Tips from the Intercom Team | Community
Skip to main content

Tips from the Intercom Team

36 Topics
P
Employee
Paul M11Employee
posted in The Workflow Recipe Book
Auto follow-up for unresponsive customers

This recipe will show how to set up a workflow that adds a note, applies tags, or inserts an AI summary note when a conversation is assigned to a team. Check out the video walkthrough here on how to set up this workflow. 👇 Step 1: Start a New Workflow Go to the Workflows section in your Intercom workspace here. Click + New Workflow (usually at the top-right of the screen). Select Create from scratch.Step 2: Select Your Trigger Choose the Trigger from During Conversation: If customer has been unresponsive. This Trigger activates the Workflow every time a customer stops replying, not just the first time.Step 3: Configure Trigger Rules Inactivity Timer: Set the inactivity timer to control how long to wait for a response from the customer before the workflow is triggered. Audience: Add filters for the conversations if you'd only like the workflow to trigger for certain conversations This ensures the Workflow only runs if the conversation matches the filters. Channels: Select which Inb

70
P
Employee
Noor Saleh
Employee
Noor SalehEmployee
posted in Intercom for Automated Support
How do I create and use conversation data attributes?

Want to use conversation data attributes but you’re not sure how they can help stay organized and keep track of important information in your conversations?We got you covered! 🤝 In this video, we’ll walk you through how to create and use them using real examples and use cases.You’ll learn how to:1. Set up conversation data attributes from scratch.2. Apply them inside a conversation manually.3. Automate their use with Macros, Basics, and Workflows to capture key data points from customers upfront and route conversations based on your criteria.5. Organize these attributes with Views in your inbox.6. Report on them to gain valuable insights. If you found this helpful, let us know how you intend to use them to inspire us and others! 🚀

3115
Noor Saleh
Employee
E
Intercom Team
Ebenezer.LaleyeIntercom Team
posted in Tips for Developers
How to Pass a Company ID over in a Conversation.

Hey there! Ebenezer here from Engineering Support👋.We get a lot of questions on how to “Pass a Company ID over in a Conversation”. While Company data doesn't get stored in the Conversation Object, there is a way to do this!☝😎First, you'll need to create a Conversation Data Attribute that stores the specific value that you're looking to access.Next, Your team will need to perform several calls to our REST API to get the ball rolling. Initially, they would Retrieve a conversation and then locate the value for  source.author.id. This value will contain the ID of the person who initiated the conversation.A little side note; You’ll want to verify that the source.author.type is "user" for those conversations. If it's "admin" then that ID will be for a team member on your workspace who started the conversation. In these situations, you will want to dig into the conversation_parts attribute to see who the actual customer is.Once you have the ID of the User, you will then want to make a call

1421
A
Jacob Cox
Intercom Team
Jacob CoxSr. Technical Support Engineer
posted in Intercom for Human Support
Delete a Single Conversation Directly From Your Help Desk

Have you ever found yourself pounding your head against the wall trying to figure out a simple way for your team to delete a single Conversation in Intercom? For a long time the only way to delete a conversation was by deleting the Intercom User or Lead associated with the Conversation. But by doing this you not only delete that single Conversation, you also delete that User/Lead and every other conversation that is associated with them. Recently our Engineering team added a ‘Delete a Conversation’ call to the Unstable version of our REST API. This new endpoint allows your team to delete a single conversation from your Intercom workspace without having to delete the associated Intercom Contact! This is a step in the right direction, but making an API call isn’t always super convenient. Also, those three letters API, can strike fear in the hearts of those customers who don’t have a little bit of coding experience under their belt. What follows is a solution for deleting a single convers

10544
chaloemkhompitoon
Noor Saleh
Employee
Noor SalehEmployee
posted in Intercom for Human Support
Prevent customers reopening closed conversations

Hey Community!  👋 It’s Noor here from the Customer Education team at Intercom.I wanted to share a helpful tip that’s made a big difference for our customers at Intercom, which is to"Prevent Customers Reopening Closed Conversations". It’s a simple setting that can really clean up your reporting and make your support process smoother. 🚀 This setting can be found in your Messenger settings, under the Control Inbound Volume section. By preventing customers, or visitors, from reopening closed conversations, you encourage them to start new ones for each new question.  Why is this important or how is it going to benefit your support workflows?It keeps separate customer queries from getting mixed up, making it easier to track how long it takes to resolve each problem. When different issues are combined into one conversation, it messes up your reporting and makes it hard to see how long each specific issue takes to handle.It saves your agents time. They don’t have to figure out if a new quest

