Making the most of valuable product insights in Intercom conversations
At Productboard, we’re proud to be included in the recent rollout of the Intercom App Partner Program.
We’ve been telling folks for years that Intercom made us better product makers. Its friendly chat interface, accessible from the corner of our app or homepage, humanized interactions with our users. Stilted emails became gif-filled chat threads. One-way feature requests turned into full-blown discussions, providing an opportunity to uncover the user’s underlying need. And we went from scratching our heads over why certain customers were churning to hearing their un-met needs earlier on, since it was so easy for them to reach out. It gave us a chance to act on their feedback and incorporate it into our products.
Today Intercom supports the needs of sales, marketing, support, and product teams, generating more quality conversations with prospects and customers than ever before. This provides an enormous opportunity for customer-driven organizations that are able to capture and act on all the product insights those conversations contain.
We built the Productboard integration for Intercom to help every product team do just that.
How to get started harnessing valuable product insights in Intercom conversations:
1. Tag
Colleagues on the frontlines apply one or more designated tags — e.g. product, usability, UX — to Intercom conversations containing product insights. Any conversation with the tag(s) are pushed into Productboard's centralized repository for product insights.
2. Consolidate
From Productboard, the product team reviews all the product ideas, requsts, and feedback arriving from Intercom alongside additional product inputs coming from other integrations like Slack, email, and in-app feedback widgets.
3. Categorize
Product managers and user researchers can categorize valuable product insights and link them to related feature ideas so they'll be on hand to inform prioritization and design.
4. Analyze
Product managers can surface the top-requested feature ideas based on insights that arrived over a specified time period. You can also filter to see the needs of certain users or companies. Then factor in additional criteria to prioritize the right features to build next.
5. Align
Product managers, designers, and developers can access all the original user insights behind each feature idea to ensure features are designed in the optimal way. Everyone in the company understands how the features on your product roadmap support user needs and your product strategy.
Now used by customer-driven product teams across the globe
Today the Productboard Intercom integration is used by over 600 customer-driven product organizations and counting.
It helps Simon Hangaard, VP of Product at Airtame, optimize their system for categorizing product insights to prioritize the right features:
“We've have great use of the Productboard Intercom integration at Airtame! Before that our Customer Success agents would be using tags to keep track of what customers had asked for what features. This obviously doesn't scale as we eventually had more than 80+ tags that agents would have to remember and understand. Now the agents simply use one of several designated product feedback tags to send conversations into Productboard. From there, Product Managers can link them to related feature ideas. It allows us to be far more granular and precise in the way our product team categorizes and acts on user feedback.”
Brano Sandala, Senior Product Manager at Kentico Cloud, has used the integration to analyze the frequency of various product requests found in Intercom conversations, emails, and user interview notes. It has helped him promote a customer-centric culture across the broader team:
“Thanks to the context in Productboard, the dev teams are really engaged. It improves the team’s empathy for customers and helps them be more goal-oriented — ‘we are working on these features because of these reasons’ — rather than mindlessly coding off a spec. From Productboard they can even drill into the original Intercom conversation and ask followup questions, plan design interviews and usability tests, and solicit feedback on wireframes.”
Mike Barlett, VP of Product at Slite, uses the Intercom integration to uncover hidden user needs behind feature requests. Mike loves that Productboard allows him to identify exactly who’s expressed certain needs in the past. He can follow up with them in Intercom and push any deeper insights that arise back into Productboard:
“With Productboard, I can re-engage customers and find out if their needs are actually different than what they asked for. This helps me get to the root of their problem and approach it with the right solution.”
Whether you use Intercom for sales, marketing or support, make sure you’re putting all those product insights from prospects and customers to use. Get started with the Productboard integration for Intercom to prioritize the right features to build next.
Find the Productboard integration on the Intercom App Store.
Explore Intercom’s new App Partner Program to see other apps and integrations offered and how you can build and monetize one of your own.
