
Flying cars, chatbots and looking forward to the next small thing
“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” – Peter Thiel People in tech commonly overestimate the impact of big things and...

6 essential chatbot recipes for sales and marketing teams
Chatbots push salespeople and marketers past the physical limitations of being human: our need to sleep, our dislike of repetitive tasks,...

Embracing complexity: designing our Custom Bot builder
For product teams, complexity is a dirty word – it’s the anti-goal. You can call it “flexibility” to make it sound better, but it raises...

Announcing Custom Bots, the chatbots that drive business growth
Today we are launching a brand new product called Custom Bots, which allows you to create completely customizable chatbots on your...

To bot, or not to bot?
The challenge with automation is knowing when you’ve gone too far, when you’ve automated to the point of ruining the very thing you...

The one simple question our bot asks that saves our sales team hours
As the rise of bots and automation continues apace, a lot of people are wondering how the sales process and lead qualification will be...

What we learned building our bot
When a new technology emerges, there’s an initial trigger. The masses react and become disillusioned, and then the trend slowly builds...

The future of our Operator bot is in London
Since its founding, Intercom has been based in Dublin and San Francisco. For our first few years we built our product exclusively in...

The cult of conversational design: why forms aren’t dead yet
2016 was the year of conversational design. Everywhere we looked, conversational UIs were breaking out of messaging apps and into the...

What’s your hierarchy of customer success?
Maslow’s famous pyramid shows a universal hierarchy of needs, and a similar framework can help us understand customers’ needs and how to...

Naming a new product? Start with the job.
Any word can be powerful, but names are transformative. A good product name gives that product a certain shape — for the team designing...

Announcing Operator: the bot for better customer experiences
At Intercom we have always been very opinionated about bots and what they can and can’t do. Today we’re launching our very own bot,...

Designing half of a conversation
Bot design is at a fork in the road. It keeps circling back to the same issues, like a chatbot that keeps saying “I didn’t quite get...

Bot names – what should you name yours?
Every year in design circles, there’s a buzzword. This year, the buzzword is without question bots. And as with anything we build, we...

Conversational commerce: 3 examples to validate the hype
2016 was the year of conversational commerce. Despite the hype, it has continued on its way to becoming the next frontier for messaging...

Browsers, not apps, are the future of mobile
A common refrain in discussions over the future of mobile is that “eventually, all mobile apps will be iOS or Android apps.” But many of...

The killer feature of messaging no one’s talking about
Messaging looks set to disrupt the computing landscape but not for any of the reasons you might expect. Chat’s threaded UI, where all...

Principles of bot design
Despite plenty of excitement it’s still unclear how conversational UIs can be made to work in a practical sense. But opinionated design...

Bots versus humans
Everyone is talking about the rise of chatbots; but are forgetting that humans are pretty good too. In recent months we’ve seen Facebook,...
























