Intercom is an intuitive, flexible, omnichannel customer service platform that uses automation and AI to solve all sorts of customer needs. For growing companies, that's great news. 

While an influx of new customers is reason to celebrate, failing to maintain quality-of-service as your business expands can give even your most loyal customers whiplash. With Intercom, you can scale your customer service to facilitate a growing business. AI chatbots, help desks, conversational support features in SMS and email channels: it all adds up to a premium experience for your most loyal VIPs. 

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. Here's how you can use Zapier's automated workflows to connect Intercom to your internal communications, email lists, and online forms to improve your customer service.

Table of contents

• Get Slack notifications for Intercom activity

• Connect Intercom to your CRM or email marketing app

• Connect Intercom with your form app

• Connect Intercom with Google Sheets

• Use webhooks with Intercom

Get Slack notifications for Intercom activity

You can admit it: You're on Slack all day, and so is your team. But don't think of it as a distraction from helping your customers. Rather, connecting it to Intercom could improve the customer experience—before questions evolve into problems. The faster your team is notified about Intercom activity on Slack, the faster they can respond.

But speed-to-response shouldn't be your only goal. Intercom also excels at segmenting your customers so you can route inquiries to the right channel. (The last thing you want is a customer to grow frustrated when they're transferred to the wrong department). Instead, work within Intercom's triggers (like "tag added to user") to send channel messages to specific Slack teams. 

Say you've got a #onboarding channel in Slack for new users of your software. This channel is where your team talks about improving the onboarding process and addresses queries from new customers about getting set up. With Zapier, you can send notifications solely to the #onboarding Slack channel, ensuring you can serve your new customers more quickly. 

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—whether that's the latest product announcement from your marketing team or a timely response from a sales rep.

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. Maybe you want a bird's-eye view of all your customers so you can better manage your data. Or maybe you need a backup for all that priceless customer information.

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.

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. It was most recently updated in October 2023 by Daniel Kenitz.