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How should I measure the value of conversational support?

  • 23 November 2020
  • 5 replies
  • 6 views
M

I'm attempting to add Intercom as another avenue of support to our product (we have no chat support currently). There's a cost to adding this, both in the Intercom subscription as well as the training/switching costs of a new process. We're running a pilot with Intercom to see how users interact with it. At the end of it, we'll need to decide if we ramp it up or shut it down. Does anyone have suggestions on how to measure and communicate the benefit of Intercom and if it's worth the costs? Best I've been able to think of is just general industry best practices.

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Best answer by Rich P 24 November 2020, 18:36

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5 replies

H

That's a great question and I've been thinking a lot about this, too.

 

My main arguments are the great reporting data that IC provides. You can see how quickly your clients get a resolution, what do they think of your service, etc.

 

To prove the cost to management I recommend maybe trying an approach of how many new hires can you avoid by using IC (cost of IC vs cost of new hire). This has helped me in the past.

Eric Fitz
Userlevel 1

@rich p​, this question immediately made me think of you, given the growth in volume you and your team have seen in chat - are there any best practices you could share with @matthew b11​?

R

Hi @Eric, thanks for pinging me on this. @Matthew, as Eric mentioned, we've seen significant growth in usage from clients and we get positive comments on this tool every week. We do not have great phone metrics to compare, unfortunately, to our chat traffic so I don't have specific cost savings numbers. But I know though our CRM that our call volume has decreased over time as chat traffic has grown considerably. We have a small team of support reps and one person can take only one call at a time. Now, these reps being able to work with multiple clients at one time making them instantly more efficient in starting, resolving and closing cases and simply more throughput. As for best practices:

 

  1. As you get started, create a lot of "saved messages" and manage them to keep them up-to-date. That'll save a lot of time as reps are getting used to working in chat.
  2. Do a couple research projects where you reach out to a couple organizations known for excellent customer service and see how they handle chat.
  3. Go through Intercom apps to see what additional tools will work for your team.

 

Good luck! You won't regret your decision if you move forward with chat.

Eric Fitz
Userlevel 1

@rich p​, this is awesome! Thank you so much for your comprehensive reply here.

M

Thanks for all the info folks. Great to hear how people are thinking about the problem.

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