9 Smart Hacks Companies Are Using With Intercom

Last updated on June 13th, 2023

Pardeep Kullar

From unique ways of bringing back fading users to smart integrations, these
are the some of the things companies are doing right now to get more out of
Intercom.

1. Have the original blog post writer email users who are dropping off

Love how simple and powerful this one is. If you signed up to a website after
reading a great blog post, wouldn’t it be nice to get an email from that same
writer? That’s the person you trusted first and will trust again.

“Thanks to Intercom, we tracked everyone who signed up from his blog post. If
they started dropping off, we mentioned his name in the subject line of our
newsletter and reminded people to share their work. The newsletter had a 77%
open rate.”

How Somewhere uses Intercom to build its
community

2. Auto follow signups on Twitter using Intercom

Intercom uses some sort of clearbit / fullcontact integration to find out a
user or company’s twitter account. We should be following some of our new
customers and sign ups but it can be done automatically.

“So, we put together a small script that uses Intercom’s
API to go through our user list and pick the
ones that have a Twitter account. Then, using Twitter’s API, the same script
will follow them on behalf of
@deepfreezeio.

How we use Intercom to engage with our users on
Twitter.

3. Yes, you can see the user’s screen from Intercom in one click

Upscope
is one of the greatest Intercom hacks for dealing with less technical users
and is an official Intercom integration.

Rather than typing out lists of instructions, you can see that user’s
screen in one click and take control to guide them.

None of that installs nonsense.

It’s instant.

One click to see them moving about on your website and then highlight where
they should click next or take control to scroll and click for them.

4. Use Typeform and link it to Intercom

Most people don’t want to fill in forms but if you’ve tried Typeform you know
just how cool it is and why people don’t mind filling it out. I think I’ve
filled in 1000s of forms and Typeforms make the process enjoyable assuming the
form is not 30 parts long.

“We needed a way for the data from Typeform to get into the hands of our
sales and support teams faster and without error. Since they are already using
Intercom for all their other activities, we wanted to stick the conversations
there. We built an integration and there is a simple way to set it up.”

How We Use a Typeform and Intercom Integration to Nurture Our Most Important
Leads

5. Track bugs / issues using Intercom via Github

“We’re currently experimenting with a Github/Intercom integration that allows
us quickly link a conversation in the inbox to a Github issue. By simply
pasting the URL to the conversation in a comment on the issue or vice versa,
we connect the two.”

How we use Intercom to support Intercom
customers

6. Connect Intercom to Close.io and solve the sales process problem

Many, especially SaaS users of intercom, will know the tricky process of
running a sales process with Intercom.

At Upscope we’ve tried lots of CRMs and sales platforms but the flow is never
quite right so we built our own component but maybe we should have tried
Close.io first.

Below is how one team integrated Intercom with Close.io.

“The reason for this is when we are looking at a customer in the CRM we want
to be able to see not only the sales emails but all the support conversations
they were having too.”

How to Integrate Intercom Support Messages with Close.io
CRM

7. Use tags to populate your knowledge base and make it smarter

Simple and sensible. When someone asks you a question, tag conversations and
over time, use those tags build the knowledge base.

Btw, if you’re applying this to Intercom Educate then read about how to make
it a SEO smart.

“Tags also help us populate our Knowledge
Base (KB). We launched our KB recently, in
March 2016. So we’re still working on diversifying its content and adding new
articles every week. Looking at the “question” tag enlightens us on what
articles to add next”

How we use Intercom for solid
support

8. Measure and contact users on time. Remove inactive users.

“We’ve tried various tools and workflows to make sure everyone who steps foot
onto the Codeship gets the support he/she needs. Thanks to Intercom we can
measure and contact all of our users. Exactly when they need to be contacted.”

“We’ve checked activeness of our users and decided to delete users who did not
respond to (had not interacted with) our messages for 6 months.”

Why we use Intercom in Bounty? How we used Intercom API to cut Intercom
expenses.

Update: We have not tested it yet but we recently come across a tool that
promises to remove inactive users from Intercom for
you.

9. A custom deeper integration of Intercom to Salesforce

Bedrock use intercom and as an integrations company they were bound to do a
better job when it came to their own processes.

“Our sales reps live in Salesforce.com, and we found Intercom’s Salesforce.com
integration to be a little underwhelming, as the integration wasn’t creating
new leads and populating those leads with data in their Salesforce fields.
This means that we wouldn’t report on this data in Salesforce, or create
custom views and assignment rules using data from Intercom at all. “

Intercom.io integrations: Sync your user data to your CRM and marketing
system
fields

10. Using Intercom as a Diary Study instead of a chat tool

This is an interesting addition.

My imagination clearly isn’t what it once was as I would never have considered
this. Turn Intercom from a chat support tool to a diary study of user’s
feelings in order to get feedback and improve the product.

“”A customer’s relationship with 99designs can last up to 4 weeks from the
brief writing stage, through to final design files being delivered.”

“By running a diary study, we are able to monitor how our customers are
feeling every time they interact with our product. It allows us to experience
the highs and lows right there with them, as well as their thoughts, feelings,
questions, frustrations, the list goes on..”

They set up Intercom chat to look like a bot and ask questions. They set up
Intercom engage to ask yes / no type questions. That’s out of the box thinking
?

How we ran a diary study from within our
product