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Customer Communications Company Intercom Raises $6M Series A From The Social+Capital Partnership to Let Web Businesses Connect Personally With Their Customers

Startup aims to replace bloated and siloed helpdesk, customer relationship management (CRM), email marketing, and marketing automation tools with one simple solution


WEBWIRE

Intercom is going to change the way web businesses communicate. The company, which is announcing its Series A round, wants to enable web businesses to deliver the kind of service you would get at a small coffee shop or bar, where businesses know every customer by name, and what makes them happiest, in order to better serve them. Leading the round is The Social+Capital Partnership, with participation from Freestyle Capital and David Sacks, founder and CEO of Yammer.

Intercom, which includes former Facebook, Apple, Google, and Amazon designers and engineers on its team, is now being used by companies like GitHub, Heroku, Bit.ly, and Rackspace. Web businesses can try Intercom for free with this 30-second install:  https://www.intercom.io/

Popular customer support products like Zendesk are designed to reduce costs and actually make it difficult for a customer to contact a business, much like the dreadful call center systems of old that big corporations still use. In addition, the way email marketing products like MailChimp are designed makes it incredibly difficult to finely target customers, meaning a business must resort to effectively spamming large groups of users. Real people connecting with customers is such a rarity today, that companies choosing to invest in building genuine relationships can easily set themselves apart and ultimately gain and retain more loyal customers.

Intercom’s segmentation technology monitors user behavior and categorizes users in meaningful ways, allowing individuals to easily start personalized conversations with every single one of their customers. Easy to set up, Intercom uses a JavaScript integration to seamlessly connect into websites and apps, letting companies facilitate effective user communication with one tool instead of several, replacing helpdesk, CRM, email marketing, and marketing automation tools.

“It’s incredibly hard to provide great, personal customer service when you have to use many disconnected tools. Companies end up spamming customers, because they don’t have the power to target and personalize their messages. They also aim to reduce inbound contact because their bloated helpdesks make it too difficult to communicate with their customers at scale,” said Eoghan McCabe, CEO of Intercom. “Intercom is a completely reinvented approach to customer communications for the new generation of Internet businesses.”

“At Wattpad, we use Intercom to engage with over 10 million users. The ability to precisely target segments of customers allows us to start timely and relevant conversations with them,” said Ivan Yuen, CTO of Wattpad. “Our customers have responded very positively, and we have seen our user retention increase by 12 percent in just a few weeks.”

Intercom strongly believes that great web businesses will be built upon human relationships. Companies using Intercom can now offer the same level of personalization and service that small brick-and-mortar businesses have offered for decades. As a result, their customers experience familiarity, comfort, and trust, while these companies are able to develop a solid base of engaged, loyal, and devoted customers.

“Intercom is built to ride a couple of very big trends. Design and engineering are becoming table stakes, and the way businesses will differentiate is through customer service,” said Mamoon Hamid, general partner at The Social+Capital Partnership. “In addition, web business sales models have been shifting towards self-serve—a.k.a ‘The Consumerization of IT.’ So what used to be seen as support conversations, and therefore a cost, will increasingly play the role of sales and drive revenue for the business.”

This Series A follows an initial $1.75M in seed funding that was raised from 500 Startups, Freestyle Capital, and angels including Biz Stone in 2012.

To learn more about Intercom, please visit  www.intercom.io

About Intercom
Some companies hate talking to customers. Other companies use Intercom. Intercom’s mission is to build the best way for businesses to communicate with their customers at scale, with a level of personal intimacy not found in today’s connected world. Intercom is headquartered in San Francisco, and has its design and engineering office in Dublin, Ireland.

About The Social+Capital Partnership
The Social+Capital Partnership (“Social Capital”) is a partnership of philanthropists, technologists and capitalists utilizing venture capital as a force to create value and change on a global scale. The Partnership is based in Palo Alto, California.



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