Intercom boosts customer communications with latest enhancements to Messenger

Intercom, the Engagement OS, is pushing the company’s biggest updates to the Messenger, the heart of its customer communications platform, offering a revamped user experience, the ability to handle more business-critical actions all within the Messenger, and can be customizable and configurable to match any company’s brand experience.

Intercom is also announcing several additional new features, including messenger-first tickets—a highly-anticipated launch that delivers the future of customer support ticketing, according to the vendor. Tickets enables businesses to funnel the most complex support requests through the Messenger and into the Intercom platform, eliminating the need for additional support workflows and tools. For a business’ customers, it delivers a more personal, modern, and richer support experience, according to the company.

“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. “We believe the answer is better customer communication, which is why we pioneered the Messenger eleven 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.”

Redesigned from the ground up to be able to do more within the in-product channel, Intercom’s Messenger features a new user experience that companies can tailor to their customers' journey including:

• 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 customers can set up and target the Messenger for different parts of the customer journey, depending on who the customer is. For example, companies can offer different versions of the Messenger for free users and paid users.
• Spaces such as home, messages, help, news, and tasks makes it more intuitive for end-users to navigate conversations, self-serve help resources, company news and more in the Messenger.
• News tab to share product launches, feature updates, company news, events, promotions, and more directly in the Messenger.
• Enhanced machine learning-driven article suggestions for businesses to give customers more relevant article suggestions within the Messenger.
• 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.
• Web and Mobile Messengers, thoughtfully designed for the best user experience across web and mobile.

With these updates, Intercom's Messenger is not only customizable and configurable, but it is versatile, flexible, fast, and designed for modern businesses, according to the company.

Basic customization, Messenger spaces, machine learning article suggestions, and updated settings are all available now, with the rest to follow over the coming months.  

Lastly, the company is announcing two additional new products:

• Visual bot builder: an intuitive and frictionless way for businesses to build more powerful bots and workflows within Intercom. This easy-to-use builder will help increase the amount of customer questions that businesses can resolve through automation, give customers faster answers, and enable more powerful automation. Visual bot builder is the next iteration in the evolution 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. Visual bot builder is available to most customers today.
• Tooltips: non-disruptive and contextual messages that serve as a layer of help within your product, triggered by the customer at the time that makes most sense to them. Businesses can apply Tooltips to any part of their product to help educate customers and drive adoption, and they are code-free so they can be designed and managed by anyone, not just product or engineering teams. Tooltips is available today.

For more information about these updates, visit www.intercom.com.