Amplitude powers data-driven, personalized experiences at scale and saved $1 million with Intercom

Many businesses face a similar challenge: finding a way to highly personalize engagement and set customers up for success to drive retention, while also being efficient and choosing the right cost-effective technology to enable this at scale.

This is a top priority for the number-one product analytics solution, Amplitude. As a solution that specializes in customer behavioral data and the digital experience, it holds a key piece of the answer to this challenge. The other crucial piece is being able to effectively engage with customers in the right place, at the right time, and with the right message. That’s why Amplitude uses Intercom to help put the rich customer insights their platform provides into action. “Customer engagement is critical to business today,” says Craig Vincent, Head of Global Success Programs, Customer Success, at Amplitude. “We know that when we engage with customers, they end up being happier, they end up advocating for us more, and they stay with us for a lot longer.”

Amplitude’s rich data, paired with Intercom’s omnichannel messaging capabilities, enables the team to craft tailored journeys for each user to help them achieve their business goals. With the two platforms working in unison, they have been able to strike the right balance between personalization and efficiency. “Since we implemented Intercom, we’ve seen our engagement rates rise by 25–30%, product activation has increased by 11% across the board, and its automation capabilities have helped us to scale our efforts without increasing headcount, which has saved us $1 million,” says Craig.

Amplitude began using Intercom to power their customer success messaging and has since expanded to use the platform across a number of teams, leveraging it to engage with customers throughout the entire lifecycle.

Identifying the need for an omnichannel customer engagement platform

Prior to implementing Intercom, Amplitude’s communications tech stack consisted of a number of point solutions. “Our Marketing team uses an email solution and our Support team previously used a separate tool for live chat,” says Craig. “We didn’t have a cohesive platform for customer engagement that really allowed us to drive efficiencies in our business, build interactive experiences with our customers, and meet them where they are.”

Without the infrastructure in place to make the customer experience more efficient, it was becoming increasingly difficult and costly to scale. “A challenge that we faced before Intercom was that our customer success efforts were focused on humans, and that is a very expensive way to go about it,” says Craig. “We also discovered that some of our customers don't want to talk to a human at every step of the journey. So, we knew that automation would be a huge lever for growth for us.” Amplitude went in search of a solution that would enable them to harness their own data to power personalized communication at scale and reduce costs by consolidating tools and leveraging automation.

Finding the right partner to achieve their goals

After evaluating a number of vendors, Amplitude chose Intercom to power their customer messaging as it enabled personalized, omnichannel communication at scale. “Intercom was ahead of the pack in its ability to add conditional logic to the journey a user can go down,” says Craig. “At Amplitude, we want to make sure that each customer’s experience is tailored to the needs of that particular customer, because we've seen that personalized experiences drive much stronger outcomes than non-personalized experiences.”

Intercom also integrates seamlessly with Amplitude, which enables the team to send rich data in the form of dynamic user cohorts to Intercom so they can tailor communications based on complex, in-app user behavior. “The great thing about Amplitude and Intercom is that they work really well together. Amplitude is the leader in product analytics and allows you to collect rich data on your users’ experiences, and Intercom is the leader in customer engagement. Those two things work really well together because you can refine the data you collect in Amplitude into cohorts, and then Intercom is able to action them because of the strength of the integration between our two products.”

Boosting the bottom line through data-driven experiences

When Amplitude implemented Intercom, they set out to increase their North Star success metric for customer engagement – net dollar retention. Craig’s team is focused on enabling users to get the most out of the platform to meet their business goals. By meeting them in-context and offering guidance as they’re using the product, the team can encourage increased adoption and create great user experiences. “Adoption is a leading indicator of net dollar retention,” Craig explains. “So, adoption is where we started when we rolled out Intercom.”

The Customer Success team built a program called “activation autopilot,” which focused on getting users up and running with their use cases as quickly as possible. “Activation autopilot has shown some really strong results,” says Craig. “In less than a year, we’ve been able to raise our activation levels by 11% across the board, which means that users who participated in the program built 11% more charts in their journey than users who didn’t. It’s had a tremendous impact, especially when you consider how big and broad our customer base is. So, Intercom definitely plays a role in our goal of driving higher net dollar retention.”

Amplitude’s ability to meet customers where they are has been pivotal to the success of the activation autopilot program. With Intercom’s in-app messaging capabilities, they can reach customers in the right place, and with the right message, to drive action. “We know that in order to effectively engage with customers, it’s imperative that we’re able to meet them where they are,” says Craig. “In-product communication is paramount for the efficacy of the type of work that we do. Our engagement rates with in-product messages are 25–30% higher than what we see with email – and that’s something we couldn’t do before.”

Creating a holistic customer experience

Amplitude’s use of Intercom quickly expanded to multiple teams when they saw the results and return on investment that the platform provided. “We started with Intercom purely for the customer success use case, but realized there’s value in using it for so much more. Amplitude now uses Intercom to support the entire customer lifecycle, everything from the beginning of the journey through activation and supporting new customers coming on board,” says Craig.

As a product-led growth organization, empowering customers to be successful using the Amplitude platform is a key component of producing bottom-line business results. “Intercom plays a key part in our product-led growth strategy,” says Craig. “For product-led growth to be successful, it requires a tremendous amount of collaboration between Product, Marketing, and Customer Success. Intercom has brought us together and allowed us to build integrated experiences so we can help users get started using the product more quickly.”

Today, a number of teams from across the company are using Intercom to create delightful experiences for their customers:

• The Customer Success team uses Intercom’s visual campaign builder, Series, to create highly personalized messaging flows designed to set customers up for success. They also regularly check in with customers to gauge sentiment and satisfaction throughout their journey, using these insights to drive action, such as asking a happy customer to write a G2 review.

• The Support team utilizes the Intercom Messenger to provide real-time support and easily manage customer conversations through the Inbox. They were able to replace their previous point solution, reducing costs by consolidating into one platform and creating a better experience to both their support reps and customers. They’re now achieving a whopping 97.8% CSAT and maintaining a median response time of just 52 seconds.

• The Product team uses Intercom to share important product announcements and enable customers to submit feature requests in a quick, seamless way.

Craig highlights the benefits of being able to work with other teams from across the company to ensure that customers have everything they need to be successful at their fingertips. A perfect example of this collaboration is Amplitude’s Digital Customer Success Center, a home for customer success within their product. This hub serves as a one-stop shop for customers, where they can seek support, access educational resources, submit feature requests to the Product team, and more.

A tech stack built for success

In addition to having Intercom integrated with their own platform, which has enabled the team to highly personalize their customer messaging using rich customer behavioral data, Amplitude has connected Intercom to a number of other tools. With Intercom’s customer communications platform heavily integrated with its tech stack, Amplitude is able to streamline its workflows, ensure consistency in customer data across its core tools, and unlock new ways to engage with and support customers.

Amplitude uses Salesforce as its CRM, so the Salesforce integration with Intercom enables the team to maintain data integrity between their key systems. They also integrate Intercom with their ticketing system, which allows them to automatically create tickets directly from Intercom conversations so the support team can do further analysis.

Looking to the future

Having seen great success with Intercom so far, Amplitude is excited to explore even more opportunities to leverage the platform across the company and continue to create consistent, engaging customer experiences. “Intercom allows us to keep growing our business because it enables us to be there for our customers at every step in their journey,” says Craig.

“We know Intercom is the right partner for us because Intercom doesn’t think of customer engagement as a one-way street – it’s a conversation. And that’s so important for building experiences that are differentiated and that will ultimately help move our customers towards their goals. That’s why we chose Intercom, and that’s why we’re so happy to be partners.”