Reduce your SaaS product friction with Intercom

Customers experience more product friction than what gets reported.

And many CTOs, CPOs, and Product Managers know this.

Creating and maintaining an amazing SaaS product is hard. You are rarely working on the full picture of the issues that are causing friction for your customers.

Nevertheless, to be a good product leader, you need to design a system that taps into support and gives accurate insights about what is causing friction.

With the help of AI, you can now have weekly reports in minutes (without extra effort or hours of coding). In this article, we will explain to you how you can use Updatemate.ai to monitor the sources of product friction.

Not knowing the full picture enables more product friction

Typically, only major bugs and feature requests get reported through support. This means there is a lot of ground the support team could cover and fix but customers do not report it.

As a product leader, the real challenge then becomes trying to lead without having the real picture. You may solve some issues based on the ones that get reported. But some features may be causing friction and you know nothing about it.

Tap into what is causing friction

Tapping into product friction issues can be the difference between having an ok and an amazing product that spreads through word-of-mouth.

Start with what you know, the issues that get reported to support.

You can have an AI agent doing the boring work for you. Less stress for you and more time to figure out solutions. You can receive reports with key insights everytime you need them.

Monitor product issues and friction in 3 easy steps

If you already have your updatemate.ai workspace or you sign up for a new one, you can receive weekly reports within minutes:

Connect to Intercom

Create a new data Source, select Intercom as the app, and then click “Connect to Intercom” and choose your Intercom account. 

Set you (and perhaps others?) as recipients

Create a new Destination, select email and just type the emails you want to send your insights to. This group can be re-used across several agents.

Create your personal AI Agent

Now it is time to put it all together into your real AI agent. 

Add a new agent and give it a name, description and icon you like - e.g. “Product friction bot”.

Select your agents' properties like work schedule (do you want this report on Friday afternoon, Monday morning or at the start of the month?). Then, set the destination to the email group you just created.

Finally, you can pick your AI model - a model is like a brain. Some models are cheap but not the brightest, others are smart but more expensive (still a fraction of the cost compared to humans doing the same work).

Pick what data sources your agent should work on. Select the Intercom conversations you just made. If you have other customer support or review data sources you can add those as well.

Now your agent is configured and you only need to tell it what you need it to do (the prompt). Use plain English. For product insights, we really like this prompt:

I'm the CTO / CPO / Product Manager of this company and want to give our customers a seamless product experience. Tell it to me straight - what features of our product are causing issues and friction for our customers?

Take these customer conversations and group them into topics. Sort topics by the most frequent first and list them like this: 

- For each topic give it a headline and a short description.

- Then give 2-5 examples of customer quotes highlighting the topic. If the quote is not in English provide an English translation after the quote.

Click the play button and your agent will load your data and do its analysis. When it is done it will redirect you to its full report.

Delegating to AI is like delegating to humans - you need to be clear and concise. Don’t be afraid to tweak and adjust your prompt so you get exactly the results you want.