2752
Noor Saleh
Employee
Noor Saleh
Employee
Noor SalehEmployee
posted in Intercom for Human Support
How to exclude time spent in bot inbox from SLA targets

Hi Intercom Community! We’re back with another Intercom Quick Win, and this one’s about managing SLAs. 🚀 Have you noticed your conversations going out of SLA before your agents even have a chance to catch up on the thread or greet the customer? This often happens because the time customers spend interacting with Fin AI Agent or going through a Workflow counts towards your SLA. Here’s a simple fix: set up a separate Bot Inbox in your Automation Settings. This way, any conversation that starts with Fin AI Agent or a Workflow will appear in a separate inbox. Your SLAs won’t start ticking until the conversation is assigned out of that inbox and into the right hands. By turning on this separate bot inbox, you can also exclude the time customers spend with Fin AI Agent or in a Workflow from your reporting. This gives you a clearer picture of how long it really takes for your agents to respond and follow up. Check out this 1-minute video to see how it works, or follow along with our help gui

1011
Graziela
Innovator ✨
Michelle F12
Employee
Michelle F12Employee
posted in Tips for Developers
Using your Support team to proactively help customers get the most out of their plan 💡

Hey Support Leaders 👋 I’m Michelle, and I’m a Support Manager here at Intercom.  I wanted to share some insight into something we’ve been working on within our Support team over the last few months that I think might be useful to others across the industry. With customers all over re-evaluating their tech stacks and looking to minimise costs where possible, it’s more important than ever to ensure that they are getting the most out of your product, and really getting to see the value it has, to help inform their decision making.  At Intercom, we spotted an opportunity to utilise our own Support team (who are speaking with hundreds of customers every day), to proactively flag with customers when they are not using features within their subscription (that they’re paying for!), so that they can see the full power of what they can do with Intercom.  The problem we faced, like most Support teams, is that we did not have a tonne of capacity to spare for our team to take on the additional wor

4061
Graziela
Innovator ✨
bernice
Expert User ✨
berniceExpert User ✨
posted in Tips for Developers
Intercom specific CSS selectors for Product Tours

Hey, I’m B, a Customer Support Engineer with Intercom 👋🐝 An issue we often see users face when building Product Tours & Tooltips is that their selector cannot be found on the page the Tour is being built on.A guaranteed way of making your Product Tour display as expected is editing your CSS selectors to the Intercom specific ones provided -[data-intercom-target="Specific element name"]You’ll find more on this method in this article from our Help Center 📌 

2711
Erin
Jacob Cox
Intercom Team
Jacob CoxSr. Technical Support Engineer
posted in Tips for Developers
Export Your Intercom Conversations to Third Party Tools

When managing conversation history, it’s not uncommon for Intercom customers to need to export the full contents of a Conversation from Intercom into a third party tool. Depending on the information needed there are a few different approaches to take.  If you don’t need the full text of the Conversation, rather you only need to export the data around the text (ex. which customer you’re speaking to, which admin handled the conversation, etc) then there are 2 different ways to get this data.Option 1: Via the Data Export option in our Reports 1). In the Reports section of your Intercom workspace click on the Data Export option, click on the Conversations or the Tickets tab (depending on which you want to export), and choose your timeframe and any filters that you want to use.2). Choose which fields you want to include in the export from the 4 dropdown menus under the Select Fields to Export section.3). Click on the Export CSV button. An email with a CSV file of those Conversations will be

29894
Erin
Femi
Employee
FemiEmployee
posted in Getting started with Intercom
How to create a Workflow that uses Custom Object data to retrieve data from a Custom Action.

Hey there 👋Femi here from the Technical Support Engineering  team! We get some questions about using Custom Actions with Custom Objects and Workflows, here’s how to do that. Let’s start by taking a look at what my custom API response to the /products endpoint of my test API looks like 👇 This is important as the request and response type will determine how you structure the Custom Action request.  Now that we know what the response looks like, let’s go ahead and set up our Custom Action. First, navigate to Settings and go to Apps & Integrations where you’ll find “Custom Actions”: This is where you'll set up all the different connections you have to external data (e.g. Shopify, Salesforce, etc.) depending on your use case. In this post, I’ll be making use of my custom online store that sells football boots.Click “Create action” to set up your first Custom Action: Give your Custom Action a clear description 👇  Configure the Request details: This is where you’ll need to enter the AP

7801
Maan Wardhan
Beth-Ann
Employee
Beth-AnnEmployee
posted in Intercom for Automated Support
Enabling a culture of knowledge management in your team

