Declan Ivory Intercom’s Vice President of Customer Support is an experienced senior leader with a passion for building and developing high-performing teams and applying digital technologies to support organizations through major business transformation.
Prior to sharing his operational expertise and strong leadership to support the growth of Intercom’s customer support team, over the last 10 years, Declan has held senior support leadership roles with Amazon Web Services, Tableau Software and Google Cloud.
Questions
• We always like to give our guests an opportunity to just share a little bit about themselves in their own words, how did you get to where you are today?
• So, for those of our listeners that don’t know what Intercom is, could you tell them what your company does?
• So, AI, it’s covers quite a bit of things. Could you tell our listeners maybe, I would say, two or three top areas that you think organisations need to focus on as it relates to AI? And maybe what are some of the skill sets?
• Could you also share with us what’s the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can’t live without in your business?
• Could you also share with our listeners, maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you, it could be a book that you read a very a long time ago or even one that you read recently.
• Could you also share with our listeners what’s the one thing that’s going on in your life right now that you’re really excited about? Either something you’re working on to develop yourself or your people.
• Where can listeners find you online?
• Now, before we wrap our episodes up, we always like to ask our guests, do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you’ll tend to revert to this quote, it kind of helps to get you back on track if for any reason you got derailed.
Highlights
Declan’s Journey
Delcan shared that that’s a good question. So, he originally studied engineering and graduated as an electronic engineer and went straight into the kind of technology industry. And he’s stayed in the tech industry for the last 35 years. But one thing he kind of realized very quickly, one component engineering background that gave him a strong problem-solving skill, and two any business only lives for customers.
So, he’s always been obsessed by doing things for customers and making their life easier and delivering a better customer experience, that’s kind of driven him from early on in his career.
And the result of ended up in various kinds of customer support roles. And in particular, over the last 10 years, he’s been working with organizations who are growing very fast, building out a compelling customer support experience, trying to apply technology to how they’re enhancing and improving the customer experience during the support journey. So, he has had the opportunity to really work in high growth environments. And how he landed in the current role, he was kind of a little bit disappointed that at the speed at which the customer service or customer support industry was really adopting technology and felt like there was a gap there.
Some examples of businesses being very innovative, but it wasn’t pervasive across the industry. And moving to an organization like Intercom, whose whole kind of raised data is about delivering customer support and having a compelling Customer Support Platform. It was an opportunity, one to work for an organization that was very innovative, and was really driving the technology capability within the customer service base. But also gave him the opportunity to use the things too that customers support are using as well, which meant that he could be a genuine voice to report back to the product team, and really implement a product roadmap, product direction, and really drive the level of transformation around how support is delivered using technology. And at the end of the day marrying technology and compelling human support to really drive a value-add experience for customers.
What is Intercom and What They Do?
Me: So, for those of our listeners that don’t know what Intercom is, could you tell them what your company does?
Declan shared that Intercom is an Irish founded company, very much focused on delivering the next generation customer service platform, built for what they call an AI world. But very much recognising that combination of AI technology or automation, working in conjunction with human support that actually delivers the best customer experience possible.
That’s kind of is the focus of Intercom, it is building and delivering has stated, the next generation customer service platform. It’s got a very strong heritage from a technology and innovation point of view.
For example, it was one of the first organisations to use messenger technology for allowing or enabling customer communications in support world, was very early in terms of adopting Chatbot, adopting AI ML to do kind of conversation analysis. And now is adopting kind of the latest generative AI capabilities well incorporating that into their platform.
Top Areas Organizations Need to Focus On as it Relates to AI
Me: So, AI, it’s covers quite a bit of things. Could you tell our listeners maybe, I would say, two or three top areas that you think organizations need to focus on as it relates to AI? And maybe what are some of the skill sets because one of the things that they had mentioned when you were introduced to me was, organizations are taking on artificial intelligence, but they don’t necessarily have the skill set to manage and integrate it fully with what they’re offering to customers. So, could you share with us maybe some of the things that organizations need to look at before they even embrace that type of technology?
Declan shared that the first part of question, the three areas where he thinks AI can be applied, the first area is on customer engagement and really the advances that have happened in generative AI and technology like ChatGPT, etc. Now there’s an opportunity for the AI interaction with a customer to actually feel a lot more genuine, authentic, more contextual, you’re being able to leverage a level of reasoning within the technology that wasn’t there before and a lot of chatbot technology.
So, the first area where he thinks the current manifestation of AI can be delivered is in delivering a better customer experience in dealing with that technology and that technology being able to automate a particularly transactions or issues that are very easy to resolve, you’re taking a lot of friction out of those particular simple transactions. And yet, then being able to handle the work, the more complex transactions to human support team that have all the context that the AI engagement has gone through, understand the customer situation. And it’s basically a thing that handover to the human support funding.
Secondary, for that human support team themselves with AI tools we can help that team to drive a lot of efficiency and to help them do their job and in a much better way. Even simple things when able to prompt, what they call Smart Reply is the trying to understand the customer problem and suggest possible solution for the support rep. So, that they can then make an informed decision on what’s the best solution, applying their own subject matter expertise to the guidance that’s been given by the AI co-pilot. And basically, you’ll ultimately drive a better solution for the customer.
