To understand the ask better:
- What data formats are you looking at (for taking data from Intercom and pasting it on your CRM)?
- Which CRM do you use?
- In Customer onboarding, account management, which activities would require this data?
We want to sync across
Companies
Users
Conversations
Anything else that can help get a full picture of the user within our sales CRM (close.com)
We are now using Close - but also have Hubspot as an intermediary which we currently (clunkily) use to connect Intercom to Close
Onboarding is still a sales process for us (we have a free version of the platform - like Hubspot) so there is still an upsell onboarding required.
Account management - checking in on regular basis and as the contract renews etc.
This will not be an easy thing to do, you would need to set up some custom integration.
Why? Here are a few reasons why only custom-development might work:
- Whatever the sync is you will not have a history of conversations - see how HubSpot + Intercom works, from the time of connecting the two, it will start syncing conversation info
- Some conversations are not being synced, i.e. outbound messages that the user did not reply to (i.e. in the case of HubSpot integration). They are technically not conversations (yet) but they exist as messages so you can read them out with Intercom API.
- There is no direct integration between Intercom and Close. If you do not use APIs, you would need to use a service such as Zapier or Make but then again you will not be able to sync it all (see previous 2 bullets). And it could be a really complex project for such services.
So you need to custom-develop the sync. Using Intercom API as well as webhooks + Close CRM API, you would be able to transfer all past and future conversations (not sure how it looks in Close CRM, never used it).
Understand - thus the request.
Intercom is trying to be a silver bullet for everything and it's getting bloody frustrating and instead of going all in with a Zapier (or similar) we're being asked to build our own integrations. It just all sums up to be very painful to use Intercom with other things.
All conversations should be getting synced over to Hubspot et al because that is communication that has been sent out to a customer - it's what the customer feels, not what confirmation we as the company has got back. If a customer complains that we are spamming them I want to know I have sent them 20 messages or emails or whatever's
Close, Pipedrive, Hubspot all basically work the same way if you've seen one you have seen them all - a threaded view of a customer (just like Intercom) just with some more specific salesy tools for engagement. So the sync needs to be the same/similar to a Hubspot
Intercom just gets more and more painful with time 😥
It's the same thing just the other way if you say "I want to see all my emails sent from HubSpot within Intercom". You can't - with native integration, you do not see anything. The other way, Intercom => HubSpot, you see at least something.
It's how these vendors work. Who should be "responsible" for creating such an integration? Usually, it's the "smaller" vendor, in a hope that they will get a portion of the users using the "bigger" vendor. "Bigger" vendor usually can not cover / does not care of covering "smaller" vendors as they are not getting much out of it and there are so many of them.
Close CRM is much smaller than Intercom, I believe.
Simplifying a MarTech tool stack is key, it's a trade-off between needs and complexity that those needs would be creating.
There is no one service that would cover all the needs one established company would have. Usually, it's a mix of what Sales needs and what Marketing needs.
Yes, but Hubspot is leveraging email which is always the ultimate 'bigger' vendor 
As soon as SaaS groups start seeing themselves as too big to integrate with Zapier and alike you know they have got too big IMO. It's happened with a lot of them. The other way a vendor could look at it is it's the opportunity cost of building all of these other things is expensive, we're best off just building great integrations. Intercom could have spent their time building a killer Zapier et al integration, but instead spent it on their own 'Custom Actions' - which makes sense if you're Intercom, it's just painful for their customers.
It's a shame as Intercom used to be the most recommended tool to me, but now it's the tool most people are trying to escape from it would seem.
That's why most of them offer APIs and Webhooks. If you are big enough (as a business) you would have developers already working with APIs. Syncing the data to Intercom.
I had clients and I worked at places where Intercom API was heavily used, and where a lot of things were custom-made to fit the needs of the business.
So, it's not impossible, it just takes some developer's effort.
But that's the answer for everything ha
I do tend to agree with you Isaak. And thats where the opportunity for organisations like mine lie.
I would love to do a deeper dive on this. Would you be comfortable with the same? If yes - can you go to thena.ai and drop a line? I will follow up with you there.
