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Tips from the Intercom Team

43 Topics
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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.  

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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 

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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!! 😊

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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

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Jacob Cox
Intercom Team
Brian Branca
Employee
Brian BrancaEmployee
posted in Getting started with Intercom
Add Product Tours to your Messenger Home

 Hi, I’m Brian, a Customer Support Engineer in Chicago 👋 Product tours are a great, interactive way to drive adoption of your product. Product Tours can be shown automatically, shared via a link, or triggered with an Intercom JavaScript method. But did you know it’s possible to add Product Tours to your Messenger Homepage using our Content Showcase app? It’s a great way to make sure that interactive and engaging information about your product is front and center and always a click away.The Content Showcase App allows you to drive engagement by featuring announcements, articles, and Product Tours on your Messenger home screen or in your conversations. Let’s walk through how to add Product Tours to your Messenger Homepage.First, copy the link to your Product Tour from the Show tour everywhere section of your Tour builder  Note: Adding a tour to Content Showcase doesn’t support dynamic URLs (add attributes to the URL). See below for a workaround!  Next, navigate to your messenger s

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Brian Branca
Employee
Brandon S13
Employee
Brandon S13Employee
posted in Intercom for Human Support
How we manage low-touch forecasting and scheduling (partnering with Assembled)

I’m Brandon, the Workforce Manager on the Customer Support team at Intercom. My primary responsibility at Intercom is to ensure that we have the right people, at the right place, at the right time in order to answer our customers’ queries in a timely fashion - and we’ve partnered with the workforce management tool Assembled to make this process easier for myself.With Assembled, we are able to connect Intercom directly to the tool through API integration. In doing so, Assembled is able to ingest and track the number of conversations that flow through all our specific inboxes. The tool then uses this historical data, along with configurable inputs I provide, to generate future short-term forecasts. I then apply manual adjustments within the tool to fine tune a forecast that is most aligned to our business model. Once we input the team’s weekly schedule and time off into Assembled, the staffing timeline updates to display our projected supply versus our forecasted demand. I then schedule

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Brandon S13
Employee
D
Employee
DulceEmployee
posted in Intercom for Human Support
Partnering with R&D on Bug Management

Hello Intercom Community! I’m Dulce, a Customer Support Manager here at Intercom 👋🏽 I also happen to be the newest addition to the NORAM manager crew based in the Chicago office. One of the things that has impressed me about our Support department is the partnership we have in place with the R&D team. As Support leaders, we know the bridge between R&D and Support is a critical one to maintain for many reasons… To ensure the product is evolving in a way that strives to meet customer demand To internally prepare for new product launches and equip our team with the knowledge & resources to enable customer success To enable Support to be an efficient link between the customer and R&D on bug identification and software maintenance One of the recent projects I undertook was to do some “spring cleaning” in the bug management space. My 2 key objectives were to A) improve how we communicate with our customers on bug prioritisation & resolution time and B) provide clear

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D
Employee
Declan I
Intercom Team
Declan IVP, Customer Support
posted in Intercom for Human Support
Using Inbox Dashboards for a bird’s eye view of your team’s backlog

Hi everyone, Declan here, leader of our Support team at Intercom. I’ve worked with many Support tools throughout my career and one of the most important features is a real time view of the state of the queues (or “the inboxes” as we call them at Intercom). The Real-time dashboard feature within Intercom is my go-to space every morning and throughout the day to understand how many conversations are waiting, for how long and for which sub-teams within my organisation. This gives me the high level overview I need and helps me pinpoint where I need to follow up with my team to re-allocate resources or strategise around further capacity planning. You can learn more about the feature here and you can use whatever filters make sense for you and your team, but I would recommend always keeping an eye on Waiting for First Reply. This shows you how many customers have opened a conversation but have not had anyone from the team respond to them yet, which we refer to as our backlog.  How manageable

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Declan I
Intercom Team
R
Employee
Ruth KEmployee
posted in Tips for Developers
Targeting Mobile Screens for Proactive Support Messages

Proactive Support Messages can be set to only display on a specific URL in the Where to send section of the settings. This is really useful for delivering content to end-users on the page that is relevant to the message. However, this can pose an issue for users on mobile devices where the Intercom SDKs are installed as there is no specific URL that can be targeted. As a workaround for this, a custom attribute can be set up for tracking the screen that the mobile user is currently viewing. By sending this data to Intercom and storing it in an attribute, it's possible to send messages targeted to mobile users on a specific mobile screen that they are currently viewing. To do this -  Create a custom attribute - for example, called 'current_screen'. This will be used to store the data which is sent to Intercom each time the user navigates to a new screen in your mobile app. This can be done for all screens in your app or just the ones that require targeted Intercom messages.  Implement

