Intercom announces the appointment of former Smartsheet CMO Anna Griffin as chief marketing officer; former Lumileds chief legal officer Cheree McAlpine as the company's first general counsel; and former Google Cloud VP and Salesforce SVP and COO EMEA Sanj Bhayro as VP, EMEA Sales. Intercom also added former Marketo CFO Fred Ball to its Board of Directors.
The new hires will help expand Intercom's presence with enterprise customers, building upon the company's success and momentum. Intercom's customers include global marquee brands like Amazon, Microsoft and Lyft Business, and the company recently brought on new customers, including H&R Block, and expanded customer deals with URBN, the parent company of Nuuly and Urban Outfitters, Notion and Culture Amp.
"Through a personalized approach to our customer and business needs, Intercom has helped us scale exponentially since we launched in 2019," said Natalie Hurst, Director of Customer Service at Nuuly. "With automation tools put into place, our team has been allowed to focus on providing only the highest quality customer service to our subscribers, proven through a 96% CSAT score based on 23,000 conversations."
Digital transformation and customer expectations for fast, friendly and personalized communication with businesses continues to drive demand for Intercom's customer communications platform. Outdated channels, like promotional emails, vendor calls and support forms, are proving to be less effective ways to engage with customers, because they provide a poor customer experience and are difficult and costly to scale. Intercom lets businesses deliver two-way, conversational and relevant communications to each customer, in a way that scales to thousands and millions of customers.
"The traditional ways that companies communicate with their customers are broken," said Karen Peacock, CEO of Intercom. "Companies need to meet customers where they are, on the channels they prefer. Intercom is reinventing how companies engage and support their customers to be real-time, in-context, personalized and supported with the right automation. We've helped thousands of businesses build strong customer relationships to drive growth and scale, and I'm thrilled to welcome leaders like Anna, Cheree, Sanj and Fred, who can help us deliver even more breakthrough value to our customers."
As CMO, Anna will reinforce Intercom's position as the leading, modern customer communications platform, and continue to amplify the voice of its customers as the company moves upmarket. She has more than 20 years of marketing leadership experience and helped grow Smartsheet to $500M ARR as CMO.
In her role as General Counsel, Cheree will set the strategy for Intercom's legal team and prepare the company for continued growth. A Silicon Valley veteran at both public and private technology companies, Cheree brings more than 25 years of global legal experience. Before serving as the Chief Legal Officer for Lumileds, she was the General Counsel for Avnet Americas.
Sanj Bhayro, based in Intercom's Dublin office, will oversee EMEA sales to support Intercom's ambitious plans for international growth. Sanj has held leadership positions in EMEA for more than 15 years, both as COO and SVP Commercial Sales for Salesforce EMEA and VP Operations and Customer Growth for Google EMEA. As a respected leader within the SaaS industry, Sanj has deep experience scaling sales teams at growing businesses and for companies of Intercom's size.
Fred Ball will join Intercom's Board of Directors to advise on overall direction and business strategy. In addition to serving as Marketo Inc.'s Chief Financial Officer and taking the company public in 2013, Fred served as CFO for a number of private and public technology companies including Webroot Software, BigBand Networks, Inc., and Borland Software Corporation. He currently sits on the boards of Contentful, Advanced Energy and FirstMark Horizon Acquisition Corporation, and was previously on the board of SendGrid, acquired by Twilio.
This year, Intercom also added new VP of Corporate Marketing Alyssa Smrekar, formerly VP Corporate Marketing at Okta; VP of Global Demand Generation and Regional Marketing Marcio Arnecke, formerly VP Regional Marketing, Americas at Zendesk; and VP of Financial Planning & Analysis Felipe de la Puente Leon, formerly Head of FP&A GTM at Dropbox. The company is now over 700 people globally.