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Intercom is a popular messaging platform that can be used to connect your customers and team members. In fact, it's used by many companies as their primary customer support tool. One of the reasons it’s so popular is because Intercom can be customized and enhanced with many different app integrations that extend its functionality to cover the entire length and breadth of the customer experience flow.
In this post, we'll cover some of our favorite Intercom integrations and explain how you can use them to get the most out of this powerful tool for your business.
Looking for the best Intercom apps to take your support workflows to the next level? 🚀 Read on to find out.
What is Intercom?
Intercom is a platform for managing customer relationships. It's a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool that lets you manage all of your customers in one place, so you can keep track of what they've purchased and what they're interested in. It also allows you to send automated messages to customers based on their behavior, so it's pretty much like having your own personal assistant!
How does it fit into customer support workflows?
The best way to think about Intercom is as a software that can be plugged into your existing workflow rather than as a standalone product. That's because it doesn't provide the full range of functionality you need in order to run your business; it just helps you improve the way you do things already.
For example, Intercom can't handle billing or accounting for your company. But what it does do is make sure that when someone has an issue with your product or service and reaches out to you via email or chat, they're able to get a response faster than they would have otherwise.
And if your support agents don't respond fast enough? Intercom will remind them later on that they haven't replied yet, so there's no chance of customer issues slipping through the cracks between messages without being noticed by someone on your team.
You can also extend the functionality of Intercom with various app integrations. We will look those shortly, but first, let’s go over the best features native to Intercom and see what it can do right out of the box.
Best features of Intercom
Chatbots
With Intercom, you can set up a chatbot to handle simple questions from your customers. The bot can then direct the customer to the right place in your app or website for further help. This saves you time by not having to answer each question individually.
Onboarding features
Onboarding features help you onboard new users quickly and easily. You can ask customers to enter their email address and phone number right after they sign up so that they have access to these important details later on. You can also send them a welcome email that contains links to different parts of your app or website so they don't have to guess where they should go next.
Intercom also has a feature that enables companies to build extensive product tours. You can set up in-app messages to trigger at certain points in your app or after certain events have taken place. For example, you can design a product tour for new users that gets them to perform their first action by a triggering guided experience when they sign in for the first time.
Help center
The help center is a place where customers can go if they have questions about how something works in your app or website. You can put together articles explaining how different things work and link them to other parts of your site so that customers can easily find answers without having to wait around for someone from support. Hosting your help center on Intercom means that it can be leveraged in an integrated way across all the functions you use Intercom for. So, for example, if you use chatbots on Intercom, they can be trained to recommend certain help articles in response to specific customer complaints.
DMs with users
DMs allow you to send messages to users directly from Intercom's interface, rather than having to switch over to another app like Messenger or WhatsApp for communication purposes. This makes things much easier for all parties involved and keeps all your customer communication is one place so everyone has access to it.
Features missing from Intercom
No level 2 and 3 three customer support
Intercom doesn’t have a built-in feature for escalations, so for level 2 and level 3 customer support, you will need to use an integration.
No cobrowsing feature
If a customer wants to show you something on their screen or have you cobrowse with them so that you two can fix issues collaboratively, they won't be able to do that in Intercom. Instead, they'll have to send screenshots or links over email or DMs. This makes things more complicated for both parties involved, and it's not an efficient use of time or resources if you need to share multiple links back-and-forth over several days before coming up with a solution together! There are a few good integrations that offer cobrowsing — including our solution, Fullview, which we'll go into more detail about further down.
No session replays
Intercom doesn’t offer session replays, which are an essential tool if you want to understand how users are actually behaving in your product. Session replays are video-like recordings of user sessions in your web app. You can watch them to see exactly where a user clicked on something, what pages they visited, what bugs and issues they encountered, and what pain points were so frustrating that they abandoned your app altogether. They’re very powerful when it comes to providing proactive customer support (because you can watch a session replay and reach out to a user when you see they’ve encountered an issue — even before they’ve reached out to you about it) and product development (seeing bugs and issues in context makes it easier to recreate and fix them, thereby improving your app). There are integrations for this, including ours, which we’ll delve into shortly.
Can’t call users
Another drawback is that you can't call users directly through Intercom. You have to go to their customer details page, locate their phone number, and then call them some other way. This can be inconvenient if you're having an issue with a customer and need to talk about it right away — especially if you want to call them and cobrowse with them in your app. Fortunately, there are integrations that can add this functionality to Intercom.
Intercom integrations
One of the best things about Intercom is that it can be extended with various app integrations. This means that you don't have to rely solely on the features and functions that Intercom provides — you can add new features, functions, and integrations to your platform as well.
By using an Intercom CRM integration — or several — companies can keep up with their competitors without having to reinvent themselves every time something new comes out.
Let’s look at some of the best intercom integrations for customer support, see how each one works and how it can help you take your customer support to the next level.
These are the 10 best apps and integrations in the Intercom App Store:
- Fullview
- Zapier
- Statuspage
- Nicereply
- Blendo
- Polytomic
- Calendly
- Chargebee
- Productboard
- Plecto
Fullview - Cobrowsing and session replays
Fullview is an easy-to-use integration that allows you to add cobrowsing, session replays, and customer calling to Intercom. Fullview also enables you to provide level 2 and level 3 customer support, which is particularly useful for SaaS products that are often a little more on the technical side.
With Fullview, you can create a seamless experience for your customers by giving them the ability to talk directly with your team. This means that customers will be able to get help faster, which can result in increased revenue for your company, better CSAT scores and a plummeting churn rate.
Features and benefits of Fullview
Fullview offers a number of great features that can enhance your experience with Intercom. Some of the best features of Fullview include:
No downloads
You don't need to download anything and neither do your users. You only have to copy a few lines of code to install Fullview on your app, and this installation takes no more than 10 minutes.
