Intercom

What it is

An agent connected to Intercom works in your inbox the way a teammate does. It reads and answers conversations and tickets, leaves internal notes, assigns, tags, snoozes and closes conversations, keeps contacts and companies up to date, and answers from your help center.

In Intercom, the agent works as the teammate who connects it: conversations and tickets assigned to that teammate go to the agent, and the replies and notes it writes carry that teammate’s name. A seat of its own, with the agent’s name and picture, is the cleanest choice, because customers then see one consistent person and your team can assign and mention it like anyone else.

It works alongside Fin. A common split: Fin answers the questions it knows in the Messenger, and the agent takes what reaches your team.

Before you start

You need an Intercom teammate account in the workspace the agent should work in, with access to the inbox. For replies under the agent’s own name, add a teammate seat for it first and give it the agent’s name and picture. Intercom bills teammate seats; an existing account works too, but replies then carry that person’s name.

Connecting Intercom

1. In AgentTeams, open the agent, go to the Tools tab, choose Intercom and click Sign in with Intercom.
2. Sign in with the teammate account the agent should work as, pick the workspace and click Authorize.
3. The wizard checks the connection and shows the teammate and the workspace. That’s it: there is nothing to type, Intercom tells us which workspace you picked and where it is hosted.

What the agent can do

• Conversations. Read, search and answer conversations, leave internal notes, assign them to a teammate or team, tag, snooze, close and reopen them, and turn one into a ticket. When you ask, it starts a conversation with a customer by in-app message or email.
• Tickets. Create tickets, answer and note them, and move them through their states.
• Contacts and companies. Look up who wrote in, create and update users, leads and companies, tag them, merge a lead into the user it turned out to be, add events to a customer’s timeline, and block a contact who sends spam.
• Your knowledge. Answer from your help center, internal articles and snippets, reuse your team’s saved replies, and tell customers when the team is available.
• Help center and news. Draft articles and news items for your team to review and publish.

What the app asks for

Intercom shows the full list on its consent screen. Each permission is there for a feature above:

• Conversations, read and write, to read, answer, note, assign, snooze and close them, and to start one when you ask.
• Tickets, read and write, to work tickets and move them through their states.
• Users and companies (read and list, write, read and write users, merge users), to look people up, keep their details current, merge a lead into its user and block spam.
• Tags, read and write, to tag conversations, contacts and companies.
• Events, read and write, for a customer’s timeline.
• Data attributes, write, to add a custom attribute when a teammate asks.
• Teammates, read only, to know which teammate the agent is and to assign to the right teammate or team.
• Articles, and news items and newsfeeds, read and write, to answer from your help center and draft articles and news for your team.
• Search content and content snippets, to answer from your workspace’s knowledge.
• Macros and office hours schedules, to reuse your saved replies and say when the team is available. The agent only reads them; Intercom has no read-only version of these two.

The app can’t delete conversations, change your teammates, export your data or touch your billing.

What it reacts to

Seven reactions are on from the start: a conversation or a ticket assigned to the agent, a customer replying on one of them, a teammate’s internal note on them, and a mention in a note anywhere. On the Tasks page you can also switch on reactions to every new conversation, any customer reply whoever it’s assigned to, closed conversations (to check nothing was left open), ratings (a low one gets a note and a suggested follow-up), new tickets, and new contacts and leads.

The agent never reacts to its own replies and notes, so one answer can’t set off another. See Reactions for filters and custom instructions.

Staying in control

Out of the box, the agent’s replies to customers wait for a person to approve them in AgentTeams, unless your rules for the agent say it may send them on its own. Start strict, then let it send the answers you trust once they look right. Approval gates explains how.

What we receive, and what we keep

• Intercom tells us when conversations, tickets and contacts change in the workspace. We keep what concerns your agent (its conversations and tickets, notes and mentions for it) so it remembers them, and anything else only when the agent has a reaction for it; the rest is dropped straight away.
• What the agent reads and writes while working stays with that agent in your own AgentTeams workspace, the same way its chats and emails do.
• Nothing from your workspace is used to train any model. For the full picture, see our privacy policy.

Disconnecting

There are two places, and doing both is the clean way round:

1. In AgentTeams. Open the agent, go to the Tools tab, open the Intercom card and click Disconnect. The agent stops working in Intercom at once.
2. In Intercom. Uninstall AgentTeams in your workspace’s app settings. This ends the access from Intercom’s side; if the agent is still connected, its Tools tab asks you to reconnect.

Disconnecting leaves everything the agent already wrote in Intercom in place, and the agent keeps what it learned. Remove the agent entirely if you want that gone too.

If something is off

• It doesn’t pick up a conversation. The conversation has to be assigned to the teammate the agent works as, and the reaction for assigned conversations has to be on.
• Its replies carry someone else’s name. The agent works as whoever connected it. Reconnect from the Tools tab and sign in with the agent’s own seat.
• A reply waits for approval that it could send itself. Add a rule for the agent saying which answers it may send on its own, or change the reaction’s instruction on the Tasks page.
• Intercom says you can’t install apps. The teammate account needs Intercom’s permission to install apps. An admin can switch it on in that teammate’s permissions.
• It connected to the wrong workspace. Disconnect, then sign in again and pick the right workspace on Intercom’s consent screen.

Related

• AI agents for Intercom: what teams use it for
• Integrations: how connections work in general
• Back to the help center