Skip to main content

A workaround for sending email auto-replies through Intercom + learnings ✨

 

A few months back I asked in this forum about setting up an email auto-responder for the holidays. While this isn't currently a feature within Intercom, our team found a workaround that met some of our needs and I wanted to share here in case other teams are looking to do the same 💛

 

Use case We need to be able to send an automatic email when customers reach out to us via text or email to provide information on our response times and self-serve resources. We'd turn this on during holidays when we had reduced support, during high-volume times, etc.

 

Workaround We created an outbound email and set it up to send to visitors, leads, and users who were "last heard from" on ;date with reduced support hours], and scheduled the email to stop sending on the date we were back online. Screenshot below for the exact rules we applied. We also created a "catching up" auto-reply letting customers know that we were back online and catching up from the post-holiday rush.

 

Screen Shot 2022-01-14 at 2.20.54 PMPros

  • This was the first holiday we truly reduced our support coverage to give our team some much-needed time off. This setting allowed us to quickly implement a way to let customers know this (especially long-time customers who remember us being available during holidays and always on!
  • If you set this up, I recommend having the "From" email be your general support email, rather than a specific person. This helped us manage expectations and set the tone that we were offline

 

Learnings + Feedback

  • The "last heard from" setting only allows you to select a date, but you can't drill down and select a specific time and date. We would have liked to start sending the auto-replies immediately after our office hours ended, rather than the next morning
  • Lots of overreach - this was the biggest downside for us. There is no way to specify the channel with the "last heard from setting". This meant that any customer that reached out to us on any channel was sent the email. While we were out of office, we turned chat bots on and disabled the composer in Messenger. Even users that interacted with the bot were sent this email, which is not ideal. 😭 We also noticed that when we made outbound calls while this email was live (we integrate with Aircall), users were sent this email - also not ideal. It would be helpful if we could specify last heard from via email and text only

 

I hope this helps other teams who need a quick auto-reply solution! Here for any questions or feedback 🙂

 

If you've gotten this far...I'm curious, has anyone had success using the autoresponder feature within Gmail for an email that's connected to Intercom?

This is really interesting. Thanks for sharing. We wanted to do exactly the same thing. Nearly 70% of our Intercom conversations originate from email.

@louise t​ Glad you found it useful! 💛 Has your team tried any other auto-reply workarounds? I'm currently looking at setting one up through Gmail, but I'm afraid users will get the auto-reply each time they send an email, rather than receiving it just the first time they reach out during a given period of time. 🤔

Hi Madeline, how are you?

 

Your tip was the closest solution to what we need in my company, however, I would like to ask for some guidance.

We need to send automatic messages to all customers who respond to emails we send, however, I was wondering how to configure the visa rule last, would it only limit to customers who opened the email during that period?

 

Another question: When I activate the sending of this email, a notification appears that 151,114 people will receive this response, but I just want customers who respond to emails from date x to receive it.

Can you help me with this?

 

Hi Madeline, that was a cool work around idea that you came up with! Thanks for sharing!

 

I definitely would up-vote any request you have open for an auto-responder email. Our company needs this too as there is currently no easy way for us to manage user expectations when someone reaches out to us via email. Chat we have covered, but email is still lacking.

Reply


Terms & ConditionsCookie settings