Intercom, a conversational relationship platform (CRP), launched its Conversational Support Funnel, a framework that aims to help customer service teams conduct better outbound conversations that drive brand loyalty.
The Conversational Support Funnel is divided into three categories:
- Proactive Support, which aims to help customer support teams answer questions proactively through outbound messages;
- Self-Serve Support, which uses chatbots and Help Center content to address common buyer questions and issues automatically; and
- Human Support, which provides real-time conversations with actual customer service reps for shorter reply times and greater efficiency.
Intercom designed the funnel to help support teams understand the types of conversations consumers are looking to have and craft outbound messages that drive loyalty through these engagements. The funnel helps customer support teams scale support and combines proactive, self-serve and human support capabilities in a messenger.
“If you’re expecting a human or real-time human interaction for every single problem that you have with a company or with a product, you can see how that’s going to create a bottleneck,” said Jane Honey, Senior Director of Product at Intercom, in an interview with Demand Gen Report. “There’s going to be frustration. There’s going to be a situation where you’ve got to contact a company and wait for somebody to get back to you, which might take several days because of the sheer volume of queries that those companies are facing.”
The funnel can also help customer support teams provide consumers with self-service capabilities via trained chatbots or content. Support teams can use chatbots and pre-existing knowledge to encourage consumers to answer minor questions or concerns themselves, allowing support teams to focus on larger VIP questions through human interaction.
“When we were putting this funnel together, 78% of support leaders wanted to move to being more proactive,” Honey explained. “They’re often very time poor, because they’re racing to answer all these queries. It’s a case of helping them step back and understand how to make that shift to being much more proactive, to deal with questions proactively and prevent them from occurring, and then resolve some of them automatically using Help Center content or bots. That way you can reserve your human support agents for the most complicated VIP questions that you might have.”