Update relationship attributes programmatically via APIs (both standard and custom Objects)

Hi ​@Glen Coco 

Jennifer here from Customer Support 😊

Can you elaborate on why this would be useful?

Right now, Intercom supports neither ETL-based relationship updates nor API-based relationship updates between “people” aka “contacts” and custom objects. 

The screenshot below is an example of customer.io and how they support “ETL”, or “db”-based relationship updates between people and custom objects. 

So for example, if a person purchased a fruit package (custom object here being “packages”) outside of intercom, and they want to inquire about the purchased package in intercom, intercom has no way of knowing that which packages the person purchased, since there is no way to:
1. either set up some kind of db-based relationship cron job
2. either trigger an API call outside of intercom to relate the package object instance to the person from outside intercom
3. or use the intercom actions API UI to relate the package object instance to the person from outside intercom

(pls correct me if there currently is a way to do this?)

As a result, the usefulness of custom objects is severely limited for use cases where a user is trying to look up packages they purchased or we want to pull up packages they’ve purchased (which we’d know via a person<> custom object relationship) without some easy way to programmatically relate custom objects to standard objects.