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How to solve for vendor communications?


We currently offer services to customers via work contracted through vendors, and all comms are in email, where we are the go-between and customers and vendors do not communicate. 
 

How can we implement this workflow skillfully and efficiently in Intercom, where we can see all comms related to a client’s custom project/service, and where vendors are not inside Intercom?

Best answer by Milan

Hello @Asa Nadeau - let me first try to understand what you want to achieve. 

 

Let’s assume you have Customer A and Customer B, and then you have Vendor X, Vendor Y and Vendor Z… 

Customer A has agreed to get from you services that Vendor X and Vendor Y offer.

Customer B decided to go for services that are offered by Vendor Y and Vendor Z.

 

So whenever Customer A sends an email to you, about specific service, you need to forward only the content and not the contact details of the Customer A to either Vendor X or Vendor Y, depending on the content (or the sender or the receiving email address). And do you want this to be two-way communication? So that when specific Vendor replies to you, you want that content (again without any contact details) to be sent to Customer A. 

Similarly it goes for Customer B. And they might be using the same service/vendor. Which complicates this. 

And all this needs to be automated? No manual work? 

 

I’d say this can not be done in Intercom, out of the box, mostly because Intercom is not Zapier to crunch the content and “digest” it and use the extract of the content to use it somewhere else… Even if that is possible, if Intercom had such capabilities, it would be very complicated to setup workflows to know/decide to which Vendor content should be sent, or in the other way to which Customer, as one Vendor will have more Customers, it’s not 1:1 I assume. You can make some logic on that based on the content of the email, on who is the sender or receiver but good luck with that, honestly, there will always be some cases where something will slip… And back to crunching the content of the email to take only the body of the email without headers, it’s simply not possible. 

This might be possible with some additional external logic/processing, like Zapier or even custom developed. 

 

Or am I assuming your use case too complicated and it is actually simpler? 

 

p.s. @Larissa Alberti thanks for the mention!  

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Larissa Alberti
Intercom Team
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Hey @Milan @Nathan Sudds 👋

Just wondering if you can advise on that 🙌


Milan
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  • August 16, 2023

Hello @Asa Nadeau - let me first try to understand what you want to achieve. 

 

Let’s assume you have Customer A and Customer B, and then you have Vendor X, Vendor Y and Vendor Z… 

Customer A has agreed to get from you services that Vendor X and Vendor Y offer.

Customer B decided to go for services that are offered by Vendor Y and Vendor Z.

 

So whenever Customer A sends an email to you, about specific service, you need to forward only the content and not the contact details of the Customer A to either Vendor X or Vendor Y, depending on the content (or the sender or the receiving email address). And do you want this to be two-way communication? So that when specific Vendor replies to you, you want that content (again without any contact details) to be sent to Customer A. 

Similarly it goes for Customer B. And they might be using the same service/vendor. Which complicates this. 

And all this needs to be automated? No manual work? 

 

I’d say this can not be done in Intercom, out of the box, mostly because Intercom is not Zapier to crunch the content and “digest” it and use the extract of the content to use it somewhere else… Even if that is possible, if Intercom had such capabilities, it would be very complicated to setup workflows to know/decide to which Vendor content should be sent, or in the other way to which Customer, as one Vendor will have more Customers, it’s not 1:1 I assume. You can make some logic on that based on the content of the email, on who is the sender or receiver but good luck with that, honestly, there will always be some cases where something will slip… And back to crunching the content of the email to take only the body of the email without headers, it’s simply not possible. 

This might be possible with some additional external logic/processing, like Zapier or even custom developed. 

 

Or am I assuming your use case too complicated and it is actually simpler? 

 

p.s. @Larissa Alberti thanks for the mention!  


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  • August 18, 2023

Hey @Larissa Alberti and @Milan !
Thanks for the help on this :)

I think the case is simpler, at least for now.

Sure, someday it would be nice to build out a platform that supports that type of data exchange between vendor and customer!

I should mention that a customer can also have multiple projects.

For now, I think we’re just trying to achieve screens/views that have the following filters, for example:

  1. all comms with a specific customer
    1. filtered by project
    2. filtered by service/vendor
  2. all comms with a specific vendor
    1. filtered by project
    2. filtered by customer

These comms would also show internal notes etc.
 

37 signals figured out a pretty slick way (“Collections”) to do this in their new email product:
https://www.hey.com/features/collections/
https://www.hey.com/collections/

I’d rather keep all our comms in one place, if possible.

While I’m just scratching the surface, I seem unable to create a view that shows all comms with someone in a “View” or “Team” in Intercom...it’s either “Open” or “Closed” or “Snoozed”, but not “All”...unless I’m in “Search”.

Thanks again for your insight!
-- Asa


Milan
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  • August 18, 2023

Ah ok so you do not want Intercom to act as a pipe between vendors and customers but you want to be able to have all the communication related to vendor/customer/project listed in one view. 


OK that seems as possible.  ​​​​

 

What you need to do is to tag each conversation with:

  • Vendor name tag
  • Cusomer name tag
  • Project (name or ID) tag

Perhaps you can even automate this, tag it automatically, based on senders email address, keywords in subject, body.., etc. Or you can always tag it manually (note: I’m talking about conversation tag, not contact tag). 

 

Then in Inbox, in Views, you can create separate views for each vendor/customer/project you want based on that tag. Like this:

You can even combine and add more filters for the conversation tag, so you can make those pairs Vendor-Customer view. 

 

For this client I also made workflow that was tagging all the conversations with Booking.com tag for any emails coming from Booking.com… 

 

The conversation status is the basic filter that is shown in Inbox and there is no way to show all. You either show Open, Closes or Snoozed conversations. 


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  • August 18, 2023

Thanks so much @Milan!

I’ll play with some tags for views based on your suggestions and see how it goes.

Quick thought:

As a way to have a view with all comms regardless of status, could I tag ALL conversations in Intercom as “All”, and then use that tag in a view that shows all (tag = “All”), plus other tags as appropriate? 


Milan
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  • August 18, 2023

You’re welcome!

 

To answer your latest question - No - it will still have Open/Closed/Snoozed even in View you create.


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  • August 19, 2023

Thanks!

Perhaps this can be a feature request:

Add “all” as an option under status. 
 

Otherwise, it appears that the only way to view all conversations with someone (regardless of conversation status)would be via search, which limits the potential of a view, and could result in missed information. 


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