Hey everyone, I’m Beth, Help Center Manager here at Intercom. Besides creating articles, one of the most important duties of managing a Help Center is making sure those articles are kept up-to-date and helpful. Our articles are not only used by our customers, but are also seen and shared by our support reps. Equipped with their deep knowledge of Intercom’s products and features, they’re often the first ones to spot content that looks stale or inaccurate, so who better to flag it than our own Support team, and what better place than from the article itself? By setting up an inbound Workflow from our Help Center, support reps can make article update requests or submit new article ideas, straight from the Messenger. Their request details can either be captured in the conversation thread, or by sending a ticket. These requests are automatically triaged into a specific Workflows, where I can easily pick them up. Tickets are great for capturing all the details needed to action the request, a

4927
Shane
Larissa
Employee
LarissaEmployee
posted in Getting started with Intercom
When should I use conversation tags and conversation attributes?

Hey, I’m Larissa, a Customer Support Specialist with Intercom. 👋We often get asked what is the difference between conversation tags and attributes. Whist they can easily be confused, they can be used in different ways.Conversation Tags are tags that are applied to individual responses in a conversation. Tags can be applied by teammates, bots, and/or rules. These tags are helpful to flag and categorize information. You can apply multiple tags to the same conversation and they can be completely different. Let’s say that on the same conversation a customer asked for a feature, complimented another one and was really happy with the support given. This conversation could have three tags: ‘feature request’, ‘positive feedback’ and ‘good interaction’.Conversation Data Attributes are more structured than tags. You define specific information that you would like retrieved from a conversation, like specific numbers, text, true/false responses, priority, etc., and then it becomes categorized to

3381
Noor Saleh
Employee
Brian Branca
Employee
Brian BrancaEmployee
posted in Getting started with Intercom
Trigger One Product Tour After Another

Hi, I’m Brian, a Customer Support Engineer in Chicago 👋A common question: “Is it possible to create two Product tours where the second tour shows immediately after the first one finishes?” The answer is yes! There are a few ways to achieve this.   Note: #2 and #3 will require the help of your dev team 1) Using SeriesPerhaps the simplest way to do this would be to create a Series which sends out the Tours. Then, you can configure it so when the User has completed the first Tour, the second one will be sent automatically.2) Utilize the Intercom(‘update’) methodAn alternative to using a Series would be to refresh the Intercom page after the first Tour is displayed. When you call the Intercom('update') method using some new user data, Intercom will look for new messages that should be shown to the user and will display the second Product Tour. 3) Use the Intercom(‘startTour’) methodAn alternative method would be to display the second tour when a button or a link is clicked on your s

3741
G
mateusz.leszkiewicz
Intercom Team
mateusz.leszkiewiczIntercom Team
posted in Getting started with Intercom
API - How to set up an Access Bearer Token A.K.A.: Find Workspace Access Token

To locate the access tokens for your workspace, go to the Developer Hub and then navigate to Your Apps.Here you'll find a list of all the apps you've built, including the workspace the app is installed on and the production workspace's access token. To find the access token, you'll need to locate the private app with the same name as your workspace's name. If this was migrated over during the update, it will have the phrase "Access Token App" at the end of its name.For example, my production workspace was called CSMappe and the access token would be this private app in my developer hub:  Once you've located this, you'll want to click on the app's name. This will take you to the app's basic information view, like this 👇​Next, you'll want to locate your access-token details by clicking the Authentication link in the navigation bar. Along with details regarding the scope of the token. (i.e. what data it can access and what it can do), you can also make updates to change the scope of your

6760
mateusz.leszkiewicz
Intercom Team
aykut.aydin
Employee
aykut.aydinCustomer Support Engineer
posted in Intercom for Automated Support
Automatically Create Tickets by Using Workflows & Custom Actions

In Workflows, it is possible to share a ticket form with customers for them to fill out, but it is not directly possible to create a ticket automatically.To create the ticket automatically, you can use Custom Actions to make an API call to create a ticket. The API endpoint you will need to use is here. Here is an example,1- Firstly, you can create your custom action using the example below, which you will insert into your Workflow later. You can adjust the content of the ticket based on your use-case. 2- Now it's time to incorporate this into our workflow:In my example, I’d like to automatically create a ticket whenever a conversation is rated negatively. (See here for more details on how to ask CSAT via Workflows)For this, I am using branches to check if the conversation is rated negatively. If so, it will trigger the Custom Action we created.  3- Result:When the customer rates the conversation negatively, the custom action is automatically triggered by the Workflow above, creating a

