Intercom has launched Operator, which is a #botoftheweek for customer experience.

Why do they need a chatbot?

Intercom makes products that help businesses to communicate with their customers. The bot’s goal here is to automate some extremely simple tasks around this communication, which the bot can handle better/faster than live operators.

For example, if someone is texting business on a website, and that business is now overnight, nobody will pick up the chat. In this case, the bot could clarify the situation and ask for the best channel to follow up when the team will be back in the office.

Just like Amazon Alexa, Operator has a growing set of skills, including:

- Set expectations based on your team’s availability
- Collect contact information
- Intelligently suggest help articles to answer questions
- Automatically close answered conversations for you
- Measure customer satisfaction

It’s just the beginning, the next step is to add some kind of SDK/framework available for teams to build their own skills 🤖

https://www.intercom.com/operator-bot