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Export conversations data to Amazon S3

Export all of your customer conversations data to Amazon S3 with data export.

Brian Donohue avatar
Written by Brian Donohue
Updated over 4 months ago

With Intercom's Data Export feature, you can export all of your customer Conversations to Amazon S3 for:

  • Reporting and analytics

  • Single Customer Views

  • Data quality and governance

There are export options for:

  • Historical: A two year export of all Conversations data

  • Periodic: Continual Hourly or Daily exports of new and updated Conversations data

  • Attachments: Conversation part attachment exports

2. Select JSON or JSON Lines format for your exported Conversations data and toggle whether you want to Include attachments.

Only Conversations data in a JSON or JSON Lines format can be exported, and only to Amazon S3.

3. In the Destination section:

  • Enter a Bucket name

  • Enter a Folder name (optional)

  • Selecting Export data dated folders will export Conversations data into folders named 2023-07-13, 2023-07-14, 2023-07-15 etc

  • Selecting Skip empty exports when no data has changed will skip any Hourly or Daily exports where no data has changed

You can't export multiple workspaces to the same bucket.

4. After that, click Download the template file to download the template file needed to set up a CloudFormation stack.

5. Now setup an Amazon S3 bucket in your AWS Management Console.

6. Once your Amazon S3 bucket is created, navigate back to your Workspace data - Data export - Destination section.

7. Under Test your bucket, click the Test button to test that Intercom can write data to your Amazon S3 bucket. If successful, a notification will show ✔ Your bucket was successfully tested. Intercom can only write to your Amazon S3 bucket, it cannot read or delete files. During the test process, a file will be written to the root of your Amazon S3 Bucket; intercom-data-export-test-file.json.

8. In the Schedule section, if you want a full Historical data export from the last two years, choose Export historical data. Then select the preferred Periodic data export frequency, either Hourly or Daily.

9. Scroll to the bottom of the Data Export page and click Start data export.

10. You will see a notification that a Verification email will be sent to you. This is a security measure to ensure that you are an Intercom Administrator with permission to access your Data export feature. Click OK and the then verification email sent page will be displayed.

12. Navigate to your email client, to find the email from team@intercom.io and click Confirm.

13. The Data Export will start, with the Historical data export appearing in the table with the Status of In progress.

14. If you want to check your Data Export configuration settings you can select the Configuration tab to see this. You cannot change the Data Export configuration settings once it is running. To change any settings you need to delete the Data Export by clicking the Delete button, and then recreate it.

15. Navigate back to your Amazon S3 Bucket folder and you will see JSON or JSONL files appearing, in day dated folders if you selected that option in Step 4. Each JSON file will contain JSON formatted Conversation data. The filenames use a date time format in UTC, beginning with the start and end date times for each hourly batch. The Historical data and Periodic data is always exported in hour batches.

16. Navigate back to Settings > Data > Imports & exports > Export data. When the Historical data export is Completed, the Periodic data export will begin with the Hourly or Daily frequency selected. All subsequent data exports will appear in the table with the status of In progress and remain when the status is Completed.

17. For Periodic data exports, each file will contain all new and updated Conversations for that period, with each JSON object containing the entire Conversation with all Parts, not a delta from the previous export.

18. If any Attachments are exported they will appear in a folder named as follows and are referenced from the JSON or JSON Lines exported Conversations data.

<folder_name>/attachments/<conversation_id>/<conversation_part_id>/<attachment_name>

19. You can delete a Data Export by clicking the Delete button.

Currently, only Conversations data in a JSON or JSON Lines format can be exported to Amazon S3.

Attachments in Conversations are not exported. Customers will need to come back to the Conversations API to retrieve them.

We have a 1MB or 1500 parts export limit. Only the oldest conversation parts are removed from the export when the limit is reached. So, if a conversation hasn’t grown by more than 1500 parts or 1MB since the previous export, subsequent exports will contain all of the data. However, if the conversation has exceeded that limit, then we'll only include the most recent 1500 parts and older parts and you will need to append the data on your side when processing the exports. For example, if a conversation grows by 1800 parts in a day and a user has a daily export configured, on the next day's export they will receive 1500 parts in that conversation and lose the first 300 parts that the conversation grew by in the last day.


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