Current users coming to our website with new emails and Intercom identifying them as leads.

Question

Not sure where this conversation goes this but dropping here for now.  We would like to create campaigns for leads that visit and interact with the site, however, we keep coming across one common issue. We have a lot of users who come back to the site and email support utilizing an email different from the one they used to create their account/ signup with.  We currently only offer 1:1 support for users, not leads, so no chat/ support widget from intercom is featured on the website. A lot of members will send an email to support directly via a different email, and it creates a new lead. We want to be able to send leads through an automated campaign but can't do this confidently while there are a lot of users being labeled as leads when they message in with new emails.  How can we keep this from happening? This is not a matter of wanting to know how to merge leads and users, I want to find a way to keep them from incorrectly being labeled as a lead in the first place. Are there any fail safes we can put up to double confirm and associate them with a company record?  Thank you!

Nathan Sudds · Accepted Answer

@alexandra k​ This is a tough one to automate because there's no way to associate multiple email addresses with an existing customer so that you can eventually begin to have less current members detected as leads incorrectly.To really make any specific suggestions it's probably better to understand the full situation but I'll add a couple generalized thoughts below that could potentially help... It might be counter-intuitive but maybe it would be better to add the support/chat widget to the site and encourage members to reach out to you that way and leads will just have a limited version available --- this way they have to login first to their account before contacting you or get that question that Intercom recommends on the public site "are you an existing customer?" when they try to contact.   If they click yes, then you've got a good filter there even if they add a different email address by accident.If that's not an option, are these campaigns you want to trigger extremely time-sensitive? If not, you could have them happen after a tag is added by someone on the team to confirm it's a lead that should be in a specific series etc?  Or you could run some automation using Zapier to review a list of known email addresses for customers if you have them in another source then tag them as a lead if you feel confident they aren't. Other related ideas, do you use a different email address for support for members vs contacting via the site?  i.e. hi@ and support@. so people reaching out for the first time will be using a different address than the existing users that could cut down on the confusion as well. Side thought, what's the worst-case scenario if someone who reaches out from an address you don't know yet but is a customer gets added to your lead campaign?  If it's not that bad and it's not happening that frequently -- the upside might outweigh the downside since it's really about the user contacting you from the wrong address.   That being said, it would be awesome if Intercom supported multiple email addresses on an individual account and there was a way to predict how likely a new email address could be associated to an existed user but it's an ongoing issue for sure, we've seen this as well just with support not only lead campaigns because there's so much great reference info in Intercom if they contact from the wrong address that's all not available for context for the support team.

Anonymous · Answer

Hey @alexandra k​&#128522; @nathan s11​'s suggestions are really great and I hope you find them helpful. I think using the Messenger on your site for leads and users, and asking them to choose a button like "Yes, I'm an existing user" vs "No, not yet", would be great for routing and identifying them correctly. Adding multiple email addresses to one user's profile is another good point and something I have definitely heard requested before. I would encourage you to submit this as a feature request to our Product Wishlist group. &#127775;

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