Intercom Saves Their Teams Four Hours Every Week with Automation

Great customer support teams are backed by a robust and well-maintained knowledge base. Sometimes the upkeep of product documentation falls to the support team itself. In the best-case scenario, the knowledge base has a team dedicated to writing new documents and updating older ones.

Intercom, a customer messaging platform that provides everything from live chat to help centers, exists in that best-case scenario. Zara Burke manages Intercom's product documentation on the Product Education team. Collaboration is key to their work; the support team helps them identify articles in need of an update.

"We rely on [our customer support team] to let us know when they spot help content that's out of date or needs to be improved," Zara explains.

Originally, to make those edits, a support rep would make the request in a Slack channel. Next, the request is reviewed and added to the product education team's Trello board. Then, Zara or another team member would work with the requester for clarification and details. It became too much work and Zara knew they had to find an efficient way to process these requests.

"It was a long process and as our product grew bigger and bigger, we knew it was one we needed to automate," Zara explains. To make their automation dreams come true, Zara turned to app automation tool Zapier. With Zapier, Zara built efficient workflows, but she found something else, too. With Zapier for Teams's Shared Folders, Zara and the Product Education team can collaborate with the support team—and any other team—within Zapier.

"Collaborating across teams is essential for helping us create better help content," she says. Now with Shared Folders, anyone with access to the team account can edit Zaps—a bridge between two or more apps—or build entirely new ones.

Automatically Turn Form Responses into Project Tasks

To simplify the change request process, the Product Education team created a form with Typeform. Any time a customer writes in about an out of date document or support stumbles across one, they fill out this form with the details. To save the Product Education team from manually copying and pasting the form's responses to Trello, Zara built a Zap.

When a support request comes through Typeform, Zapier automatically creates a new task in Trello. That task contains all the relevant information—the support rep's name, the URL for the document, type of change, and context—so the Product Education team can prioritize and correct it.

"Now our team automatically gets notified when a new update gets added to our Trello board, and all of the information we need is there," Zara says. "Setting up this Zap also allowed us to ask for more detail when someone submits an update. The extra detail is key for us improving our help articles based on our customers' feedback."

This workflow is the perfect pairing of form with project management tool. If you use a different project manager, like MeisterTask, you can swap apps as needed.

With Shared Folders, working with across department lines has never been easier.

"We collaborate with many teams across the company," Zara says. "[These Zaps] allow our Product Education team to keep in sync with other teams."

All images courtesy of Intercom.