Clarification on User Matching for CoBrowse Sessions in Intercom

Question

Hello We're currently facing an issue where CoBrowse sessions are not available in Intercom unless the user is logged in to our site.According to CoBrowse support, the SDK should be initialized as soon as the website loads, regardless of the user's authentication status.They mentioned:“The issue could be that the CoBrowse SDK is only being started when your users log in. Would you be able to check that with your Dev team? I see no reason for it not to be started before the user authentication happens as the agent and user will still be matched through Intercom.”In our implementation, the CoBrowse SDK is initialized for all users, not just those who are logged in.We suspect the issue may be related to how users are matched between Intercom and CoBrowse. When a user logs in, we pass their email to both Intercom and CoBrowse, which seems to enable session matching. However, for guest users (not logged in), no email is available, and as a result, the session is not linked between the platforms.Can you please confirm what identifiers Intercom and CoBrowse use to match users for co-browsing sessions? If email is required, is there an alternative approach to support guests as well?Looking forward to your guidance on resolving this.Thanks.

JefWo · Accepted Answer

Intercom typically uses user_id or email, but for visitors, it falls back to the anonymous IntercomVisitorId (the intercom-id cookie). If CoBrowse isn’t seeing that ID, it might be worth ensuring that both SDKs are pulling from the same cookie or session context before login.We ended up passing IntercomVisitorId manually to CoBrowse for guests, which helped tie the session together. Might be worth testing that flow.

Ivan Korovkin · Answer

Hello ​@JefWoThanks for the quick response.We’ve checked the Intercom dashboard, and the issue is still present. If this was implemented manually, do we need to submit a request for it, or have you applied this change for all clients?In case we need to make code changes, please provide the instructions.Also, how can we get the IntercomVisitorId so we can pass it to the CoBrowse SDK?Thank you,Ivan

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