Intercom aims to make online business personal - even with chatbots

Some of the fastest-growing tech companies right now are reinventing web functions that have been with us since before the turn of the century. Not as famous as the first two, San Francisco-based Intercom has found favor as an online messaging platform that helps businesses engage and support their customers and prospects. The boom in online messaging among consumers and the rise of conversational computing in business has helped Intercom thrive since its foundation in 2011. It now has more than 30,000 paying customers globally and is backed by $241 million in venture funding. People increasingly expect to find a chat option for customer support when they visit a website or use an app, says Intercom's SVP of Marketing, Shane Murphy-Reuter: Given that every single company in the world has customer support -- typically by email, maybe calls for larger companies -- I do not see a world in the future where a messenger isn't on every single website and in every app.