4250
aykut.aydin
Employee
Jennifer K
Intercom Team
Jennifer KIntercom Team
posted in Getting started with Intercom
How to Create a New Workspace

Hi I’m Jennifer 👋I am part of the Support Team here at Intercom 👍We often see confusion between creating new Workspaces live in production, creating Test Workspaces and creating Developer Workspaces. There are 3 different types of Workspaces that can be created.Intercom Apps (instances) are called Workspaces, whereas Integrations are called Apps. We've made this change to avoid confusion for developers who are building apps on our Framework.   However, we have not renamed the "app_ID", as changing the name of that to "workspace_id"would have been a breaking change for integrations with Intercom across web apps and websites.To create a new Workspace, you can click on your avatar in the lower left-hand corner. You then hover over your current workspace's name and a pop-out should appear. At the bottom of the "Search for a workspace" pop-out, click "Add a new workspace..." 👍​If you are trying to create a Test Workspace, you should go to your general settings. You'll then be directed to

3170
Jennifer K
Intercom Team
R
Employee
Ruth KEmployee
posted in Tips for Developers
Converting visitor to lead by passing anonymous email

Using our JS API, it is not possible to update the email field of a visitor type contact with the standard Intercom('update', {"email": "rk.test@testing.com"}); Doing so will result in a 403 error. However, using a parameter in the JS API called anonymous_email will allow you to convert a visitor to a lead via the JS API without running into any issues. Use the update method to pass through the email of the visitor without needing to set up REST API calls to achieve the same result. Intercom('update', {"anonymous_email": "test@example.com"});

2011
F
Shauna
Intercom Team
ShaunaIntercom Team
posted in Getting started with Intercom
Why are users disengaging from my Series? How do I re-engage those users back into the Series?

Hey, I’m Shauna - Technical Support Specialist with Intercom 👋I’ve had a lot of interactions with customers who are querying why their users disengaged from the Series and how to re-engage them - so I’m here to help 🚀 To start out at the root of it - why are users disengaging from a Series? Disengaged Users are users who haven’t qualified for the next block in their path or users who haven’t come online to receive a message within the set timeframe.Note: If using the "try to match once" rule, a user will disengage as soon as they reach this block if they do not match the rules at that time. If users will need time to match the rule block, try using the "try to match for X days" rule. This rule means that users will stay at this block until they match the rules and then proceed down the path, or they will disengaged after 'X days' have passed.Some other examples where Users can disengage is in the case of an Email or SMS - the user could be:Unsubscribed from Emails or SMS On the Hard

1500
Shauna
Intercom Team
Jennifer K
Intercom Team
Jennifer KIntercom Team
posted in Getting started with Intercom
Guidance on how to set up different workflow triggers with rules and conditions and understand their prioritisation

When creating a Workflow, there are multiple Triggers to choose from and it's important to note that once you chose a Trigger and set the Workflow live, you cannot change the Trigger type.Each Trigger has a different purpose and there are 14 Triggers that can be used depending on if you are creating a Workflow for a Conversation or for a Ticket.This article goes into more detail on what each trigger does and their common use cases 📄- https://www.intercom.com/help/en/articles/7434613-introducing-triggers-for-workflowsYour Workflows always run in sequential order. Customers only experience the first customer facing Workflow they match which is why we recommend having different audience rules in your targeting if you have multiple Workflows with the same trigger as if you have the same audiences and same triggers, only the first Workflow will fire.You can read more on how to manage the order of your Workflows in this article below 👇https://www.intercom.com/help/en/articles/7857645-manag

5460
Jennifer K
Intercom Team
mateusz.leszkiewicz
Intercom Team
mateusz.leszkiewiczIntercom Team
posted in Getting started with Intercom
What to do when Product Tour is not firing? (Troubleshooting guide)

Your Product Tour may not be showing or sending for a number of reasons. I'll review a few, but let me know if this does not sound familiar to you. Intercom Messenger must be installed on the page the tour is built on. If Messenger isn’t installed on the page you built the tour on, the tour will not work. To make sure your Messenger is installed, you can check your Network tab in your Browser Developer Tools (Fn+F12) and put Ping in the search bar. If there are some logs, it means that Intercom is installed on your website. 👇     If a user matches for multiple tours at the same time through the “Show tour automatically” audience rules, we will only send the user the most recently updated tour by date. The audience rule might not be set up correctly in “Show tour automatically.”. For example, this could be set up for users rather than leads (you can click on the toggle there to change the audience). The page URL in the audience rules in “Show tour automatically” may be incorrect.

