Fresh Technology's journey to first-class support

We spoke with Jonathan Kilton, Director of Revenue Operations at Fresh Technology, LLC., about their transformative journey with Intercom. Get ready to dive into a story of improved efficiency, elevated customer support, and the tangible impact of transparency across the customer service organization.

Can you tell us a bit about Fresh Technology and your role?

Certainly! My name is Jonathan Kilton, and I’m the Director of Revenue Operations at Fresh Technology, LLC. Fresh Technology is a SaaS provider specializing in restaurant technology solutions. We offer a suite of products designed to streamline various aspects of restaurant operations, including back-of-house, front-of-house, and out-of-house solutions. My role involves overseeing revenue operations and ensuring that our technology helps restaurants enhance their presence, reputation, and profitability. Our systems manage over $300 million in annual sales across 13 million guests.

What was your customer communications setup like before implementing Intercom, and what challenges did you face?

Before Intercom, email was our primary support channel and our customer communications setup was being stretched. We were growing fast, expanding into new countries, and as a result faced several challenges when it came to maintaining our customer service experience.

• International expansion meant we needed to provide 24/7 support.

• We set up a new offshore support team to scale our efforts and needed a way to ensure standardized communication.

• Our service level agreement (SLA) metrics weren’t where we wanted them to be. We struggled to scale the team as our inbound ticket volumes grew, and lacked a consistent escalation workflow, which led to inefficiencies. 

• We needed to improve our documentation – both internally, to upgrade our standard operating procedures (SOPs), and externally, to ensure customers had access to all of the help documentation they needed. 

What did you need to solve those challenges, and how has implementing Intercom helped?

We set out to tackle the issues we were facing by implementing a number of process improvements and leveraging features in Intercom that would enable us to increase efficiency and maximize our impact. 

The key challenges we tackled were: 

• Upskilling the support team: We focused on training our support agents and used Intercom’s reporting, along with our own QA process, to monitor performance and ensure our customers were getting a strong, consistent support experience. We leveraged features like Macros and Fin AI Assist to help us ensure that customer communication was standardized across our support and reduce the risk of errors. 

• Expanding our support offering: We began offering chat support complemented with outbound phone capabilities, and extended our support availability to be 24/7, allowing us to serve our customers at international scale, whenever they need help. We currently use a third-party platform for phone support, but are testing Intercom Phone in beta right now – having both of these channels in Intercom would reduce the need for “tool switching,” which would save our team valuable time.   

• Establishing new SLAs: Our customers’ support requirements had changed and so we adapted our SLAs to meet the new standards. Tracking these metrics daily allowed us to measure progress towards these goals.

• Managing increased support volume: While we were redesigning our support operation, our business continued to grow at speed and our ticket volume almost doubled. This proved to be a significant challenge, so we leaned on Intercom features like Fin, their AI chatbot, and reporting capabilities to help us understand how many customers we could empower to self-serve and free up our team’s time, which enabled us to manage this volume spike without increasing headcount. We also reassessed our ticket escalation process and implemented a number of changes to ensure we were able to work through escalations more efficiently.   

• Improving the customer – and teammate – experience: By looking at trends in customer conversations and reports in Intercom, we were able to identify high-priority areas that would benefit from new SOPs or help documentation. From there, we created the documentation needed to set both our team and our customers up for success.

What results have you seen since you implemented Intercom? Any hard metrics you can share?

Since implementing Intercom, we've seen remarkable improvements across a number of our core metrics as we were able to completely shift how we were delivering support. This brought our first response time from 10-20 minutes with email-only support to under 45 seconds with live chat, our median handling time dropped to under 30 minutes, and our median time to close to just under an hour. 

These improvements have been a game-changer for us, and have also significantly enhanced our customers’ satisfaction. Now, our CSAT scores consistently hit the 3-5 range, showing our customers' delight with our support and increased ability to provide them with faster answers and resolutions to their issues. 

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

Intercom integrates seamlessly with the rest of the tools in our tech stack, which enhances our overall operational efficiency. We've connected several platforms to Intercom to create a comprehensive and well-integrated ecosystem, such as:

• Zapier: Zapier helps us automate tasks and connect various apps and tools to Intercom, streamlining our workflows.

• HubSpot: Intercom's integration with HubSpot enables us to manage customer relationships effectively and align our marketing and support efforts.

• Calendly: Connecting Calendly with Intercom helps us seamlessly schedule support calls with customers so we can provide help when it best suits them.

• Omnichannel: With Intercom's omnichannel capabilities, we can provide a consistent customer experience across various support channels.

These integrations have made Intercom the central hub for our customer communications, allowing us to seamlessly manage interactions, streamline processes, and provide a more cohesive and efficient support experience to our customers.

What do you think is the biggest benefit of Intercom?

The most significant benefit of Intercom for us is undoubtedly the transparency it brings to our customer service. As the Director of Revenue Operations, I've found that you can't improve what you can't see, and in customer support, a single negative experience or review can have a substantial impact on a company's reputation.

Intercom's real-time visibility into conversations has been a game-changer. It has allowed us to monitor and manage customer interactions effectively, ensuring that we can address issues promptly and maintain a high standard of service. This level of transparency has not only improved our SLA metrics and efficiency but has also been instrumental in safeguarding our customers' satisfaction and our company's reputation.

Are there any opportunities you’re excited to unlock with Intercom in the future?

Absolutely, there are a lot of exciting opportunities on the horizon with Intercom. One area we're looking forward to exploring further is Intercom's reporting functionality, like the ability to dig deeper into our data without leaving the Intercom app. As it becomes more advanced, we anticipate that it will be hugely helpful in streamlining our reporting processes and enabling us to quickly identify underlying issues or trends.

We're also keen to dig deeper into our AI-human support experience by splitting out reports based on whether a support agent or bot interacted with or resolved a customer query. A key element of this will be leveraging the "bot excluded first response time" metric, which will give us more accurate and real-time reporting on customer interactions and service quality across the board.

Intercom's commitment to innovation and the continuous development of their platform give us confidence that it will continue to play a pivotal role in our ability to deliver exceptional customer support. We're excited about what the future has in store.

What advice would you give to others considering using Intercom?

My advice to others considering using Intercom is simple: you get what you put in. Intercom offers the ability to get a bird’s-eye view of your support operation, and also do deep analysis of what’s happening under the hood. The choice you make in terms of how extensively you use the platform will directly impact the quality and actionability of your data.

So, invest time and effort into optimizing your use of Intercom. Explore its capabilities, customize it to suit your needs, and continuously fine-tune your processes based on the insights it provides. The more you engage with Intercom and harness its potential, the greater the impact you can have across your support – and your business.