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Hello,

This is a question I’ve had for quite some time, but is there anything that can be done to create custom data objects (not attributes) in Intercom that go beyond Contacts and Companies? 

In our case we’ve been sending the data to People and Companies for quite some time, but the data structure has always been an issue, as we needed to attribute the data to either a person or a company, which means that we cannot cover all customer data as in our business customers can have, for example, multiple licenses with multiple users within the same team 😁 

In the perfect world, it would be great to have a flexible CRM-like data structure, where I can just go ahead and create a custom data object that I can attribute to a user. I know that we can use Custom objects withs Custom actions, but I’d much rather like to have the data at hand that I could use for outbound message targeting. 

 

What are your best practices to overcome this challenge?

 

 

Hi @Aleksei O! Ebenezer here from Engineering Support👋.

Unfortunately, this isn’t currently possible but this is a very good idea and would be very beneficial to a lot of customers that need this as well. 

I would love to bring this to our R&D team to see if this is something that can be implemented.

Could you delve a bit deeper on the use case and how a feature like this would be used by your Org?

Hi @Ebenezer.Laleye 👋

 

Thanks for the response. Ideally I’d like to have a data structure, where custom objects can be nested, for example, under contacts and companies. The hierarchy below is suggested as an example: 

Companies > Teams > Licenses > Contacts > Conversations

Having different and customisable data objects would allow us to have more accurate user data (and thus would significantly increase our ability to do targeted outbound comms) as in many SAAS products, User and Companies can be using multiple products. For example, I can have one User belonging to one Team, that has access to 5 different licenses, but not all of the are necessarily attributed to this particular user directly. 

 

Hi @Aleksei O 

Thanks for providing context concerning this!

I’ll bring this back to the Team, it’ll be a big help in creating this feature.

Whenever we do release new features, we'll announce it on the Product Changes page, so I'd recommend keeping an eye here! 

@Aleksei O  This sounds very interesting, is there a reason why adding custom attributes couldn’t work for this as a workaround?  It may be helpful to see how your structure is further but I’m thinking based on what you shared that maybe there could be attributes to identify the teams and licences for your contacts and conversations -- and if you were needing to use this for Views or Audiences or Workflows etc then it would be available in those cases. 

Happy to jump on a call to see more of what you are trying to accomplish to see if I could suggest some workarounds in the meantime -- you’ve got me curious now, maybe you’ve explored all the angles around or have a workaround and just want it to be easier or more robust, that makes sense too for sure. 

 

Hi @Nathan Sudds ! My original answer was erased by the community platform upon submission, so it took me a while to get back here 😀

 

My biggest struggle with data structure in Intercom is that everything has to be nested under Contacts or Companies, while in the CRMs the data is nested under custom objects with it’s own hierarchy, and it cannot be attributed directly to Contacts or Companies. Custom attributes is an option we’ve explored already, but there are some interesting limitations (for example, character limit). 

 

 

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