From complexity to clarity: Retention.com’s journey to consolidated customer service

In today’s world, customer satisfaction is make or break for any company. Customers expect next-level experiences when seeking support – and they’re not willing to wait around for anything less.

A company all too familiar with the importance of keeping customers happy (and around) is Retention.com, a platform with product offerings to help Shopify merchants recover lost shoppers and increase revenue, identify anonymous website visitors, and expand businesses’ email lists.

Having previously experienced challenges with a fragmented customer service tech stack, Retention.com wanted to consolidate its support tools and workflows into a single platform. The team already used Intercom for support ticketing – with great success – so it was the obvious choice to help them unify the rest of their support ecosystem.

Identifying the problem-to-be-solved

Before using Intercom to power the entire customer service experience, Retention.com used separate tools to house its knowledge base and manage support tickets. This resulted in a disconnected – and at times, frustrating – experience for customers, so the need for a more streamlined, efficient, and user-friendly support solution became increasingly apparent.

“We’d been using Intercom for support ticketing for years, and with great success, but our support documentation was housed in a makeshift blog on our marketing website,” says Robb Clarke, Technical Operations Manager at Retention.com. “It was hard to navigate, and difficult to find the article that you wanted because of limited search functionality and no real ability to suggest related articles. Ultimately, it wasn’t the best experience for our customers, and if they were seeking support in the first place, having a bad experience while trying to solve a problem wasn’t going to help the situation.”

The path to a unified support experience

Determined to tackle these challenges and create a more consistent customer experience, the team turned to Intercom. “It made sense for us to leverage Intercom’s Articles feature for our knowledge base since we were already using the platform for ticketing,” says Robb. “We knew this would enable our agents to easily reference articles in their replies to customers, as well as a ton of other conveniences from having everything in one place.”

However, with close to 200 blog posts already written on Retention’s makeshift blog hosted on WordPress, Robb and his team initially felt that this would be a big mountain to climb. Luckily, the team was able to use Intercom’s API to help them do this with ease. “By exporting our articles and using the API, we managed to efficiently migrate and categorize our content in Intercom – formatting and images included,” Robb says. “This beat manually porting almost 200 articles.”

The power of AI and automation

Since moving support to a single, consolidated customer service platform, Retention.com has hit the ground running. “Honestly, we loved Intercom so much that we even got a second instance of it just for our B2B product, RB2B,” says Robb.

The team is focused on empowering customers to self-serve answers to their own questions, so they leaned on Intercom’s AI and automation to help them move the needle. “The biggest win for us is the ability to see how well our users are able to serve themselves when it comes to their support needs. In the last seven days, we’ve had 1,726 instances of users seeking support. Of those, 96.2% were resolved through self-serve support,” says Robb. “So they were able to resolve their queries using our knowledge base, workflows, or Intercom’s AI-powered chatbot, Fin.”

With AI and automation tackling the bulk of Retention.com’s support volume, Robb explains that the team is freed up to focus on other areas of impact for the business. “Only 1.7% of our support instances in the last week were handled by a human from the start, and 2.1% were helped by a teammate after self-serve, for a total of 3.8% needing human involvement overall. Fin alone is resolving 34.7% of the conversations it’s involved in, so being able to drastically reduce the need for human interaction on our end allows our team to continue to improve the product, expand our documentation, and improve our support offering.”

Help before it’s needed

In addition to the wins the team has experienced on the self-serve front, Robb points to Intercom’s proactive support functionality as being “a wonder, as well.” The team uses Workflows to trigger proactive messages as users interact with specific pages in Retention.com’s dashboard, enabling them to personalize customer communication, provide help before it’s needed, and create stand-out experiences.

“Intercom’s proactive support capabilities give us the ability to automate communications when users meet certain criteria, whether it’s of a customer care nature, like touching base if they haven’t installed our script after a certain amount of time, or sending an email to celebrate quick wins, like reaching a particular account milestone,” says Robb. “They’ve been really effective for us so far – of the customers who have interacted with our workflows, 38% have completed them. And if a customer has a more complex question or wants to talk to a human, the fact that we've already collected answers to a lot of fact-finding questions via the workflow greatly reduces the time it takes us to process a ticket."