Support Stack Episode 10 – 94% Opens on Product Updates: Axuall’s Intercom Playbook
When customers ignore release-note emails, your best updates go unseen.
In this episode, Jordan Hooker (Customer Support Manager at Axuall) shares how his team solved that problem by moving product-change communication directly into Intercom—meeting users where they already work.
He breaks down the practical system that helped Axuall:
Use the Messenger External Links app for a persistent “Latest release notes” link.
Choose the right outbound format—banners for outages and maintenance, pop-ups for new features, surveys, or events.
Target by user role and page to avoid spamming occasional users while engaging daily admins.
Measure success: one release update hit a 94 percent open rate across 438 users.
Keep Fin up to date with a Support Ops-owned content calendar and documentation refreshes.
Look ahead to Product Tours that drive instant feature adoption inside the product.
It’s a clear, repeatable framework for proactive education that reduces noise, improves adoption, and strengthens Fin accuracy—all without adding headcount.
Episode Transcript
Conor Pendergrast (00:00)
Hi, I'm Conor Pendergrast and welcome to episode 10 of Support Stack.
hey Jordan Hooker, welcome to Support Stack. How are you today?
Jordan Hooker (00:14)
I'm doing well, Conor. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
Conor Pendergrast (00:17)
So you are customer support manager at Axuall is that correct?
Jordan Hooker (00:22)
That is correct.
Conor Pendergrast (00:23)
Good, and you're here to talk to us, all of us here, about how Axuall handles product changes and in particular the fun part of telling all your many customers about all your product changes. So tell me about the genesis of this. When was it that you started thinking about this and started making changes and introducing Intercom into all the mix there?
Jordan Hooker (00:45)
Sure.
Yeah. Great question. So we moved to Intercom in June of this year, so 2025. Our previous support tool got the job done in terms of support functionality, tickets, et cetera. But for our growth in the direction and scale of the company, needed more. And so we made the switch to Intercom, particularly for the features that are available to us via Fin and via...
Outbound messaging, which we'll talk about here in this conversation and what it looks like to be able to utilize those things, to be more proactive with our customers, to talk to our customers in the places where they're using our tools. Whereas in our previous tool, it was just much more challenging to do that without really significant engineering engagements. So, ⁓ one challenge we had is that our ability to communicate with customers when we release new products, new features.
particularly things that were tied to lots of support tickets or conversations with customers via our success managers or through our client services team as they were implementing. Some of those things could be, you know, multiple months from the conversation to the actual thing being fixed or released or changed or built.
And so how do we make sure that those customers know that we heard it and we took the action and we actually went and accomplished that thing that, that was valuable to them. And so previously I released notes, went out via an email. And as we all know, you go to your HubSpot dashboard, you look at the, you know, open rate and the click rate, and those are just very rarely great. People get a million emails a day. It's hard to know, ⁓ what's important or you just don't have time for it. And so with our switch to intercom.
We now have had the ability to just give that to our customers where they're working on our tools, ⁓ through pop-ups, through banners and those types of features. And so it's made a really significant difference for us in the ability of our team to tell our customers, hey, this is this new exciting thing. Here's how you go look at it and use it.
Conor Pendergrast (02:51)
Yeah, so you asked for it, you really wanted this, and now we're pleased to have been able to solve this problem for you. Do you just, out of curiosity, you mentioned a couple of the ways that you can interact with customers from a banner at the top, from full page takeovers, you could do those fall back to email as well if you really needed to, but as you say, the open rates there are gonna be pretty low, and it's not getting people when they're at the right time, which is something that...
Jordan Hooker (02:59)
Yes.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Sure.
Hmm.
Yes.
Conor Pendergrast (03:19)
I talked about with Tobi Davis in a previous episode as well. It's like capture people when they're already interested is a great way of doing it. how, like Jordan, when you're, when you're setting up a new auto message or when your team is, how are you deciding which type of outbound message you're going to use?
Jordan Hooker (03:23)
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Sure.
