Make your customers successful. Des Traynor of Intercom

The tools and processes he uses to teach their customers to achieve success.

Since we’re the marketplace for startup tools, we’re keen on knowing the workflows of entrepreneurs we admire — we talk to them about the tools they’re using to do their jobs and how they’re using them. From these conversations the Workflows series was born: To inspire and empower entrepreneurs.

“How do we make our customers more successful?”

This is the question Des asks himself daily. He’s the Co-Founder & VP of Customer Success at Intercom. He obsesses over teaching their customers on how to be more successful with Intercom. He always thinks of ways to provide them with a better service, to find ways to teach & educate customers, while making sure that Intercom isn’t slowing them down.

His team consists of engineers and content creators who collectively make sure that customers properly install and set up the tool in their products to get great results. They help clients with lifecycle marketing and best practices for Intercom, and they prepare the documentation, articles, seminars, webinars, and screencasts to help ensure their customers are successful.

Des’ most important job: Communicating with Customers

When you obsess over making your customers successful, you make it your main job to communicate regularly with them: answering their questions and concerns as effectively, as cheerfully, and as quickly as possible.

Des’ team solves customers’ problems and also relays information to the product team from their conversations with customers and from their research into how people use Intercom. “If people aren’t using a certain feature, we’ll try to find out why or send a message to ask them about this.”

And all this is carried out through Intercom, Des’ main tool. In his words, “There is no day that has passed since August 2011 where I haven’t used Intercom”.

On managing a distributed team

To keep close contact with customers, Des’ team needs to cover time zones. It currently stretches from Northern Italy to San Francisco. The hard part of managing a team spread around the world “is getting everyone together to discuss an idea.” Des does his best to make it work, and traveling is often the best solution.

However, distributed team is tricky, and people underestimate how difficult it is to tackle the problems. “It has great benefits, but it has costs. There’s definitely no simple trick to it that makes it easy.”

In terms of best practices, Des advises teams to make sure there’s always overlapping time, although “You can’t solve time zones. It’s a reality of Earth. Even if you agree on the overlapping time zones, it’s always kinda tricky because if it’s 5pm somewhere and 9pm somewhere else, both people don’t have the same levels of energy for the work ahead.”

To stay in sync they do a lot of Hangouts, they have a common Slack channel where they keep talking to each other all the time, and they collaborate on projects using Basecamp.

As you can imagine, internal communication is important for Intercom. They’ve used all different products for this: Campfire, HipChat, and now Slack. Slack has very convenient integrations. It is a tool that keeps them updated with what had been discussed while they were away. That’s why Des has built a habit of reading back through his team’s Slack channel when starting his day. He wants to see if there were some major issues and what has been done to address them.

“Chat is more live than email so you get more dialog than you would through email”. Slack acts as a complement for email which they still use internally.

In Des’ terms, Basecamp is “good for collaborating on projects where there’s gonna be discussions, exchange of ideas, tasks that need to be done by a certain date.” He likes it that it enables them to create a template for projects which sort of automates things and make them smoother.

Des’ Kit

Here are the tools Des is using to get things done as VP of Customer Success:

- Intercom
- Slack
- Hangouts
- Basecamp
- Trello
- Gmail
- Google Docs
- Droplr
- Workable
- Mention
- Sublime Text
- iA Writer
- Wordpress
- Gauges
- Buffer
- Reeder
- Google Analytics
- Twitter

Daily workflow

Des works both in Dublin and San Francisco. His working days in Dublin are the opposite to those in San Francisco. He travels back and forth between the two cities, their headquarters is in the States and they have a product team in Ireland. He’s in San Francisco at least every other month for up to 3 weeks, depending on what’s going on.

In San Francisco, his day begins with meetings for 2 — 3 hours because that’s when both the Dublin team and the San Francisco one are at work. Then he gets to review and update on projects within his team, give feedback where, and do project work himself.

For Des, email is his to do list. “Email is the running total of things I have to do”. He’s a fan of inbox zero. After waking up, he usually goes through his emails (even on his phone) reading and archiving those where he has no action to do. The others are left in his inbox and at any given point he might have between 20 and 100. He works in themes, handling at the same time all emails related to the same project. When he’s finished with something, he archives related emails.

Des’ writing process

‘Inside Intercom’ is a well regarded blog because they share a lot of well-written articles uncovering great insights. Behind it, there are several writers and guest writers, including Des.

Trello helps them manage the ideas they have for blog posts. There they have a dedicated content board with columns indicating the stage of each blog post: idea, work in progress, ready to go, and published.

Des’ favourite writing tool is iA Writer: “I like it for the full-screen-distractions-free writing mode”. Anything else he tries to write in gets him distracted, whereas iA Writer keeps him focused. That’s why he tries to do here as much as he can before moving everything in Wordpress, the platform ‘Inside Intercom’ is hosted on. There’s a tricky thing about it: “the first second I go into Wordpress there are all those new distractions: resize, images and so on.”

After publishing the articles, they keep an eye on analytics. If one article is getting lots of traffic very quickly, he checks in Gauges the top 5 referring sources to keep track of what’s going on. He prefers Gauges to Google Analytics because the later has a slight delay in reporting data, and Gauges “is a really good value small tool you use for quick insights”.

What’s important when choosing a tool

“It has to solve a problem that exists in my life.”

Some good examples for this are Mention, Workable, and Buffer.

“A classic problem would be with Google Alerts that is not good enough, not fast enough, and it misses too many things.” Whereas Mention is way better, works really well and does its job.

Same with Workable. It is a hiring tool that solves the entire workflow of needing to hire people. “It owns the entire flow from start to finish and solves a complete gap that exists.” Workable allows you to create a job opening, to advertise your open positions, and everything with absolutely no effort. It’s quick and easy.

Another problem that tools solve for him is social sharing. Because Des tends to read a lot of content, and in batches, Buffer comes in very handy. He uses Feedly to read all the different websites he is subscribed to, and then schedules his tweets with Buffer. “If I was to tweet everything I read as I read it, I would tweet 400 times. Buffer won’t let this happen.”

Des’ favourite all-purpose tool: Droplr

Droplr is a small and simple product that works perfectly for what it needs to do: share files. It lets you upload something to the web and gives you a link on your clipboard to that file. Des uses it probably 20 times a day “It’s great value and I can’t understand people who don’t use it. It’s the one tool that when I’m looking at my screen and it’s not running I’m like, Why the hell it’s not running?!”

Advice for startups trying to educate their customers

There are two types of education for your customers: teach them how to use your product and how to get results. If you want to take Workable as example, one piece is “here’s how to post a job”, and, the more important piece is “here’s what a great job post looks like”. Keep in mind that when someone tries to assess if a product is good, it’s not about him being able to create a job post. It’s about him being able to get job applicants.

The same applies to Mention or any other tool — they can teach you how to use their interface, or they can teach you what are the right things to search for. A lot of people focus too heavily on teaching how to use their tool forgetting that teaching how to get results is actually more important. You need webinars, documentation, articles and screencasts to help your users get much better at using your product.

Des does this because he knows it will bring his customers to success. “I like generating content once I understand the problem. It’s really effective when you explain a concept or method clearly so your customers can now solve a problem.”

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This article was also published on The Underdog