Zip saved $500k in under 7 months and creates delightful experiences with Intercom

Zip is a leading “buy now, pay later” company, providing fair and seamless solutions that simplify how people pay. With a growing presence across the globe, the team’s mission is to be the first payment choice. They use Intercom to meet customers where they are and power support in-context, directly in their app and on their website, to create engaging, delightful experiences.

Martin Gohary is the CX Operations Manager at Zip U.S. and oversees all operations related to Zip’s U.S. customer experience. His team handles everything from regulatory complaints and escalations to technical operations for all of the company’s support platforms. Prior to using Intercom, Zip’s primary support channel was email and the team faced efficiency challenges, which made it difficult to produce the level of support they wanted to achieve.

Some of the main challenges Zip needed to solve were:

• Finding a more streamlined way of managing customer queries, without overwhelming the team.

• Ensuring the team was set up for success to meet Zip’s SLAs for their customers, which their previous support set-up didn’t enable.

Finding the right solution to meet customers where they are

Zip knew that without a customer communications platform enabling in-context and in-product messaging and providing powerful bots and automation, it would be impossible to overcome these challenges. By adding Intercom to their tech stack, the team has been able to reach customers in their product and on their website to provide stellar support. Zip is very focused on ensuring customers’ queries are handled as quickly as possible, so they use Intercom features like Resolution Bot, Custom Bots, and other behind-the-scenes automation to offer up instant answers and empower customers to self-serve.

Leveraging automation has not only resulted in a great experience and faster resolutions for Zip’s customers, it has also enabled the team to scale their support efficiently, without increasing headcount. In just under seven months, Intercom’s bots and automation saved the Zip team over $500,000.

“I’m a big fan of utilizing technology, because you can hire more people to answer customers’ questions, but it’s expensive and unscalable. Being able to use AI and automation is a 21st-century solution to this problem and only enhances our team’s ability to quickly answer our customers’ common questions,” says Martin.

Offering help when and where it’s needed

Zip implemented the Intercom Messenger across their properties to ensure that customers are always able to get the support they need. The team now sees 95% of all inbound queries coming through their app, which shows how many people prefer to receive support directly in the product, precisely when and where they need it.

With a consistently high volume of inbound conversations, it’s critical that Zip can lean on some of Intercom’s automation features to help them drive efficiency across their support, and most importantly, delight their customers.

“I’m focused on creating great experiences for both our customers and our team. We want to make sure that our customers are able to get all the support they need from our products, and if they have a problem, that we have a proper pipeline to accelerate those issues to the front line. Internally, we do a lot of work on building out our tools to support this, like creating workflows and automations in Intercom that allow us to move really fast,” says Martin.

Driving efficiency with automation

Resolution Bot and Custom Bots play a pivotal role in Zip’s ability to manage their inbound support volume. Here’s a quick look at the results the team is seeing using Intercom’s bots:

• Resolution Bot is automatically resolving 33.6% of all inbound conversations.

• Zip’s Custom Bot containment rate is sitting at an impressive 68%, meaning that the customers who interact with Custom Bots don’t need to seek further support from the team.

• Overall, both Resolution Bot and Custom Bots are contributing to a self-serve support rate of up to 38%, saving both the Zip team and their customers precious time.

Martin’s team uses Intercom to derive insights from customer conversations and understand what their most commonly unanswered questions are. From there, they configure Resolution Bot with these answers so customers can quickly find what they’re looking for and resolve their issues. When customers open the Intercom Messenger on Zip’s website or in their app, Custom Bots are set up to greet and assist them with their query. Customers are offered the ability to self-serve using documentation and answers provided by the bots, and if they would like to speak with a support agent, the bots collect the information needed for the agent to get up to speed quickly.

Above all, the Zip team is focused on creating excellent, efficient support experiences for customers. With this automation running behind the scenes, the support team has been able to save their customers significant time, resulting in high levels of customer satisfaction. “Some of the biggest benefits of Intercom are its bots and being able to support our customers in real time. Since implementing Resolution Bot and Custom Bots, our resolved by self-serve support rate has climbed to a healthy range of 34–38%, which saves our customers time and makes their experience more efficient,” says Martin.

Driving business impact with Intercom reports

The Zip team leverages Intercom’s reports to analyze trends in customer conversations and utilize these insights to drive improvements across the company. Martin explains that these insights allow them to identify ​​their customers’ precise needs and share them with other teams. “I’m a big fan of the fact that you can easily schedule reports through Intercom to share with the rest of the company,” says Martin. “We have to get data to the product and engineering teams so they can make decisions, and thanks to Intercom, it’s seamless to extract the data and share that out so everyone has visibility over what our customers are saying.”

“It’s great how granular we can get with these reports. When we’re sending them to the product team, for example, they don’t just want to hear that the app’s not working, they need to have specific details. We’re able to pull all of that data for them from Intercom, like which version of an operating system or device a customer is using, where in the journey they’re running into the issue, and other helpful information like that,” he says.

The CX Operations team also leverages Intercom’s reports to communicate progress and performance to Zip’s executive team, enabling them to continually demonstrate the speed and efficiency with which the team can support their customers – and the bottom-line impact that efficiency has.

Enhancing the support tech stack

Intercom is a key part of Zip’s support tech stack, empowering the team to communicate with customers in-context and meet them where they are. Zip also uses Zendesk for email and voice support, and as their ticketing system to manage escalations. With Intercom and Zendesk integrated, the team can ensure that their workflows can seamlessly pass from one tool to another as they work through customers’ issues.

“When agents need to escalate something, they’ll push it to Zendesk and we have an internal team that focuses on escalations that can take it from there. The Intercom integration with Zendesk has worked really well for us,” says Martin.

Zip also integrates Intercom with Playvox, a support quality assurance platform, to do automated analysis of customer conversations in order to drive continuous improvement.

Producing results

Since implementing Intercom to power its support, Zip has seen impressive results. The platform’s bots and automation have been hugely helpful in empowering the team to efficiently manage conversation volume and ensure they’re consistently providing a stellar experience for their customers.

“Intercom’s bots have had a great impact on both our company and our customers, and you can see that in our results,” says Martin.

Planning for the future

Looking ahead, the Zip team has plans to drive even more efficiency across their support and continue to build out their tech stack with new Intercom innovations. With new channels and capabilities consistently being added to the Intercom platform, they’re excited about the opportunity to find new ways to support their customers.

“We’re looking forward to working with Intercom’s Product and Engineering teams to connect Custom Bots to the rest of our systems through the API and exploring new features like Switch and SMS,” says Martin. “We want to continue to find ways of creating great experiences for our customers in a way that’s really efficient for our team. That’s another thing I really like about Intercom, they give us access to betas because they know we always want to try new things. It’s always exciting to see what’s being built, so it’s cool that we have that relationship with Intercom. It makes it a great experience for us too. As more teams at Zip start using Intercom, I think it has the potential to become an all-inclusive customer experience platform for us.”