Yeah. It's a great question. So in terms of banners, which is big pop-up at the top of the screen, we're very unlikely to ever use a full page thing unless we feel like it is just critically important. But those banners at the top we use for a few things. Those are for ⁓ outage alerts. So our system is built on a significant number of APIs connecting to all sorts of sources.
And then any given day, there's a few of those sources that are down. So what does it look like to make sure our customers know that, or if there's going to be maintenance? We ran a maintenance window last night. We were able to notify our customers better than we could via email, via status page through our system now with intercom. So we use banners more for those types of things. We've also used it in a few very targeted times when a particular customer has gotten a new feature. So when we have moved customers to an SSO login.
Conor Pendergrast (04:08)
Yeah.
Jordan Hooker (04:34)
as opposed to, you know, authenticating through email and password. Hey, here's this great new feature. It's going to be so much faster. Here's what you need to know. So we use banners for that purpose. Pop-ups we use a little bit more and those are really focused on product releases. ⁓ surveys when we are running our, twice annual survey for some of our customers to get some feedback, we'll utilize it there. Event registrations. We ran our annual.
Conor Pendergrast (04:34)
Of course, yeah.
Jordan Hooker (05:03)
client event earlier this fall. And so our ability to ⁓ notify customers of that and drive more engagement with that was also through those pop-ups. And then of course, for all of these, we also still do email because there will always be people who can catch that way. But this has definitely increased our ability to communicate.
Conor Pendergrast (05:20)
Mm-hmm.
That's great. Okay, so there's a lot of different ways that you can use those outbound messages. But today, we're talking about outbound messages as a component of or a way to deliver news to people when something has changed about the product. there's something else that you haven't mentioned yet, which is specifically your product has release notes, which...
Jordan Hooker (05:29)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Conor Pendergrast (05:47)
some a lot of people might know is actual written notes about what has changed in a new version of the product. What's what is the first place that you put those for customers?
Jordan Hooker (05:57)
Sure.
Yes, absolutely. So we embed those in a website that's got a PDF. so traditionally we send an email to our customers, click this link, opens the PDF and another, ⁓ another tab on your web browser and you can read the release notes, download them if you would like. Of course, as we've mentioned email, not a great medium for getting engagement from customers. And so that's been the first place that we've done that.
Shifting into intercom now, we've started to use pop-ups to ⁓ notify customers of our release notes, as well as new product features, just very particular things that we wanted to zero in on something really exciting and really new. We've done that. ⁓ Also embedding it inside the widget, just consistently having a link in the widget that says, click here to see our most recent release notes. And that information is there, which just always keeps it available. You know, if we get a
Conor Pendergrast (06:32)
Mm-hmm.
Jordan Hooker (06:54)
three weeks past the last release, let's say maybe even we have a month where we don't have a particular release knowing that our customers, if they think, what was the last one they can go and take a look. Am I up to date? That's available there. We've also now started embedding that in our help center. So customers have the ability to access that through that as well.
Conor Pendergrast (07:12)
That's super. Okay, so the widget being the messenger, intercoms messenger that most people, I mean, if you're watching this video, you're very familiar with it in the bottom right. Should we, can we start there? Can you, do you think you could show us like how you've set that up?
Jordan Hooker (07:16)
Mm-hmm.
Yes, absolutely.
our messenger particularly ⁓ Tobi set up for ⁓ each of our products. So we have three products that various types of customers are using. So we're looking at ⁓ one particular that we use. And so in terms of our ability to communicate about release notes, what we use is an external ⁓ link app. So if you are
Inside the messenger, you're setting it up. You have the ability to add the external links app. We actually have a few of them. One for the tickets portal. So for customers that have access to that, we also link our website. So if somebody wants to go to the homepage, it's there, but we consistently have this view our latest release notes that you can see down here that customers can click through and then open up as well, which is just, as I mentioned, constantly available to them in the messenger.
Conor Pendergrast (08:14)
Hmm.
