Intercom

Score9.9 out of 10

151 Reviews and Ratings

What is Intercom?

Intercom Helpdesk is the support workspace where human teammates handle customer conversations and tickets. Fin, the customer agent, and Copilot work in that same Inbox, so a case can move from an automated reply to a teammate with the conversation history attached.

Key Capabilities

Inbox: Conversations and tickets share the Inbox. Default views are All, Unassigned, the signed-in teammate’s inbox, and Created by you. Team inboxes take routed work, and saved views filter those lists. With the bot inbox turned on under Settings > AI & Automation > Automation, bot-managed conversations route to that inbox.
Copilot: A teammate opens Copilot from the right sidebar of a conversation or ticket and asks a question. Answers draw on public Help Center articles, including articles synced or imported from Zendesk, internal articles synced or imported from Confluence, Guru, or Notion, public URLs, snippets, PDFs, macros, and conversation history. Each answer links its sources so the teammate can check them before sending. Back-office tickets, Tracker tickets, and Custom Answers configured for Fin are outside that source set. The Knowledge Hub is where a workspace adds, syncs, or removes those sources and chooses which ones Copilot may use. Every teammate can use Copilot on up to 10 conversations or tickets a month at no added charge.
Reply tools: AI Compose rephrases a reply, changes its tone, translates it, or corrects spelling. AI Summarize writes a note from a conversation or ticket. The compose shortcut is Command-J on macOS and Control-J on Windows. AI Autofill fills a ticket title and description when a teammate creates a ticket from the Inbox.
Fin in a workflow: A Let Fin Answer step lets Fin carry the conversation until the issue is resolved or a teammate takes it. Each Let Fin Answer block has its own inactivity timer. On handoff, the Inbox keeps what the customer said and what Fin did.
Human in the Loop for email: The help article documents this as open beta, and it is separate from the loop-in step inside Fin Procedures. An escalation rule under Fin AI Agent > Train > Escalation, with the channel condition set to Email and the action set to Ask for input, makes Fin pause when its confidence score falls below a Low, Moderate, or High threshold. Moderate is the default. The Inbox shows an Ask a teammate note with Fin’s draft and the reason it paused, and the customer receives a short holding reply. The reviewer can give guidance, approve the draft, or take over the conversation. If nobody responds before the configured Proceed after time, Fin sends the original draft. The same control can sit inside the Fin step of a Workflow.
Tickets: Short questions stay conversations. Longer work that needs investigation or another team becomes a ticket. Ticket types, including their fields, are created under Settings > Inbox > Tickets and belong to one of three categories. Customer tickets track a long-running request and send status through the Messenger and email. A teammate can convert a conversation in one click, or a customer can submit a form from a conversation, a Workflow, or the product. A Back-office ticket is opened from a conversation, assigned to another team, and cross-posts internal notes and status changes back to that conversation. A Tracker ticket groups related conversations or Customer tickets around one shared issue, such as an outage, a bug, or a faulty delivery batch, and can broadcast one update to the affected customers. Where Multibrand is enabled, all three categories can carry a brand. Changing the brand requires the Can manage workspace data permission.
Workflows: Workflows are built at Fin AI Agent > Workflows on a visual canvas, with no code, and are generally available. A workflow can face the customer or run in the background. Triggers include the start of a conversation, a later customer message, a page visit, a click on a site element, a new Messenger conversation, a customer call, a ticket being created, a teammate changing state, assignment, or notes, an unresponsive customer or teammate, and a call from another workflow. Steps branch on conditions, read or update profile attributes, tag and assign, add an internal note that mentions a teammate, and open, assign, or close tickets. A reusable workflow can be called from other workflows. Data connectors can return order status, send request details to another tool, or start a downstream action. Rules snooze or close inactive conversations. Auto-close of an abandoned workflow conversation is set under Settings > AI & Automation > Automation, with a wait of 3, 5, 7, 10, or 15 minutes counted from the last bot or Fin response, and only while the customer is on a step that asks for input. Pausing a workflow blocks new triggers. Conversations already in it, including Wait steps, finish on the version that started them. A workflow must be paused or in draft before it can be deleted. An inactive subscription pauses every workflow, and the workflows stay paused after the subscription is restored until a teammate sets them live.
Procedures: Procedures are separate from Workflows. They are natural-language instructions Fin follows, and Fin can change course when the customer changes direction. Procedures are in managed availability.
Knowledge and reporting: The Help Center holds the public articles customers browse. The Knowledge Hub holds internal articles, snippets, PDFs, and synced websites. Reports, quality checks, and monitoring cover Fin and teammates together, including response times, conversation ratings, and Fin resolutions.

Audience & Use Cases

Audience: Support leads, front-line teammates, and back-office teams that take work from the customer conversation.
Use Case: Route email, chat, phone, and messaging into team inboxes, and let Fin answer inside a workflow before a teammate joins.
Use Case: Turn a long-running request into a Customer ticket and post status through the Messenger and email.
Use Case: Open a Back-office ticket for finance, legal, or engineering from the customer conversation, with notes and status posted back to that conversation.
Use Case: Link many conversations to one Tracker ticket and send one update to the affected customers.
Use Case: Have Copilot draft from the Help Center and the Knowledge Hub, with the teammate checking the linked sources before the reply is sent.

Technical Specifications

Inbox channels: The help desk lists email, live chat, phone, SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook in the Inbox.
Workflow channels: Inbound workflows run on chat, email, Slack, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and SMS. A separate trigger covers an inbound phone call.
Inbox AI processing: Copilot, AI Compose, AI Summarize, and AI Autofill call OpenAI GPT models. On an EU-hosted workspace, that processing stays in Europe. On an AU-hosted workspace, Copilot is available and the processing stays in the United States.
Copilot allowance: Up to 10 conversations or tickets a month for each teammate are included.
Workflow controls: The workflow list filters by Audience, State, Tag, Channel, and Type, either customer-facing or background. Each Let Fin Answer block keeps its own inactivity timer.
Apps: Intercom reports connections to more than 450 apps, including Jira, Slack, Salesforce, Shopify, and Stripe. Order, billing, and account details from connected apps can sit beside the conversation.

On 12 May 2026 the company, previously named Intercom, renamed itself Fin. Intercom remains the name of the help desk. On 15 June 2026 Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Fin for approximately $3.6 billion, subject to customary purchase price adjustments. Salesforce completed the acquisition on 10 September 2026. Fin, including the customer agent and the Intercom help desk, operates as part of Salesforce AI Labs and still serves its customers. Salesforce offers Fin alongside Agentforce as a customer agent that works with the help desks a company already uses.