Stop Support Spikes: Proactive Intercom Messages That Flatten Volume | Ep. 6 with Tobi Davis
Ever wish you could smooth out your support queue instead of riding the rollercoaster between silence and chaos?
In this episode of Support Stack, Tobi Davis, Head of Customer Experience at Pupil Progress, shares how his small team uses Intercom to predict and prevent seasonal support surges.
Tobi walks through their proactive approach to managing predictable spikes — like exam season — using outbound messages, dynamic targeting, and lightweight workflows that keep customers informed and support teams calm.
You’ll learn how they:
Use Intercom’s in-app messages to reach teachers at the perfect moment — when they’re already thinking about the task.
Create dynamic audiences and custom attributes (like “leader_of”) to send messages only to the right users.
Embed Typeform forms inside Messenger to collect requests and route them straight to the right queue.
Balance proactive and reactive support through agent-triggered workflows that help users learn more after every chat.
Build user trust by sending fewer, more relevant messages — reducing inbox noise and boosting engagement.
Whether you’re a CX leader, support manager, or anyone dealing with predictable peaks, you’ll take away concrete tactics to calm busy periods and empower your team to work smarter.
👉 Subscribe to my daily email for more Intercom + CX insights
Episode Transcript
Conor Pendergrast (00:00)
Hi, I'm Conor Pendergrast and welcome to episode six of Support Stack.
So, hey Tobi Davis from Pupil Progress, how are you doing today?
Tobi Davis (00:16)
I am all god Conor, how about yourself?
Conor Pendergrast (00:19)
I am very well, I'm pretty excited for what we're talking about today. So you are head of customer experience at Pupil Progress and I can imagine that you get a lot of people starting to use Pupil Progress and it's very different from how they did things when they were children, when they were in school. We've got technology and that comes with a lot of opportunities, but it also comes with probably a lot of help that people would need and can, I imagine, lead to some
Tobi Davis (00:34)
Yes.
That's right.
Conor Pendergrast (00:49)
Potential overwhelm if you are not smart like you and people with progress are.
Tobi Davis (00:54)
Yeah, absolutely. mean, you know, schools, perhaps not the most technology centric or technology forward institutions out there. And so before using Pupil Progress, a lot of our users will be tracking their assessments, their attainment on Excel or Google Sheets, or in a lot of cases, a pen and paper, which, you
Can be can be a challenge at first I suppose because some of our teachers, know, they've been teaching for 20 years 25 years and they've always done it this way and so You know we come in with with with pupil progress, know, really sort of powerful piece of software Which is all well and good but you know, this is what they've been doing their whole career why change now sort of etc, etc and so Yes, certainly There can there can be some kindness
of challenges in adoption from that point, just in kind of an audience that maybe is less. ⁓
excited to learn and use new technologies, I suppose. And so one thing that we do have as well is all of that kind of potential resistance is...
turned up to 11, so to speak, when they have mock results that need to be in or, you know, we're coming up to exam season and we want to do the sort of last of the, you know, last of the tracking and analysis of the class's attainment, you know, before they need to go off and sit the exams and hopefully do as well as possible.
Conor Pendergrast (02:41)
course
and because these are all relatively predictable times and so they all they tend to overlap quite a bit so people do their mock exams at the same time people do their real exams at the same time people start school at the same time and
Tobi Davis (02:56)
Yes.
Conor Pendergrast (02:58)
I can imagine from when you're thinking about it from a customer support experience or from a customer experience, you're thinking to yourself, okay, well, I want to make sure that our support team's not overwhelmed and on the other side of it, that your customers.
all of your customers, all your various customers are getting a great experience as well. So you're here because you use intercom. can you give us a quick idea about what your main tool is to smooth out those volume curves?
Tobi Davis (03:16)
Yes. ⁓
Yeah, this is exactly it, right? So we use intercom. We've been using intercom for a few years. ⁓ It wasn't what we used when I first joined Pupil Progress, but you're absolutely right. There's a challenge to it, right? Where by, okay, every single school in the country, give or take, is gonna be doing ⁓ mock results at some point between mid-mock exams, some point between mid-November and early December.
And after that, it will cool down. Before that, it's not super busy. And obviously, in an ideal world, what you'd want is to split that up a bit. But alas, we do not live in an ideal world. So the way that we use intercom, or the reason why we switched to intercom to start with, I suppose, is to be able to better manage high volumes. Because the other side to this is we're not
a huge company, we're not a huge team. And there's not too much point in us being a huge team because January, February, super manageable. Easily we've got enough agents to manage the queue. We are able to be sort of super luxurious with the other tasks that we're doing and whatnot. And then March comes around, June comes around and December and it's the exact opposite, right?
the case of how do we...
manage our time in both of those accordingly. So it's like, how can we maximize the time that we are quieter to make life easier for us when we're busier? ⁓ And so one way that we do that is to sort of try to predict or try to get ahead of the questions that we know our users
Conor Pendergrast (05:10)
Hmm.
