Intercom – CRM For Developers

Intercom is a customer relationship management tool built specifically with web-application developers in mind. Rather than trying to adapt a similar tool to fit their unique needs, developers can use Intercom’s straightforward features to better serve their subscribers and build their base of devoted users.

Before you can start learning more about your more loyal users, you’ll need to copy and paste a few lines of Javascript code into your existing HTML. Once that code has been saved, you’ll be ready to start collecting information and using it to better serve your users. Visit the dashboard page to start sorting and filtering your current users based on their account age, activity level, city, or relationship. Intercom will show you the last time a particular user logged in, as well as the local time wherever that person is located in the world. Using Intercom, you can also get access to your users’ public social networking profiles on sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Reach out to longtime users who haven’t logged in recently by sending a message through Intercom. Those users will receive in-app messages the next time they sign in to your web-application, and they can respond immediately with whatever information you’re seeking to find. You can also create automated messages that are sent out whenever certain conditions are met – like when new users login for the first time, or when users in California go a week or more without signing in to their accounts.

Practical Uses:

• Find out why a particular user hasn’t logged in to his account since signing up
• Make sure your users in Europe aren’t experiencing any technical difficulties
• Get a feeling for how many of your users are based in the United States
• Sort users based on how frequently they log in to your app

Insider Tips:

• Intercom needs each user’s email address and sign-up date to begin tracking usage
• Web-app owners can send the same message to multiple recipients
• Relationship metrics are tracked based on the amount of communication between a developer and each of his or her users
• Developers can view their users on a map or in a list format

What we liked:

• Intercom is a CRM tool developed specifically for web-app developers and owners
• Developers can re-engage users who haven’t logged into their apps in a while
• Web-app owners can add custom data for additional sorting and measuring capabilities
• Intercom provides links to each user’s public social networking accounts

What we didn’t like:

• Intercom doesn’t offer integration with many popular help desk tools

Alternatives:

• None

Company Info:

• Launched: January 2012 (Public Beta)
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: San Francisco, California
• Founded by: Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee, and David Barrett
• Web site: https://www.intercom.io

Costs:

• Free during public beta