Completely secure
Your data is encrypted and stored on servers within the EU.
Fully GDPR compliant
As one of the only cobrowsing and session replay vendors in Europe, Fullview is fully GDPR compliant.
Session replays
Fullview Replays allows you to watch video-like recordings of user sessions right from Intercom. Your support agents can quickly see customer bugs and issues in context — even before a user reaches out to them with a problem. They can offer proactive support that’s fast, efficient and eliminates the friction typically present in these kinds of interactions. No more screenshots, long email chains or ‘please describe the issue you are having’ requests. They can also see console information (like network, device and user journey info) on a side panel within a session replay and easily filter by errors, warnings and logs.
Customer calling
Cobrowse with your customers in-app with Fullview. You’ll never have to send them a Zoom link again — you can call them directly within your app at the touch of a button.
Cobrowsing
With cobrowsing, a support agent and user can browse and control a screen together. This means that they can solve issues collaboratively. Instead of describing how a user should complete a step, fill a form and use a feature, a support agent can now send a cobrowsing request straight from Intercom’s inbox and guide the user through the process — or even complete it on behalf of the user with necessary. They can also see console information (like network, device and user journey info) on a side panel within the call and easily filter by errors, warnings and logs, just like when watching a session replay!
Live chat and async support
These two features, encapsulated in Fullview’s cobrowsing and session replay capabilities, allow you to talk to with your users directly from Intercom without leaving your existing workflow or asking a user to leave your app to hop on a Zoom call or join a meeting link.
Troubleshooting features
Fullview also provides tools, specifically Fullview Console, that allow you to troubleshoot issues with no effort or delay. You can clearly see console information like device, network and user journey in an easily accessible side-panel on a call or when watching a session replay. We provide convenient filtering for errors, warnings or logs, so support agents will always have all the information they need to tackle customer issues at their fingertips.
On top of all these great features, Fullview is available in both freemium and paid plans, so you can choose the one that works best for your budget and your business needs. Take a look at the integration in Intercom.
If you're looking for a single tool to integrate all of your customer support tools, Zapier is the way to go. It allows you to create custom "zaps" (Zapier's word for automations) that automate tasks in different apps.
For example, if someone replies to a support ticket from Intercom, Zapier could automatically send them an email with specific information about the issue and then forward their response back to Intercom for a follow-up.
Statuspage is a service that allows you to monitor your website's performance and alert your customers in real-time when something goes wrong. You can also receive notifications about outages, security issues, and server maintenance.
You can even integrate Statuspage with Intercom to give your customers the ability to report incidents directly from the Intercom dashboard. With this integration , you can add status updates as part of your account management workflow, so you don't have to worry about keeping track of them separately.
Survicate is a tool that lets you send your users NPS, CSAT and CES surveys straight from Intercom, through messenger or emails. Survicate helps you streamline your survey process and makes it easier for customers to reply to them, meaning both engagement and response rates go through the roof. A neat feature about Survicate is that you also receive data from surveys that were completed — if a user abandoned them midway, for example.
This integration also gives you access to a separate product called Feedback Hub, that helps you import and organize customer feedback you've received on Intercom.
With the Blendo integration, companies can more easily sync customer data generated in Intercom in one place. From there, they can easily combine it with other types of data from different sources: payments data, events data and the like. This makes reporting across multiple data sources a piece of cake. And it also goes a long way towards giving you a 360-degree video of your customer.
Polytomic is another integration that allows you to sync data from a variety of sources. Its also built to be easy to use, so you don't need the help of engineers when you're syncing app databases, data warehouse, and spreadsheets to Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, Zendesk, or, in this case, Intercom! It also allows you to automate the data sync process or set up custom sync schedules to make sure that all you're working with current and relevant data that is consistent across all your systems.
Calendly is a web-based booking tool that allows you to manage your appointments online. Calendly integrates with Intercom to help you keep track of your customers and their upcoming bookings. Once the integration is set up, you'll be able to see how many current or future appointments each customer has scheduled, as well as any relevant information for each appointment, such as who they're meeting with and where it's being held.
Chargebee is a subscription billing platform that allows you to accept payments from customers, manage subscriptions and invoices, automate your billing process, and more. You can use Chargebee to create and manage pricing plans, add new customers and run pricing experiments in a structured way. You can also use Chargebee's automation features to send emails and text messages to your customers at specific times, such as when their account is about to expire, which can help boost your loyalty and retention rates.
Productboard is a product management tool that helps you create and communicate your product strategy. It allows you to build product roadmaps, centralize user feedback and prioritize features based on it, test new feature ideas to validate them and integrate with the tools you already use for product development and customer support. With the Productboard app for Intercom, you can capture valuable product feedback in Intercom and then send it to a centralized repository where it is easier to organize, glean insights from and implement.
Plecto is a dashboard software that allows you to build customizable dashboards using data that you collect in Intercom. Some of the categories of data you can import and organize into dashboards include comments, average customer reply times and events/activities. The dashboards you build using Plecto also sync up with Intercom, meaning they're updated in real-time, which means you're always working with accurate information.
Summary
Intercom is one of the most popular platforms for customer support, and it's easy to see why: it features a robust lineup of features and what it lacks, it makes up for in a pretty comprehensive marketplace.
While all-in-all, Intercom is a great CRM, it's missing a few important features to truly cover all bases in an end-to-end customer support workflow. But with the right integrations, you'll have that flow built in no time!
If you're looking to retool Intercom for level 2 and 3 customer support, look no further than the Fullview integration for cobrowsing, session replays and console logs. All three features help you to demystify product and customer issues, gain much-needed context into support tickets and cut support time in half! Not too shabby, if we do say so ourselves.
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