As a business grows, most support managers will be challenged to answer this seemingly tricky question: can you deliver a top-notch customer experience…but at a lower cost? Not so long ago, answering this question meant veering in one of two directions. If you said “no,” you had to find a way to justify having truly satisfied customers at an equally high cost. Case in point: online retailer Zappos whose delighting commitment to customers made its team meant support available for quite literally anything .On the other hand, if you said "yes," you had to Latest Mailing Database be willing to sacrifice best-in-class support for possibly not the worst support ever. You ended up looking much more like the telecom providers Comcast and Virgin Media whose support has been outstanding for all the wrong reasons.

"The reality is that there are very few companies that can afford to operate at either extreme" But this approach to support management compromises either your business and, more likely than not, your team – or your customers. The reality is that there are very few companies that can afford to operate at either extreme. At Intercom, we've worked hard to Latest Mailing Database find a way to do both: deliver an exceptional customer experience and operate with the efficiency that our business and our team need. More than that, by balancing the two, we've been able to achieve what often seems elusive: a positive revenue impact. Are you Zappos – or are you Comcast? At some point, many support teams find themselves leaning towards one extreme or the other.

In the life of a business, you might find yourself spending time on both sides. For companies that still remember their brave start-up days, chances are your support team is more like Zappos than Comcast. When customers are far apart, it makes perfect sense to Latest Mailing Database connect with them personally and one-on-one at a near real-time pace. “The problem is that as businesses grow, we tend to think of efficiency and customer experience as two diametrically opposed choices” When Intercom started, our co-founder Des was sending out 100 emails every day, each one personalized, to potential customers. For many years everyone in the company was expected to assist customers in the Intercom inbox and to this day we still offer customer support sessions where teammates across the company can follow along.