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R
Employee
Jordan S11
Employee
Jordan S11Employee
posted in Intercom for Automated Support
Supporting Customers When Releasing New Products

Hello Intercom Community! Jordan here - first time poster, long term Community fan. I am a program manager on our Support Operations team. I am currently heading up our new product introduction (NPI) program, specifically helping our Customer Support team plan for inbound volume and supporting Customers with their adoption of Intercom’s new products. When preparing for new releases, one of the most important things we prioritize are self-serve resources. These resources allow Customers to find the answers they are looking for without being required to talk to a human. Intercom allows us to create a cohesive suite of self-serve resources using the Help Center, Custom Answers and Workflows. How this might look: Your Customer writes in via your messenger wanting to learn more about how to set up X new feature using recommended best practices. A Custom answer immediately jumps in to help, offering a brief overview of best practices for implementing X product as well as a link to a Help Cen

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Jordan S11
Employee
Andrew R12
Employee
Andrew R12Employee
posted in Getting started with Intercom
Fine Tuning The Customer Follow-up

Hi Support Leaders!I’m Andrew, a Customer Support Manager here at Intercom 👋When was the last time you or your team revisited how you follow-up with customers reaching out to your team? Following up on support requests can take up a lot of time and bandwidth for you and your team - however Intercom has a number of features you can leverage to automate this process & streamline it when a human touch is needed. This not only opens up your team’s bandwidth to focus on customers waiting to hear from you, but can also help reduce your team’s time to close metric for customer interactions. One of the first things I recommend to teams looking to streamline their follow-up workflows is to use Intercom’s Snooze feature. This is great because when your team sends a reply to a customer, they can ‘snooze’ the conversation for a set amount of time which doesn’t necessarily close the conversation but rather keeps it in an ‘open but not visible’ state in your team's inbox. This means that only t

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Andrew R12
Employee
Eric Fitz
Employee
Eric FitzEmployee
posted in Intercom for Human Support
How we use Tickets for our internal On-Call team

Within Intercom’s Customer Support team, we have an “On-Call” team made up of tenured teammates who have the responsibility of helping their colleagues answer more complex customer questions. Previously, these questions were raised through a different instance of the Messenger and funnelled into an entirely separate Intercom workspace, apart from our Support team’s main Intercom workspace. With the launch of our Tickets feature, we saw a unique opportunity to funnel these inquiries into our main Intercom workspace, streamline the process and remove the inefficiency of having two workspaces. To raise a Ticket with our On-Call team, our Support team simply opens the Messenger in their Intercom workspace (the benefit of having our Support team work from “our” instance of Intercom!) and start a new conversation, where they’ll be greeted by an Inbound Workflow. Once they follow the steps in the Workflow to ensure that their question is routed to the correct On-Call team, they’re presented w

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Eric Fitz
Employee
Franka
Employee
FrankaEmployee
posted in Intercom for Automated Support
The importance of a long-term Workflow strategy

Hey there Support aficionados across the globe! I’m Franka, one of the Support Managers here at Intercom. Apart from managing people who are my first responsibility and passion, I also act as an interim Conversation Designer and manage support Workflows and Workflow performance day to day. Anyone following the world of chat and automation has surely heard of ChatGpt shaking up the slightly sleepy world of support in the past couple of months. This event served as a trigger for us at Intercom Support to start thinking deeper about our automation strategy. First question we asked ourselves was “How do we currently present ourselves to our customers and how would we like to improve this in the future?” While we were not surprised with our state of automation, our main learning was that the past few years of ad-hoc strategising has brought us to quite a complex overall state. We noticed we ask a lot of questions right off the bat, but don’t necessarily always help customers self-serve at t

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Franka
Employee
Leanne H
Employee
Leanne HEmployee
posted in Intercom for Automated Support
Setting expectations and answering frequently asked questions during your team’s down time 🏝️

Hey everyone 👋 I’m Leanne and I’m one of the Senior Managers on the Customer Support team here at Intercom.  For the past few years, I’ve been the driver of our End of Year Break coverage and workflow planning. During the holiday season, we want to ensure our Customer Support team get a well earned break to spend time with their family and friends, but we also have to ensure we’re still on hand to help our customers - some of whom will find that the end of the year is their busiest period of the year.  We have a few strategies that we use to organise the right coverage for each day of the End of Year break, but we also use some of Intercom’s handy features to pre-empt some of the frequently asked questions we receive during this time of the year, and to set expectations with customers that we have a smaller team online so it might take a little longer for replies.  When we get close to the December holiday season, we get a lot of questions from customers asking about how they can set

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Leanne H
Employee
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