How Intercom leveraged strategic gifting to delight customers and nurture client relationships

Existing Intercom customers.

Intercom is the only complete Customer Service solution that provides a seamless customer experience across automation and human support, delivering increased customer satisfaction while reducing costs. Their platform connects businesses directly to customers using powerful messaging and automation, and they enable teams to scale support without investing more resources — leading to happier customers and more efficient Customer Support teams.

To create a gifting plan that rewards and delights Intercom’s existing customers by celebrating key milestones and contributions, while also empowering their Sales team to find strategic opportunities and continue strengthening relationships.

Intercom monitored several key indicators, including NPS, CSAT and account spend to help understand if their gifting campaigns were working.

The Intercom Sales and Customer Advocacy teams collaborated to identify three gifting moments in their customer journey:

The Intercom Brand Studio team then partnered with &Open’s team of designers to curate a special gift for each scenario. Gifts were sent out to customers once they reached these milestones.

There are a lot of different corporate gifting providers to choose from. So first, decide on and define the exact experience you want to deliver and why. Know what the non-negotiable aspects of your specific program are. Having a detailed strategy going into those conversations will make your decision a lot easier and, in the end, more successful.

Intercom decided to choose &Open based on the truly considered customer experience the &Open platform and team could provide. This ranged from the gift sourcing to the bespoke redemption experience to the capabilities for recipients to forgo a physical gift in place of a charitable donation. Intercom customers were the focus every step of the way. To date, over 50% of customers have opted for the donation option, showing that this choice really resonated with the audience.

One of the most memorable experiences of the campaign was presenting final gift designs to the entire company at Intercom’s weekly Show & Tell. The reaction from everyone was incredible! The Intercom team loved the gifts and was eager and excited to start sending them to customers. There were even multiple queries as to how team members could get their hands on the gifts for themselves (which means we did our job correctly).

Feedback was overwhelmingly positive from both the Intercom team and their customers. Gift redemption rates were higher than they had expected and the satisfaction survey allowed the customers to send direct feedback, with some even including photos of their gifts, like in this tweet.

12 months after the launch of the gifting program, Intercom has seen an increase in CSAT and NPS scores amongst customers who received a gift, as well as positive a correlation with revenue health.

Intercom is just one example of how better gifting has transformed business relationships into ones that last. Want to learn more about getting started on your own customer gifting journey? Book a demo today.