Can you tell us about your customer communications setup before Intercom, and what challenges you faced?

Smartly’s customer base started to grow rapidly from 2016, and we knew that we needed to invest in a more robust tool than Facebook Messenger to handle enterprise-level volumes of enquiries and meet our hunger for integrations and customization.

Our customers often require immediate expert technical assistance in order to get their campaigns launched on time, so offering live chat support and real-time conversation (vs tickets) in a scalable way was crucial for us. We also struggled to efficiently and immediately access the information we needed about our customers and locate where they were in the tool when launching a chat so that we could impersonate them and replicate their issues.

Something unique about Smartly is that while we have a specialist Support Operations team, we also get multiple other functions involved in providing some volume of chat support per month. This helps our Product and Customer teams stay close to customers and keep up with our rapidly evolving platform. But, it also poses unique challenges, so we wanted to find a solution that would be easy to understand for occasional supporters, and that could automate as much of the triage process as possible.

What did you need to solve those challenges?

We sought a platform that enabled advanced customization, and one which was regularly innovating (Smartly loves being involved in alpha and beta tests). As Smartly support involves so many occasional supporters, and we need to adapt our Intercom workflows and integrations as fast as our product, it was also important that the tool be easy to onboard new users to.

We needed features for personalized (saved) responses, deep analytics to ensure we meet our ambitious SLO goals, and flexible integration capabilities to enhance the overall customer experience and boost support effectiveness. It was crucial for us to find a tool that could seamlessly integrate with our existing systems for customer management and analytics.

Intercom met our needs by providing a comprehensive solution.

Can you please describe how you have implemented and used Intercom to solve those challenges, including the features you have found most useful?

Implementing Intercom has enabled us to:

• Offer real-time, scalable support: Since starting with Intercom, we’ve transitioned from only offering support through Facebook Messenger, five days a week, to now offering 24/7 multi-platform product support. This has allowed us to help our customers faster than ever and in a more scalable way.

• Balance efficiency with a personal touch: It’s very important to our brand identity that our support be human, and that our team can have their own personalities whilst being as efficient as possible. So we have a lot of fun with Intercom GIFs, but also leverage saved replies to be both friendly and efficient, boosting our CSAT and generating some lovely customer comments and praise.

• Seamlessly integrate our key systems: Intercom’s ability to integrate with our existing tools and systems has been a game changer for us. We use the Intercom API and webhooks, and have also built custom apps to connect to external tools, including Catalyst (for customer success management), Productboard (for product feedback), and Slack. We even use Intercom webhooks with our own LLM to automate the creation of Jira bug tickets from Intercom notes, speeding up bug ticket creation time by 90%. Having everything integrated with Intercom helps us to give our Support team insights into each customer and enable direct and streamlined communication with other teams.

• Easily onboard teammates to a user-friendly platform: We needed to have flexibility to experiment with different workflows and onboard hundreds of full-time and occasional supporters to the tool. Intercom has proven to be very intuitive, so even occasional supporters can jump in and deliver an awesome customer experience.

What results have you seen since you implemented Intercom? Any hard metrics you can share?

Since we started using Intercom, it’s been a remarkable partner, enabling us to grow rapidly whilst maintaining:

• A first response time of less than three minutes

• An average investigation time of just 90 minutes

• A CSAT score of 97% and higher

In addition to that, we’re now able to close 10% of our total support chats automatically using Workflows, which saves us a huge amount of time. And in the last two years, by leveraging more of Intercom’s functionality in automation and analytics, we’ve been able to reduce operational costs by over 30%.

A large part of that was being able to reduce our “cost per chat,” which we calculate by looking at the hourly rates of our employees and getting total staffing costs for the month, and then dividing that by the total number of chats per month. By increasing our use of automation and studying data in Intercom to help us optimally schedule teammates with different skill levels for different shift times, we’ve been able to optimize costs. And best of all, we’ve been able to do that whilst increasing our support footprint, as well as our capacity and availability.

Please share any specific tips, tricks or strategies you found helpful to achieve these results.

1. Smartly was founded with the philosophy that “everyone does support” (i.e. many non-support staff members are required to participate in support shifts each month). This is definitely a valuable approach for any growing startup to experiment with – it’s enabled us to build much greater and broader expertise across our company. We treat support as the ultimate cross-functional collaborative environment, where supporters work side by side with customer success managers, data scientists, marketers and product managers.

2. Our integrations with Salesforce and Catalyst (using Intercom webhooks) allow our commercial teams to provide vital context on customers (such as revenue, upcoming renewals, custom setups, stage in lifecycle, language needs), which is immediately viewable by supporters in new chats and helps us to ensure the right supporter is assigned to the right cases.

How does Intercom fit into the rest of your tech stack? What tools have you connected to Intercom?

Intercom is our key chat support tool, but is also leveraged for marketing for product update emails, in-app posts, and customer surveys such as NPS.

Smartly uses custom apps built with Intercom building blocks that connect Catalyst, Workday, and Productboard to Intercom, allowing us to save on manual work and improve collaboration between teams. Salesforce and Jira are also connected via a webhook.

What do you think is the biggest benefit of Intercom?

Smartly is trusted by over 600 brands with its rapidly evolving multi-platform product, and reliable customer service plays a major role in that trust.

Take, for example, the challenge of managing peak times like Black Friday. Intercom's automation features like Workflows can handle routine inquiries and guide customers to resources without human intervention, which frees up agents to focus on more complex issues. Our in-house Intercom bot, which we built using Workflows and call “Nadine” (named after one of our earliest Smartly users – a true long-term and current user of the platform), filters chats into categories, provides instant answers where possible, automates tagging, and helps us to prioritize.

Nadine is a non-AI bot and currently resolves up to 10% of our chats totally independently (due to the complex nature of our product, we still involve people in most chats). But more importantly, it speeds up triage, collects vital information for investigators, and enhances the entire support experience for our customers.

Overall, Intercom provides the flexibility to adapt to changing needs, ensuring seamless support during critical moments like Black Friday and beyond. And we’re extremely excited to take that to the next level and begin testing new AI-powered features like Fin AI Copilot. 

What advice would you give to others considering using Intercom?

Pick a tool based on where you think your support team needs to be in five years, not today. You need a tool that can scale with you and adapt and innovate as fast as you do. For example, Intercom has been very quick to market with new AI-driven functionality and their tool evolves constantly, so we’re not being left behind our competitors.

When it comes to using Intercom, we believe that it shines brightest when you explore its full range of features and look at the potential holistic impact it can have on customer satisfaction and overall organizational profitability. When our Support teams are working effectively, we’re able to bring better product features and services to our customers.

Dive into Intercom's AI features, along with other capabilities. We're particularly excited about exploring new betas as Intercom continuously delivers cutting-edge solutions for customer service.