Tobi Davis (05:24)
gonna be asking, right? And so one, I'll just share my screen now. can see literally we just set this one
Conor Pendergrast (05:31)
Great
Tobi Davis (05:31)
live
a couple of days ago. This is an outbound message, absolutely right. so one thing that we know happens at this time of year, I mean, we're recording this in October. So we're coming up towards the real sort of peak for us is a lot of our users will be wanting to do mock exams based on...
Conor Pendergrast (05:35)
So this is an outbound message.
Tobi Davis (06:01)
the the exams just gone. So the the 2025 series. Obviously the challenge for us is that that is thousands and thousands of potential papers, right? So what we can't really do is just add all of them as much as we would as much as we would love to. You know, obviously there's that that capacity ⁓ challenge in multiple areas of the business. So
We do it on a request basis and the challenge that we can have is, know, it gets to ⁓ late November, it gets to early December. That's the time that they're thinking they want to put the marks in, right? They've just done the test, just marked it. Let's put it in. But you let us know at that time and there's, you know, 20 others in the queue and it's going to take us two weeks to get it on.
Conor Pendergrast (06:56)
Yeah.
Tobi Davis (06:57)
there are some kind of challenging conversations to be had and the potential there for not such a great customer experience at a time that is already stressful with all of the other things that...
Conor Pendergrast (07:02)
course.
Yeah, where they're feeling a time
crunch. Yeah.
Tobi Davis (07:15)
Exactly, yeah.
So something that we really try and do every year, you can see, you know, this one went out to about two, just under 3,000 users, is try and...
Try and preempt those as much as possible right now to an extent. There's always going to be some people who You know either forget or they don't see this one or they do end up coming in at the end of november Asking us to do it and you know, we we try and sort of handle those situations as and when But if we can get as many of those beforehand, right if we can get our our users our teachers thinking I am going to want to do the aqa geography paper three for my mock
next month. Let's send it over now, let's get it on there now and then it's just ready to go when they go there.
Conor Pendergrast (08:10)
Yeah.
And I guess the advantage of a proactive message as well as they don't, to a certain extent, they don't even have to be thinking that far ahead because based on what I'm seeing here, this is a chat. So they get this message when they're in the context of using pupil progress anyway. So the next time that they sign in, they see this message and they think to themselves, I do need to request that. I wasn't gonna, I wasn't even going to think about what I needed to do for two weeks. I'm glad they told me now I'll get my request in.
Tobi Davis (08:17)
Yes.
Yes.
Yes,
that's absolutely right. think, you know, what you've touched on there, I think is so key to this, right? like, I'll be fully honest, I am a...
a bit of an email hater or a self-confessed sort of email hater. You're competing with so many other things in somebody's inbox and you're getting information to them at a time that they, you know, if you're lucky, might be ready to receive it, but chances are, you know, they're not ready to receive it. They click markers red and move on. you're right, like we send a message this way, it's only going to pop up when they sign in
to
pupil progress, right? So pupil progress is gonna be on their mind. We're not having to try and get them to, yeah, to change what they're doing. That's exactly right. They'll be signed in, they'll go to do whatever it is they need to do. And then this message pops up in the corner. It's just a link to a type form. So they would click the button, the type form opens within the intercom messenger. And then that's
Conor Pendergrast (09:27)
distract them from everything else that they need to do.
Tobi Davis (09:50)
gets all the details that we need from them, sends a ticket straight through to our technical support team, and then that one is then added to the queue now rather than in a month's time. So that when they need it in a month's time, it's already been done.
Conor Pendergrast (10:06)
Yeah, yeah,
I'm a sucker for, ⁓ for waiting two weeks and then be like, ⁓ I should have started this two weeks ago because now I'm relying on someone else to to someone else's timeline. So I think this is this sort of like, Hey, you don't have to do it now. But when you're ready to, we're going to need to do something. So you should tell us about that now.
Tobi Davis (10:11)
Mm-hmm.
Ex-
Yes, absolutely. It's, you know, it's, because as, as, as, as we all know, and, know, I've, not been a teacher myself, but I can only imagine there's a thousand different things to be thinking about at any one time, right? You're, you're absolutely right. It's so easy to, to just kind of slip your mind or like, I've been meaning to do that. And then a week goes by, two weeks go by, and then all of a sudden it's, I need to do it right now.
Conor Pendergrast (10:41)
Mm-hmm.
