Hey, I’m Larissa, a Customer Support Specialist with Intercom.

We often get asked what is the difference between conversation tags and attributes. Whist they can easily be confused, they can be used in different ways.

Conversation Tags are tags that are applied to individual responses in a conversation. Tags can be applied by teammates, bots, and/or rules. These tags are helpful to flag and categorize information. You can apply multiple tags to the same conversation and they can be completely different. Let’s say that on the same conversation a customer asked for a feature, complimented another one and was really happy with the support given. This conversation could have three tags: ‘feature request’, ‘positive feedback’ and ‘good interaction’.

Conversation Data Attributes are more structured than tags. You define specific information that you would like retrieved from a conversation, like specific numbers, text, true/false responses, priority, etc., and then it becomes categorized to make reporting a breeze. Attributes, like tags, can also be applied automatically by bots and Inbox rules, however, only conversation attributes can be collected from your customers directly. With conversation attributes, you can easily see how many conversations your team received about a specific topic, for example, and see the case reasons that generates more contacts. You can then consider improving your Help Center articles for these topics so your customers can try to resolve their questions with self-serve support before reaching out to your human support.