Intercom’s product philosophy: developing personalized goods

Intercom is dedicated to adding a human touch to every product modification, whether we are developing tools for enhanced customization or fortifying our privacy and security.

In order to facilitate quicker resolution, my team is concentrating on developing and coordinating a variety of channels of contact between clients and end users, including social media, email, video/voice, and messaging. It makes it easier for me to design experiences that increase customer pleasure and colleague productivity when I keep in mind that we’re connecting actual individuals rather than viewing them as data points in a database.

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Why does Intercom’s teams value this principle?

Since every client is distinct and has various requirements and goals, we think it’s important to provide conversational, omnichannel customer support solutions. This entails creating and organizing procedures so that end users may select the channel that works best for them at any given time, feel completely at ease using it, and know that communication will continue uninterrupted even if they decide to change channels.

We also strive to enhance channel capabilities so that users and customers have access to all the features and resources they need to answer questions. A basic illustration? enabling the sharing of PDF documents over WhatsApp to prevent users from switching between channels in order to transmit important data.

What role does the principle play in the design thinking and product development process?

From inspiration to iteration, we approach every stage of the design process with the “make it feel personal” philosophy in mind. It encourages us to do the following, which are some of the ways it improves our design:

Always put the requirements of the user first

Working in SaaS environments makes it easier for business demands to sway decisions, thus aiming for a personal feel lets the team intentionally refocus on meeting the most crucial user needs. It turns into a compass that helps designers avoid being delusional by emphasizing pressing issues. In addition to frequently aligning with company requirements, meeting user demands virtually always directly increases customer happiness and business value.

Use automation and emerging technologies.

As designers, we are always trying to figure out how to streamline a procedure with fewer clicks. In order to create intelligent, flexible, and contextual defaults, we are urged to take time-based efficiency, user activity, and behavior into consideration. This concept serves as a reminder to strive toward personal experiences.

In order to help customers set up processes that work best for their team and promptly resolve end user inquiries, the product incorporates embedded technologies such as artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and machine learning. This enhances speed, efficiency, customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty.

Include joyful components

Our mission is to make the process enjoyable while assisting customers in easily achieving their goals. Incorporating pleasure aspects forces us to rethink the goods we’re developing, making them user-friendly and pleasurable while also setting us apart from the competition.

This idea has been significantly utilized in the development of Intercom’s exquisite onboarding processes. It also encourages us to consider carefully how we may use micro-animations to provide realistic visual feedback on our users’ progress or incorporate moments of excitement when users first discover a feature.

In what ways does the concept assist support teams in achieving favorable results for their users?

Adding a human touch to our product not only makes users happy, but it also greatly aids in support teams reaching their objectives and raising customer satisfaction.

Boosts productivity

Effective performance is fueled by personalization, as the Intercom ecosystem’s design decisions have repeatedly demonstrated. For instance, the new Inbox’s outgoing composer was created using a channel-first approach. With a clever contact dropdown that sorts contacts by type first and then by name, it gives the colleague the choice to choose contacts based on the selected channel.

This helps prevent error situations in the event of a channel-contact data type mismatch and creates a mental model of channel-first behavior that scales more efficiently to accommodate various use cases. Moreover, the dropdown automatically selects the most recently used channel, reducing cognitive strain and enabling teams to work more quickly.

enhances security, privacy, and trust

Providing our customers with power and customization to match their users’ needs—including what they want to share and how they establish trust—is another way that we help make experiences more personalized.

We just delivered a feature that enables clients to map their reply address to the incoming email address that their end users use to contact them, for instance, as part of one of our product enhancements. This implies that, depending on what they require, they can decide to either shield the teammate’s email address with a generic user ID or divulge it. While some clients wish to safeguard their teammates’ identities and look more official, others may want to share their email ID in order to foster greater connections and trust with their end users.

Use cases vary depending on the demands of the business, but it’s crucial to provide tailored experiences that satisfy diverse client expectations. We can foster trust, privacy, and security by giving the user power.

raises client satisfaction

Customer happiness is directly related to personalization. Generally speaking, we try to respond to feature requests from customers as soon as we get them and directly engage with them to learn about their expectations for the product.

At Intercom, when we build processes, we consider scalable experiences that can be tailored to match the demands and expectations of our customers. Our straightforward graphic templates that enable issues within emails—rather than just the Messenger—are one recent example. They have significantly raised customer satisfaction.

Personalizing business for our clients and their clients

We weave this dedication to personalizing business throughout every stage of our operations. We’re always considering how we can improve, streamline, and make their entire experience more relevant when we examine consumer requests and comments. This allows them to keep building individualized relationships with their clients.