Intercom not working for the majority of users

Question

Hi there, We have implemented Intercom in our SaaS-platform. Our goal is to reliably track users and use the product tours feature. We don't currently use the messenger. The platform is a SPA with only signed in users and we did our installation in accordance with the docs. It's been succesful and we have seen users being tracked. However - we have been tracking our users' login actions using our backend as well, and this way we see that only a fraction of our users is being tracked. Differences vary but no more than 25% of real users seem to be tracked. We know that our original stat is correct because we have examples of users signing in and being tracked correctly by us, but not appearing within Intercom. We suspect that intercom may be blocked with our users somehow, but the fact that this happens to most of our users has us concerned. Does anyone have experience with this, and are there any known workarounds?

Milan · Accepted Answer

Hello @bart a​when you say "track" with Intercom, what do you actually mean? Are you sending some events to Intercom? How are you syncing the data - over API from your backend or do you rely on javascript on the frontend? Being a SPA means that Intercom script might not be reinitiated each time, hence, not sending data to Intercom. Also when you say that you do not use messenger, does it mean that you have hidden it in the settings (which is fine, Intercom will still work, I'm just checking to see if you are not actually switching off the whole script)?

Bart A · Answer

Hi there! Thanks for taking the time to respond.In basis I'm talking about web sessions. We want to use this to track if our users are active and what features they use. We do not send events (yet) to intercom, because that seems like step 2, once we know that Intercom works for everyone. For our old way of tracking we use the backend that just inserts events into a database. For Intercom we use the javascript integration for SPA. The script is initiated on page load, the boot() call is done once the user has identified and every route change (equivalent to page load) an update() call is sent. I know this works, because if I use the app, my session is tracked correctly. And indeed, we have only turned off the messenger using the settings in the intercom portal and not just removed the script. You said something that piqued my interest though, you mentioned it's also possible to use an API from the backend. If I can't get the script to work in a normal manner that would still be an option - even though it would make integrating intercom quite a bit more work. And the question would remain for me if other intercom features - such as the product tours - would keep on working for the people who are not currently being tracked.

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