Intercom Switches to Tropic, Achieves 6x ROI and 100% Process Compliance in 6 Months

About Intercom

Intercom’s vision is to bring a messenger-first, personal experience to all customer and business communication. Their customer communications platform is used by 100,000+ users around the world to supercharge their conversational marketing programs.

As they grew, Intercom was looking for the right vendor to help them make their procurement process efficient, sustainable and compliant.

The Challenge

Intercom had previously struggled with a scattered and decentralized purchasing process that cost them considerable time without taking compliance into consideration.

They originally implemented another third party procurement solution, but found that it was costing them even more time due to the vendor’s inability to fit within Intercom’s (admittedly complex) existing process.

The Intercom team took a step back, asking Tropic for help with both compliance and time savings.

“Tropic basically stood up a new procurement process overnight, and the whole organization has been thrilled.”

Andrew Yim

Former Director of Strategic Finance, Intercom

The Solution

Intercom evaluated Tropic on its abilities to deliver the following outcomes:

Reduce the time it took to close open contracts
Reach 100% stakeholder compliance

Time Savings

Tropic redesigned Intercom’s procurement process to work seamlessly with the company’s existing contract management process—two systems that had previously been siloed.

This new approach has prevented any need for non-system-driven updates, saving Intercom 125 hours per year in this area alone.

Stakeholder Compliance

Intercom’s previous solution was reactive, relying on stakeholders to initiate their own renewals. In contrast, Tropic’s solution is proactive, relying on Tropic to initiate each renewal well ahead of the contracted date, ensuring 100% compliance with the formal process.

This has led to led to the following outcomes:

Contract renewals start 90 days ahead of time
Zero auto-renews have slipped by

“Tropic’s end-to-end approach to the procurement problem has given us a 180-degree turnaround of our internal procurement processes, saving us a ton of time and money, said Director of Strategic Finance Andrew Yim. “Tropic basically stood up a new procurement process overnight, and the whole organization has been thrilled, including stakeholders who were skeptical of procurement overall.”

Tropic was able to hit the ground running after facilitating a transition from another provider, and started to drive impact immediately.

"Tropic’s end-to-end approach to the procurement problem has given us a 180-degree turnaround of our internal procurement processes, saving us a ton of time and money."