Yes, I need to do it last
week.
Tobi Davis (10:55)
Yeah, exactly. it's like, you I do that. I do that in loads of things in my personal life. And, you know, so we acknowledge that's going to be the case, right? It's unrealistic to say when it gets to November or December, like we can't really say, ⁓ well, you you should have let us know a month ago because it's like, well, yeah, but...
Conor Pendergrast (11:09)
Yes. Yeah.
Yeah.
They didn't. Like, they still need to do it.
Tobi Davis (11:20)
They didn't and this exactly,
this is the situation that we're in now. So it's, know, but by hopefully getting ahead of that, it makes it easier for our users and also makes it easier for our team. Like I think that's something that...
Conor Pendergrast (11:35)
Of course.
Tobi Davis (11:38)
is equally important is that that November, December period is stressful for our users, but it's stressful for our support team. They've got chats coming out the wazoo and things to do and just stress levels are higher. And so anything that we can do to stop those kind of more confrontational conversations from happening is a big, big plus.
Conor Pendergrast (12:02)
Yeah.
Yeah, because so for looking at the details here, it's been sent to 2800 people. But that doesn't mean that everyone's seen it so far, because that's just the people who could who could see it when they're signed in. 4 % of those people have seen it so far. So what you're doing is eking it out over a longer period of time, so that there's a more even spread of requests ultimately for uploading the past papers, which is really, really helpful.
Tobi Davis (12:12)
Mm-hmm.
That's absolutely right. and you know where we are at the moment is coming up to the October half term You know some schools who use pupil progress will be This will be there last week. They'll be off next week some you know, it's 50-50 some will be the week after and So what what would exactly you're right? What we're trying to do here is just catch Catch the last week of term right the last time they're logging on to pupil progress before ⁓
before they can sort of switch off for a bit. You know, they see the message, it pops up, you know, and exactly, yeah. And for a lot of our users, they might not need to do anything right, hopefully at the very least.
Conor Pendergrast (13:10)
Might as well do it now.
Yeah.
Tobi Davis (13:19)
It's getting that on their mind. of course, the good thing for us is if one maths teacher asks us to add paper one, then every other maths teacher can also then have that. So hopefully, even if one person from that cohort of user, suppose, who teaches that qualification, even if they forget, hopefully someone from the other side of
Conor Pendergrast (13:34)
That's grace.
One of
Tobi Davis (13:49)
country who teaches the same
Conor Pendergrast (13:49)
their colleagues will get us.
Tobi Davis (13:51)
course will get it.
Conor Pendergrast (13:53)
Interesting.
Okay. So, then, ⁓ I noticed in the rules, which is where you set who actually gets the message. You've got it set to dynamic audience. And so that part means if someone starts using pupil progress next week and they fit all the other criteria, then great. get the message as well. It's not, it's not static and defined, which is helpful. And then leader of has any value. That sounds like something specific to people of progress. Is that right?
Tobi Davis (13:59)
Yep.
Yes.
That's right, yeah, so that is a custom property that we have. ⁓
I'll actually show you very quickly sort of what we're working with with a demo example I've got here. So you can see here is one of my numerous demo accounts. Yes, exactly. And so we pull this through and we've got a few things on here that are really key to this type of messaging. So the message we were looking at a moment ago is
Conor Pendergrast (14:42)
Always gotta have your test accounts, don't you?
Tobi Davis (14:56)
is based off of this property here, right? Leader of. ⁓ That's something that pulls through directly from our platform via custom integration. And it will just tell you what, if any, ⁓ subjects this person is a head of department for, right? So if this was a real person, we could see, okay, they are leader of health and social care. So, you know, as a subject leader, they will have a response
responsibilities like adding the assessments, getting the kind of admin stuff done, ⁓ that if they are ⁓
Conor Pendergrast (15:32)
Mm-hmm.
Tobi Davis (15:35)
a teacher of that subject but not the subject leader, they won't need to do. Someone else will do that for them. They just need to go on and put the marks in. So when we set our rules or we set our kind, know, we're creating the audience, we don't need to send this to everybody ⁓ because the majority of our users, you know, if you think about, say, a maths or an English department, there might be 10 teachers but only one leader. So only one person needs to do this.
Conor Pendergrast (15:41)
Yeah.
Tobi Davis (16:05)
for everybody else to be able to do their work. ⁓
Conor Pendergrast (16:11)
super. And then the advantage of the targeting
there as well is that you're not sending it to like every person and overwhelm and not necessarily overwhelming but you're not wasting the attention of everyone who's who would never need to upload a past paper. You're targeting it just to the people who will receive the message who need excuse me who need to receive the message.
