Intercom today launched the next generation of its Messenger, which can handle more business-critical actions and is customizable and configurable to match any company's brand experiences.
Intercom is also announcing several new features, including messenger-first tickets, enabling businesses to funnel the most complex support requests through the Messenger and into the Intercom platform.
"Intercom has earned the loyalty of our customers because we provide the solutions they need to increase customer retention, which is a challenge facing every business," said Paul Adams, chief product officer at Intercom, in a statement. "We believe the answer is better customer communication, which is why we pioneered the Messenger 11 years ago. Today we've reinvented it for the next decade, when in-product messaging will become the primary channel for businesses to engage with customers."
Intercom's Messenger features a new user experience that companies can tailor to their customer journeys and includes the following:
- Visual customization and new designs with a variety of styles, colors, sizes and more, so companies can fully customize the Messenger to make it feel native to their product;
- Full configurability so users can set up and target the Messenger for different parts of the customer journey depending on who the customer is;
- Spaces, such as home, messages, help, news, and tasks, to help users navigate conversations, self-serve help resources, company news, and more;
- News tab to share product launches, feature updates, company news, events, promotions, and more;
- Enhanced machine learning-driven article suggestions;
- Checklists to onboard and activate users by guiding them through a set of actions;
- Compact Messenger that lets customers provide just the right level of information to their users; and
- Web and Mobile Messengers.
Intercom tickets offers a messenger-first, native customer experience for both live and asynchronous support. Tickets also lets businesses do the following:
- Use bots to collect customer information;
- Set customer expectations and show ticket progression;
- Send customers proactive notifications to keep them up to date and let them know when further information is needed; and
- Continue to leverage industry-standard support channels, like email, but with the flexibility to meet customers in their preferred channel.
Additionally, Intercom launched the following two new products:
- Visual bot builder to help increase the amount of customer questions that businesses can resolve through automation. This is the next iteration of Intercom's bots following the launch of Custom Actions and Custom Objects, which enables customers to integrate bots within the Messenger to other back-end systems.
- Tooltips, for non-disruptive and contextual messages that serve as a layer of help within products, triggered by customers themselves. Businesses can apply Tooltips to any part of their product to help educate customers and drive adoption.