Investing in success: How Fundrise resolves 50% of its support volume with Intercom’s Fin

We spoke with Luke Ruth, Chief Product Officer at online investment platform Fundrise, about the challenges of supporting a growing customer base without the right technology, and striking the right balance between personal, human support and AI-powered efficiency.

Fundrise is the largest direct-to-investor platform and allows individuals to access alternative assets like real estate, venture capital, and private credit. Fundrise has over 2 million users, ~$3 billion of equity capital under management, and generates over a million tax documents each year.

Having experienced limitations with, as Luke puts it, a “standard toolbox” for support, the Fundrise team set out on a journey to implement Intercom’s complete AI-powered platform – a decision that continues to pay dividends.

Let’s dive in.

Can you tell us about your customer communications setup before Intercom, and what challenges you faced?

Historically, we’ve used the standard toolbox of email and phone support (no chat) to connect both prospective and existing investors directly with our Investor Relations team for any type of question. The questions we get range from being incredibly high-level, like “What is Fundrise?,” to the typical support requests around password resets, to complex questions around our investment strategy and property underwriting.

As you can imagine, solving some of those questions, like the more complex and nuanced ones, was time well spent. But solving some of the more frequently asked or basic questions, like 2FA issues or questions about account statements, was a pure time suck.

The core challenge was responding to all cases in a timely manner while carving out sufficient resources for our team to spend on providing thoughtful answers to the questions that warranted them.

What did you need to solve those challenges?

We needed to be able to take the less complex cases off our Investor Relations team’s plate. If we didn’t reduce the load coming from those types of cases, we were going to be stuck choosing amongst a number of bad options, like:

1. Get back to people slower

2. Reduce the quality of responses

3. Hire to scale the team in an unsustainable fashion

We engaged Intercom specifically to use its AI Agent Fin as a way of handling those low-complexity cases. All of the answers to our frequently asked questions already existed in our site and app, but people just weren’t finding them. We saw Fin as a great opportunity to serve up our content in a way that was more easily accessible to our customers.

We conducted a proof of concept where we quickly trained Fin on our existing help center content, investor updates, and marketing site, and ran a series of tests in quick succession where we exposed Fin to a larger and larger audience.

Being able to monitor the success metrics as we rolled Fin out to bigger and more important audiences gave us the confidence we needed to execute quickly. It also helped to ensure that the answers being provided were right and actually making for a better customer experience – not just taking the load off our team internally.

What results have you seen since you implemented Intercom? Any hard metrics you can share?

The results have been extraordinary and exceeded our expectations by a considerable margin. Less than three months after launching Fin, it now handles more than 50% of our total support cases.

We typically see a considerable spike in interactions at the beginning of the year as a function of seasonality and taxes, and while we did see that same spike, Fin was able to field almost the entirety of the spike, yielding a nearly 50% reduction in cases year-over-year.

Fin has had a huge influence on our hiring roadmap for the Investor Relations team, allowing us to be much more selective about how and when we grow the team, as opposed to having our hand forced by a high volume of cases.

What do you think is the biggest benefit of Intercom?

First and foremost is the ability to handle low-complexity support cases. But beyond that… the ability for non-technical team members (non-engineers) to be able to manage and improve on the experience over time.

Since launching, our Product and Investor Relations teams have worked together to take the accuracy of Fin’s responses from 80% to north of 95% – with zero technical resources required. That’s an incredible unlock.

What advice would you give to others considering using Intercom?

Use Fin.