"Follow" Conversation Notifications

Hi @DBurnett 

Jennifer here from Intercom

I totally get that it might seem obvious, but it's super helpful for our Product team to understand why certain features are important to you. So, I'd really appreciate it if you could share a bit more about your specific use case here. We're always eager to hear from our customers and learn how we can improve! 👀

I manage an IT Team that utilizes conversations and tickets for client communication.  We have three different teams with 4 people in each team.  Some tickets come in that I do not need to monitor or follow along with.  Others come in that I get requested input on or that I want to track to keep up on the client communication. 

I still want almost all of these tickets to be handled by the employees and not directly by me.

If I go in and CC myself on a ticket, that works sometimes.  If I adjust participants and add myself, I will receive a reply but only if the customer continues to hit reply all.  I can track all ticket responses, but we average 30-50 new conversations a day, plus the responses to each conversation.  This is way too many notifications to effectively get the information for the 2-3 conversations I want to actually follow.  

I can be pulled into a conversation by someone mentioning me, but then the subsequent notifications do not go to my email/push notifications.  

I am looking for something that allows me to “Follow” a conversation and choose to get the notifications about it, without needing to assign the ticket to my user.  

I know this might be fairly unique, but with how many notifications we get across all systems, being able to see the Intercom icon and know it is something I need to get back to is very helpful.

Not unique at all! This was a feature I’ve relied on in other platforms heavily. Massive +1 to what was described above, a follow feature is super helpful for having specific control over which conversations I’d like to receive alerts on without having to add myself as a CC (which I reserve for when I am going to be a separate, active participant on the conversation, only) or sign up for alerts on an entire team. 

One other case -- it’s incredibly helpful for new teammate onboarding, or for folks learning newer concepts in the queue. For example, if I come across a conversation where I’ve hit a wall and I’ve pinged my team for help, a follow option is incredibly useful to be able to passively learn from the conversation when it’s answered (and to see how it continues to evolve with the customer). Otherwise, I need to manually keep a list of links which gets unwieldy fast, or add a CC participant which feels heavy handed when I’m not actually going to be part of the conversation moving forward. 

Completely agree - a very much needed core functionality!

Hi 

Hi, any update on this? It’s a super important area for knowledge sharing and admin.

​@Kyle Sawyer this feature isn’t on our roadmap currently but I’ll keep my fingers crossed, I’d love to see this feature too 🤞

Agree with the need for this feature. I’m not directly customer facing, but would like to be able to follow along conversations or tickets for potential product issues and replies from employees or customers without keeping tabs open or constantly looking for updates. Is there some kind of work around for this in the meantime?

This feature is a must. We just switched from Zendesk which uses “followers” to seamlessly add people to the discussion, but without the need for the client to see them in Cc. It’s really disappointing that Intercom doesn’t have a way to work collaboratively with other internal teams. We need this to be able to notify Sales/Account Managers about sensitive topics, or non-client-facing roles about issues, such as Product Developers, Finance. This really helps efficiency, which is why we switched to Intercom 😩

I can’t stress enough how important this feature is. 

Follow/Watch/Whatever you want to call it. If we could manage participants in the BCC section that would basically get the job done as well. 

This was a huge feature we relied on in servicenow as well. Our support leaders used it as a key tool to help support our teammates and be proactive on customer interactions. Expanding on that for tickets or conversations of particular interest ideally we could have them display in an Inbox view.

One of the workarounds we found was to @tag oneself in the conversation now whilst that should send us notifications to any updates — it won't display the ticket in any personal inbox or views, the downside there is it can make the conversation thread a tad messy and distracting for teammates.

We’re switching over to Intercom and the ‘Follow’ feature is something a LOT, if not all of our teams use on a daily basis. Similar to a comment above, we use this to add in Sales/Product/Leadership etc. to receive updates on every message in a ticket (internal and external) without the customer seeing those people added as CCs. Some Sales teams request to be added as a follower on all tickets for their customers for a specific type of customer request so they have visibility and can stay informed with their customers. Not having this feature will cause issues once we fully make the switch over to Intercom.

The ability to follow and unfollow would be huge for our teams! In some cases, we need to follow cases initially and then remove ourselves as followers once it’s being handled elsewhere, hence the need for the unfollow feature. Thanks!

​@Alicia Ferreira This 100% will be your biggest complaint when you convert. We’ve been very happy with Intercom, especially in comparison to HubSpot for ticketing. However not having a follower feature causes a lot of consternation. 

Everything you’re describing is our exact use case. 

Thanks for putting feedback on this ticket. 

+1 For this feature. We have a lot of internal stakeholders who want to be kept updated with progress on conversations/tickets, particularly our Customer Success team. Like others mentioned before, we had this feature in Zendesk and it was very useful. If we could see it on the roadmap that would be amazing!

I think this feature would be great, I use this a lot as a way to keep track of learning from other team members as well. I recently joined the Customer Support team at my company and want to learn as much as I can from other tickets. I use the feature often on slack and it would be great to see it here as well

This is core functionality of a ticketing system.

​@Michaela Hone ​@Jennifer K Any idea if this feature is on the roadmap?