Intercom Product Principles: Create Personal Products by Design

Our mission - the change we want to create - is to personalize business on the Internet.

Whether we're creating tools that improve personalization or enhance our privacy and security, Intercom has always been committed to bringing a personal touch to every change we make to our product.

This is the ninth article in a series exploring the principles of our products. Here, Pranava discusses our engineering principle "Make it feel personal".

My team is focused on creating and aligning various communication channels between customers and end users to enable faster resolution - mediums such as messaging, email, video/voice and social networks. Remembering that we're connecting real people instead of seeing them as entries in a database helps me create experiences that improve customer satisfaction and teammate efficiency.

Why is this principle important to Intercom teams?

We believe that every customer is unique with different wants and needs. It is crucial to provide omnichannel customer service solutions that are conversational and personalized. This means designing and framing workflows that help end users choose the channel that's right for them at all times, feel completely comfortable in the channel they're using, and ensure an uninterrupted flow of communication. if they choose to change channels.

"We apply the 'make it feel personal' principle to every step of the design process"

We are also working to improve channel capabilities so that customers and their users have all the features and tools needed to resolve queries at their fingertips. A simple example? Support for exchanging PDF documents on WhatsApp to save customers from having to switch channels to share necessary information.

How does the principle help in the process of designing and building products?

We apply the principle of "make it feel personal" to every step of the design process, from ideation to iteration. Here are some of the ways he makes us better designers by encouraging us to:

Systematically prioritize user needs

It is very easy to be influenced by business needs when working in SaaS environments. Therefore, aiming for a personal feel helps the team consciously focus on solving the most important user needs. It becomes a benchmark that focuses on real issues and prevents designers from being blinded by intuition. Meeting user needs almost always contributes directly to customer satisfaction and business value, and often aligns with business needs.

"As designers, we are constantly thinking about how to reduce the number of clicks in a workflow"

Take advantage of automation and future technologies

As designers, we are constantly thinking about how to reduce the number of clicks in a workflow. With this principle reminding us to work on personal experiences, we are encouraged to consider time efficiency, user activity, and behavior to develop smart, adaptable, and contextual defaults.

Using built-in technologies such as artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and machine learning in the product helps customers configure processes in a way that works best for their team, quickly solving queries from their end users and thereby improving speed, efficiency, customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

Add elements of fun

We strive to help users achieve their goals easily, while making the process enjoyable. Adding fun elements inspires us to think differently about the products we build, make them intuitive and enjoyable for our users, and differentiate our product from that of our competitors. This can contribute to brand awareness and identity, as we create a distinctly "Intercom" style, and help to:

Better feature discovery and integration Set the right expectations Focus on hierarchy

We've applied this principle extensively to shape Intercom's beautiful onboarding experiences. It also helps us to think deeply about how we can add fun times when customers experience a feature for the first time, or t...