There’s even simple tooling that AI can provide, like summarizing a case or a conversation that customers had particularly important if you’re doing 24/7 support, and you’re handing over from one agent to another, you’ll be able to have a tool to actually generate a summary of what has happened today, in a very kind of concise and factual way and use that as the handover mechanism. Again, just makes the life of the support team a lot easier.
And the third area where AI can be applied is actually running a support operation. So, they can use a AI technology to really understand the nature of the work that’s coming into you whether that cases or conversations being able to analyse those that scale and volume, and look at the trends that are appearing there and use that and to drive improvements, whether that’s in the product, whether it’s in your support processes, whether it’s within the field that you have within your team, those operations inside, the third area where AI can be applied and really drive value. They’re kind of the three areas where AI particularly as it is today can be applied and drive a lot of value.
The second question you had, which was around what skills that are required. And that’s a really interesting question, because there’s lots of people are focusing on “Well, you take it all the transactions and your handling them in an automated way, does that mean that the job of the support rep is going away?” Absolutely not, like the job of the support rep is actually changing with AI, they’re changing in a very positive way.
One, you’re taking out a lot of the easy transactions or the easy issues, which ultimately don’t provide the billing work for support agents that you like the more complex issues where they can actually demonstrate their subject matter expertise, they can hone their skills, hone their problem-solving skills and effort, they’re actually providing far more fulfilling work to support reps in that environment.
From a yield point of view, problem solving skills are really important. Generally, if customers are coming through the support team is for the more complex issues. And generally, they’re expecting a level of empathy, a level of understanding of them as a customer. So, you’ve got to have your support rep to can really understand the customer context, provide a personalized experience as a result of that. And that’s kind of the traditional support role is changing, but new roles are emerging.
Well, a very simple example, like he’s hired in what he calls a Conversation Designer in the last few months, because ultimately, if customers are interacting with automated technology, and then dealing with a human support person, you really want to make sure that it’s a seamless experienced.
And you’ve got to constantly look at what is that customer experience, is it actually as seamless as it needs to be, is the handover almost seamless from a customer point of view, and you’re taking full advantage of all the context that has been gained through the automated that was dealing with that the customer, the customer does not have to duplicate information, you’ll actually feel like they’re being heard from the very onset of their engagement with you as a support organization.
But that has to be designed in, it doesn’t happen by chance, like people kind of feel “Oh, I can turn on ChatGPT. Or I can turn on the AI technology and it just worked.” It worked to a fashion but if you really want to make it stand out for you as the business and really drive value for your customers, you got to be very thoughtful around that whole conversation flow. And you’ve got to understand that not everything can be automated. And you have to think about the human support piece as well. And it’s really about AI augmenting and supplementing that human support piece.
The roles like conversation designer, or a new role, prompt engineering, how can you educate your customers, like to interface with your AI technology in the best way to actually get the maximum value back in terms of getting their questions answered, etc.
So, it’s a really, really interesting space at the moment because it’s evolving. No one has all the answers, there is the blueprint around exactly how this works. We’re almost creating the runbook as we go along and adaptive technology and really understand what that mean from a customer experience point of view. What does it mean from a corporate point of view as well. So, from that point of view, new skills are required, the AI technology is only as good as the information and knowledge that it has access to, who generates that knowledge and information, our human support team, again, much more emphasis on our team developing knowledge articles, developing knowledge artefacts that can be used by the AI.
And that’s really important as well, like you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got a very strong problem solving mindset in your team, that they’re really thinking about, “Okay, well customers had this issue come through to me the human support rep, how can I ensure that I can provide knowledge back into the ecosystem that makes sure if another customer has the problem, they’re not going to come through another the automated.”That again, another skill set that the whole knowledge management, knowledge creation skill set is really important in support world. So, his own hypothesis is that support role is actually going to become far more valuable in this world of AI first and there are new skills, new capabilities required. So, it’s going to be really, really interesting space for people from a career point of view.
Me: Very good. So, all of what you said a while ago, I even hear things like new careers coming up, new opportunities, the scope is so wide for persons who are emerging and trying to figure out what they want to do in life. I mean, when you think about where the world was 20 years ago, and some of the careers that exist today, I’m sure 20 years from now, there are careers that are, as you mentioned, just emerging that are going to become top areas that people would want to be pursuing in like we’re in 2023 now, so 20 years from now will be 2043, what would be really existing by then?
Declan shares that absolutely, there’s going to be a whole new set of skill sets required. And it evolve, like when technology has emerged at any stage over the last number of decades, people have been able to adapt technology and change the nature of the roles that they undertook.
With that technology is complementing roles and augmenting roles as detect them with AI like complementing the human support experience for our customers and driving the ultimate value for customers. And that’s a really exciting because it can be frustrating by the pace of adoption of technology, particularly with the customer support industry. He thinks by and large, we deal with customers the same way we dealt with them a decade or two decades ago. And now there’s an opportunity to really transform how support is delivered and that for him is really, really exciting.
