6 ways to automate Intercom with Zapier

The more customers you acquire, the happier your bottom line will be. That's a given. While that's cause for celebration, you still need to work toward maintaining customers in the long run, so they don't churn and turn to your competitors. 

To do this, your customer service and support teams need to work together to provide exceptional experiences 24/7. And, if you use a tool like Intercom to help solve tickets and keep the lines of communication open with your customers in real time, you're already halfway there. 

But to get the most from Intercom, you have to make sure it plays nicely with all the other apps you use to grow and run your business. With just a few Zaps—our word for Zapier's automated workflows—you can automatically route tickets to the right teams, gather feedback, and even use AI to analyze conversations. Here's how.

Table of contents

• Route tickets to the right teams

• Connect Intercom to your CRM or email marketing app

• Connect Intercom with your form app

• Connect Intercom with Google Sheets

• Gather feedback and analyze conversations

• Use webhooks with Intercom

Route tickets to the right teams

The faster your team is notified about Intercom activity, the faster they can respond. From handling new tickets to following up with customers, speed-to-response is key to improving customer satisfaction and maintaining efficient support operations.

But you won't want to spend all your time checking Intercom for updates. Instead, you can use these Zaps to send new tickets and customer activity to apps like Slack or Zendesk. That way, you're reaching the right teams where they spend most of their time—automatically.

Connect Intercom to your CRM or email marketing app

While Intercom may be your first touch point with a customer, it shouldn't be your last. And depending on the size and complexity of your business, multiple people may interact with a customer at different points along their journey with your service or product. 

Keep your tools in sync by connecting Intercom with your email marketing apps and customer relationship management (CRM) tools. That way, you can ensure each customer gets the right follow-up and keep their information updated and in sync across platforms.

Connect Intercom with your form app

Maybe you like to keep it old school with a tried-and-true form. Form apps like Typeform or Webflow can be great lead generators, particularly for businesses with an impressive web presence. The trick is getting that customer information from a web form into a customer service app like Intercom in a timely fashion—especially when you have a high volume of leads.

There are simple Zaps for linking form submission apps with Intercom. Visitors on your website can quickly convert into Intercom leads, where they'll enter your internal Intercom customer funnel. Or you can use a new entry within Typeform to send a message to you via Intercom, connecting your backend with your customer-facing communications. 

To give your communications a little more modern-era digital oomph, you can also set Intercom to add or remove tags based on the data in form entries. That way, entries sort themselves into highly specific segments, making it easier to craft specific responses at scale.

Connect Intercom with Google Sheets

Big data benefits big decisions, but what do you do when you need to see all your raw customer data in one place? Maybe you want to view how many customers belong to a specific tag so you can start brainstorming new email campaigns. Or maybe you want a log of all your customer conversations that happen in Intercom so you can analyze them and create customer profiles.

The solution is connecting Intercom with Google Sheets using Zapier. Every time a new user is logged by Intercom, you can set Google Sheets to create a new spreadsheet row that automatically populates with all their relevant information. There's no copying and pasting with this method, no clicking "save," no saving to a USB. It all happens automatically, setting you up for a seamless experience.

Or, if you want to add a lot of customer data to Intercom quickly, you can also run the process in reverse. Export a customer list to Google Sheets, then set Zapier to add Intercom users from the information in those rows.

Gather feedback and analyze conversations

Once you've helped a customer out—whether that's by solving a product issue or by answering specific questions—you'll want to know how you did. Gathering feedback from your customers can give you valuable insights into the way your brand is perceived and help you pinpoint any areas for improvement. 

Automation can help you streamline this process. The moment you close out customer conversations in Intercom, these Zaps will automatically send them a customer feedback survey while the experience is still fresh in their minds. 

Want to skip the surveys altogether? You can also use AI to analyze customer conversations for sentiment, key topics, and overall satisfaction, without needing to directly ask any humans for feedback. 

These Zaps cover that whole process automatically—from sending customer conversations to ChatGPT and delivering the analysis in tools like Google Sheets or Slack. 

Use webhooks with Intercom

Zapier has thousands of apps ready for automation, but there may be an app you use that doesn't have an integration quite yet. When that happens, you can use webhooks to integrate other apps with Intercom. Think of webhooks as the duct tape of the digital world: they connect almost anything.

If you have a tool that connects to webhooks but not Intercom, you can let webhooks serve as the go-between. Here are a few workflows to get you started:

Personalized communications, faster responses, better customer service

If an app doesn't integrate into your business, it loses value. You need fast, responsive, and personalized automation built into your existing systems to make the most of your customer service platforms.

Use Intercom along with your favorite apps to segment your customers, absorb new leads, and keep your team in the loop every time a customer has an issue. Even as your business scales, your existing team can handle new levels of attention and interest without missing a beat.

And this is just the start of what you can do with Intercom and Zapier. What will you automate first?

This article was originally published in September 2020, written by Nick Moore, with previous updates by Daniel Kenitz. It was most recently updated in June 2024 by Elena Alston.