This comprehensive guide will help you get started with Intercom. We recommend you take the following steps as a priority, as these will unlock further features and functionality for you and your team to get the most out of Intercom.

We’ve broken it up into sections:

First, install the Messenger to connect with customers and enable omnichannel communication such as email, phone, and SMS so your customers can reach you, and your team can handle everything in one place. This provides the best customer support experience because it allows you to collect data for personalization, enable Fin AI Agent to resolve queries or hand them over to an agent, and send in-app outbound messages. Whether the plan is to install the Messenger in a dev environment or in production first, be sure to start this process straight away.

From the Installation settings page, you’ll find two code snippets to (1) Install for visitors (2) Install for logged-in users, we recommend installing the Messenger for both.

Customize to have a Messenger that looks and feels exactly like your brand, and suits your preferences such as when you’re available to chat and how inbound conversations are handled.

To send emails from your business or shared email address and improve open rates, you’ll first need to verify your domain. Then allow email forwarding from your address(es) to Intercom and manage all inbound email from your chosen inbox. With ‘sender address’ also configured, if a customer contacts you through support@examply.com, then your replies will also come from support@examply.com.

Connect your social media accounts to Intercom such as Instagram and WhatsApp, so your team can respond to all direct messages you receive from one place.

Time to invite your team, set up team structures, roles, permissions and decide how conversations will be routed to them and how work will be shared out. These steps set your org up for success by defining some of the basic roles, permissions and workload assignment that will be used going forward. Most of them only need to be configured once, and they will make it easy for you to report on and manage your team as you grow.

Custom roles are reusable sets of permissions that you can assign to teammates when you invite them to your Intercom workspace. They also make it simple to update permissions for a large group of people all at once.

Now you can ask teammates to join your workspace and set their permissions. Depending on your plan, you can also assign lite seats to collaborate with teammates outside of your Support team.

Create team inboxes to give each team their own dedicated inbox, then decide how you’d like conversations to be assigned to these inboxes so that teammates can handle the right conversations first.

Choose how you want inbound conversations to be assigned to teammates in the inbox. We find the best assignment method for Support teams is ‘balanced assignment’. You can also set an assignment limit for the number of conversations agents should typically be working on. It’s also possible to override the assignment limit for individual teammates (e.g. if they’re new to the team). If you’re unsure, 3 conversations is a good place to start.

Conversations are simple queries that can be handled quickly, and tickets are for complex async queries that may require investigation and collaboration. There are three ticket types you can set up: Customer tickets; Back-office tickets; and Tracker tickets.

The next crucial step to setting up a successful customer service offering is building your Knowledge Hub with support content. Having a strong content base early on enables you to automate more than 50% of inbound conversations using our AI Agent, provide all teammates with a personal AI assistant, and increase the number of customers who self-serve via your Help Center. Plus, it’s more efficient to manage all your internal and external content in one place.

Start by creating public articles or syncing / importing your existing knowledge base from Zendesk. Then customize your on-brand help center and set it live so customers can self-serve. To use these articles with Fin AI Agent and provide customers with instant answers, you can decide which content Fin has access to.

The Knowledge Hub is also your internal knowledge management system for creating, syncing, or importing internal articles from Confluence, Guru, or Notion. To provide teammates with their own personal AI assistant in the inbox, you can enable these articles for Fin AI Copilot.

After investing in a tip-top knowledge base, you’re ready to test that knowledge with Fin AI Agent and witness the real magic of good quality content. Fin is the key to instantly resolving 50% of your support queries. It improves your customer experience by reducing wait times and boosting CSAT scores, and frees your team up to focus on more important things. You can see it all in action before any of your customers and learn exactly how Fin behaves.

All Fin needs to perform well and start resolving conversations is your support content, so you’ll need to get this added before you can preview and start interacting with Fin in the Messenger.

If you’d like to test Fin internally with teammates, or trial it on a specific group of customers, it’s easy to do this using audience rules.

With the essentials set up, you should consider how Intercom fits into your current tech stack and install the apps you regularly use. Then look at bringing your data into Intercom to segment and target customers based on who they are and their behavior, helping you create more personal interactions and drive customer engagement.

Determine what custom data you need to integrate with Intercom to truly personalize the customer experience. Then plan and organize the data you want to capture and create it inside Intercom.

You can start proactively messaging your customers now too! With a suite of message types including outbound email, chat, surveys, banners, product tours and more, you’re able to reach customers how you want, when you want. This reduces inbound volume all while driving up adoption, retention and customer satisfaction.

Start with creating an outbound email or in-app chat message and use audience rules to target your message at the right customers.

You can also build your own on-brand reusable email templates and manage multiple email lists with granular subscriptions.

Email, chat, banners, and tooltips are available on all plans as standard. If you want to survey your customers, give product tours, orchestrate outbound campaigns with Series, and more - get the Proactive Support Plus add-on for your plan.

If you're new to Intercom, check out our Intercom Academy course: Getting started with Intercom: Fundamentals. This will guide you through your first steps with Intercom, helping you fully leverage its capabilities and start seeing value right away.