#intercom.io

10 posts!

Product Lessons we can Learn from Google+

Gems outlined by Paul Adams:

Build around people problems, not company problems

Perceived benefit needs to be greater than perceived effort

Here's a quick breakdown of some tips we've used in our business. Thanks to the Intercom, UserFox, Mixpanel Engage and Customer.io teams for the tips. With these folks you can send your users personalized emails and messages, based on each users' specific patterns of activity.

- When users reply, make sure the email goes to a real person, who can respond back.

Nothing sucks more than a user replying to an email generated by you or by your system, and that email bouncing, or going to a noreply@. Or worse, their message actually matters, and no one responds!

More from Peter @ Userfox here

- Personalize as much as possible

This comes from our experience. Users have responded far better when they feel

a. the email came from a real person, and 

b. it was meant for them specifically. 

In practice, this is fairly difficult to automate, but it pays off in spades. Some ways we do this:

- where possible, we check out the user's website or app. Particularly easy if you signed up with your work email address

- we see if they have any other Chat widget or helpdesk/CRM installed (particularly any that we integrate with) 

- we tell you what we really think - if there's a typo, if you have great design, if you're switching from a competitor - we mention any and all those things because a. they matter, and b. we want you to know that we care that you do well. 

You CAN automate some things - using first names in the subject line and email, targeting users based on key activities they've just completed, and so on. 

- Be Proactive - establish trust.

@Brennandunn from Planscope has a great guest post on the Intercom.io Blog. The general thrust of the post is about providing better support than your competition. His point about being proactive though, is to

a. show the user that you personally care about them as an individual, and

b.  using your data to know when reaching out will matter the most. For example, when users are at high risk of churn, reach out personally to re-engage them, and bolster the relationship, and establish trust.

More on this later - we've been using these tips and some others which we'll share in future posts!!

As I’ve been working to get our startup Goodbits up and running I’ve been using many different tools to get as much insight on our customers activity. The one tool that I’ve been using the most has been Kissmetrics which has allowed me to look at specific events or actions that a user carried out on the site. Making it far more useful than the popular choice of Google Analytics or similar.

It has been very important to learn what daily habits our users are carrying out, so the better information I can compile the better I can deduce common usage patterns that I have to improve and refine. Check out this post from Nir which is an interesting read on Habit forming.

Now there is a new kid on the block and I’m loving it. Intercom, a web app that is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Tool on my customers with some serious powerful features.

This is Kalv's blog post on how we're using Intercom and other tools to engage with the people that are early users of Goodbits.

We've really appreciated everyone's feedback as we reach out more directly to ask questions about how they're using the site.