Frame.io uses Intercom to provide personalized support to 2M customers

Frame.io is a cloud-based video collaboration platform that acts as a central hub for creators. The team has redefined the traditional model of video collaboration, boasting a customer list that includes the likes of Netflix, HBO, Google, and Masterclass.

Having experienced exponential growth in recent years, Brett Rush, Director of Customer Experience at Frame.io, explains that their customer base has grown more than 11 times in size since he joined the company in 2016. When Brett initially came on board as Head of Support, Frame.io’s CEO, Emery Wells, along with the CTO and Sales and Engineering department heads, were all on the frontlines of the company’s customer support. Since then, Brett and his team have developed a robust set of processes to streamline and scale their support in order to meet the needs of their growing customer base.

With customer expectations at an all-time high, Intercom’s conversational support solution has enabled Frame.io to create strong, consistent support experiences and build lasting relationships with their customers. The team is now providing support for a whopping two million customers and managing 4,500 conversations each month.

Building a tech stack for success 

Having previously used Help Scout and Zendesk, Brett explains that neither platform provided them with the all-in-one solution that they needed. The team used Help Scout primarily for hosting their knowledge base but found that the ticketing solution wasn’t suitable for their needs, and with Zendesk, Brett notes that the set-up process was tricky to navigate. “We had difficulties with Zendesk not being a plug-and-play solution. Design and engineering resources are needed to get set up. Intercom was easy to configure and implement while offering the ability to provide conversational support,” he says. 

Intercom’s conversational approach to customer experience was one of the standout features to the team, explains Frame.io’s CEO Emery Wells. “Intercom is an easy choice. It’s a platform with a combination of products that’s truly unique and accomplishes multiple jobs around customer communication,” he says. “At the highest level, that was the biggest differentiating point for us.”

From tickets to conversations 

Over the past year, one of the team’s goals has been to make their support more conversational, rather than it feeling like a ticketing system. Leveraging a combination of Intercom’s proactive, self-serve, and human support capabilities, they’ve been able to make great progress in pursuit of this goal, creating personalized experiences for customers at scale through conversations. And the results speak for themselves. In the last year, the team’s first-response time has been reduced from 3 hours to just 15 minutes – an 87.5% reduction.

Gill Wiggins, a manager on the support team at Frame.io, points to bots and automation as key contributors to the team’s success in boosting efficiency across their support. With such a large customer base, scaling personalized support to reach every customer can be a difficult feat, but with Intercom, they’ve been able to strike the right balance between being personal and efficient. “We sometimes forget that there is such a big gap between the number of support reps we have on the team and the number of customers we’re supporting because our KPIs are consistently high. Intercom has really helped us to bridge that gap – it almost acted as another rep at times,” she says. 

Empowering customers to help themselves

Through self-serve support features in Intercom, Frame.io’s customers have been empowered to search for information and find answers to their own questions. Pointing to the trends they’re seeing in customer appetite for these self-serve support journeys, Brett says, “We have over 20,000 help center visits and 36,000 article views every month. Our customers are really focused on trying to find the answer to their question first, or at least explore a solution before trying to reach out to our team.” 

In an effort to free up the team’s time and avoid the drain that comes with having to consistently answer the same questions, Gill and team implemented a custom bot flow to help resolve some of their most frequently asked questions. “We’re constantly tweaking the wording in the bot flows and customizing it to our style to ensure our customers aren’t having to read the same thing over and over, but the Custom Bots have been so helpful in freeing up our team’s time and ensuring that our users are getting a response in a timely manner. It makes it feel like we have another person on the team, which has really helped.” 

Proactively meeting customer needs  

The Frame.io team leverages proactive support to alert customers when a temporary issue arises, as well as to understand common sticking points within the product where the team has an opportunity to provide some additional support or education. Intercom enables the team to have a direct line of communication with customers, keep them updated, and manage the conversation volume that’s reaching the support team so they don’t become overwhelmed with inbound queries. 

Brett explains that the team is also utilizing conversation tags to analyze recurring trends and identify where customers are running into issues or tend to have questions, saying, “Intercom has really helped us turn our conversations into data. As my team hears all too often from me, data speaks volumes. If we’re not tracking what our customers need or are looking for, it’s going to be so difficult to understand that customer’s story and be able to relay that back to the rest of the company.” 

Balancing the workload

When it comes to managing inbound conversation volume, the team has implemented Intercom's workload management feature, which automatically assigns inbound conversations to ensure that no agent has more than five conversations in their active queue. Gill explains that this has had a massive impact on the team, pointing to a few major benefits they’ve experienced since implementing it: 

• The automatic distribution of inbound queries has helped to reduce queue anxiety for agents. 

• New hires have been able to ramp up faster – by not having the ability to cherry pick questions to answer, the team members are getting exposure to a broader range of topics. 

• Keeping inbox queues at a manageable level has had a great impact on team morale. 

“We tested workload management for a week and when we asked the team how they were feeling, it was a unanimous yes to keep it,” says Gill. “It was interesting because even though it was a busy week, they said it felt like a really quiet one. I think it’s made their day so much easier knowing that they can jump into a meeting and not come back to see that there’s been an explosion in their queue.” 

Seamless collaboration

Outside of support, Gill points to the benefits of having their Product and Sales teams able to jump into conversations in the Inbox and collaborate to reach faster resolutions. “It’s great when other teams are actively working in Intercom because we can mention them in a conversation and have them reply to us in there too,” she says. 

This direct insight into what customers are writing to the support team has also proved to be very valuable in helping the Product team to analyze and prioritize customer requests. Using Zapier and Airtable, new feature requests received from customers can be automatically sent to Airtable for the team to consider adding to their roadmap. 

Making it easy to talk to customers

Customer communication is a core part of Frame.io’s business, with Brett explaining that all new hires are trained on how to use Intercom and encouraged to jump into conversations with customers from the get-go. The feedback the team has gotten from the onboarding program has been incredibly positive, with new hires pleasantly surprised at how easy Intercom makes it to speak directly with customers. 

“All the time we hear feedback from folks that have never talked to a customer before, saying that they came in a little scared but it was actually very easy to have a conversation with the customer through the Inbox,” says Brett. “Intercom’s easy to use and allows you to feel comfortable talking to customers, which is great. It’s not like a ticketing system where all of a sudden you’re just bombarded with lots of tickets. I feel like it’s really different having a conversational platform.”

Looking to the future

As Frame.io continues to grow, Brett, Gill, and the team are focused on continuing to champion the voice of the customer throughout the company and ensuring that their needs are being met through personalized and efficient support. “Gill and Erin, another manager on our support team, are constantly staying abreast of new Intercom features and figuring out what we can do with them,” says Brett.

Speaking to the impact Intercom has had on the business, he adds, “I think the results we’ve seen to date speak volumes to how Intercom has helped us to remain a tight-knit team and offer support at scale.”