A conversation with Dental Intelligence: Providing the best chat experience for customers

We spoke with Max Williams, Support Manager at Dental Intelligence, about his experience using Intercom to support their 9,000 customers, as well as common problems support teams face and how technology can play a pivotal role in solving them.

Could you tell us a bit about Dental Intelligence, your role, and your background?

You bet. My name’s Max Williams and I manage the Support team at Dental Intelligence, which is a solution for dentists that empowers them to run their practices. We help them understand the analytics of their business, help them run everything efficiently, and along the way, we’ve acquired other platforms, such as online scheduling software, to become an all-in-one dental software solution for our customers. We’ve used Intercom for as long as I’ve been at Dental Intelligence. I actually started as a support agent and now manage the team, and I’ve loved every minute of it. Back then, we were a team of seven people, and that has now grown to 40 in just two and a half years.

What challenges do teams face when it comes to creating a great customer support experience, and what role does technology play in overcoming those challenges?

Dental Intelligence has acquired a lot of companies as we continue to add to our offering, so we need to create a kind of universal experience for customers, regardless of the platform each person is using. That’s one of the biggest challenges Intercom solves for us. Our customers always know how to reach us and have a wonderful, consistent experience with the bot as we triage their queries.

On our side, we can sort customer queries into different inboxes based on things like prioritization level, which product a customer is using, and things like that, which saves us a lot of time. We can leverage Intercom’s automation capabilities to effectively triage and get down to the nitty gritty before we’ve even spoken with the customer, which makes it a much more seamless and efficient experience for them, as well as for our team.

What has your experience been like using Intercom, compared with other support tools you’ve used in the past?

I’ve explored other support software in the past, like Zendesk and Salesforce, but none of them provide the chat experience that we want to create for our customers. Intercom is the best in the industry for that and makes it very easy for one of our agents to handle 10 chats at a time. With Zendesk, they could handle a maximum of three. So, we’re able to resolve way more customer queries and still provide an excellent experience for them using Intercom, because it makes it so easy for both the customer and the support agent.