Atlassian powers sales and support at scale with Intercom

Since the launch of Jira 1.0 in 2002, software giant Atlassian has grown rapidly, adding products like Opsgenie, Statuspage, and Trello to its growing portfolio. Now standing at over 7,000 employees, Atlassian is focused on providing the best possible experiences for its 200,000+ customers and empowering improved team collaboration through efficient communication.

As Atlassian grew, teams from across the company sought a way to consolidate their communications, boost operational efficiency, and create delightful and engaging experiences. With Intercom’s customer communications platform, Atlassian is able to build lasting relationships through conversations with their customers and prospective customers.

• The team overseeing the Opsgenie product uses Intercom to power their sales and support in an efficient, scalable way.

• The support team for the Statuspage product uses Intercom to power their frontline support, with big growth ambitions for building out their use of the platform in the future.

• Other teams from across the company use Intercom to share important updates with customers about new products within the Atlassian suite.

With Intercom supporting their customer communication needs, the Atlassian team is empowered to drive growth across all areas of the business. We spoke with Wayne Stewart, Head of Customer Service and Support, Cloud Growth, DevOps & IT, Don Pierce, Head of Support, and Jesse Collado, Technical Support Manager, at Atlassian, to find out how they’re using Intercom to achieve 95% CSAT scores and ensure their teams maintain a target first-response time of under three minutes.

Driving best-in-class results

The Atlassian team providing support for the Opsgenie product uses Intercom to ensure their customers are set up for success – whether it’s through self-serve support or seeking help through the Intercom Messenger. Wayne and Don have used Intercom since the beginning of Opsgenie’s journey, so when Opsgenie was acquired by Atlassian, they made the decision to bring Intercom with them to their newly formed support team.

Since then, they’ve expanded to include teams from around the globe, with Intercom sitting at the helm of their support operation throughout this period of rapid growth. Wayne, Don, and Jesse point to Intercom as a platform that enables them to seamlessly collaborate with other teams, ensuring that their support standards – and success metrics – consistently remain high.

The support team’s goal is to maintain a first-response time of less than three minutes, and with Intercom they are able to do just that. One of the many things they like about the platform is the ease of use. “Like every support manager, we want the team to spend more time fixing the customers’ problems, learning, and engaging with the customer,” says Don. “We don’t want the tools to override that – the tools should be helping them.” Don notes that while he initially had reservations about chat as a support channel, he’s seen the tremendous impact chat can have on team efficiency and improving the customer experience. “I’ve come over to this side and embraced chat because it’s fast, it gets stuff done, and it gets the customer up and running,” he says.  

Adopting a support methodology to meet team and customer needs

With up to 90 conversations arriving in their inbox every morning, the team wanted to ensure they could efficiently route customers’ questions to the right support reps and quickly resolve issues. When looking at how to optimize their workflows, they set out to solve a few main problems using Intercom’s routing and categorization capabilities:

• With conversations rolling in without any categorization, it was difficult for the team to meet their target first-response time of under three minutes.

• Not having categorization and routing in place posed a risk of new incoming conversations being missed as the team had limited visibility over new chats that were waiting.

• Handovers between regions and time zones were tricky to navigate, with no consolidated way of transferring ownership or context of customer conversations.

Maintaining a first-response time of three minutes or less was critical to the team, so they implemented new processes to help them achieve this. They customized the Intercom Inbox and utilized additional features to uplevel their support and drive efficiency across the team.

A new-and-improved Inbox set-up

To achieve their goal of streamlining support, the team created dedicated views and teams in Intercom. These views include a first-responder queue for new inbound chats and region-specific views to ensure the smooth handover of conversations between teams in different time zones. “Those two changes have made a massive difference for the engineers because they’re now able to handle the conversation volumes and backlogs in an easier way,” says Jesse.

The benefits of implementing this inbox set-up have been immense, enabling their global support team to:

• Reduce team stress levels: Breaking conversations out into views has made the workload more manageable and reduced stress levels on the team.

