Intercom, founded in 2011, is an AI-first customer service platform with the most advanced, comprehensive, and effective AI product offering in customer service.
Today, Intercom serves over 25,000 businesses globally, ranging from startups to enterprises — all of whom rely on their tools to increase customer satisfaction and drive growth.
Overcoming operational hurdles
Intercom’s support organization, with teams spread across Chicago, Sydney, and Dublin, faced significant operational challenges due to its dispersed structure. Initially managing operations with a patchwork of Tableau, Slack, Workday, Google Calendar, and Google Sheets, the team struggled with inefficiencies in scheduling, resource allocation, and real-time visibility. This led to frequent scheduling errors, impacting service level agreements (SLAs) and customer satisfaction.
Rather than expanding the team to handle the growing demands, Intercom took an AI-first approach, strategically relying on Fin AI to manage simpler support inquiries. This created unique complexities in managing the combination of AI-driven and human-led support. As AI handled routine tasks, human agents were tasked with solving more complex issues. With this shift, precise scheduling and workforce management became more critical to ensure human agents were ready to tackle these higher-level conversations.
Finding a partner to go the distance
Choosing the right platform was about more than just features — Intercom wanted a partner that aligned with their vision. Assembled stood out for its ability to scale without friction while facilitating collaboration between managers and agents. This shared approach made for a smooth transition and speedy implementation.
It was crucial to find a partner who understood our goals. We hire great people and want them to stay and grow, often through internal transfers. We needed a partner who could support a two-way, collaborative system rather than a one-way approach."
Anthony Lopez, Director of Support Operations
One of the critical factors in choosing Assembled was its ability to integrate seamlessly with Intercom’s existing tech stack — especially tools like Google Calendar and Workday.
Previously, time-off management was handled with spreadsheets and Slack, making it cumbersome. Assembled held several deep-dive sessions with Intercom to build and validate a solution integrated with Workday. This streamlined scheduling and ensured automatic updates for vacation or sick time are automatically reflected in Assembled. Automated weekly optimizations now allow the team to adjust schedules instantly, saving 5 hours per week.
Before Assembled, everything was unconnected and ad hoc. Scheduling 80 to 100 individual agents weekly was extremely cumbersome, especially with new product releases. Assembled optimized our weekly trainings with just a button click, significantly reducing the time and effort required."
Brandon Solie, Workforce Management Program Manager
Thanks to Assembled’s robust integrations, real-time and historical ticket data syncs automatically, powering fast, accurate forecasting and adherence tracking. The ability to export data from Assembled and create reports in Tableau provides actionable insights for ongoing account optimizations.
Today, over 90% of Intercom's workforce management processes are managed within Assembled.
Adapting to the AI revolution
Intercom's Fin AI Agent achieves an impressive 42% resolution rate, taking care of routine customer queries and allowing human agents to focus on more complex cases. This shift has directly impacted the productivity and occupancy of Intercom’s support team. As Fin handles the easier, more predictable inquiries, the harder, more nuanced conversations are funneled to human agents. In practice, this means that customer support engineers are seeing a decrease in the number of tickets they handle per hour and an increase in average handle time, as they focus solely on these complex issues that require a deeper level of problem-solving.
As Fin's resolution rate goes up, it's the tougher questions that make it to our inbox. We’ve seen a clear shift in workload, where our engineers are now working on fewer but more challenging tickets. Average handle times have increased, not due to inefficiency, but because these tickets require more time and expertise to resolve."
Brandon Solie, Workforce Management Program Manager
Occupancy has also evolved with the rise of AI-driven support. While many assume that AI would reduce headcount, Intercom has found that the need for human agents remains strong, especially as they are responsible for managing and updating the help center. Fin directly feeds from the help center, meaning that any product changes or new features require timely updates to these resources. Intercom’s frontline agents, who know the product best, play a crucial role in this process. As a result, Intercom has increased occupancy to ensure its agents are always available for both managing high-level inquiries and maintaining the help center.
This shift in productivity and occupancy, influenced by the collaboration between AI and human support, is directly linked to Assembled’s role in forecasting and resource allocation. By providing precise predictions of workload demands, Assembled ensures that Intercom can maintain a balance between AI-driven efficiency and the human expertise needed to solve complex customer issues. This, in turn, affects capacity planning and headcount decisions, ensuring Intercom’s support team is always optimized for the evolving nature of customer interactions.
Achieving continuous improvement together
Intercom’s journey with Assembled highlights the power of collaboration and the importance of choosing the right technology partners. By integrating seamlessly with existing tools and adopting a collaborative approach, Assembled helped Intercom transform its workforce management, leading to increased efficiency, better support experiences, and a more engaged team.
We were impressed with Assembled’s collaborative approach. They actively engaged with us to understand our challenges and didn’t shut down our ideas. Instead, they developed features that addressed our problems and improved efficiency at scale. Their willingness to adapt their product was key to our decision"
Anthony Lopez, Director of Support Operations
As Intercom continues to evolve with AI and other technological advancements, Assembled remains a vital partner, ensuring that the support team is always equipped to provide the best possible service to their customers. The partnership between Intercom and Assembled is a testament to how innovative solutions and collaborative efforts can drive significant improvements in customer support operations.
