How Smartly.io uses customer support to win enterprise customers

With thousands of advertising dollars on the line, marketers need a high degree of confidence that their tools won’t let them down as they rapidly test and optimize ad campaigns. The stellar customer support that social ad automation platform Smartly.io provides gives marketers the reassurance they’re looking for. 

Creating this kind of support requires a special mindset on the team, bolstered by investment in the right tools. A lot of companies treat support as just another cost center, but at Smartly.io, the team embraces support as a competitive advantage in an industry that’s often high pressure and ever-changing. Intercom has helped them maintain that competitive edge with its open platform and collaboration features. As a result, Smartly.io’s support has helped the company win big-name customers like Uber, eBay, Walmart, McDonald’s, and Under Armour.

Director of Service Operations Marc-Olivier Meunier says: “Since the start, support has been at the heart of the company. Our 10x growth in the last 5 years wouldn’t have been possible without Intercom.” 

Providing a reassuring support experience

The need to scale customer support led Smartly.io to Intercom over five years ago. With ad tech tools constantly evolving, the Smartly.io team needed to give its customers an easy way to troubleshoot issues at any time – or risk customer dissatisfaction and churn.  

Marc-Olivier explains, “Most of our customers are dealing with fairly urgent questions and they can’t afford to wait 24 hours for an answer. Chat lets us give them fast feedback and creates a great support experience.” 

To deliver fast response times, the Smartly.io team chose to use chat as the primary way to support customers from the very start. At first, Smartly.io tried supporting customers through Facebook Messenger; it also tested Skype for a while. But these tools lacked basic features like in-app messaging and didn’t give team members enough context about the customers they were chatting with. The team needed a more robust support tool that signaled to its customers that Smartly.io would be there for them in high-stakes moments. 

The team also needed a tool that offers strong collaboration features like a shared inbox and easy conversation routing. That’s because every team member answers support questions at Smartly.io, from execs to folks in marketing, finance, and even legal. This unique approach to support keeps the entire team close to customers and gives them the confidence that they’re building the right product features and services. According to Marc-Olivier, “You can’t do support if you don’t know the product inside out, or vice versa. By having everyone do support, we’re able to smash silos between teams.”

Tailoring Intercom to their needs

Plenty of support tools on the market offer chat. But what convinced Smartly.io to go with Intercom over other conversational support tools was Intercom’s open API. The API gave them the ability to build custom dashboards and tailor Intercom to their needs.

For instance, the team developed its own app that sits within the Intercom Inbox and gives team members a snapshot of the conversation history from the customer’s viewpoint. It tells team members at a glance who’s chatted with the customer recently, for how long, and in what order. This info gives team members much better context as they’re chatting with a customer.

Another custom-built Inbox app shows the volume of conversations for each team member at any given moment. With this info, support team leads can easily assign incoming conversations to available team members and ensure that customers get a fast response. This setup has been so effective that the team’s been able to keep their time to first response consistently under 5 minutes. 

Intercom has also helped the team stay highly efficient. Using collaboration features like Intercom’s internal team notes, team members are able to easily loop in others for troubleshooting help when complex questions arise. By keeping the number of customer-facing handovers to a minimum and taking an empathetic tone with customers, the team keeps their CSAT scores consistently high.

As Marc-Olivier sees it, “Our number one goal in support is to help our customers get back to work. When we solve their problem, we’re able to fix their frustration and put a smile back on their face.”

Great support that results in 10x growth

Intercom has supported Smartly.io in its rapid growth over the last 5 years, helping it to grow 10x. With Intercom at the core of its support tech stack, Smartly.io has been able to achieve a 97% CSAT score and respond to customers within five minutes of them writing in. Customers rank it as the #1 tool on the G2.com Relationship Index for Social Media Advertising, which measures customers’ satisfaction with various social media advertising tools and their support. Great customer support has become synonymous with the Smartly.io brand, allowing them to differentiate themselves from competitors, win big customers, and accelerate its growth.