We run a small call centre on Intercom Phone and the current call routing behaviour is causing us real problems. Sharing here because I suspect we're not the only ones.
The core issue: when an inbound call comes in, Intercom rings available agents once. If that ring isn't answered — agent is on another call, notification missed, away from desk — the call drops into silent hold. There's no continuous polling, no signal to agents that a call is still waiting, no queue state they can pull from. The customer ends up sitting on a dead-feeling line until they give up. From our side, it looks and feels like we're missing calls we shouldn't be missing.
What we'd expect, and what every other call centre platform does: keep polling available agents until one picks up, or expose a clear queue state agents can manually answer from.
A few smaller things point to the same underlying issue — Phone hasn't quite been designed for a working call centre yet. Manual callbacks aren't recognised: miss a call, ring the customer back from the ticket manually, hang up, and Intercom then prompts us to call them again because it doesn't track that an outbound call already went to that number on that ticket. Callers on hold get silence — no hold messaging, no position-in-queue, no reassurance they're still in the queue. And scheduled callbacks fire on a fixed timer-based delay rather than queueing up for the next time an agent is free.
The chat, transcription, and AI summary side of Intercom is genuinely excellent and is the reason we picked it. But the voice product feels close-but-not-quite for anyone running a real phone queue. Would love to know if continuous polling and proper queue behaviour is on the roadmap, and if anyone else has worked around this in a way that doesn't involve Slack alerts as a band-aid.
Happy to share more detail with the product team if useful.