Hey, I just realized that I've been invited to this group some weeks ago and now I want to use it to share my experience with the "transactional / event-based messages" feature and also get some information on how others use it ;)
How it started
Some months ago I read about this new feature and thought "wow that's amazing, why not get all of our communication (= also send our system-mails through intercom) into intercom so the support team is able to access everything". So we started our project and planned everything to get it done.
Playing around a bit
In order to see how easy it is we started by only sending 1 event to intercom every time a user's booking got confirmed. Everything went pretty well, it was super easy to send the event through intercom's API, the event arrived super fast and you could use it for any existing messaging type.
Problems and how Intercom reacted to them
After doing some testing we thought we're ready to move all of our system mails over to intercom. That's when it started that we found some things which didn't work like expected.
- 5min Limit
- When using an event to send out a message you can choose how often that email should be sent out to the same user. A screenshot showed "Send once every 1min" but unfortunately you were only able to choose at least "5min". While it makes total sense to not spam users with unnecessary emails in some cases you just need to send the "same" email with different data to a user within 5 minutes -> Yesterday I randomly found out that it is now possible to use 1min 🎉
- Only 50 event-based mails
- While moving all of the mails suddenly a message popped up stating that "I've reached the maximum number of messages triggered by an event". After talking to the support team they told me that this wasn't supposed to be like that and changed it to "50 event-based messages per event". So you can now have up to 50 mails/push/banners whatever can be triggered by the same event. -> as stated above intercom changed it very quickly 💪
- Send mails to unsubscribed users 🤔 - When sending out transactional messages (= booking confirmations, password resets, and so on) you need to be sure that they are actually sent out - no matter if a user is subscribed or not. Unfortunately, you're only able to send them to users who are either subscribed or unsubscribed but have been seen in the last 90 days. The best example: Imagine you have a user which has been inactive for 6 months. He forgot has to password and tries to reset it. As he hasn't been online in the last 6 months, the email will just not be sent out because of this rule. -> In order to reach everyone, you can update the lastSeenAt yourself via the API which works but imo is not the right way to do
Current state
Now that basically everything (besides the "problem" with unsubscribed users) has been changed in our favor we're super happy having moved our system-mails to Intercom. As all of our customer communication is now bundled in Intercom our Support-Team is now able to easily see if a user has received an email or not which gives your more information to help out our customers.
Tbh I sometimes had a hard time as it really seemed we were the first company using this feature and trying to get out its full potential I'm now happy that we moved them. Thanks, to the support for always asking my very specific questions and of course to the product team who really took care of getting rid of our problems by changing some parameters 💪
I'd love to get some thoughts from people who also use the feature 👌