Biz Stone, 500 Startups And Others Put $1M In CRM For Web Businesses Intercom

CRM and 500 Startups incubated company Intercom has raised a seed round of $1 million from angel investors including twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Huddle founder Andy McLoughlin, Dan Martell, 500 Startups and Digital Garage.

Intercom’s customer relationship management tool (CRM) is designed specifically for web businesses. The web-based SaaS features Google Analytics-like integration so that its database of customers is always automatically up-to-date, tracking every interaction. With its flexible filtering function, users can be segmented into groups for whom the business has different goals (i.e. converting free users into paying customers).

Here’s how the startup differs from the standard CRMs. Intercom get its data from a JavaScript snippet that users add to the applications, similar to Google Analytics. As a result of this, the platform automatically learns a businesses’ customer base, and how they use a product.

Intercom includes the ability to contact customers directly from the product itself, so if you see a high-profile user signing up, greeting him with a personal message in the app is super simple. You can also create messages based on rules within the app. For example “show users this message when they have spent more than $100” , or “show all users with more than 1,000 twitter followers this message”.

In order to figure out who a businesses’ users are, Intercom will track activity data of how often customers use an app, business data pertaining to what plan are they on and/or how much money have they spent, social network profile data and communications and contact data.

All of this data, combined with the features mentioned above, will help online businesses convert trial users to paid accounts, and to grow a long-term relationship with customers, explains CEO and co-founder Eoghan McCabe.

For example, beta customers like GitHub are using Intercom’s messaging features to learn about and engage with their customers—individually and automatically, at scale. The Intercom product, which has been in private beta, currently has 1,500 active users from 500 companies, tracking and communicating with over 1 million customers.

“Intercom brings real human relationships back into the picture for web businesses and their customers,” says McCabe. “As ‘software eats the world,’ in the words of Marc Andreessen, and all businesses become web businesses, genuinely personal and personalized customer service is the most effective, long-lasting way for companies to differentiate their offering and fight commodification.”

McCabe and his co-founders Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee, and David Barrett all hail from Ireland and previously founders created error tracking service Exceptional, which was acquired in 2011.

Today, Intercom will be available to the public and will be free until the first full version of the product launches this summer.