And you've
added an audience rule to that, I noticed as well. So an audience rule being, some people won't see those release notes. ⁓
Jordan Hooker (08:25)
Yes, that's
right. So a subset of our users could not care less about our release notes. They are users that come into our system once a year to complete paperwork for the companies that they work for. They're not interested in our release notes. These are specifically geared towards our daily users of the system who are the administrators for those companies.
Conor Pendergrast (08:39)
Mmm.
That's great. And again, this comes back to don't waste people's time because when you've paced waste their time and attention, they start to pay attention less to what you're saying and what less to what you're doing. And so by narrowing, by adding that little audience marker, the current page URL, it looks like that's a way of signifying these are people who are not going to be interested. So don't waste their time because you want them, especially if they're only in there once a year, you want them to pay a lot of attention to what they're doing.
Jordan Hooker (08:53)
Yes.
Mm-hmm, that's correct. Yes.
Yes.
Yes, exactly. Yeah. We have noticed for those types of our customers that come into the system, if they drop out of the system at any point during that process, getting them back into it gets harder each time. So whatever we can do to quiet the noise, focus their attention really is key. So that, that has also been something for us. That's been a great change in inner commas, our ability to narrow the focus of audience for particular items.
Conor Pendergrast (09:43)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've seen that in things like data connectors and tasks as well, using the audience settings there as well as content, obviously enough, but using the audio settings there really delivers improved answers by Fin but also it'll help customers as well. Like it will help them to not get irrelevant stuff sent to them.
Jordan Hooker (09:48)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Yes, and very key in that ability because we've all interacted with that AI agent who is feeding us information that's not relevant. And again, it just creates noise and challenge and friction.
Conor Pendergrast (10:17)
Yeah. Yeah. And us when we're trying to deliver a great customer support and trying to do it using AI as well, all of that work is necessary to sort of undo the reputational damage that's been, that's been done by a terrible chatbots over decades at this point, really. Yeah. Okay. So, so that's released notes in the messenger. So that's basically someone is using your product and they're already interested in some sort of help.
Jordan Hooker (10:21)
Right, exactly.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yes, very true. Yes, absolutely.
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Conor Pendergrast (10:45)
They're looking in the right place.
What about for people who are just like they're starting their day or they're getting into the product and now you'd like to make sure that they know what changes have happened. You use outbound messages for that, right?
Jordan Hooker (10:57)
Yes,
that's correct. So we have going to use outbound post, particularly as relates to our release notes, ⁓ for customers to really present them with that. So you log in on our most recent release was on October 14th. You log in on October 14th and a pop-up pops up at the bottom right there off of the messenger that says, we're excited to announce our new release notes. Here's a link to the information where you can see that.
and so we've utilized it for that as well as, ⁓ particularly for one of our recent releases, there were a couple of features that were really key, really critical things customers had just been asking for and really needed. And we were very excited. And so we were able to focus attention on those as well. ⁓ but overall our strategy for anything released product wise has now been to use these proactive messages, through the outbound posts.
Conor Pendergrast (11:53)
Of course. Can we, can we look at one of those like exciting features that, people were looking forward to and see, see some of the, some of the ways that you're sending that message.
Jordan Hooker (11:59)
Yes, absolutely.
Sure. Yeah. So what we utilized ⁓ in terms of that, that I mentioned, so in our September ⁓ release, we had a few features that were really key ⁓ to things that our customers needed to do. What can we do to make the tool easier, better for customers as they engage? And so we utilized the pop-up ⁓ separate from our release notes for that particular cycle to say to customers,
Hey, here's this really exciting thing. These two new features that we really want you to know about and have more information about. And so we drop those in a particular post. So as a customer, when I logged in, it popped up, ⁓ and gave them that information. And it's just a couple of quick bites of information. So even if you, it pops up and you were doing something else and you're like, okay, let me go down there and click X on that. You're still getting a quick visual of that information. And so.
