Hey there ​@Erica Griggs, Emily here from Support Engineering at Intercom

For messages that are part of a user's conversation from the inbox, if the user does not view the response in the Messenger within three minutes, the response is automatically delivered to the user via email.

However, this does not apply to outbound messages. When you create an outbound message, you select the delivery channel (email, in-app, or push notification) and Intercom will not switch channels. If you want an email to be sent when a user is not online to receive in-app messages, you would need to set up a series that prompts an email if a user is not online within a certain number of days. For example, if a user doesn't come online to receive the chat message within 3 days, an email can be sent instead.

Let me know if you have any further questions!

I believe you’re misunderstanding the request. I’m not referring to “outbound” messages. 

I’m referring to when you have an existing conversation or ticket and the customer and a customer hasn’t replied. You have workflows specifically for “If a customer has been unresponsive”. In these workflows, you can select to follow up with a customer seconds, minutes, hours, and even days later. The “messages” that are sent from the workflow are only sending in the Messenger. I would think that if the customer hasn’t seen the message within 3 minutes, it would send via email, but it is not. We cannot assume that a client with an open ticket is going to be coming back to the website to check the Messenger every day. 

Ideally we want a follow up with an unresponsive customer 1 day after we mark the ticket as “waiting on customer”. This “message” can be sent to the Messenger, but we feel it should also be sent via email if the customer doesn’t read it within 3 minutes. The workflow would then snooze for 1 day and then follow up one last time with an additional “message” letting the client know we’ll be closing the ticket. Again, this “message” can send to the Messenger but should also send via email if not viewed. 

What I find interesting is that adding a CSAT step in the unresponsive customer workflow DOES email the customer. If that is possible, then I’m not sure why the above scenario with messages would not be.

If the above scenario, can in fact, be accomplished, please let me know how. I’ve been working with Laura in Onboarding and she also believes this should be possible but is finding it is not.

That is right ​@Erica Griggs, a messenger message is sent, not an email.

What you could do is create a custom action that would email the customer a follow up message asking them if they have seen the previous message. 

You can learn more about custom actions in workflows here

And the endpoint you would be using would be this one: https://developers.intercom.com/docs/references/rest-api/api.intercom.io/conversations/replyconversation

Let me know what you think of this implementation