful, flexible automated workflows with no engineering resources.<\/p>\nThe anatomy of a modern customer support tech stack\u00a0<\/a><\/h2>\n
Strategy first, technology second<\/h3>\n
![\"Support](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/Support-tech-stack-inline-1-1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nFuture-proof your support tech stack with the Support Funnel<\/h2>\n
\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/CSF-Funnel-BG.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nLay the right foundations with a powerful all-in-one customer support tool<\/h2>\n
Ingredients of a great customer support tool<\/h3>\n
\n
Top customer support tools<\/h3>\n
Intercom<\/h4>\n
\n
HubSpot<\/h4>\n
Front<\/h4>\n
Zendesk<\/h4>\n
Enhance your team\u2019s capabilities with connected integrations<\/h2>\n
\n<\/a><\/p>\nTop proactive support tools to integrate with<\/h3>\n
Surveys and qualitative feedback: Typeform<\/h4>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/Typeform-app-tech-stack.jpg\")
<\/p>\nNPS, CSAT, and CES surveys: InMoment<\/h4>\n
Analytics: Heap<\/h4>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/Heap-app.jpg\")
<\/p>\nProactive notifications: Article Inserter (built by Intercom)<\/h4>\n
Business intelligence: Prodsight<\/h4>\n
Screen capture and digital experience intelligence: FullStory<\/h4>\n
Product feedback: Productboard<\/h4>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/Productboard-app.jpg\")
\n<\/a><\/p>\nTop self-serve support tools to integrate with<\/h3>\n
Issue tracking: Statuspage<\/h4>\n
Knowledge base: Article Search (built by Intercom)<\/h4>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/Article-search-app-tech-stack.jpg\")
<\/p>\nE-commerce order tracking: Shopify<\/h4>\n
\n<\/a><\/p>\nTop human support tools to integrate with<\/h3>\n
CRM: Salesforce<\/h4>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/Salesforce-app-tech-stack.jpg\")
<\/p>\nIssue tracking and management: Jira<\/h4>\n
Cloud-based phone support: Aircall<\/h4>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/Aircall-app-tech-stack.jpg\")
<\/p>\nSubscription payment and management: Stripe<\/h4>\n
Social media: Twitter<\/h4>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/Twitter-app.jpg\")
<\/p>\nCo-browsing: RemoteHQ<\/h4>\n
\n<\/a><\/p>\nBonus: Top automation tools to integrate with<\/h3>\n
Zapier<\/h4>\n
Automate.io<\/h4>\n
Tray.io<\/h4>\n
Future-proof your customer support tech stack for the modern era<\/h2>\n