Either you stop and register, that's a feature I've been interested in seeing, or you register, ah, that sounds interesting, I'll go back and look at that later. And so it gives them the ability to do that. What was really great for us was in terms of our usage, as you can see here, this message was sent to 438 of our users in that system, and 94 % of those users opened that message.
Conor Pendergrast (13:16)
Yeah.
Jordan Hooker (13:20)
and saw the information. And so our ability to communicate and drive adoption of new features through this tool has just been incredible.
Conor Pendergrast (13:28)
It's just so much higher. And I noticed
once again, you are targeting specific people here as well, both in terms of their role as well as where they are in the product. So it's not just, they're not just sort of first signing in there. They're going specifically, it looks like to an admin section of the product and it's only for user type admin. So it's very targeted just to people.
Jordan Hooker (13:33)
Yes, that's right.
Yes.
Mm-hmm. Yes, that's right.
Mm-hmm. Yes. Yes, it is.
Yeah.
Conor Pendergrast (13:51)
And
so we're hiding, we're not showing the actual content of the message here, just to hide that a little bit. so that's why if someone's looking at the video, that's why it's not shown there. But it's the rules here are targeting the content to make it relevant to the audience and relevant to where the audience is and what they're most likely to be doing once again.
Jordan Hooker (13:55)
That's right.
Yes.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Yes, that's correct. And in terms of this, is one subset of users. And then of those users, a whole entirely different subset that need, need this particular information. And so our ability to communicate, whereas previously, like we've mentioned with email, you just have an email list and you're shooting it out to everybody and hoping the right people see it. This now helps us ensure that we give them every opportunity to see it.
Conor Pendergrast (14:36)
Yeah.
Or if you're not, then you're asking the engineering team to run a customer request or something like that to get a list of all the users and then BCCing them all or something like that. You know, uploading lists. this, once you've got the attributes set up, which is pretty trivial work and
Jordan Hooker (14:47)
Right, yes.
Mm-hmm.
Conor Pendergrast (14:54)
we go back to this helps Fin to answer questions as well when it has the information about who has what role. ⁓ Then, hey, great, you've got the right information here. So speaking of
Jordan Hooker (14:58)
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Mm-hmm.
Conor Pendergrast (15:06)
obviously as products change as well, that's stuff that Fin needs to know about. Otherwise it's getting out of date information. What kind of responsibility is it like? Who's responsible on your team for making sure that Fin gets that information and how it gets the information?
Jordan Hooker (15:12)
Mm-hmm. Correct.
Mm-hmm.
Sure. Absolutely. So two kind of levels of that, of course, as our technical product is built and developed, our engineering team and our product team is building out the technical documentation that's needed for, ⁓ for that. the other side, on my team, I have a support ops analyst, Jenny Carpenter, who is responsible for taking the new information that comes through. actually manages this entire outbound program as well.
⁓ keeps track of the content calendar to make sure that, you know, five product managers don't want to say something on the same day. We need to manage that out and make sure that that's clear. ⁓ but she goes through, takes that information and then updates our documentation that then is used by Fin to present to customers as well. And so kind of about building that stream, we've ensured that yes, we have the of course, very technical documentation, which is important.
Conor Pendergrast (15:51)
Fantastic. Nice work, Jenny.
Ha
Jordan Hooker (16:18)
But we also have documentation for our users to generate through Fin and through our help center that is not necessarily technical because while we do have a subset of users who are very technical and do need that information, most of our users are more interested just in the front end functionality of the tool. So how do we communicate that way to them in a way that's helpful?
Conor Pendergrast (16:31)
course.
Excellent. Well, it's a comprehensive setup you have here in terms of communicating with your customers and communicating with the right people at the right time as well. I mean, do you have any plans to evolve this? What would you dream of doing next? What would you dream of doing? What are you intending to do next? And what would you dream of doing one day?
Jordan Hooker (16:45)
Mm-hmm.
See ya.
Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I think one of the things that was surprising about this is how quickly we got this functioning. I mean, we switched to Intercom in June and by end of July, we were starting to utilize these tools and build them out. They're incredibly user friendly, incredibly quick. Of course, now looking at the rest of the functionality and outbound, there is some more complex tools that Intercom has available to us.
But at the same time, they're still very clear and well designed to set up. one of those that we're ⁓ targeting right now and Jenny, who's our support ops analyst is working on is a focus on the product tours. So not just, Hey, what does it look like to tell customers, Hey, these great new features are here. Click on this link. It'll tell you about it or this little snippet instead.
You log in and you click on a certain webpage and it goes, Hey, there's a new feature on this page. Would you like a quick tour of how it works? Click through that thing. Five minutes later, we've guaranteed adoption from that user of that new feature. And so that's probably the biggest thing for us is looking at those product tours and figuring out how to get customers to start utilizing the new features right when we release them, which of course serves a few purposes. One, we built this great thing and we want them to use it. And.
We can't know for sure if the thing we've built is going to accomplish everything we want until we have a, you know, certain mass of users who are utilizing it. So it helps us iterate more quickly on these new features and products as well.
Conor Pendergrast (18:38)
Of course, that's fantastic. And then the dream for you, like what's the dream ⁓ of using edgecom or in particular, I'd say let's, we can think about anything, but let's maybe narrow it down to product releases and customer education.
Jordan Hooker (18:43)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sure. Yeah. I think from a customer education standpoint, it is truly about proactively supporting customers where they are. So figuring out the ways to utilize these tools to say, Hey, we've noticed that this customer gets to this page and they're sitting on this page for a really long period of time. What does it look like to present content to them in a really concise and streamlined way that helps them? You know,
Perhaps they're not stuck. Perhaps they landed on that webpage and their phone rang and they're on the phone. But perhaps they are. So what do we do to ensure that? And so for me, I think that's the dream of just constantly giving our customers more of what they need, where they need it. And of course that helps them in using the tool. That also reduces some burden on my team because if we can meet customers where they are, give them a really quality education and support experience proactively.
Conor Pendergrast (19:23)
Yeah.
Jordan Hooker (19:47)
That also takes some of the pressure off my team for those tickets that might potentially come through in that regard or result in just low adoption of the tool as well.
Conor Pendergrast (19:57)
Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, Jordan, thank you so much for giving us a look under the hood of how Axuall is ⁓ educating customers on product changes and product releases and and just very similar to the Tobi Davis episode as well, smoothing the curve of incoming conversations. Where should our delightful viewers find you online or find stuff about Axuall online? Do you have anything that you could promote perhaps?
Jordan Hooker (20:02)
Sure.
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Sure. Yeah.
Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. So if you'd like to connect with me, you can find me on LinkedIn. I am linkedin.com slash in slash Jordan Hooker. Easy to find me there. ⁓ you can also find my podcast table service, ⁓ on the, ⁓ on LinkedIn. And then also if you go to YouTube and search for table underscore service, you'll find that there, ⁓ you will of course find Conor in a previous episode from season one that I definitely encourage folks to go listen to. Yes, absolutely.
Conor Pendergrast (20:53)
Who me?
Jordan Hooker (20:56)
and then aside from that, if you're interested in learning more about Axuall, particularly if you're a health system that is looking for a way to, ⁓ improve your recruiting credentialing and, ⁓ employee records and keeping all of that up to date and having a better experience for your clinicians, ⁓ you can find us at Axuall that's X U a L L.com. And we'd love to talk with you about what we can do to assist your team.
Conor Pendergrast (21:22)
Nice one. Well, thank you very much, Jordan. And ⁓ dear viewer, if you'd like to see future episodes of Support Stack, can find them on YouTube. Just subscribe where you're watching this video. It is right here. Just press the subscribe button. Other than that, you can find my email list, customersuccess.cx/daily And that's where you'll get my daily emails about intercom, about customer support leadership, about customer education, all these kind of topics that we're talking about today. And have a delightful day and see you soon. Bye.