@Soniak Sorry you had this issue, I’ve never had this issue with the feature but I think if something isn’t working correctly with this workflow it’s probably because the side conversations feature is intended to be used with external vendors -- because of this, maybe Agent 1 and Agent 2 in your team have permissions that mean that side conversations replies from outside of Intercom are not being handled correctly if they match an address for a team member.
That being said, in your screenshot it does look like the reply was private as it shows with a yellow background. Still it would be good to investigate if you think it was shown to the customer because if you happen to try to use this side chat features and the client sees that discussion it could be very problematic.
I’d recommend reporting this to the team further with all the conversation links so they can request access and investigate just to be sure.
Did you say the customer definitely saw this?
Good luck and let us know what you find out!
Hope this helps
Hi @Nathan Sudds , thanks for your reply!
- The customer definitely saw it. He’s the one who sent me this image
- You’re likely right - I think that both Agent 1 and Agent 2 had permissions inside Intercom and it may have matched to a team member even though there’s a yellow background indicating a private convo. I’ll have to test again :)
If we discover this issue persists with other external contacts, I’ll be sure to raise it here again and connect with the Intercom team. Thanks again !
Hi @Nathan Sudds , thanks for your reply!
- The customer definitely saw it. He’s the one who sent me this image
- You’re likely right - I think that both Agent 1 and Agent 2 had permissions inside Intercom and it may have matched to a team member even though there’s a yellow background indicating a private convo. I’ll have to test again :)
If we discover this issue persists with other external contacts, I’ll be sure to raise it here again and connect with the Intercom team. Thanks again !
@Soniak Oh wow! That’s not great and now your team is going to have a traumatic experience every time they start a side conversation now 😭🤣
New fear unlocked 💀
@mateusz.leszkiewicz I wonder if you have any thoughts on this one? It seems worth looking into if you think this behaviour sounds odd or maybe the use case wasn’t considered that a teammate might try to use it as a team side conversation because it could be very problematic if not!
haha tell me about it @Nathan Sudds . The team’s first response was “never use side convo feature”. It’s likely an error on my part, however, the term “side conversation” just intuitively felt like I could talk to someone about the issue privately/ in a different thread. Good to know now it’s intended for external vendors.
haha tell me about it @Nathan Sudds . The team’s first response was “never use side convo feature”. It’s likely an error on my part, however, the term “side conversation” just intuitively felt like I could talk to someone about the issue privately/ in a different thread. Good to know now it’s intended for external vendors.
Side Conversation Important Highlight
They need to make this in RED, I put a red box around it for this but it’s in a subtle yellow haha 🤣
Also I would say that I doubt Intercom wants it to be this fragile to where if someone uses it with their team it goes public to the user when it’s supposed to only be in the side conversation so if that’s true - it’s worth reporting as a bug and privacy concern.
I actually like your idea of an internal side conversation, it could be helpful to not clog up the conversation thread with the user but definitely not if the messages go o the user 🙃
I still wonder if there’s something else up there, because I feel like Intercom would have caught this edge case or exception and prevented it. Looking forward to what @mateusz.leszkiewicz has to say!
@Soniak On the bright side, at least you weren’t using this for months already and then finding out… you weren’t using it… for a.. long time right??? 👀💀
That makes sense @Nathan Sudds ! Well, just to test if something like this could go wrong… the “client” here was someone we knew so nothing lost in this instance PHEW. Just a little risky if we’re dealing with PII or any sensitive information, even if it’s a user error on our part. Would appreciate a look from @mateusz.leszkiewicz :)
Hey @Soniak and @Nathan Sudds
Thanks for bringing this up — I’ve looked into it, and as Nathan mentioned earlier, this is the expected behaviour.
Side Conversations are meant for internal use or emailing external contacts (like vendors), and they’re not visible to customers in the Messenger. You and your teammates will see system updates in the main thread (like when a side convo is created or replied to), but the customer won’t see those unless you send them a direct message from the main conversation.
If it seems like they are seeing something from a side convo, it’s worth double-checking that the message wasn’t sent from the main thread by accident.
If you are still in doubt - please reach out to us via Messenger in your Workspace and we can look into this in details.
