Intercom Lets You Take Customer Conversations Anywhere With Twilio SMS

Intercom Lets You Take Customer Conversations Anywhere With Twilio SMS

When a prospective customer knocks, you should be there to answer. If you’re not, you should know who knocked and how to follow up. This can seem like a Herculean task to some businesses, but it’s a breeze with the right set of software and Twilio Messaging.

Using SMS, Intercom reported that their customers’ lead collection improved 10%, and they now connect with 43% of site visitors as opposed to a previous 33%. Their customers were able to boost their closed conversation loop completion rates by 7% as well, moving from a 63% to 70%.

Intercom is turning the challenge of scaling global, 24/7 website visitor interaction into an opportunity for growth. Using the right data and the right communication channels, businesses can be everywhere for prospective customers all at once, on the channels they’re already using. Intercom gives businesses the means and the mediums they need to discover new customers, communicate with them, and convert them – all in one place.

Replying To The Customer From Anywhere At Anytime

That warm fuzzy feeling shared between your business and prospective customer? That’s a closed conversation loop. It’s the ideal outcome for all customer interactions: a question is asked, answered and the loop is closed. But, conversations with leads function differently than the average conversation.

A potential new customer won’t endure radio silence. They expect a reply regardless of what timezone you’re in, or what time it is back at HQ. A customer might switch from email to chat or SMS mid-conversation, and expect you to be able to do the same.

Intercom empowers businesses to answer a lead’s questions quickly via web chat or email, or a lead can choose to receive notifications via SMS that a business has responded to their question within Intercom’s Messenger. But, any reply won’t do. Intercom gives businesses the data they need to provide contextual support in situations where context matters.

If a user has viewed your pricing page four times in the past 24 hours, Intercom will give you that information so you can act accordingly. Intercom knows a prompt, helpful reply could be the difference between gaining a new user, or losing a current one. The data is on their side. When Intercom needed to deliver a new way for their customers to find and convert users synchronously and asynchronously, they turned to Twilio.

Contextual Conversations With Your Customers

Intercom has a straightforward philosophy that drives their Acquire product: every website visitor is a sales opportunity. Chat and convert them to customers. “Chat” is a nebulous verb. It could mean an email chat, web chat, or to receive notifications that a business has responded via SMS. Using Acquire, Intercom lets businesses seamlessly adopt any of these channels, and switch in-between them.

Let’s say a person asks a question via web chat when no one is around to answer. The business could set up an auto reply through Intercom informing them of their average reply time, and offering options for a follow up – email and SMS.

If the potential new customer with the pricing question is leaving work and closing their laptop, Intercom gives the business the ability to notify a prospective customer via Twilio SMS that the conversation has continued. If the lead accepts, they’ll get a text with a link. When the lead clicks the link, that installs a cookie that directs them to the page where they initially asked the question. So if you ask a question about a pricing page on a desktop, and punt the conversation to text, the link you get via text will rout right back to the pricing page. This context matters for leads and Intercom’s customers.
The cookie enables Intercom’s customers to determine if that lead converted regardless of if they’re on mobile or a web browser. Twilio enabled Intercom to take conversations (and conversion data) anywhere on mobile.

When Intercom shipped SMS as a synchronous and asynchronous channel for customer interaction, there were concerns that it would negatively affect email registration rates. If leads are opting for SMS, then they may not opt for email, and conversion rates for email will slump. What they found was surprising: SMS unearthed a completely new pool of leads. Email rates weren’t affected, and SMS drove new conversions for their customers.

Building Using React.JS, Planning For The Long Term Scale

“Twilio was the easiest part of the Acquire integration,” says Lynch. “We went straight to the docs. They were sane, simple, well documented and allowed us to build for the long term.”

Intercom builds their software for those granular, moment by moment interactions where reply time counts. Winning these moments is the key to success not only for their customers, but for their own business. No matter where or when a customer knocks, Intercom aims to be there to open the door, and start a conversation. 

Using Twilio, they can take that conversation anywhere. Intercom has customers all over the world. With the click of a button, Intercom can deploy local phone numbers to enable their customers to provide a more contextual, personalized experience to their users. As Intercom’s customer base expands vertically and globally, they can count on Twilio to scale alongside them.