Intercom integration:

Planhat's Intercom integration makes it really easy to sync your chats into Planhat. After an initial manual sync of historical chats, new/updated chats will automatically sync.

Within Planhat, you can view your chats alongside other conversations, such as emails and meetings. It's simple to filter your view (e.g. see the highest priority chats), and to tag in colleagues to collaborate.

You can also visualise and analyse time-series chat data, meaning you can track trends over time, and identify spikes and outliers. With Planhat, you can act automatically in response to data, e.g. automatically applying Workflows or sending notifications in response to positive or negative indicators. You can even combine chat data with other data types (e.g. revenue data), allowing analysis such as who are the most expensive customers to support.

🚀 Tip: The Intercom integration also enables you to send Intercom messages to your End Users from Planhat. If you would like to know more about this, check out this article.

📌 Important to note: The integration does not sync usage data from Intercom. For this, you can use Planhat's API, tracking script or product analytics integrations.

Chats are synced into Planhat if they can be mapped to End Users, via their email address (e.g. bob@pendo.com).

If a chat is received by Planhat and the End User already exists in your Planhat tenant, then the chat will be synced in and mapped to them.

If the End User doesn't yet exist in your Planhat tenant, but the Company does (e.g. Pendo in this case, as identified by the email domain), Planhat can automatically create the End User on that Company, and then sync in the chat. It's your choice whether you would like Planhat to create End Users from external conversations like this - it's configured per tenant. You can view your current setting under "Automatic Detection of New Contacts" within "General Settings"; speak to your CSM if you would like to enable or disable this.

There is a button in the integration to manually "Fetch All". This is typically used when you first set up the integration, in order to sync past chats into Planhat.

It may also be used later on, if new End Users are added to Planhat using a different method than the Intercom integration, and then you want to sync in their historical chats. In addition, it's possible to manually sync Intercom chats for an individual Company, by going to their Company Profile, clicking the icon of three vertical dots in the top right, and selecting "Sync Intercom Conversations".

The default setting is that a manual sync goes back 60 days, which is suitable for most cases, but it's possible to change this to a shorter or longer time period on request (up to 360 days, although that's not recommended). Speak to your CSM if you would like to change this - it's set in "Chat Initial Sync Period" in the "Admin Settings" of your tenant, which is accessible to Planhat staff.

Going forward, chats that are new or updated in Intercom will automatically sync into Planhat, in near real time.

Remember that chats can only sync in if they can be associated with an End User via the email address (as described above).

To set up Planhat's Intercom integration, follow these steps:

Intercom chats are saved in Planhat on the Conversation model, type "chat".

You can view the chats themselves on the Company and End User Profiles, as well as in the Conversations Module. It's easy to apply filters; for example, to specifically show Intercom chats (just filter by type is equal to "chat"), or to look for chats with a particular tag (e.g. "high priority" or "bug"). In the Conversations Module, you can even build more advanced filters based on chat fields you are syncing in, such as chat ratings, remarks or status. You can comment on chats in Planhat, e.g. to tag in other colleagues (typically to bring an issue to the attention of a team that doesn't use Intercom). It's even possible to reply to customers' chat conversations from within Planhat.

In addition, within the "Metrics" tab of the Data Module, chat volumes can be saved as time-series data (under the "Conversations" category). You can build on this raw time-series data with Calculated Metrics - for example, tracking trends over time, or comparing a Company's number of chats with the amount of money they are spending with you. In Pages (in the Customer Intelligence Module), you can create graphs to analyse and visualise chat data, including chat field data.

This article has focused on syncing Intercom chats into Planhat. If you would like to learn about sending Intercom messages from Planhat, see here.