Intercom announce their new messenger to help businesses capitalise on messaging explosion

Intercom, invented in-app messaging in 2011, a message style widely adopted by companies to talk with over a billion people around the world. Five years later, messaging has exploded, and businesses are looking for a way in. In response to this rising demand, combined with feedback from customers, Intercom is shaking up business messaging again with the launch of the new Intercom Business Messenger, which will  rival the look and feel of today best consumer messaging apps like Facebook Messenger..

The Intercom Messenger is at the heart of all Intercom products, designed to be the most modern and personal way for a business to talk to its customers. It is found within Intercom’s Acquire live chat tool, the Engage marketing automation tool and the Support customer support tool. Designed for consumers, built for fast-growing businesses, Intercom’s new Messenger brings a level of transparency to business and customer interactions not experienced since before the internet age.

Intercom is also announcing it now reaches more than one billion end users through the Intercom messaging platform. At launch, the updated Messenger will be rolled out to these users of the 13,000 businesses that use Intercom to talk & connect with customers.

New Messenger features include:

– Personal teammate profiles to help consumers connect with the human inside a business.

– Emoji reactions to help businesses get emotionally rich feedback, at scale.

– Flexible Multiple message delivery options to keep user disruption to a minimum.

– Multiple message types to serve all business messaging purposes.

– Customisable color & wallpaper options to add personality to the Messenger.

– GIF support to let teammates & consumers talk like they would with friends.

– A totally new floating chat interface which helps consumers & businesses communicate in a more seamless way.

Consumer messaging apps aren’t ideal for business use, as they are designed primarily for consumer needs, which center around small group communication. And despite the hype, there is little evidence in the Western world of business success with these apps as standalone solutions. Existing business communication tools, like helpdesks and live chat, are largely outdated and impersonal, and are many steps behind how consumers actually engage with businesses.

The Intercom platform is the only messaging offering to span all channels & platforms, including in-app chat, email, Facebook, Twitter, push notifications, along with iOS, Android and web. These channels provide businesses with critical user context necessary to have the authentic, human conversations we are all naturally wired for. Also, consumer messengers have only one message type – a chat – whereas Intercom has a range of message types tailored to different business objectives.

Launch partners for the new Intercom Messenger include Product Hunt, Expensify, Getaround, Fog Creek Software, and Le Parker Meridien New York.

“There have been some incredible developments in social and messaging platforms in the past decade. Critically though, the world of business has been lagging behind,” said Paul Adams, Intercom’s VP of Product. “Our goal with the new Intercom Messenger is to continue pushing ourselves to deliver the best business messaging product in the world, one that lets companies, and their customers, get much closer to talking to each other like people.”