How Pantheon creates a unified customer experience across sales and support

Pantheon is a website operations platform with a mission to power the open web as the primary platform for delivering digital experiences that drive results. It currently runs over 285,000 websites, enabling marketers and developers to quickly build, test, and manage Drupal & WordPress websites. CEO Zack Rosen knew they needed to create a seamless customer experience to match that of their platform.

With their previous ticketing setup, they were averaging responses in 30 minutes or less, but Zack knew they could improve that further by implementing live chat on their website. This was especially important because in the web publishing industry problems tend to happen right as developers are reaching crucial launch deadlines. Getting a quick solution to their problems during these times has an outsized impact on the success customers see with Pantheon which ultimately impacts retention.

Intercom brings Pantheon closer to its customers through live chat

Since switching to Intercom three years ago, 80% of inbound conversations come directly through the Messenger. With a global team of 25 agents providing 24/7 support coverage and fielding around 4,000 conversations a month, Intercom’s Inbox gives their team the necessary workflows to collaborate and quickly solve customer issues. Through live chat, Pantheon’s first response time has decreased to under 2 minutes!

For Shak Hossain, Pantheon’s Head of Support, Intercom’s data and reporting has given him the insights needed to scale their team’s growth appropriately to maximize team efficiency.

“Intercom gives us insights into busy and slow hours which help determine our staffing decisions. We can see week over week where our busiest hours are to finetune hours across our global team to ensure we have enough coverage at all times.”

Crucially, Intercom’s conversation ratings have also enabled Shak to better understand how the support team is performing. When using a traditional ticketing system, the customer feedback response rate was less than 10% after a conversation was closed. Tickets simply weren’t getting rated because feedback was being asked in a follow-up email. With Intercom, feedback response rate has increased to over 40% of conversations that get a rating. Best of all, collecting more feedback has actually improved their CSAT scores from the low 90’s to high 90’s.

As a result, Shak always has a pulse on how the support team is performing and ways in which they can improve the customer experience. All of this improvement has come even as their monthly conversation volume has grown. He attributes that primarily to the switch from ticketing to live chat.

“What chat gives us that ticketing doesn’t is we can develop an empathetic bond with our customers in real time. We believe strongly in a customer first philosophy, and live chat allows us to allay fears and develop trust that is harder to do asynchronously.”

As Sales adopts live chat, a consistent messaging experience becomes important

While the support team at Pantheon was fully ramped on live chat, the sales team was just starting to experiment with it. SDR manager Justin Campbell had implemented Olark as a simple way to provide an option to chat for leads that landed on their website. However by July of 2018, Justin noticed their chat volume begin to increase rapidly and they needed to find a more robust solution.

The key challenge was that 20-30% of chats they were fielding were actually support related. Even chats that initially started as a sales conversation could seamlessly transition into a support related question. The same issue was also experienced by the support team as well where a free trial user may have started a conversation to solve a technical question but then wanted to sign up for a paid plan.

When Justin’s SDR team encountered a technical support question they couldn’t answer, they would direct users to email their support alias to get their issue resolved. Using two different messengers was creating a fragmented customer experience and creating inefficiencies in the way sales and support collaborated.

“It was increasingly becoming clear that prospects were getting comfortable interacting through chat, even demanding it, which meant we needed to operationalize it in a better way. We needed to adopt one messenger across both our sales and support team in order to quickly triage inbound chats to the appropriate team and make it seamless for our prospects and customers too.”

Intercom’s Messenger now lives across Pantheon’s entire customer experience

By migrating all of their communication with prospects and customers to Intercom, Pantheon’s sales and support team can effortlessly collaborate to solve any customer questions. When inbound conversations come in, the support team can quickly triage conversations and assign it to the sales inbox when needed and vice versa. With notes, tags, and Intercom’s live view of customer data, both teams have the context they need to keep response times under two minutes. Most importantly, for the customer it’s one seamless experience. Even as the sales and support team work in the background, the customer only needs to start one conversation.

One particular aspect of Intercom that Justin values the most is the overall visibility of chats, including ones they have closed. He believes chat is useful as a training tool for ramping up new sales reps:

“When I’m onboarding new SDR’s to our team the first thing we do is put them on chat. It gives them good guardrails and enables them to craft more thoughtful answers, instead of a live call where they may be more nervous. We can also easily review their past conversations to provide feedback on areas for improvement.”

Since implementing Intercom in the SDR team, Pantheon has seen a 78% increase in the number of inbound leads converted via chat compared to their previous solution and 35% of chat sourced leads convert to enterprise opportunities.

Ultimately, for Zack crafting a seamless and consistent customer experience is a top company priority which is why he chose to use Intercom as Pantheon’s solution for customer messaging.

“Our first core value is customers come first. Strategically, we think a lot about how we can deliver on that. So when making a foundational platform decision like what solution we are going to use to communicate with our customers, we’re making a big bet. It’s not just about what the product does today, but the vision of where they are going. We chose Intercom because we know they are a product-centric company and have a similar customer-first mindset like us.”