Intercom Reinvents the Business Messenger

Irish-founded tech firm Intercom changes its messenger application for use in business with a new system that helps companies connect more personally with their customers.

Launched less than a month ago, the new Intercom Messenger is designed to provide consumers with all the information they need in a single, centralized location. It allows businesses to instantly access third-party platforms that help deal with customers' needs.

This new concept offers 12 apps that can be added directly into the messenger, including Google, Shopify, Aircall, MailChimp and Stripe. Intercom plans to make more applications available in the coming months.

Users can scroll through Messenger and integrate whatever platform they need at any given time. Apps can work inside conversations, allowing users to chat with customers while completing other tasks, like requesting a meeting, completing purchases or checking order statuses. Businesses can also create and add their own apps to better serve their customers.  

Intercom thinks that keeping everything inside the messenger will bring more convenience to consumers, which will ultimately optimize companies' sales and accelerate their growth.

For example, when people are in the research phase of their purchase, enterprises can use the MailChimp app to collect their email and reach out to them. The Aircall platform allows businesses to have voice and video calls with customers who need additional information before buying a product within the messenger. Companies can also use the Stripe platform to convert users from a trial to paying customers, or to manage existing subscriptions.

On Intercom's blog, Vice President Paul Adams explains that even though messaging applications have become the primary way we communicate with friends and family, businesses are still using old technologies like email and live chat to interact with consumers.

“Customers today want to communicate with the people behind the business, not with a faceless brand, or through soulless technologies like ticketing systems,” he writes. The need to have more direct, personalized interactions with brands is even more profound with younger generations.

In this context, messengers are quickly becoming one of the most effective communication channels for companies.

One of the biggest goals with the new Intercom Messenger is to set businesses up to success in the long term by expanding the value of what a regular messenger can bring them. This can be achieved by making messaging applications as effective and convenient as possible for enterprises and their end users.

Intercom was founded in 2011 as a customer messaging platform by designers and engineers David Barrett, Ciaran Lee, Eoghan McCabe and Des Traynor. The company currently has over 100,000 monthly active users.