How Keen scaled a personal support experience and increased user engagement

To communicate with more than 50,000 developers that use their platform, Keen relies on Intercom. Tying together powerful features, efficiency at scale, and more personal communication, Intercom lets Keen make every interaction – from onboarding to support – a great experience.

“My job is to care about the developer. I constantly think about their experience on our platform and how we can improve it,” explains Maggie Jan, Director of Developer Advocacy at Keen. The fast growing technology company provides a platform for product owners and developers to build on data quickly and easily, enabling them to create in-app analytics and dashboards for their end users. The company has invested heavily in developing a world-class experience for customers. “It’s a developer-friendly product,” Maggie explains. “Our customers’ success depends on our ability to communicate clearly and on a personal level.”

Intercom was an ideal solution for Keen. The platform centralized all their customer communications, allowing them to reduce the time to resolution for support requests, and drive a 30% increase in customer satisfaction. These improvements to their customer experience reduced churn by 0.5%, and is helping them gain a competitive advantage as they build a reputation for friendly, helpful service.

Consolidating customer communication

Prior to Intercom, Keen used multiple tools for customer support and engagement. As the company grew, the siloed products made customer communication disorganized and inefficient.

“We had Olark for live chat, emails coming in through Groove, but having them all separated was a mess. With Intercom, we can control everything from one place. Important user information is right along side of the conversation so we know exactly who our customers are, what they’re struggling with, and how we can help,” says Maggie.

With Intercom, Keen has connected their help desk and help center to work synchronously to tackle customer questions. The help center is the first stop for users to get support. It contains everything from technical help articles to product how-to guides, so users can find answers on their own. For issues they can’t handle themselves, users can easily reach out to Keen’s help desk via the Intercom Messenger.

When it comes to supporting customer, the team inbox equips Keen with everything needed to solve a user’s problem. As new messages enter the inbox, teammates can see who’s working on a conversation to avoid overlap. In the conversation, a user’s profile and company data is displayed on the right-hand side, giving teammates key information to get to a solution faster. “From the inbox, I can go to the page the user is on and see exactly what they’re looking at, including their last query. I’m often able to make a quick adjustment to solve the problem,” says Adam Kahn, Support Engineer at Keen.

Automation should complement support, not replace it. When a Keen user asks a question addressed by one of Keen’s help center articles, articles relevant to the conversation are automatically suggested to the teammate to share, or easily searchable in the message composer. Teammates also use macros that they can quickly personalize to answer frequently asked questions, address known product gaps, and assist in churn mitigation, in a fraction of the time. The efficiency of the team inbox, including macros, and help center articles has led to a dramatic 60% reduction in time to resolution for support conversations. Moreover, the team has cut down their time spent on support by 30%.

Letting user feedback shape the experience

For Keen, customer support is also their main channel for product feedback. They continuously engage customers to find out what their problems are and how to fix them. With Intercom, the Keen support team tags all feature requests and product questions and views them in aggregate so they can quickly prioritize their efforts.

Feedback through Intercom not only helps shape the product, but the customer experience as well. Maggie describes how users frequently asked about pricing and the upper limits of the APIs, even though the information was published on the website. “As a company, we really value transparency around pricing, but didn’t realize we were not doing a good job of making it clear and easy to find. The customer feedback we collected helped us figure out the best placement for that content. Customers are now better able to self-serve the information, and don’t frequently ask about it.”

Targeted engagement boosts activation rate

Like many SaaS companies, Keen is always trying to improve the process of turning new signups into active users. After studying the behavior of new users, Keen saw the need to proactively highlight information at certain points in the onboarding process. To do so, they used Intercom to deliver automated in-app messages to reach users with the relevant product information at the right time. Easy access to customer support and improved product education in the onboarding flow have increased successful activation among new users. Maggie credits Intercom for “continued cost savings across customer experience,” and expects that, “using Intercom, we will be able to increase our activation rate by 10% this year.”

Putting the customer first

In total, the improvements Keen has made with Intercom for support, product education, and engagement has improved customer satisfaction by 30%, driving real value for the business. Since consolidating all their customer support into Intercom, they’ve seen a remarkable 0.5%. decrease in churn. Maggie attributes Keen’s success to their customer-centric mentality. “We constantly ask ourselves, ‘What are we trying to provide for people who interact with our brand? How do we make the most of the relationship we have with our customers?’ Intercom gives us a way to act meaningfully on those challenges.”