Merge conversations & tickets- Beta available 🤩

Adding @fernando syncta @Zvia @Rob D @Sofian @Dean G @User2491 @User89 @Luke J @User634 @User610 @User1061 @Adam W @User2540 @Milan @Nathan Sudds @Thibauld @User52 @Lucía @KAILEYTHORPE @tautvydasit @David Desrosiers @User263 @Zvia @Joseph S. @Andrea @Pat Barlow @Patrick Payne (he/him/his) @User1445 @Elyce @Jason L12 @Erin K @Rohan K @Mell @Thomas Murphy @Nate M. @Rhiann Porter @Bianca111 @Lee @Ebony Davis @Regan Macdonald @Jackson @Zack York @Patrick Payne (he/him/his) @Victoria Hotz @Teren @Daniel Winklhammer @Managers @Asim J @Jūratė @Renatas @NicolasPerez @Xenia @Federico Ardoíno @Lennard @Troy William @Jonas Nielsen @LADE Support Team @Chris Hughes @Michael Conley @Carmelia Scales @Andrea @Brandon Foret @Solar-Panel @John Bona @Hannah Cohen @Mathieu Pascal @Gian Luca D'Intino-Conte @Ben Sligar @Pedro Henrique Stival @Jamie @Yasaman @Pat Barlow @Philipp Hofmann @Austen @Lisa Rogers The merge conversations & tickets feature is now available in beta! 

Great news! Thank you for letting us know

Yesssssss!!!! Just requested access

Hello. Great feature, happy to be a part of the beta. 

Can the merge been automated? Example - Intercom system often indicate that conversation is a potential duplicate. I would prefer if that would lead to auto merge. Worst case scenario - agent will check an un-merge it. 

Hello. Love this feature! 

I have a suggestion: can the conversation ID be included in the first list when attempting to merge conversations? This addition would make it easier to identify the primary conversation you'd like to merge others into, especially in cases where there are multiple duplicates.
Currently, the subject of the email and the conversation time are displayed at the first point of merging.

Additionally, a feature for bulk merging? This would be helpful in situations where a user has multiple conversations. Instead of merging them one by one, We could simply select multiple conversations after searching and merge them all at once.

@Denis Taranets  @adam 

Hello, It’s Mat from the Support Engineering Team

Those are wonderful suggestions. I will add them to our backlog of feature requests. 

Love the feature. Although I do not understand the following: 

Can I merge group conversations or tickets?

No, for security purposes you cannot merge conversations or tickets with multiple participants.

As of now we are deleting participants, merging the tickets, and adding the participants back in. We should have the flexibility to merge any two tickets assigned to the same company.

Thrilled to be part of the beta, have been waiting for this feature ever since we started using Intercom!

Something very limiting I’ve noticed immediately is that you can only merge conversations/tickets if they both have the same user/lead as the contact. This is pretty useless in a lot of cases, as another huge issue with the way the system works is that it creates duplicates leads with the same email address every time they start a conversation from a different device or clear their cookies… so you end up with duplicate leads as well.

It would be great if you had the option to merge any conversations with any user/lead as the participant. Or, if there could finally be an update to Intercom wherein it recognises email addresses and doesn’t create new duplicate leads every time someone contacts you from a different device or clears their cookies.

Oh, another thing! I notice you can merge a conversation into a ticket, but not the other way round. Why is this? Would be great to be able to merge in either direction

We are LOVING Merge! It’s been on our wishlist for almost 3 years, since we moved from Zendesk, so very very excited about this feature and loving it so far!

One request from us - it’d be awesome if the recent conversation history showed a convo was tagged “Merged” instead of just “closed” - it’d save time sifting through convos. Very minor, but would be a nice extra :D
 

@Michael Conley 

Appreciate your feedback around the restriction around merging group conversations. As our docs mention this is a Security feature set up to prevent your team from accidentally adding participants to conversations that they shouldn’t be included in. That said, I’ll flag your feedback for our team!

@Mell 

Thanks for that feedback around better highlighting of those conversations that were closed due to merging! I can see how that could be helpful information to surface. I’ll flag this feedback for our team!

Hi @Rhiann Porter !

We appreciate your taking the time to provide feedback around the new merging feature. 

Creating a new Lead when someone writes into your team is necessary to maintain the Security of your Lead’s data. If we assumed that everyone who provided you with the same email address was actually the same person, the it would be too easy for bad actors to log into Intercom pretending to be someone that they are not. For example, just because I tell you that my email address is Rhiann@porter.com, it doesn’t mean that I am really the owner of that email address. If you were to assume that I was the same person and logged me into that Lead’s account, I would now have access to all of your past conversations. The cookies stored on the device is what confirms for us that a person is who they say they are.

That said, I can understand how nice it would be to be able to merge convos of different Leads once it was confirmed that they are who they say that they are. I’ll flag that feedback with our team in the hopes that they can come up with a reliable system that takes both security and convenience into account!

Great feature :)

One question - is there a reason why merging conversations across different channels is not supported?

Hi there @Nurit !

Glad to hear you like the new merging feature! 

I believe the issue with merging multiple channels has to do with the fact that we then don’t know for sure which channel to use for future messages. That said, this feature is still in Beta and the team is still improving it. They are aware that this is an ability that people would like to see incorporated into this feature down the road. I’ll flag your feedback with the team as a Feature Request!

Thanks for your reply, Jacob. I have asked this question a few times and never once had someone respond with this security concern reasoning - previously it’s just been “oh we can’t do that yet, I know it’s annoying! I’ll raise it as a feature request”. Nobody has suggested before that this phenomenon is actually intentional.

It seems the obvious next step then that Intercom would have a feature wherein we could merge these leads once we have established that they are the same person. The benefits of allowing the merge of leads/users really do outweigh the negatives and I think most users would agree. Having 6 copies of one person makes issue and product ownership tracking really rather difficult.

Thanks for your reply @Jacob Cox!
For now, until it improves, it would be better if the pop-up when merging conversations only shows mergeable conversations. It's difficult for teammates to tell which channel the conversation belongs to from the list.

Very happy to hear this, looking forward to testing this out!

SO beyond excited about this feature. Testing it out now. First two things I’m noticing: 

I feel like its not obvious that “chat with Erin Kappers” is linked. But I think it’s important that people are able to click there and see what the other chat/ticket was. I just started clicking everywhere in the box to figure out where the link was. 

I wish there was an easier way to understand which conversation is which. For example, I wish it had the ticket name or one of the fields for the ticket when you’re selecting what you merge into. Or even some way to realize if there’s a conversation/ticket that previously had something merged into it so you know you are merging into the right one.

Excited to add both our workspaces to this beta! Thanks to the Intercom team for hearing us out. :) 

I wish I saw this earlier just requested access!  This is a long time coming -- excited to try it out and give feedback.  So needed, after trying the beta I’m going to definitely recommend it to clients too.