Product Tours allows you to create a better first-time product experience for your customers, so you can drive faster adoption. You can build a series of in-app messages to guide customers around your product, so they can discover its value faster.

Designing a tour is fast and easy, and doesn’t require any code. Here’s how to get started:

First, go to Outbound from the main menu and click + New message in the top right corner.

Then, choose Product tour as your content type.

You can also choose to start with a pre-made template by picking this content type from the left sidebar.

For this example, we’ll start from scratch. Give your tour a short and snappy title and description. For example, if you’re designing a tour to onboard new users, you could call it ‘Get started’:

To change the URL for a product tour:

Note: Be sure to click Save and Close before exiting the main product tour page after making any changes!

You can send your tour from any teammate, or hide the sender entirely:

You can also define a custom color for the buttons in your tour:

To start designing your tour, click ‘Add steps’:

A new window will open. Here, add the website you’d like to build your tour on:

Once you’ve added a URL, click ‘Open website’ to start building your tour.

At the bottom of your site, you’ll see a blue banner - this is the tour builder.

Navigate to the specific page in your product where you’d like to start building your tour. Then, click ‘Begin tour here’:

Now, start creating your messages.

There are three types of messages to choose from - a post, a pointer or a video pointer.

Posts are perfect for capturing your customers’ attention at the start of a tour.

A post shows in the middle of the page - it doesn’t point to a specific element. You can help introduce your product by inserting an image or embedding a video. You also personalize your message with attributes, like greeting customers using their first name.

Pointers are perfect for showing customers how to use your product. You can guide them by pointing to a specific website element, such as a button. Just click the element you’d like to point to, then add content to your pointer:

If the element you'd like to choose is behind the tour builder bar, just click 'Hide' on the left to hide the tour builder.

As well as text, you can insert an image, add emojis, embed video and add attributes to make your pointers more engaging. Once your pointer displays, it will automatically dim the background to highlight the message.

By default, customers click ‘Next’ on your tour to advance each message. If you’d like them to type in a field, or click on the website element to proceed to the next step, select how the tour should advance:

Video pointers allow you to personally engage and guide customers, by using short, captioned videos of yourself or a teammate to show them around.

You can learn more about creating video pointers here.

Pointers, and video pointers come in two sizes. (The video pointer above ☝️is large.) The default pointer size is small. To switch between sizes, click “Advanced” then select the right size from the dropdown:

Here you can also define an optimal pointer position. Choose from auto left, right, above or below:

To give your customers a comprehensive tour, you should create a sequence of messages. You can use any combination of posts, pointers and video pointers to build the best tour for your customers.

If you need to re-order your steps, just hover over the step you’d like to move, and drag it with this icon:

Once you’ve finished creating your tour, you can easily preview it:

Here, you’ll see how your tour will appear to customers:

To finish your tour with a bang, you can send a shower of confetti on the final step.

Just click 'Settings' then switch this toggle to 'On':

This is what your customers will see when they complete your tour:

From this settings tab, you can choose whether customers should be able to snooze your tour:

Snoozing the tour will delay it for 24 hours, then the customer will receive it again, as long as they’re on the correct page where it’s triggered. A tour can be snoozed multiple times, and allows customers to take your tour at the right time for them. Perfect for non-urgent messages. 👌

Once the message has re-matched post snooze, we’ll mark the associated snooze record as completed.

The “Restart” option adds a button on each step of your tour (after the first) which will take your customers back to the beginning so they can take the tour again:

Once you’re happy with your tour steps and settings click ‘Save and close’:

Product Tours are specifically designed to work with desktop web apps. For an engaging multi-step experience on your mobile app, try Mobile Carousels.

Intercom does not support integrating with desktop apps (like those built using Electron framework). As such, Product tours are only available on desktop websites when viewed in web browsers.

Follow this guide to ensure that your tour always sends correctly.