Intercom has been extremely helpful in allowing targeted messages to help users gain knowledge of The Food Corridor application. (Thanks for the recommendation, OTL!) What I’ve found most useful about Intercom is that it allows non technical users to build rulesets to target specific messages. This helps you help your users uncover new functionality, but only at the moment when the functionality is useful.
For example, if someone has signed up but not created a booking in TFC, we can send them a message a week after they sign up with a helpful link. This message can be via email or an in-app message, and if they respond to the in-app message, it notifies customer support just as if a chat was started any other way.
As a developer, all I had to do to get this data (which lives in our database) up to Intercom was to craft a javascript object. I added a method in the application_controller and have it cached for a while, because we ended up sending dozens of attributes up, and they are slow changing. From then on, the message targeting is done entirely within Intercom, where the non technical user can build rules based on this custom data plus any data that Intercom collects by default (last login, etc).
If you do want to target messages specific web pages (only pop up a message on page XXX, but not page YYY) you need an understanding of regular expressions. Depending on how comfortable your non technical users are and how complicated your site is, a developer may need to write the first regular expression and then have the other users extend it.
I’m skipping over other pieces of Intercom, including a knowledge base and in app synchronous chat. I think those are valuable as well, but the real win for me was allowing non technical users to control in app messaging with minimal software development investment.
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