Intercom Launches Two-Way SMS and New Bot Features for Businesses to Deliver Better Customer Experiences

The new launches build on Intercom’s vision to enable a new era of customer connection and engagement

Intercom, the Engagement OS, launched three new capabilities to help businesses create powerful customer experiences and drive ongoing engagement.

Intercom SMS is a truly two-way SMS tool for sales, marketing and support teams to reach and communicate with customers, replacing the status quo, one-sided SMS tools and dead-end text messages that are impersonal for customers and disconnected for businesses. Custom Actions and Custom Objects are next-generation, no-code platform features that let businesses design personalized, self-serve support experiences in minutes. The features now connect Intercom’s bots with first-party data to present customers with real-time information during a conversation, like order status or payment details, and let customers take actions, like updating their contact information or canceling bookings. With customer support undergoing a once-in-a-generation change, Custom Actions and Custom Objects are examples of how Intercom is building the future of automated support.

“Intercom exists to help businesses provide better experiences for their customers,” said Jane Honey, Senior Product Director at Intercom. “These new features help businesses make the most out of every opportunity they have to connect with a customer—whether it’s building stronger customer relationships through two-way conversations, or leveraging automation for faster and better experiences for both their support teams and customers.”

Intercom’s Engagement OS has consistently leveraged the power of AI and bots for more personalized and faster customer interactions, and in recent years has invested in enabling omni-channel customer communication across a variety of channels, including email, surveys, push notifications, in-app messages, WhatsApp and more.

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Intercom SMS is a fully integrated solution built natively into the Intercom platform, so it can be used alongside Intercom’s omni-channel offering to build complete customer journeys. It is the most powerful option bringing together mass outbound SMS with SMS support, that doesn’t require a separate tool or provider. Whereas most SMS solutions are powered by keywords, Intercom SMS is truly two-way texting. Customer support reps can respond to SMS messages within the Intercom Inbox and also send targeted and personalized outbound SMS messages at scale, both increasing engagement and encouraging customers to take action.

“Using Intercom SMS, we’ve seen higher engagement on our SMS messages and completion rates by our customers, as well as significant time savings for our team,” said Daniel Leung, Head of Product & Strategic Growth at Curex. “Our patients prefer SMS, but setting it up, tracking conversations and responding used to be a very manual process. Intercom SMS has made it easier for everyone—both our internal team and patients alike, helping us make the patient experience seamless.”

Because Intercom SMS is built natively into Intercom’s all-in-one platform, which captures and stores customer and event data, businesses also get automatic access to powerful and deeply integrated SMS targeting, orchestration, message personalization, optimizations, robust reporting and more. The feature is available now in the U.S, U.K, Canada and Australia.

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Customers expect more from bots than just simple resolutions, and businesses need easy and intuitive bot builder environments to meet this demand.

Custom Actions manages the connection between Intercom and external data sources, while Custom Objects helps businesses store, organize and use external data within Intercom in the way that suits their business. The features connect Intercom’s Custom Bots and Resolution Bot with customers’ first-party data from external sources, and teams can set up the data connection in minutes, with no-code integrations.

Through the integration, bots can answer more questions and resolve even more conversations automatically, without needing a human touch. This not only boosts self-serve rates and reduces inbound support volume for support teams—it also provides a better and faster customer experience. Custom Actions and Custom Objects are available now to all global customers using Intercom’s bots.