TrueCommerce reduced inbound conversation volume by 20% with proactive and self-serve support

As experts in integrated commerce solutions, the TrueCommerce team uses Intercom to support its customer base of suppliers, retailers, brands, manufacturers, and logistics service providers. With its unified commerce platform, TrueCommerce combines sophisticated supply chain automation with a personal touch.

For the past 25 years, TrueCommerce has been helping over 13,000 customers across three continents be more connected, more supported, and more prepared for growth. By creating a central hub to integrate everything from EDI to inventory management, fulfillment, digital storefronts and marketplaces, business systems, and more, they help their customers do business in every direction. Their Foundry Platform empowers businesses to connect virtually any organization or service to their supply chain ecosystem, and deliver an exceptional customer experience. Great customer experience is also at the heart of what TrueCommerce does, and the team has been using Intercom to provide their customers with a personal, all-in-one support solution since 2018. 

The launch of in-app support

In recent years, TrueCommerce has significantly expanded its product offering, with customers now able to visually package and manage warehouse orders and shipments for their solutions. They can also leverage one of the platform’s many ecommerce integrations to sell their products on household-name websites like Amazon, Walmart, or Target – with TrueCommerce managing everything behind the scenes.

The Foundry Platform acts as the central hub for customers, where they can manage everything from inventory planning to designing their own digital storefront. There, they can also access the TrueCommerce Support Center directly if issues arise.

With up to 13,000 customers signed in at any given moment, the team knew that a reliable support system that is accessible from all areas of the platform was critical. They chose to power their Support Center using Intercom. Unlike email or other non-chat support channels, this kind of in-app support gives customer the ability to seek support at the exact time – and in the exact place – their issue is happening.

Having looked at and tested alternative chat solutions prior to moving to Intercom, Christian Parker, Vice President of Managed Services, says, “We knew our users were going to need chat, so it was just a really easy decision to pull Intercom in. We did try other solutions like Enghouse chat, but Intercom was lightyears ahead of everybody and is really easy to install.” Having experienced Intercom as an end user prior to implementing it at TrueCommerce, Christian goes on to say, “I remember thinking, ‘This is amazing! I love this’.”

Christian’s team of service and support specialists use the Intercom Messenger to provide real time, personal support to their customers when they need it most. They receive over 10,000 customer contacts a month, so it’s essential that the team has a way to quickly understand who they’re chatting with. Using a custom integration between Intercom and NetSuite, their CRM, the team is able to easily send data attributes from one system to another, such as the products and integrations the customer is using and who their account manager is. These attributes give the team valuable context as they’re chatting with customers so they are able to better personalize their support and ensure a positive customer experience.

Offering just-in-time proactive support

Given the high number of active users signed in at any given time, it’s important for the team to be able to quickly communicate with users when the need arises. The Intercom platform helps the team identify which customers are online when they need to send an alert out and use Intercom’s outbound messages to proactively communicate with affected customers. Through these efforts, the support team has seen a dramatic decrease of almost 80% for the contact rate by affected users when temporary issues come up, as they already know how to take action.

“By targeting specific users who are active in the product when issues come up, we’re able to let them know we’re already on it and how they can stay updated,” Christian explains. Providing this type of targeted support at the precise moment it’s needed, without having to send a mass communication to all customers – many of whom may not be impacted by it – is one of the many reasons TrueCommerce chose Intercom.

Self-serve support for common questions

In addition to proactive support, TrueCommerce uses self-serve support features within Intercom, such as Articles and Custom Bots, to answer commonly asked questions and serve up relevant help center content to customers. The team also embeds their own status page directly within Intercom so they can direct customers to it when there’s a known outage, and they’ve also built a series of custom apps with the Intercom API to enable customers to submit and manage email tickets from directly within the Messenger.

Overall, the combination of self-service and proactive support has helped TrueCommerce reduce its inbound conversation volume by 20% over the past two years, even as its user base has continued to grow. Looking ahead, Christian and his team plan to further build out their self-serve support offering, tailoring all of their existing help center articles to fit their expanding portfolio of products.

Building a modern support experience

The move to Intercom has been met with resounding praise from TrueCommerce’s customers. Christian’s ultimate vision is to move away from large email threads as a form of support, explaining that it’s inefficient and doesn’t provide a good experience to the customer. TrueCommerce acts as a central hub for its customers, with quick and detailed answers in the product, which is exactly why the support team chose Intercom as its support platform. In Christian’s own words, “Our customers were getting tired of having to go to different places to get the answer they needed. They were so excited about Intercom – they just fell in love with it.”