We’ve made several improvements to make message creation and organization more intuitive and consolidate Intercom's outbound channels. Check them out here.

Below is a quick overview of what's new. See our new docs page for full details.

- The “Messages” area of Intercom has been renamed to “Outbound” - Product Tours now live inside Outbound - Auto and Manual Messages are now called Ongoing and One-off Messages - To create what was previously called a Visitor Auto Message, now simply create an in-app message and set the targeting to visitors - Message folders have been replaced with tags - You can now filter your message list by people type, message state, sender or tag - Operator and Reporting have moved up ⬆️ alongside Inbox, Outbound, Articles and Platform - There are new email and in-app message templates to help you get started when creating a message

Note: for some customers, these changes may have been in place already, this notice is for the majority of our customers that are experiencing these changes for the first time today 😎

We've made several improvements to our HubSpot app, now you can:

- More accurately score and prioritize each lead by sending all qualification data you capture in Intercom to HubSpot

- Get more context for each conversation by seeing lead data from HubSpot including email, company, stage, and owner right in the Intercom Inbox

- Keep lead ownership in sync by automatically setting owners in HubSpot as they are in Intercom (note: we won’t overwrite existing owners if they are set in HubSpot)

- Improve lead attribution by saving HubSpot cookie data for new leads captured in Intercom. This allows you to keep your original lead sources (direct traffic, paid ads, etc.) and instead capture Intercom as the conversion point for these leads (bonus: you can then view all leads converted by Intercom and from which sources in HubSpot)

To enable these features with your existing HubSpot integration, head here. To learn more about the app or install it, visit the Intercom App Store and our updated documentation.

With our new Messenger setting, you can prevent customers from re-opening conversations that your team has previously closed. For visitors and users, you can also define how long a conversation must have been closed before it can longer be replied to.

If you enable this setting, customers can still see their closed conversations in the Messenger. However, instead of being able to reply directly, they will be encouraged to initiate a new conversation.

To learn more about this feature, see our help article.

You can now search for conversations by email address, which will pull up all conversations you’ve had with that user.

If you’re looking to find conversations that mention an email address, you can search for an email addresses as a keyword by putting it in quotation marks.

For more information, visit this article.

Starting today, it’s easier to draw better insights from your conversations through 3 new tagging updates, so you can improve your product and business.

The tags settings page is now the central location for you to view and manage your tags. This includes the ability to see how many times tags have been used.

We’re also introducing new rules to automatically tag new conversations. Tag rules reduces the manual effort required from your team while ensuring that your tag report are more accurate.

Finally, we are extending tagging to Custom Bots so that you can understand the content of those conversations. Now when you build a bot, you can automatically tag specific conversations as they’re triaged by your Custom Bot.

For more information, visit this article.

You can now make responses to your customers even more personal with answer targeting! This will allow you to limit answers to specific audience segments when using Answer Bot, creating a more tailored experience for your customers.

To get started with answer targeting, add the unique criteria or set of attributes to each Answer you create.

You can start segmenting your responses now. For more information on Answer Bot, you can also visit these articles:

How does Answer Bot work? Answer Bot: How to create an effective answer When does Answer Bot send a message?

Emails you send to leads in Intercom that contain links back to your website can now be used to identify visitors. This means when these leads visit your website by clicking links in your email and start a conversation, their real name or email will show up instead of "Purple teapot from New York". Even better, you can send personalized messages to start more conversations with valuable leads and create a tailored experience from email to your website. You can enable link tracking here.

To learn more about link tracking in Intercom, check out our docs page.

You can now tag and message groups of Product Tour recipients at once based on how they interacted with a certain tour. For example, you can easily select everyone who viewed, completed, hit the goal, or had an issue with a Product Tour and add a certain tag to their user profile to keep track of which tours they've taken or send them a targeted follow-up message. Here's how to get started:

Our new reports give you an exact breakdown of how fast your team is responding to and closing conversations. Using these insights, you can instantly answer questions like “How many of my conversations are closed in an hour?” and then optimize your performance, if it’s below target.

For each metric, you will see six distinct buckets of response or close times, and then a corresponding percentage of conversations. These views are pre-defined by default and data is refreshed and calculated every time the page is loaded. Learn more about our performance reports here.

You can now decide whether all visitors and users must go through triage before they can initiate a new conversation. This lets you collect helpful info for every conversation and route it to the right team or teammate.

For example, you can have users select between wanting to get in touch with support, sales, report a bug, or request a feature before they're able to compose and send their message. After their initial interaction with the Custom Bot, the message composer will re-appear. Here's how to enable this feature:

To learn more about triggering Custom Bots when visitors or users start a new conversation, check out this doc.