Intercom, together with the rest of your business
Connect Intercom beside your HR system, your issue tracker and the rest, and ask questions that need more than one of them, in plain English. Intercom brings your customer conversations: what customers wrote, which are still open, and how they were handled. Where two systems give different figures for the same thing, the answer shows both and says which it used. Every figure links to the conversation it came from, and Synaptic Intelligence only reads.
Questions Intercom helps answer
- Customer conversations are up this quarter. Has our support team grown to match?
- What are customers contacting us about most this month, and is there an open Jira issue for each?
- How many customer conversations are open right now, and which have waited longest?
- What were customers contacting us about this week?
- How many conversations did we have last month, against the month before?
- Which open conversations are marked as priority?
- What did customers say about refunds this month?
Message text is read one conversation at a time, so a question about what customers said reads the conversations it needs, not the whole workspace.
Intercom beside your other systems
Customer conversations are up this quarter. Has our support team grown to match?
- Support & service counts the conversations opened in Intercom this quarter and last.
- HR counts the people in your support team at each quarter end from your HR system, such as BambooHR. Employee is HR's word, so HR's count is the one used.
- The answer sets the two side by side as conversations per person in each quarter, and every figure links to where it came from.
That question consults two departments and reconciles their answers, so it costs four credits. A question only Support & service needs costs one.
What it reads
- Conversations. Listed newest first, or searched by date, status, priority or the words in them, with each one's title, status, priority and when it was opened and last updated.
- What was said in a conversation. The first message and the replies that followed, with when each was written and whether it came from the customer, a teammate or a bot.
- Conversation statistics. How long a conversation took to be assigned, when a teammate first replied, and how many replies it has had.
- Your workspace's name. Read when you connect and when you test the connection, to confirm which workspace it is.
It reads when a question needs it. Nothing is synced, and your workspace is not copied. It never replies, assigns, tags, closes or deletes anything in Intercom.
How you connect Intercom
- In Synaptic Intelligence, an admin opens Sources, then Connectors, and finds Intercom under Support. If it isn't listed, type its name in Find a source.
- Open Intercom and click Connect with Intercom.
- Sign in to Intercom, choose the workspace to connect, and approve.
- You come back to Synaptic Intelligence. A message names the workspace it connected to, such as “Intercom connected to Acme”, and the Intercom card opens.
Connecting checks that the workspace answers before Support & service uses it.
What it asks Intercom for
Two read-only permissions, and nothing else:
- Read conversations, to list, search and read conversations.
- Read one admin, to confirm which workspace was connected.
For IT and security: how the connection works
OAuth 2.0. Intercom sets an app's permissions on the app itself, not at each sign-in, so the two above are all any connection can have. Intercom's access token does not expire. It is stored encrypted, never shown again, and revoked when the app is uninstalled from your workspace.
The connector makes four requests, all to api.intercom.io with the API version pinned to 2.11: GET /me when you connect or test, and GET /conversations, POST /conversations/search and GET /conversations/{id} when a question needs them. The search is a POST because Intercom's search takes its query in the request body; it changes nothing. The connector has no request that writes.
Which department it feeds
Intercom feeds your Support & service department: customer conversations, what customers asked about, and how those conversations were handled.
Each person sees Support & service's answers only if their job title allows it.
How you disconnect Intercom
In Synaptic Intelligence, an admin opens the Intercom card under Sources and clicks Remove. That deletes the connection and its stored access token, and Support & service stops reading Intercom. Disable pauses the connection instead, and keeps it for later.
Removing it here does not uninstall the app from Intercom. To revoke the access token at Intercom as well, uninstall Synaptic Intelligence from your workspace's installed apps in Intercom's settings. After that nothing more can be read, whether or not the connection has been removed here.
How your data is handled
Where conversations are processed, by whom, and how long anything read is kept are set out on these pages:
- Privacy & security, including access, data residency and processors
- Privacy policy, including our role for the personal information in your systems and how long we keep it
- Terms of Service
Plans
Each system you connect counts once. Starter and the free trial include three connected systems, Growth five, and Team, Business and Enterprise as many as you need. Reading answers is free for everyone; asking uses credits. See pricing.
Other systems
- Xero
- QuickBooks Online
- Sage Accounting
- Oracle NetSuite
- Salesforce
- Every integration, and the full list of systems
Thinking of connecting ChatGPT or Claude to Intercom yourself? Build or buy: what it involves. And for why two systems can both be right about one figure, why HR says 41 and payroll says 43.
Intercom is a trademark of Intercom, Inc. Synaptic Intelligence is not affiliated with or endorsed by Intercom.
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