App, Website or Tool that Declan Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Declan shared that he could be very flipping and say Intercom itself, you’re probably looking for a different answer. So, while their team do use Intercom, they really love it, he kind of took that back and there are lots of kind of productivity tools he could mentioned, but he’s actually going to give one, it’s probably maybe a little bit of a surprising answer. ButLinkedIn for him is a really, really vital tool for a whole lot of reasons. Like in the support world, it’s all about connections and networking and very often in LinkedIn, you get access to people who have new ideas, new opinions, they’re sharing thought leadership particularly around AI and customer service, etc.
So, it’s been a really, really rich ground for getting information around.
What are people really considering as best practice?
What are they thinking in terms of some of the challenges that they’re facing when they adopt AI?
Getting those connections and getting access to some of the top leadership articles that are appearing in LinkedIn, for him at the moment, makes LinkedIn really compelling. It’s also really useful for there are sometimes situations where you may really need to reach out to customers in a different way, so maybe not through your traditional channels, but you want to kind of have a different channel to talk to maybe someone in a customer’s organization that you deal with in an ongoing basis, LinkedIn is great just for getting those network set up and actually engaging customers in a different way.
And then from a recruitment point of view, like understanding what talent is out there, who are looking for roles, what are people’s experiences, who’s a good match for maybe a new opportunity that you have?
So, for him, when he took a step back, he thinks of where is your productivity, etc. And actually LinkedIn, the tool that he uses most on a day to day basis, the company and that’s what he does in the role there.
Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Declan
When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Declan shared that the first one is a book calledAtomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear. And this is really around the fact that you can drive improvements very incrementally. And he talks about improving 1% per day and how that accumulates over time. And it really gets you thinking about changing your habits, and making very small changes in how you are, but that ultimately delivering your very beneficial result, at the end of the day.
The other book is a book called The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller. And this is around really allowing you to focus on what’s the most important thing that you need to do right here, right now, not that you neglect everything else, but you make sure that you give the right priority to the thing that’s going to have the most impact right here and right now.
And then the final one book called The Creative Problem Solver: 12 Smart Tools to Solve Any Business Challenge by Ian Atkinson. And that gives a framework of 12 problem solving techniques that he found really useful to share with teams and get them thinking about how can they approach different problems in different ways. And that framework of 12 tools or 12 approaches ultimately, if you apply one or two of them to a particular problem, you will come up with some very creative solutions, very creative approaches to actually solving a particular problem. They are three books that he’s kind of consistently gone back to in his career, and he’s found them very impactful both for him and for teams that he’s been working with.
What Declan is Really Excited About Now!
When asked about something that he’s really excited about, Declan shared that it goes back to the excitement that he talked about applying technology. So, at Intercom, they have built what they call an AI bot called Fin, that’s the name. And he’s been really kind of excited by the fact that he’s been able to get early access technologies that they were the first beta customer for them. And that kind of thing that he’s working on is how can they apply Fin in the context of their own business, and really drive a different customer experience. And he’s got all the team engaged in that, again, for adoption of any technology, you really got to get your team excited, motivated by it, you’ve got to allow them to influence how you introduce that technology. That’s kind of the biggest thing that he’s working on at the moment, is allowing him to develop different perspectives around how you can apply this technology, getting his team involved, getting their insights around, what does it mean from a customer perspective? What does it mean from a teammate perspective, and really beginning to build out, what does a support operation of the future look like when you are in what they call an AI first or an AI led world.
And it’s really interesting, because a lot of things will change around the metric that you use to measure your team, the scale that the team need, how you think about capacity planning, there’s lots of different things that can lead into building an operation of the future in this world.
And that, for him, is the thing that kind of energizing him the most and allowing him to learn the most as well. And equally for his team, like everyone in the team was really learning through this process and they’re really being very thoughtful around how they can introduce this technology in the right way. So, deploying Fin for their own use case, and then to coordinate their customers who are using Fin, that’s where his staff and the team are really focused. And he would say he actually don’t think he’s been this energized in work for many decades.
Where Can We Find Nathan Online
LinkedIn – decivory
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Declan Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Declan shared that he has a quote from Henry Ford. And the quote is, “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”And he thinks that really captured the benefit and the essence of the failure, everyone fails and he thinks people need to be comfortable with failure, once you’re learning from it and in Henry Ford words, moving forward in a more intelligent way on the back of that learning.
Me: Now Declan, I just want to extend our deepest appreciation and gratitude to you for taking time out of your very busy schedule, for hopping on our podcast and sharing some of your insights, sharing a little bit about what your organization does, about what artificial intelligence is bringing to different industries, what are some of the opportunities that exist not just from a development and customer experience perspective, but even in terms of new career opportunities and developments that can emerge out of this new phase that we’re going into. It was really insightful, and I really thank you so much for joining us today for this interview.
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Links
· Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear
· The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller
· The Creative Problem Solver: 12 Smart Tools to Solve Any Business Challenge by Ian Atkinson
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