Attributes are a great way to attach more data to your users, companies, conversations or to store temporary data to build out complex Workflows.

In Intercom there are 5 types of attributes:

These used to store data about users and leads in Intercom. By default, Intercom comes with some basic attributes such as name, phone number, email, etc. You can also add your own custom data attributes depending on the needs of your business. Examples include:

Similar to people data attributes, company attributes are used to provide more data about the companies your business deals with via Intercom.

Some default attributes include company name, industry, company website and ID. You can always create more custom attributes, for example:

These are great for storing data about the ticket or conversation that your support team is working on, whether that is to give more context on a customer's issue or for categorization and reporting purposes.

Examples of conversation/ticket data attributes include:

Workflows and tasks can use a new type of attribute called a "temporary attribute".

Temporary attributes are useful when you need data only for the current workflow and don't want to save it permanently in Intercom for reporting or other purposes. You can create these attributes to hold information that's relevant to the specific workflow being executed.

For example you can create a temporary attribute to:

When setting up a workflow, you can Give Fin a task. Within that task, you can ask Fin to use any people, company, conversation or ticket attributes – you can insert these attributes into the “Task goal and guidance” using the attribute inserter {..}

From this menu, you can pick different types of attributes listed under the different category headers:

Here, you can also set up temporary attributes via the “Results” tab when configuring a Fin task. These are used to tell Fin what data to output from the task.

For example, you might instruct Fin to classify a user's query and save this as a temporary data attribute.

If the user is contacting requesting a refund, set the value of attribute “contact reason” to “refund”.

If they’re asking about exchanges, set the value to “exchange”.

If they are reporting a fault item, set the value to “faulty item”.

More tips and set up guidelines for Fin Tasks can be found here.

If you wish to collect data and store it for the user, company, conversation or just temporarily in your Workflow or task, you can do so by using the “Collect data” step. This is useful if you want to later use the collected data to create conditional logic in the workflow / task using branching.

Here, you can specify what type of data attribute you would like to collect:

Actions can be configured to retrieve or update data in an external system. For more details, tips and best practices on creating actions themselves, go to this article.

Data attributes can be used in Actions to send this data to external systems to, for example, update or retrieve user records to and from your database.

Data attributes can be used in both the request URL and the payload body of the Action inserting them using the attribute inserter {..}

You also might want to send Fin task outputs or collected temporary data to an external API for processing and to do so, you need to first create a mapping.

In your Action, you first need to create the same attribute(s) (contact reason in this example) that exist in your Workflow configuration:

Next, you need to map the action inputs in your workflow / task:

Here, for each of your attributes, you can insert the local/temporary data attribute that is either outputted by Fin performing a task or collected from the user: