Stuart is using Intercom to engage and proactively support their clients – at just the right time

Owned by GeoPost, Stuart is the leading logistics platform in Europe, operating in more than 100 cities with over 3,500 clients and counting. Having previously used email and SMS to communicate with both their clients and couriers, the team at Stuart knew they needed a channel that was faster, more efficient, and more personal to help them onboard and support their customer base as they grew their presence across Europe.

Stuart has over 100 agents on their support team to ensure a great experience for clients and couriers. Andrew Baylis, Head of Live Ops and Support, explains the present team size reflects the surge in growth they’ve seen in their user base over the last few years: Stuart now supports over 3,500 clients and 30,000 partner-couriers.

The team made the switch from Zendesk to Intercom because the level of support they needed to provide to their growing user base just wasn’t possible with email. Andrew says, “Hot food is one of several big industries for us, and sending an email when your meal is getting cold is not the right communication channel. We were looking for something far more effective, and that’s where we found Intercom.” Intercom’s outbound messaging gave them a faster, more flexible and reliable way to communicate with their clients. In addition to replacing email, the team was able to use outbound messaging in place of SMS – their previous channel of communication with partner-couriers – saving significant monthly costs. 

Going from strength to strength with Intercom

Stuart focuses on three main industries: grocery, retail, and food, and has recently expanded its product offering to include Stuart XL, a delivery service that works with companies like IKEA to offer home delivery and furniture building services to their customers. Another recent addition to their offering is Hub 2 Home, a retail-focused initiative that offers a delivery hub within major cities that stores can deliver orders to, and from which Stuart can fulfill the last part of the distribution.

Intercom plays a critical role in keeping Stuart connected with their clients and partner-couriers across every vertical, helping them to effectively manage the tens of thousands of chats they receive every week. With Intercom’s Inbox integrated with Stuart’s CRM, the team can categorize incoming queries based on the stage of the delivery process they relate to and use assignment rules to route them to specialized agents rather than grouping all process issues together. This has led to a huge spike in efficiency with valuable seconds being shaved off every interaction, resulting in the team gaining over 88 hours of time back every week and agents being able to handle up to 90 chats per hour. Having originally used Intercom for marketing and customer success and building out to include support, Andrew explains, “Intercom has grown up a lot since we started using it, and we’ve evolved alongside it.”

Personal, proactive support – in a scalable way

With the change in eating and shopping habits resulting from Covid-19, Stuart saw a whopping 400% increase in grocery volumes due to the rise in business their clients were seeing. Now facilitating the delivery of thousands of packages every day, Stuart is proactively supporting its clients and drivers with Intercom, leveraging outbound messaging to get ahead of known issues like adverse weather conditions and public events that could affect delivery windows and remind partner-couriers of necessary checks they need to make during delivery. In the UK, for example, deliveries containing alcohol or dangerous goods such as knives need to adhere to the Challenge 25 rule, which states that partner-couriers need to check that any recipient appearing to be under the age of 25 is over the legal age of 18 before they can complete the delivery. Integrating Intercom with their clients’ apps and websites enables them to proactively remind partner-couriers to check ID, reducing any potential issues and enhancing their overall quality of service.

The team is also using self-serve support features like Custom Bots with sophisticated resolution and routing capabilities to help them triage incoming queries in a way that’s fast and efficient, but also personal. In a test with a UK pharmacy client, the team was able to use these bots to share relevant help center articles, which resolved 70% of customer queries through automation.

On the client side, Andrew notes that small, independent restaurants typically don’t have time to chat, so Intercom’s ability to give them live updates on the status of deliveries has been incredibly impactful during this time.

A support tech stack built for success

To ensure they’re providing the right support – at just the right time – Stuart uses the Intercom API to integrate tools in its wider tech stack like Slack and Segment. Enabling these systems to talk to one another helps Stuart’s support team to have all the necessary context on-hand to understand each stage of the delivery lifecycle so they can provide timely, informed support to their drivers and clients, every step of the way. Data from Intercom is also analyzed by other teams within Stuart – from operations, to client and account management teams – to gain valuable insights on their overall client and partner-courier experience and identify areas that need to be optimized.

By integrating their data systems like Segment with Intercom, the team at Stuart is able to identify and reach out to customers based on their behavior on the platform. For example, by pulling their own CRM data into Intercom, Stuart can automate engagement campaigns to onboard partner-couriers and clients, congratulate partner-couriers on reaching key milestones, say, 5 or 10 completed deliveries, and much more. The ability to acknowledge their customers’ successes at scale and keep these communications personal is one of the many reasons Stuart uses Intercom.

As the direct link between their clients and partner-couriers, Stuart also needs to be able to facilitate real-time communication between both sides of their user base – and with 3,500 clients and 30,000 drivers, that’s no easy feat. By integrating Intercom with Slack, the team has built a communication channel that permits their enterprise clients like Just Eat to get in touch with delivery drivers through a dedicated Slack channel. This integration allows the partner-couriers to receive messages directly within the Stuart driver app, and makes communication between parties easy and seamless.

End-to-end engagement

Outside of their support operation, Stuart’s marketing team also uses Intercom to engage people at every stage of the user journey. From acquisition and onboarding to loyalty campaigns, marketing is making the most of Intercom’s engagement products to maximize the experience of their clients and drivers, seeing goal completion results of 60% and higher for many of these engagement campaigns.

The team is using UTM parameters to track conversions from ad campaigns on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google, which they can match to client account data in Intercom to give them a clear picture of how their campaigns are performing and help them to understand more about their new clients. Once a user has signed up, the team uses Product Tours to walk them through how to download invoices, give feedback on deliveries, redeem coupons, or add multi-drops to a single delivery, and has successfully onboarded over 17,000 users to-date.

Support that feels 1:1 at all times

Above all else, Stuart uses Intercom to stay connected with their user base as they continue to grow, and build strong relationships with the new clients and drivers that join them along the way. With such a large and fast-paced operation, keeping communication personal can be difficult.

But with Intercom, the team can maintain those personal conversations even as they grow. Andrew fondly recalls getting messages from users through the Business Messenger, saying, “One of our drivers in Barcelona used to message us every day saying ‘Hope you have a blessed day’ – which was something we never got with email. Intercom made our communication far more friendly and personal.”