Coda achieves over 95% CSAT and creates personalized experiences at scale with Intercom

All-in-one doc software Coda provides a powerful tool that combines word-processing, spreadsheet, and database functions in one place. As a result of that flexibility, its customers use it in countless different ways. Coda uses Intercom to power customer communications across the entire user journey and create tailored, in-context experiences to set their customers up for success based on their needs.

Brian Lederman, Head of Sales, Support, and Success at Coda, explains that the team wants customer support and the customer experience to be key differentiators for their business. In fact, it’s one of their core operating principles. “We can do a lot of things for a lot of different people, and that means that we have no one-size-fits-all approach to the customer experience,” he says.

Coda uses Intercom to power in-context messaging across customer support and engagement, leveraging the Intercom Messenger and Outbound Messages to meet customers where they are. With Intercom at the helm of its communications, the team is empowered to create stand-out experiences, leverage data to personalize their customers’ journeys with Coda, and drive ongoing engagement. “Intercom's really been a big part of the customer experience since day one,” says Brian. “I'm pretty sure we had Intercom before we had any customers, actually.” Having experienced a huge wave of growth in recent years, the team’s use of the platform has evolved from powering their support to it now being a core piece of their communications tech stack. Intercom’s flexibility ensures that as Coda continues to grow, they can still provide the highly personalized experiences their customers expect – at scale.

A one-size-fits-all approach to customer communication doesn’t work

With a highly customizable product that varies in complexity, it’s critical that Coda can deeply understand its users in order to personalize their experiences and meet their exact needs. “One of the things about having a very horizontal product is that it's difficult to provide a very contextual experience for each individual user,” says Brian. “Intercom really helps us understand our user personas and where they are in their journey with Coda so that we can continue to provide a really rich and personal experience based on who they are … and where they are in their experience with our product.”

This deep understanding of customer personas and behavior enables the team to trigger targeted messages from Intercom based on a customer’s role within their workspace, their Coda skill level – which ranges from beginner to advanced – or actions they take within the product. They can also leverage Intercom’s powerful automation capabilities, like Custom Bots, to collect valuable information about customers’ queries, drive further efficiency across their support with smart routing rules, and enhance their customers’ experiences through faster replies and resolutions. “Since we introduced Custom Bots, our Support team has been able to save time and reduce their median reply count for certain queries by 57% – from seven replies to just three,” says Brian. Coda has also customized the Intercom Inbox to make managing inbound conversations more efficient, with dedicated team inboxes to ensure queries are routed to the right place to get support.

Leveraging feedback to drive action

Collecting feedback from customers at the precise moment they’re experiencing something is an important step in gaining a deep understanding of their journey with your product. Coda uses Intercom Surveys during the onboarding process and to measure NPS in order to contextualize customers’ experiences and drive action based on direct, in-the-moment feedback.

Using the Coda and Intercom integration, Brian explains that the team has been able to leverage the insights they’re getting from Surveys and share them across the company. “We want to provide a more contextualized and personal experience based on user feedback. So, once we capture the information, we can then synthesize it for our teams and then use that data to power downstream behavior,” says Brian. “As an example, if we have a survey result that maybe was a bit of a detractor, somebody who was having a negative or not-so-great experience on their onboarding journey with Coda, we can then take that information and get it in the hands of a CSM or someone on the support side to step in at the right moment.”

Building a seamless customer experience

Brian notes that the ability to engage with customers and collect feedback in-product using Surveys is a seamless and elegant experience for their customers. “We feel like we're getting really good responses with relevant information,” he says.

“The idea that we can provide the right level of interaction to meet the customer in their moment of need and turn a frustration into a moment of delight has been really powerful. We have very happy customers as well. We want to take those moments of delight and amplify them.” This is evident from the team’s high customer satisfaction scores, which consistently sit above 95%.

A tech stack built for scale

As Coda continues to grow, it’s important for teams from across the company to be able to use tools that set them up for success – without sacrificing data integrity. They have heavily integrated Intercom with the other tools they use, like their CRM – and, of course, their own product – to ensure that they can collaborate seamlessly with other teams while maintaining a single source of truth for customer communication. “We rely really heavily on the Intercom Pack – the integration that we have with Intercom – to pull in a lot of really rich user data and customer experience data into Coda,” he says. “That gives us the ability to synthesize and analyze this information, and of course, collaborate and share it across the rest of the company. Everybody at Coda wants to know what our customers are saying, so it's great that we can amplify the voice of the customer across the whole organization.”

Being able to integrate with the tools they need to adopt as they scale is crucial for the team as they look to the future. “We use Salesforce on the sales and marketing side, so we have Intercom integrated really seamlessly into our CRM. This enables us to really provide all the necessary user detail and customer information all in one place,” he says. “So, regardless of the system each team is using, we still have that same single source of truth with Intercom.” By having their systems in sync and leveraging customer data from multiple sources in Intercom, Coda can completely tailor their customer messaging, create a better user experience, and save valuable time.

Looking to the future, Brian and the team at Coda are excited about the opportunity that lies ahead with Intercom. “We need to continue to deliver that same level of customer experience at scale. We're growing incredibly rapidly and we need a tool to really be nimble and agile and grow with us,” says Brian. “This year is a really important year for us as we open up more omnichannel experiences, and we're looking forward to partnering with the Intercom team to provide more ways for customers to communicate with us.”

At our recent New at Intercom event, we invited Brian to speak with our Chief Product Officer Paul Adams about how Coda is creating great customer experiences while also driving growth across their business. Check out the keynote session here.