Intercom’s Custom Bots Brings Messengers, Workflow Apps, and Bot Technology Together for the First Time for New Levels of Automation and Overall Business Impact
Leading customer messaging app platform, Intercom, has launched a new chatbot tech designed to accelerate sales. The new chatbot design could help growing businesses to easily create their own custom bots. All this, without code! The new code-free chatbot would convert more website visitors into customers, beyond the limits of human-scale. This directly and positively impacts sales acceleration. The new product announcement following a $125 million Series D funding earlier this year.
MarTech RADAR 2018: Top 150 B2B Technology Companies You Should Follow
Intercom Ensures Now is the Time to Adopt Bots for Business
Custom Bots, a totally new technology from Intercom, integrates messaging automation tools under one roof. The code-free chatbot design brings messengers, messenger apps, and bots together for the first time to unlock new levels of automation for businesses looking to scale.
At the time of this announcement, Debby Shepard, Product Manager at Intercom, spoke to us in detail about her company’s chatbot technology and how it is powering sales and marketing automation products like Task Bots and Custom Bots.
Debbie said, “Intercom’s customer messaging platform helps businesses acquire new customers and grow their business. Messaging matches the way people actually want to buy – it’s personal and real-time – and unlocks huge potential for sales teams. Without messengers, businesses are ignoring website visitors – potential high quality leads.”
CRMs could leverage Intercom’s chatbot design for sales acceleration. Debbie added, “Talking to every visitor isn’t scalable without the right automation tech. Intercom’s automation lets businesses talk to every visitor, automatically qualifying leads and freeing up people time. It also prioritizes the best leads and routes them to the right salesperson. Additionally, our new Messenger home screen lets businesses capture and convert visitors without even needing to start a conversation.”
Custom Chatbots Could Become Ubiquitous Tool for Personalized Sales Conversations and Meetings
Currently, Intercom is the only messenger with an open platform that powers more than chat. Businesses can now develop and connect customized bots with the 100+ workflow apps available on the Intercom App Store, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and more. Apps enable sales teams to end every bot conversation with an actionable, personalized next step. These end-to-end bot workflows accelerate the sales process and improve the customer experience, resulting in faster growth.
Recommended Read: Salesforce Einstein Analytics Unveils Conversational Queries to Simplify Data
Founded in 2011 in San Francisco by Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee and David Barrett, Intercom powers 500+ million conversations a month—that’s 6 billion conversations annually—a number that has been doubling YoY.
With the launch of Custom Bots, Intercom delivers a hybrid approach to automation where humans continue to play a critical role and increased automation doesn’t mean decreased personalization. Intercom proves businesses can achieve both by combining the brilliance of humans with the scalability and cost efficiency of bots.
Custom Bots is the most advanced automation technology Intercom has ever built. Specific features include:
- Code-free creation of custom bots with their own identity
- Bot Auto Messages (BAM), which are bot triggered conversations and messages based on rich targeting such as visitor activity and Clearbit data
- Ability to build custom questions and reply buttons, building conversational workflows with multiple branches
- Bots can use apps from the Intercom App Store to automate booking meetings, scheduling demos, and syncing with popular CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot
- Reports that show leads captured, leads qualified, meetings booked, and more
Recommended Read: B2B Buying Disconnect: Are You Targeting the Right Set of Customers?
We probed further about BAM within Intercom’s custom chatbot. Debbie clarified, “Bot Auto Messages (BAM) are a new feature within Custom Bots. BAM is a set of chatbot-triggered conversations and messages based on rich targeting. This means brands will be able to more accurately target and proactively message visitors based on the most relevant and up to date information. For the end user, this results in a more streamlined and personalized customer experience.”
With Custom Bots, Intercom is taking the chatbot market for sales, marketing, and services to a new height. It’s the right time for businesses to see positive results from their chatbot adoption delivering contextual conversations based on the right data.
