Currently in Intercom, when an external customer/email recipient removes an email recipient from an email thread, Intercom automatically adds them back on to the thread. This means that it is very easy to press “reply” and send your email to recipients who should not have received that email. This poses a serious data protection risk. It places extra work on the Intercom user to double check again the email recipient list every time before sending a reply, which results in extra work and undue delay in replying to customer emails.
This behavior creates a real risk that confidential information or data may accidentally be sent to the wrong recipient.
It would be very useful if Intercom either (a) only allowed replies to the email recipients who were on the immediately previous email - even if that is from an external user or (b) clearly alerted the Intercom user that an email recipient has been automatically re-added back into the conversation by Intercom, to reduce the risk of my team replying and sending information to a recipient who should not have received it.
This would then match how other inboxes operate e.g. gmail, hotmail when using a “reply all” function. Currently the Intercom “reply” default position is different to what the user expects and so increases the risk of the user getting it wrong.
Expected benefits:
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Prevent accidental sharing of confidential information/data with unintended email recipients;
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Increase GDPR and data security;
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Reduces work for Intercom users and increases customer response time as no extra checks needed before pressing “reply”;
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Avoids the need to alert staff and train them to a different unexpected feature that does not match industry norm when replying to emails with multiple recipients.