Intercom Blog

Intercom | Dublin, Ireland | SUPPORT ENGINEER | Full Time | ONSITE

Do you have a strong need to understand how and why things work the way they do? Are you acutely aware of customer experience and upset when a company you’re dealing with lets you down?

If you have some engineering or web development experience and want to be a part of creating truly exceptional customer experiences then the Customer Support team at Intercom is right for you.

Intercom supports over 12k businesses ranging from bootstrapped startups to large enterprise corporations. Our Support Engineers partner with our customers to tackle the challenging technical issues they face in innovative ways. In this role, you will be directly responsible for helping people integrate Intercom into their products, diagnose and report problems they have, and serve as the bridge between our customers and our product teams.

[We use Intercom to support Intercom customers](https://blog.intercom.io/intercom-customer-support/), so whether you’re just starting out in your career or want to get a deeper understanding of fundamental customer motivations and how those are applied to building an ambitious, world-class product, this role provides that great opportunity.

Our way of providing support is based on the [principles of continuity and trust](https://blog.intercom.io/rebuilding-support-around-continuity-trust/) and our style of communication is personal, friendly and fun. We engage in dynamic conversations with our…

Do you pay your hair stylist $10k+ for creating hair that will theoretically increase your bottom line?

Will that hair project also require months of work?

If so, your hair stylist would be very, very smart to say "No, sorry," to your request, because then there will be at least one more client of his/hers out there with a negative result. Which makes the hair stylist's portfolio success rate that much lower.

And the sign of somebody who won't say "No" is the sign of somebody who's not dedicated to results. As consulting god Weinberg would put it, they'd fail the Orange Juice Test: http://blog.intercom.io/the-orange-juice-test/

If you ask me, a better metaphor would be whether a person will go out with absolutely anyone who offers them a free dinner (even if they think the potential date is dumb as a box of rocks)… And what other, later, more desirable potential dates would think of that person's choice to not exert choice.

I found this on Intercoms blog post entitled "Some Things can't be Wireframed". This picture reflects the meta design of many websites. https://blog.intercom.io/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/SquareSpace-Frame.png

We've arrived with this design from years of design evolution and no one person is responsible. All products seem to ultimately converge on some optimal universal archetype. Websites, books and radio towers are no different in this sense. The same will be true of mobile Apps someday but I don't think its the case at the moment.

https://blog.intercom.io/things-cant-wireframed/

There will always be at least one thing that was more complex than expected.

Even finishing a project looks good to employers.

This post explains that even adding a word counter can be complex.
http://blog.intercom.io/there-are-no-small-changes/

"Do we crop the string, or display an error message to the user? If we display an error, where does it appear? What does it say? Who is going to write the error message? How do we explain to the user why we’re limiting them to 140 characters? How will these errors look? Do we have a style defined? If not, who is designing it?"

This hits the nail on the head.

Optimization is very, very rarely completely „free“ - and usually a concious trade of some property for another trait that‘s deemed more important in a specific case.

Simplicity for performance. Code size for compilation speed. Startup time for architectural complexity. UX for security.

For a great product, you need to say „no“ much more often than not. Do one thing and do it well. Be Redis, not JBoss.

I love how this article gets down to the essence of it: https://blog.intercom.com/product-strategy-means-saying-no/

The problem w/ circles, lists and tags, is that they require the user themselves to create and maintain them. Unless your tech can read minds and prompt for new affinities discovered or changes in relationship automatically, its too much cognitive load.

You should read - http://blog.intercom.io/what-we-can-learn-from-google-plus/
Curious how you solve for that.

I don't think its natural for humans to say "today Bob went from acquaintance to friend" or "i'll make a circle for dirty jokes" proactively.