Why You Should Analyze Intercom Conversations
Intercom is a useful tool for businesses that want to communicate with their users and help them with their issues on a daily basis. It’s used by customer support teams to answer questions and solve issues, and it’s a valuable tool for engaging customers to increase loyalty and grow the business. It’s also used as lead generation software growing sales through real-time conversions.
The upshot of all of this customer communication is that businesses are left with a rich data set full of insights into what customers have been getting in touch about. From issues they’ve been having with your business’ products to bug reports, as well as requests for new features and customer feedback (both positive and negative), you have a wealth of useful information at your fingertips.
However, there’s one issue with this data: it’s hard to draw any meaningful conclusions from it all unless you methodically analyze it on a regular basis. Diving into your Intercom analytics on a frequent basis will allow you to spot issues more quickly, identify trends and actually use the data to make decisions to improve your business.
In this post, we’re going to dig a little deeper into some of the reasons you should be analyzing your Intercom support conversations. Looking to find out more about how to do the analysis itself? Take a look at our guides to tagging conversations and some of the challenges with Intercom tagging, and then come back here to fully understand why you should then analyze your data.
And then once you’re ready to dig into all that data, how do you go about it? We might be a little biased, but we think that Prodsight is a great way to extract insight from your Intercom conversations!
1. Understand churn reasons and improve retention
Des Traynor, the co-founder of Intercom, recently delivered a keynote speech at Collision conference, with the message that customer retention is the new conversion. Previously, businesses were focused on getting new customers, and getting them to purchase your product. Acquiring new customers who would convert was the goal.
In recent years, though, the business world has seen a shift to subscription-based models. Rather than getting a customer once, who buys one thing and moves on, with subscriptions, you have regular customers who convert month after month. This means that the idea of customer loyalty has become far more important, and “enables you to think about marketing as a function of delivering customer success.”
This doesn’t apply only to businesses with a subscription model. Businesses of all kinds and in all verticals should be focused on trying to retain existing customers — and not least because it’s far cheaper to retain customers than to acquire new ones.
But retention is nearly impossible without understanding what your customers want and need from your product. How can businesses learn more about who their customers are and what they’re looking for?
Every support conversation on Intercom contains nuggets of information that could indicate reasons for customer churn. Churn could be due to a range of reasons, including:
- Missing features or functionality
- Poor support or customer service
- Product performance issues, such as a slow or buggy product
- Preference for competitor products
- Dissatisfaction with pricing or business model
By analyzing support conversations and reviewing your Intercom tagging can you understand the potential reasons for customer churn. Once you understand why customers are leaving, you’ll be better able to prioritize the issues and you’ll be equipped to address them at the root level.
2. Generate content ideas
If you’re a marketer or customer success manager, you’ll know the importance of creating valuable content for your customers — but sometimes it can be difficult to come up with ideas for a new blog or help desk posts. By delving into your Intercom analytics and thinking about the types of questions your customers are asking, you can easily come up with ideas for useful content that will directly answer those questions.
When creating content, you want to make sure that it’s going to provide value for your users — after all, there’s no point in investing time, effort and money into creating blog posts that no one’s going to engage with. Luckily, nearly every question asked by your customers could be a candidate for a blog post.
If you notice a number of users who seem to have misconceptions about your service or product, it offers you the perfect opportunity to write a piece explaining how your product works, and how it can give your customers value.
You might have noticed a trend in customers asking questions about how your product works. Rather than leaving them to figure it out for themselves, you’re presented with the chance to explain the product’s functionality. You could also call out specific features, creating a series of expert blog posts that will help customers (and potential customers) to see the value in your business’ product offering.
A common query flagged in support conversations is around product pricing. Addressing this head-on in a blog post gives you the opportunity to flag how your product adds value beyond the cost and the ways in which customers can benefit from investing in it.
Creating content that resonates with users is a worthwhile investment for any business. By writing blog posts and guides that resonate with your users and answer the questions they’re asking, you’re creating a practical bank of information that they can draw upon. Even if they don’t commit to buying your product immediately, by being there and visible for them at the time they’re doing research, they’re more likely to return to your business when they are ready to convert. What’s more, investing in this type of content means that you’re investing in customer loyalty — and as Des Traynor pointed out, that’s the key to success.
3. Identify ways to reduce support costs
Customer support is a vital component of any business, but it can be costly. Your company might be in the lucky position, for example, of facing a surge in new users — but it’s not financially feasible for you to expand your customer support team to ensure you’re able to answer all of their questions. It’s a dilemma for any business, as failing to answer questions from potential customers could mean they don’t convert, but investing too heavily in support resources could spell disaster.
However, by analysis your support conversations on Intercom, you can easily identify recurring questions and issues faced by new users and potential new users, especially if you have an efficient Intercom tagging system.
Once these recurring issues have been identified, you can either fix them in the product or provide better customer education to answer the question and reduce the need for the issue to be raised. Either one of these options will result in fewer new customers reaching out to the support team with the same set of questions — which, in turn, will lower the costs your business needs to spend on customer support. It also comes with the added benefit of keeping your support team sane, as they won’t have to deal with answering the same questions over and over again!
A solution for Intercom conversation analysis
Have we convinced you of the need to analyze your business’ support conversations on Intercom? If not, here’s a reminder of the three key reasons why you should be doing it:
- It can help you to understand the reasons for customer churn — and if you can get on top of that, it means you can address the issues.
- You can easily generate ideas for new content by directly answering questions customers are asking.
- By addressing frequently raised issues, you can reduce the cost of customer support as there’ll be less need to invest resources in repeatedly answering the same questions.
Prodsight provides automated topic and sentiment analysis for Intercom support conversations, allowing you to easily identify what questions your users are asking. With topic auto-discovery, you can automatically uncover topics mentioned by your users, meaning it’s easy to track what issues are being continually raised. You can even visualize trending topics on your timeline, so you can address any issues in real-time, and with smart Intercom tagging, you can use Prodsight Search to instantly find all mentions of a customer issue, allowing you to quantify and prioritize problems to swiftly take action.
Want to see what Prodsight can do for your business? Why not sign up for a 7-day free trial today to try out all of the features mentioned above, and start getting to grips with Intercom conversation analysis.
