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Dos: 1. Buy a tollfree phone number and list it your website. Some people like to talk to a support agent rather than email. 2. An official email makes the bu

Dos: 1. Buy a tollfree phone number and list it your website. Some people like to talk to a support agent rather than email. 2. An official email makes the business appear legitimate. Have an email@companyname.com. Don'ts: 1. I didn't have good experience with website chat widgets as I found them confusing to configure and that generated numerous low quality interactions. 2. Since the volume of emails is low initially, better to avoid email automation as that can take up a chunk of time to set up. Start with manual emails and once you know which email copy evokes a response, you can think about automating them.

dwrodri 5y ago
This makes a lot of sense: Ideally, we'd want a small (<20) amount of "future power users" as our focus group, since we imagine these users would provide us with the most most powerful growth via word-of-mouth if we work extra hard to make that initial focus group happy.
ghengeveld 5y ago
We (<20p SaaS) use Intercom with great success. It's hooked up to our support email as well, so users who prefer email can use that, while giving us a central mailbox for it. Most customers really appreciate quick, low barrier chat. We all take turns as operator (we call it Empathy Day). As you handle support for a while, certain recurring topics appear. We identify these and either use canned responses (macros), or (preferably) improve our product to prevent these questions in the first place. We also have a bot for some basic things like pointing at the docs for certain topics. We sometimes are asked to jump on a call, but only do that for highly technical support requests and enterprise customers. Since we have customers worldwide and a globally distributed team, synchronous communication is tricky anyway.
- atatatat 5y ago
  How did you decide on Intercom over the dozens of competitors in the space?

dwrodri 5y ago

This makes a lot of sense: Ideally, we'd want a small (<20) amount of "future power users" as our focus group, since we imagine these users would provide us with the most most powerful growth via word-of-mouth if we work extra hard to make that initial focus group happy.

ghengeveld 5y ago

We (<20p SaaS) use Intercom with great success. It's hooked up to our support email as well, so users who prefer email can use that, while giving us a central mailbox for it. Most customers really appreciate quick, low barrier chat. We all take turns as operator (we call it Empathy Day). As you handle support for a while, certain recurring topics appear. We identify these and either use canned responses (macros), or (preferably) improve our product to prevent these questions in the first place. We also have a bot for some basic things like pointing at the docs for certain topics. We sometimes are asked to jump on a call, but only do that for highly technical support requests and enterprise customers. Since we have customers worldwide and a globally distributed team, synchronous communication is tricky anyway.

atatatat 5y ago
How did you decide on Intercom over the dozens of competitors in the space?