Tobi Davis (16:30)
Yeah.
Absolutely right. And it means that, you know, the messages that we are sending are more meaningful, right? Because we're not... ⁓
We're not just hitting you with something every time you log on. How about this? How about this? It's, you know, it's fewer and further between. And it means that, you know, the idea there is that our users can trust us more and they can trust us that when we do actually have something to say, you know, it is a bit more important maybe, or it is something that is worth their time to check out and investigate. Because, you know, it can be easy. know.
Conor Pendergrast (17:02)
Mm.
Tobi Davis (17:13)
certainly if you're getting too much communications, too much from a certain platform or business, then you can just switch off.
Conor Pendergrast (17:23)
Yeah.
So, okay. Try this for a segue Tobi So we've been talking about, we've been talking about proactive messaging. So these outbound messages, what, ⁓ what about someone who might be already talking to you and giving them more things for them to learn from someone who's talking to support team, for example, do you have a way of giving them even more help?
Tobi Davis (17:40)
Yes.
Conor Pendergrast (17:50)
and further engendering their trust and educating them on how to use pupil progress.
Tobi Davis (17:57)
We do, ⁓ we certainly do. And I think it's almost you've kind of got two sides of the same coin to an extent here, right? Because we, for lack of a better term or lack of a better way of putting it, what we're trying to do is, you know. ⁓
mean that our users sort of don't have to get support as often or they're getting fewer sort of human support. It's better for them because they just know how to use the platform. They're not having to ask us. And it's better for our team because again, at those kind of crunch points, they can focus really on those users who are having problems or really need our support. So I'll just share my
here as well and just sort of show you this.
This is set up as a workflow in intercom, so not a proactive message. And this is all something that is ⁓ completely manually triggered. So it's not an automation. We're not doing it. You can see the audiences, anyone who we choose for it to be. It's not something that's being sent out automatically.
This is a tool for our team to really lean on and try and push our users in the right direction in terms of their knowledge and understanding of the platform. The way that this one works, you can see, is we've got lots of these different resource pack tags set up on Intercom.
Conor Pendergrast (19:31)
Hmm.
Tobi Davis (19:33)
you're asking me how do I publish student reports on the app. Well, it's not that.
Hard to do right or it's quite straightforward behavior of the product. So, okay Well what I'm gonna do in our chat is probably answer this right? You're saying how do I publish it? You know, maybe we have a macro Maybe we have something or other that means you're getting this information
Okay, you know that and that's great, but what happens when you want to delete one? You you've published it and there's a mistake or it's old or whatever it is and you don't want parents to see that anymore. Well, you'd probably just come back on the chat and you'd come through to one of our team again and we'd say this.
Conor Pendergrast (20:03)
Of course.
say Tobi I created
I created a published a report but I was only trying to test it how do I delete it now
Tobi Davis (20:25)
Exactly, exactly. And so what we could do is, you know, I could answer that question again and we could kind of...
have that loop of every time you've got a question, you come through, we answer it, and we go from there. Or we can try and, again, of, as we spoke about earlier, be proactive in saying, okay, here are these other things that you probably will wanna know as well. You'll probably wanna know how to...
delete a report, you will probably want to know how to send out invitations, you'll probably want to know just more information about the app generally. Let me share that with you now. You can have a look through and then it's a win-win. It means that we're able to handle our volume and capacity a bit better and it means that you as the user are more empowered, more confident, and just...
have a better experience on the whole.
Conor Pendergrast (21:28)
Yeah, this is fantastic. I really like this particular example because it's so, it's like it's targeted at when you're having those human one-on-one interactions through intercom. But the fact that it's coupled with the proactive outbound messages, I think it is really powerful.
so Tobi, thank you very much. This has been really helpful to get a perspective on how you can use proactive and reactive messages and automatic messages to help bring more customer and user education. I have a question, a last question for you, Tobi, which is if people want to find out more about what you're doing or more about pupil progress, where would they go?
Tobi Davis (22:03)
Yes.
Yeah, absolutely. So best place would just be to our website, pupilprogress.com and our LinkedIn as well. have lots of, it's the only social network we use really these days. So definitely give us a follow on there and you can keep up to date with things about our platform and about kind of education more broadly.
Conor Pendergrast (22:36)
Excellent! And dear viewer, dear watcher, if you want to see more episodes like this, you can go to youtube.com, and then it's the at symbol, support-stack. And if you want to get future episodes, you can sign up to my email list. You'll get an email every day with something interesting to do in Intercom or as a customer support leader, and that is at customersuccess.cx/daily Thank you very much. I we will be back for another episode next week. Bye!
Tobi Davis (23:05)
Thank you.
Bye bye.