Intercom Overview

Vitally's Intercom integration can be used to import the following Intercom data into Vitally in real time:

Companies - Vitally imports the entire Intercom company (defined here), allowing you to view and report on Intercom company data such as plan, segments, tags,custom_attributes, and more.
Users - Vitally imports the entire Intercom user (defined here), allowing you to view and report on Intercom user data such as segments, tags,custom_attributes, and more.
Conversations - Vitally imports your Intercom conversations, allowing you to view (and respond to) conversations occurring within Intercom.
Data Events - Vitally can also sync, in real time, any user activity you send to Intercom. This will only sync events from when you integrate with Intercom moving forward.

Enabling the Intercom integration

To enable the Intercom integration, navigate to your Settings (⚙️) by selecting your Account Logo on the top left and under Operations select Integrations to find Intercom (or via Quick Jump). When there, simply click the Connect to Intercom button. That will redirect you to Intercom, where you'll be asked to authorize our access to your Intercom data.

Once you authorize our access to Intercom, you'll be redirected back to Vitally, where you'll need to configure a few options:

Import Users and Companies

If you only want to import your Intercom conversations into Vitally, and not your companies and users, leave all options unselected. If this is the case, there won't be a link established in the integrations card because we aren’t syncing in the user and only syncing in chats.

There are a few important details to confirm prior to enabling this option:

Confirm you use Intercom companies. Intercom doesn't require that you create companies, but Vitally does. If you do not create companies in Intercom, then checking this option will have no effect - your users will not be imported without companies.
Confirm that 1) you set Intercom's company_id field and 2) you set company_id to the same unique ID tracked in your other customer data. For example, if you use Segment, ensure the ID you specify for customers in Segment is the exact same value as the company_id for your Intercom companies. We use this ID to combine your customer data under the same account in Vitally, so if you use different values here, we will create duplicate Vitally accounts (one from Segment and one from Intercom).

About user_id and company_id: Intercom does not require that you set these fields, but we do! Because Vitally often unifies user and account profiles across many different systems, we need a unifying ID that lets us link your Intercom profiles to data from other integrations.

If you aren't sure about the above, or if your Intercom IDs differ from your other tools, you can leave this option unchecked, and we'll import your conversations using user emails (i.e. if "user@company.com" starts a conversation in Intercom, we'll look for a user with that email in Vitally and attach the message to that user if found). For more information on these fields, please see Intercom's documentation. To understand why we require this, please see the importance of external ID.

Confirm that 1) you set Intercom's user_id field and 2) you set user_id to the same unique ID tracked in your other user data. The same requirement for customer_id above also applies to Intercom users. If your Intercom user IDs differ from your other tools, we will create duplicate Vitally users (one from Intercom and one from your other tool).

Because it is quite common to have companies in Intercom that don't actually have current subscriptions with your product, we only import companies into Vitally that have met your Intercom qualification settings and been seen over the last 90 days (as indicated by Intercom's Last Seen attribute).

If you do enable this option, once you attempt to enable the Intercom integration, we'll run a quick check to see if we can confirm your IDs match with your existing account data in Vitally. If we detect issues, you'll see an error like this:

If you see this error, it means some companies are missing the company_id or some users are missing the user_id in Intercom. Please resolve these issues before importing your Intercom companies and users.

Import Event Data

This option is only supported if you enable Option #1 above - otherwise, we'll have no way of knowing which users to attach your events to in Vitally. If selected, we will auto-track new Intercom product events into Vitally from the point the sync is enabled going forward. From there, you'll be able to leverage our default product metrics and create Elements, Success Metrics, and more, all backed by your Intercom events!

Important! If you enable the Segment & Intercom integration, you most likely do not want to select this option. Since Segment is likely sending us your product events, and also sending those to Intercom, selecting this would create 2 product events (one from Segment and another from Intercom) for every single event a user causes.

Ignore Events

By default, Intercom will send all events to VItally, some of which may not be relevant. For this reason, you will want to "Ignore" any events you don't want to track in Vitally.

There are two benefits to "Ignoring" an event:

Keeps your event list cleaner in the UI as there will be fewer data to sift through.
This enables us to process your data as quickly as possible as we are not processing data that is not relevant to you.

To update an Event Status go to: Settings > Events > Status column

Update Intercom companies with Vitally's account data

This option is only supported if you enable Option #1 above. If selected, we will update your Intercom companies with data we track about your accounts in Vitally, giving you the ability to leverage our data (e.g. health scores, indicators, etc) for Intercom auto-messages and campaigns.

Please see this article for more information on how this process works.

FAQ

Q: I'm missing some conversations, what's happening?

A: Our Intercom integration does not support syncing Intercom generated emails or in-platform posts and the recently new Intercom ’tickets”.

Q: My outgoing email conversation is missing the attachment, why?

A: Due to a limitation with Intercom's API, conversations sent from Vitally as emails (and not in-app chats) will not contain the attachment.