• Ensure no conversation gets missed: When all messages were arriving in a single inbox, there was a risk of conversations getting lost. The views ensure that all conversations are being routed to the right inbox so that the team on duty can jump in to offer support with the context they need to resolve the customer’s issue.

• Collaborate more seamlessly: Teammates can now transfer ownership of conversations to a team in another region during shift handover periods and leave notes to ensure a smooth transition and a consistent customer experience for the customer.

• Get improved reporting: The new inbox views enable the team to see success metrics by region and ensure that their high bar for support is maintained across the board.

• Maintain their target first-response time: The team’s first-response time came back down to between two and three minutes.

Don says, “It’s deceiving now when you’re looking at it. You’d think we’re not doing a lot of volume, but the volume is there, it’s just much more manageable, and the team is not stressed out.” Jesse also highlights that auto-assignment helps the team save time, removing the need for teammates to manually assign conversations and giving them more time to focus on the customer. This gives the team more control and visibility over their work, their backlog, and what other people are working on. “It’s one click for every person, but at the end of the day, it saves time and makes an impact, especially when we’re talking about maintaining a three-minute initial response time,” he says.

Creating stellar experiences through personalization

Atlassian also leverages Intercom’s API to ensure that all of the tools the support team uses are integrated. Wayne explains that the robust API is one of the team’s favorite features of the platform, as it enriches data for the support engineers, reduces the need for context-switching, and ultimately improves the customer experience.

Jesse adds that having all of the information support engineers need in one platform is incredibly helpful, and gives a more personal experience for the customer. “The data we can see in Intercom lets our customers know that we know who they are from the first interaction. It increases that sense of ‘Hey, they’re listening to me. They know who I am,’ and I think they appreciate that a lot. It’s very powerful to have all of the information on one screen,” he says.

Wayne also highlights the excitement around Intercom’s API internally, saying, “When new engineers start to dig into Intercom and the API, they always say things like, ‘Oh my gosh, every product should have an API like this – the things we can do, the data we can extract!’”

A shining example of strong, scalable support

Atlassian has seen incredible results using Intercom to support their customers in a way that’s both personal and efficient. Intercom allows Atlassian to manage 1,400 monthly conversations and maintain their target first-response time of three minutes or less. This helps the team to drive sky-high CSAT scores of over 95% – with the average score sitting between 97% and 98%.

The team is supporting a complex product and Wayne points to the impressive time-to-close they’re able to achieve using Intercom. “Being able to resolve the bulk of the questions our customers ask in under three hours is a phenomenal benefit,” he says.

Driving business growth for sales

In addition to support, Atlassian uses Intercom to communicate with prospective customers visiting their website and convert the visitors to drive business growth. Prospective customers will sometimes have both technical and sales-related questions, so it’s a critical benefit that both sales and support can collaborate on an integrated communications platform.

Building lasting customer relationships

Above all, Atlassian is committed to ensuring that it’s creating strong, personal experiences for its customers, resolving their issues quickly, and forging lasting relationships with them. When asked what the biggest benefits of using Intercom in Atlassian are, Jesse noted, “I love the smiley faces, and also the informality of the chat. It increases engagement with customers and they feel closer to us as a support team. Our CSAT is consistently above 95% and chat allows us to solidify the relationship with the customer.”

Don notes, “Fast resolutions of client issues is the biggest benefit.” Echoing this, Wayne says, “Speed is definitely the big factor. I see this in the comments that customers send in all the time. They’re surprised by how easy it is to get access to us and how fast it is to get somebody to respond.”

Planning for the future

Atlassian has seen such great success with Intercom that they have already expanded their use of the platform to power their communication in a number of areas across the business. This includes the team at Statuspage, who have also adopted Intercom with the goal of driving best-in-class results for their customer communications.

As other teams are introduced to Intercom, there is continued excitement around the opportunity to gain a deep understanding of their customers and create personalized, delightful journeys. Looking ahead, Atlassian has big ambitions for how to drive personal and efficient customer communications across sales, engagement, and support – and the team is only getting started.