Intercom Adds New Products to its Engagement OS, Reinventing Traditional Customer Engagement Models

By PR Newswire Last updated Mar 24, 2022

Intercom debuts new products and platform innovation at New at Intercom event

Intercom, the Engagement OS, launched two new products: Surveys, the only tool of its kind that enables businesses to capture insights from customers and act on them in real-time, and Switch, a tool for support teams to seamlessly transition customers from phone support hold queues to Intercom’s Messenger support at the customer’s preference. Building on its investments to deliver next-generation support, the company also announced the new Intercom Inbox—a complete rebuild and redesign to make its most-used product the fastest and most efficient support inbox for the modern era.

“We believe ongoing customer engagement is the future of internet business, and that demands a new operating model—one that unifies and reorients every aspect of an organization to deliver exceptional customer experiences,” said Karen Peacock, CEO of Intercom. “We built Intercom’s Engagement OS for this purpose—to give all customer-facing teams one primary, unified platform to work together and create an ongoing dialogue with customers.”

Today’s announcements will enable Intercom’s more than 25,000 organizations, including industry leaders like Amazon, Atlassian and Lyft Business, to drive business growth and scale with its Engagement OS. With the enhancements to the platform, all customer-facing teams can collaborate to create powerful experiences and drive ongoing customer engagement.

“Atlassian is committed to creating strong, personal experiences for our 200,000+ customers. This means resolving their issues quickly, while forging lasting relationships with our customers. Intercom’s Engagement OS enables us to do just that,” said Wayne Stewart, Head of Customer Service and Support, Cloud Growth, DevOps & IT at Atlassian. “We use Intercom to power, and scale, best-in-class customer communication and to facilitate customer engagement across many areas of our business. Intercom’s platform helps us gain a deeper understanding of our customers’ needs and helps us create delightful journeys for them. We’re excited to see continued innovation from Intercom and we look forward to building onto our years-long partnership.”

Richer Insights and Personalized Experiences With Surveys

Surveys enables businesses to collect useful and actionable customer insights to tailor and target personal and effective messaging to customers. As in-product messaging becomes the primary channel to engage with customers, and as businesses move on from third-party data and into a cookieless world, Surveys enables organizations to deliver ongoing customer engagement by effectively capturing and taking action on first-party data in real time.

Intercom Surveys is the only survey tool that automatically connects customer insights to a variety of responsive, real-time workflows that drive product adoption and retention. Distributed directly in-product, Surveys reaches customers when they’re most likely to engage and leads to higher response and engagement rates, with accurate insights businesses can automatically turn into action. Because Surveys is supported by Intercom’s singular customer communications platform and robust outbound messaging system, companies can leverage the insights for personalized, ongoing customer engagement across multiple channels. Examples include using NPS scores to trigger follow up actions from the sales team to immediately reach out to VIP detractors and set up a churn prevention call, or new customer surveys that ask for the customer’s use case and immediately provide a tailored onboarding experience.

“Intercom has grown with Coda since day one and provides the technical foundation for our customer engagement strategy,” said Brian Lederman, Head of Sales, Success and Support at Coda. “Our users’ needs vary greatly, and Intercom’s flexibility lets us tailor the user experience to do everything from sending targeted messages to delivering customer support. Now with Surveys, we can extend what Intercom can do with a frictionless experience. We’re using the insights from onboarding surveys and NPS scores to better understand our customers and act on their feedback. With Surveys, we can build workflows based on the insights, triggering outreach on advocacy opportunities or direct contact from our sales team.”

**Introducing Switch–The Omnichannel Support Experience**

Switch eliminates on-hold wait times that often lead to a frustrating customer experience by enabling support teams to give customers the choice to engage with customer support however and whenever they want. Customers can easily move from phone support to Intercom’s Messenger, eliminating wait times and delivering faster answers.

Customers can simply call into phone support, select an option to move to messenger support, and then receive a link to be taken directly to the messenger. For support teams, moving calls to messaging is more cost-effective and more efficient, allowing teams to scale support without exhausting resources or requiring more headcount, since agents can handle multiple customer inquiries concurrently.

Switch works with any phone provider system and is natively built into Intercom’s platform. Support teams can use Switch alongside any existing phone provider, and integrations such as Aircall, to log customer calls and then switch to Intercom to deliver an omnichannel support strategy. Teams can also build their own applications to integrate calls into their Intercom environments.

A Next-Generation Inbox

Customer support is undergoing a once-in-a-generation change with increasing internet scale and higher customer expectations. Last year, Intercom debuted the first holistic framework to deliver and scale modern customer support by combining best-in-class proactive, self-serve and human support capabilities. The newly re-imagined Intercom Inbox is central to this framework, and the update will make Inbox the fastest, most effective and most powerful support tool available.

Built for scale with a modern, consumer-grade design, Inbox gives support teams the freedom to work how they want, with available customizations like dark mode and four native languages. Keyboard-first shortcuts and quick actions equip teams to work and respond to customers at speed, leading to increased team productivity and improved customer satisfaction. Inbox updates will be available to all Intercom customers this summer.

“Our next-generation Inbox is the support tool for the future. It will set the standard for how support teams manage their workloads and do their jobs,” said Paul Adams, Chief Product Officer at Intercom. “It’s the only inbox on the market built for speed and designed for internet scale, so teams can meet rising customer demands and actually enjoy the tool they spend so much of their day working within. It’s a central ingredient of the Engagement OS we’ve built in response to a market that is undergoing fundamental change and evolution.”