2950
mateusz.leszkiewicz
Intercom Team
aykut.aydin
Employee
aykut.aydinCustomer Support Engineer
posted in Intercom for Automated Support
Enhance Customer Satisfaction with Automated CSAT Follow-Up Actions in Your Workflow

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is a crucial metric for any business aiming to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Taking the initiative to understand and act upon customer feedback is essential for continuous improvement. Here, I’ll guide you on how to ask for conversation rating and take follow-up actions based on the given rating in Workflows. Step 1- Create a Workflow by going to Automation > Workflows > New Workflow. Select “Create from scratch” and then select “Teammate changes the conversation state” trigger type. Step 2- Choose “Closed” in the below section. This means, the Workflow will trigger when the conversation is closed  Step 3- Now you can add the first action of your Workflow. Ask for conversation rating. Step 4- Enable the below toggle to make sure your Workflow doesn’t proceed to the next steps until the customer gives a rating. If you don’t enable this option, the Workflow will proceed to the next step without waiting for the customer to provide a rating. S

6180
aykut.aydin
Employee
Sarah H11
Employee
Sarah H11Custom Support Specialist 2
posted in Getting started with Intercom
Why does my Email audience count look less than I expect?

When creating a Proactive Email, we often get asked why the audience size is smaller than using the same filters in the Contacts page. Let’s break down the main reason this can happen!With email messages, we automatically exclude users that:Don't have an email Have unsubscribed from you Have marked your emails as spam Have bounced any emails you've sent to themIf you want a more accurate list of the users who would be in your email audience, you can see this in Contacts by using the same filters in your message and then additionally adding Email is unknown and Unsubscribed from Emails is false or Marked email as spam is false or Has hard bounced is false.  

1020
Sarah H11
Employee
Pavel Kozlov
Employee
Pavel KozlovEmployee
posted in Intercom for Automated Support
Using Apply rules step in Workflows to tag conversations based on specific keywords

Hello Intercom community, Pavel here, Engineering manager from Automation group at Intercom.  We recently shipped the “Apply rules” step to our Workflows. This step is essentially a “case” statement that allows to apply multiple sets of actions based on specific conditions for each set.What I wanted to share in this post is how well this step handles a very popular use case of tagging conversations based on keywords.Before this release you could do it only using rules, and you had to create a rule per each keyword. Now you can do the same work in Workflows using just one Workflow.Here’s how it works:  Go to Workflows and find “After a customer sends any message trigger”   Add the “Apply rules” step​ ​​​​​​  Set up keywords/tags pairs   Set your Workflow live!  Hope it helps! Cheers,Pavel 

7784
E
Sarah H11
Employee
Sarah H11Custom Support Specialist 2
posted in Intercom for Human Support
Target messages to users based on Survey responses

Hey folks 👋 I'm Sarah, a Customer Support Specialist in Dublin, we may have spoken before if you've ever written into the support team. A common question I get asked, is if it’s possible to send follow up messages to users based on their response to a Survey and the answer to this is absolutely! When you create a Survey in Intercom, you can choose to save the Survey answer the user selects as a user attribute by clicking here 👇 You can then create a Proactive support message, to follow up with users based on the answer they have chosen, by using this attribute in the audience rule 👇 The above Email will now send to users who have rated less than 3 in the Survey.  Hope this helps and happy Surveying!! 😊

900
Sarah H11
Employee
Jacob Cox
Intercom Team
Jacob CoxSr. Technical Support Engineer
posted in Getting started with Intercom
Harness Webhooks in Your Series to Send Survey Responses to Slack

As a Customer Support Engineer, a common question I get from customers is, “Can I send Intercom Survey results to Slack?”The answer is a resounding “Yep”! In fact, it’s possible to do this within Intercom without having to write a single line of code. (Though a little knowledge about how APIs work never hurts 😀!) What you’ll need to do this: Slack’s API docs An Intercom Subscription that includes both Series w/Webhooks and our Surveys product. Create the Series Create a new Series in your workspace and set up your Audience rules to filter for your intended Survey audience. In my example, I want to send a Survey to all of my customers who have signed up for my product in the last 90 days. This Survey can send on any URL that my Intercom workspace is installed on. Create and Add your Survey I’m not going to go through all the steps of creating a Survey. If you want to learn how to set one up you can read about that here. That said, one important thing to remember to do when setting the

8800
Jacob Cox
Intercom Team
Ask a question
Terms & Conditions