Inter efficiently manages 60k customer conversations daily and keeps FRT under a minute with Intercom

More than a digital bank, Inter is a super app that has reinvented itself to simplify the lives of its more than 20 million customers. The company adds new products and services to its app every day, giving customers the opportunity to manage their finances, shop online, get cash back, and much more.

Inter currently offers a complete set of services in banking, investments, credit and insurance, international money transfers, as well as a shopping app that includes the biggest retail stores in Brazil and the United States. The team uses Intercom’s customer service platform to build relationships with their customers, leveraging its self-serve support capabilities to boost efficiency across the business – and delight users. “Innovation is central to everything that we do,” says Lais Belico, Solutions & Client Experience Analyst at Inter. “We wanted an innovative support solution that could scale with us as we continue to expand our service offering.”

Challenge

Inter’s previous support set-up was challenging for the team to manage as they needed humans to answer every inbound query and phone call, which was expensive and not scalable. This also meant that if unexpected surges in inbound conversation volume occurred, the team was easily overwhelmed.

On top of that, not having a centralized platform for tracking support queries in real time meant that customer calls outside of business hours could get lost, with no way for the team to track who was calling and why. Inter needed to find more efficient ways of managing their support, and a solution that would enable the team to keep track and stay on top of inbound conversation volume.

Solution

With Intercom’s customer service platform, Inter can leverage powerful support management capabilities to set both the team and its millions of customers up for success. The company is committed to answering customers’ queries within two minutes, so it’s crucial that they have the tools and integrations available to them to help them do this.

“Intercom has a lot of tools that help us manage volume spikes,” says Lais. “For example, if we see an increase in chat interactions beyond what we expected, we know something has happened. In these situations, we can go into Intercom and see what our customers are saying to identify the issue and proactively resolve it.”

Since Inter started using Intercom, it has seen its support conversation volume increase dramatically. According to Lais, “The platform has been able to scale with us, allowing us to easily manage the growth. We started out with 11,000 customers contacting us through Intercom every day, and since then, that number has grown to 60,000.”

By being able to keyword search in Intercom, the Inter team can analyze trends in customer conversations and take measures to proactively support them in order to drive down support conversation volume over time. Inter has also linked Intercom to its social media support channels so the team can monitor customer complaints and easily reference their conversation history in Intercom.

Providing support at scale with self-serve support and an interoperable tech stack

As a fully-digital business, Inter’s focus is on creating stand-out digital experiences for its customers. The team leverages Intercom’s self-serve support capabilities, such as Articles, to power their help center. They also utilize several integrations in order to meet the expectations of customers who prefer to receive digital support. “Our customers are used to digital platforms, so they like to have self-serve support as an option,” says Lais. “We know that they like to try and resolve issues themselves, which is why we leverage bots and automation.”

Inter had previously invested in an IBM Watson chatbot, which the team calls "Babi." Lais shares, "Babi is our virtual customer support assistant and the first point of contact with our team when they need help.”

When searching for a customer service platform, it was important for Inter to be able to integrate the new technology with Babi. Fortunately, with the Intercom and IBM Watson integration, Inter was able to retain the power of Babi, while also adding new capabilities to its support offering with Intercom. The virtual assistant is set up in Intercom as a user, allowing Inter to access its data, conversation history, response time, and questions answered. “Having all of this in Intercom is hugely helpful for our team, as we’re able to use the conversation history and insights to curate content for Babi,” says Lais.

To ensure the team has all the necessary tools to help customers efficiently, Inter also integrates Intercom with its CRM system, Salesforce. With these two platforms integrated, Inter’s support agents can quickly get all the context they need to resolve customers’ queries, such as their account information, conversation history, and more.

“It’s great that Intercom houses all of our conversation history with customers. Our support agents can use it as their first port of call, and can also access our CRM to analyze customers’ profiles. Having everything integrated is a big help because it simplifies and speeds up interactions,” says Lais.

Measuring success

When it comes to measuring the success of its customer support program, Inter looks at a number of important metrics, including the team’s first-response time, NPS, and the resolution rate of its chatbot, Babi. Using Babi integrated with Intercom to resolve 60% of support requests, the team can be freed up to focus on complex or urgent issues. And with an NPS score of 81 (based on Inter's last NPS release for active customers), it's evident that customers are receiving stand-out support experiences.

“Currently, Inter has a first response time of less than one minute, which directly impacts customer satisfaction. Without a doubt, Intercom has helped us massively as we’ve scaled. Our customer contacts very quickly grew to 60,000 per day, and Intercom has handled that evolution very well,” says Lais.