A conversation with Fathom: Providing award-winning customer service

We caught up with Adam Wilson, Global Head of Customer Support at Fathom, about how his team approaches customer support, the obstacles they’ve had to overcome, and the role Intercom plays in providing stand-out, award-winning support to their customers.

Adam, can you tell us a bit about Fathom and your role?

Sure! I’m Adam Wilson, the Global Head of Customer Support at Fathom, a platform for financial reporting, insights, and forecasting.

What did your customer support tech stack look like before Intercom, and what challenges did you face?

Before Intercom, we used Zendesk for our customer support, but the platform wasn’t working for most of our team as the interface was hard to navigate. We needed a solution that would not only work for everyone, but that could also pull all of our support together under one roof.

Our core focus was being able to provide fast, accurate support to our customers. Some of our customers need instant responses while they're working on a report or a forecast, while others would prefer to send us an email that they can return to later. The key is meeting both of those needs without creating divergent processes that introduce failure points, and we saw that Intercom would allow us to do that.

Since making the switch, how has Intercom helped you to solve those challenges?

Intercom has enabled us to focus on the customer’s needs and specific issues rather than the mechanics of providing support. This, in turn, has allowed us to deliver the highest levels of customer satisfaction and short response times across every region.

Our customer satisfaction score is consistently above 95% – in fact, it’s currently 97%. And we’re now able to respond to customers more than 60% faster than we were with our previous solution. We just won the “Customer Service Organization of the Year” award at the 2022 Australian Service Excellence Awards, which was such an incredible achievement for our team, and was recognized by Anthony Albanese, the Australian Prime Minister!

In addition to that, the simplicity of Intercom really stood out to us. We wanted a single platform that would be easy to use so our team could focus on helping our customers, rather than spending a lot of time navigating between different tools to resolve customer queries.

Intercom’s recent addition of the real-time dashboard has also been very positive. I can get a snapshot of support activity and performance across my teams, which is good. We're a small team and a small company, but it's great to get that bird’s-eye view, and I can share that with the leadership team as well. That's a good quality-of-life improvement for customer support organizations. It’s really powerful and helpful.

Another benefit of having a single support solution is that we can host all of our support articles in Intercom and easily share them with customers via the Messenger. The experience is all linked, which makes it more seamless for the customer and our team. In contrast to previous companies I’ve worked at, where we used a wide range of in-house systems that required a lot of manual work, the unified solution that Intercom offers is incredibly simple and powerful in its approach.

How does Intercom fit into the rest of your tech stack? What tools have you integrated with Intercom?

We use Zoom for our customer support escalations, and we’ve integrated Calendly with Intercom to schedule these escalation calls directly from conversations in the Inbox. We also use Loom to capture helpful product walkthroughs and deliver customer education.

To simplify escalations and product feedback, we’ve connected Intercom to Jira for our development and support escalations and to Productboard for feature requests and tracking product enhancements. Finally, we use Guru for internal product knowledge, which seamlessly integrates with our workflows in Intercom. Having everything connected makes it much easier for the team to work and saves us valuable time.