It’s easy to understand your team’s workload and your customers’ biggest issues with conversations reporting. You can track your new inbound conversations, busiest periods, and conversation trends, and optimize your support.
Note: The Conversations report is available on the Essential, Advanced, and Expert plans. Custom report building requires Advanced or Expert. To view reports, teammates need the Can access Reports permission. To create or edit a report, they also need Can create, edit and internally share reports. For CSV exports, Can export CSV is required; for chart drill-ins, Can access Chart drill-in is required. Report-level sharing can further restrict access even when workspace reporting is enabled.
Create a conversations report
Go to Reports and create a new report, then select the Conversations template to get started quickly.
You can also use a range of conversation metrics and attributes to create your own custom report on the Advanced or Expert plan.
What's included in the conversations report template
The conversations report template includes these charts and metrics by default:
New conversations
Conversations replied to
Replies sent
Closed conversations
New conversations - by time
New conversations - by channel
Replies sent - by time
Comparison of New Conversations and Replies
Hourly Distribution of New Conversations
How to read chart data
Hover over the information icon at the top of a chart to see reporting period, report level filters, metrics, and metric level filters applied to each chart.
Learn more about conversation metrics in the Conversations dataset.
Customize the conversations report template
The conversations report template is fully customizable, enabling you to add more charts from the chart library, or remove charts you don't need in this report. All charts can be resized and moved around to where you want them.
Conversations report use cases
Manage your team’s workload with the 'New conversations - by time' chart
You can track how many new conversations you’re handling over time with the New conversations - by time chart, so you can identify long-term growth trends. You’ll be able to see if you need to streamline your support process, hire more staff or tackle recurring spikes in volume.
In the New conversations - by time chart, the previous date range is also shown alongside the current one, so you can compare two periods.
It’s important that you can easily compare the same days with each other across weeks. To compare two weeks like-for-like, you need to set the time range to be divisible by 7 days (i.e. 14 days, 84 days, 210 days etc). For example, if you select a period that’s not divisible by 7, such as 12 days, the days of each week won’t line up with each other correctly.
Understand the rate that conversations are being replied to
The Comparison of New Conversations and Replies chart shows the number of conversations started in the chosen period (in blue) alongside the number of conversations where teammates have replied (in yellow).
The ‘conversations replied to’, may include conversations started before your filtered date range.
The ideal result in the Comparison of New Conversations and Replies chart is an even number of conversations started and replied to.
If you see fewer conversations replied to than conversations started, your team may be experiencing a backlog of conversations.
More conversations replied to than started, suggests your team are working through a backlog of older conversations, or responding to conversations which have reopened.
See which channels your conversations are coming from
The New conversations - by channel chart will show you how your new conversations are spread across the channels you support. Channels are the different ways that customers can start a conversation with you.
How to break down replies sent by your team
For another view of your team’s workload, the Replies sent chart shows how many replies they’ve sent within your selected date range.
'Replies sent' in the legacy conversations report counts teammate replies to conversations without a user response. However, ‘Replies sent’ in the new conversations report template and custom reports only count teammate replies in conversations with a user response.
How to identify and manage your busiest periods
It's easy to check which days and times get the most new conversations in the Hourly Distribution of New Conversations chart, so you can make sure you have enough teammates available to manage the busy periods.
Useful conversations report filters
You can gauge your team’s workload for any period up to a year, using the date range filter.
You can also filter your conversations report by:
Tag — Review a subset of conversations with certain tags.
Continent — Select a single continent, or more than one.
Country — Choose a single country, or more than one.
Channel — Filter based on where conversations started. E.g. email, chat, or your mobile app.
Started by — See only conversations started by your customers, or those in response to a proactive outbound message or a bot.
Teammate currently assigned — Show conversations currently assigned to a team or teams.
Teammate — Show conversations where the action was performed by one or more teammate/s (E.g. conversations replied to, or closed by that teammate).
Conversation data attributes — Show conversations with specific attributes that you define.
Changes from the legacy conversations report
Changes from the legacy conversations report
If you're migrating from the legacy conversations report to Intercom's new reporting templates, here's what changed:
Available in the new template: Open Conversations, Snoozed Conversations, Reopened Conversations, Closed vs Reopened Conversations, Open and Snoozed Conversations — these can be added when customizing the report template.
Busiest Period for New Conversations: This chart name wasn't migrated, but the same capability is available as Hourly Distribution of New Conversations, which shows the days and times with the most new conversations.
Email PDF: The legacy PDF email subscription is being deprecated. The replacement is scheduled sharing of an interactive report link — see Schedule delivery in your report settings.
Schedule Report: Now available as Schedule delivery. Recipients receive a report link by email on the schedule you configure.
Understanding data discrepancies
If you notice differences in your data totals or manual calculations, this is usually due to how specific metrics are aggregated.
Closed conversations: This metric counts every "close" event. If a conversation is closed, reopened, and closed again, it counts as two events, not one unique conversation. Additionally, closures performed by automation — such as those by Fin — are excluded from "Conversations closed per hour," which only counts closures performed by teammates.
Manual calculations: Comparing manual counts against Intercom reports may yield different results — this is expected, as reports use server-side aggregation that can differ from simple row counts.
Notes:
Unique conversation counts may differ depending on the specific report filters applied.
The default Conversations started at metric (which anchors to the date of the customer's first message) counts conversations with at least one customer message. To include outbound conversations without a customer reply, use the Conversation created at metric (which anchors to when the conversation was opened, regardless of whether the customer replied) and the Has user reply attribute (a filter that segments conversations by whether the customer sent at least one message) to segment by reply status.
Reporting data is available for up to 2 years. This is a reporting lookback limit — underlying conversation records are retained separately. The date range filter within a single report supports up to 1 year at a time.
Which metrics does this affect?
Two metrics are often confused here:
Teammate replied counts conversations with at least one visible reply.
Teammate closed includes all closures, even without replies — which is why closure counts can be higher than reply counts.
Most conversation metrics count a conversation only once at least one customer message has been sent — so outbound conversations that were never replied to won't appear in these metrics:
First response time
Time to close
The default New conversations metric (which uses the Conversations started at timestamp — the date of the customer's first message)
To count conversations regardless of whether the customer replied, switch the New conversations metric to the Conversation created at time pill (the timestamp selector below the metric name), then add the Has user reply attribute to segment by reply status.
Note: 'Conversations replied to' is the one metric that counts regardless of whether the customer replied first — it counts any conversation a teammate replied in, even if the original conversation had no prior customer message. Reopened and replied-to conversations are also counted, but the act of unsnoozing a conversation alone is not included in this metric.
A ticket type I've used doesn't show up in my ticket report or its filters
Ticket reports apply the same rule as conversation reports: a ticket type only appears in filters and reports once at least one ticket of that type has received a customer reply.
Excluding holding messages from analytics
To prevent holding messages from skewing your response time or conversation data, you can exclude them using custom attributes.
A holding message is an automated reply sent to customers while your team is away or unavailable. These messages can skew your response time data if not excluded from your reports.
Create a custom attribute, such as Holding Message Applied.
Update your bot or workflow to apply this attribute when a holding message is sent.
In your reports, apply a filter to exclude conversations where Holding Message Applied is true. This removes those conversations from your metrics so your response time and conversation data reflect only genuine customer interactions.
Tracking weekly teammate performance
To analyze escalations and general performance on a weekly basis:
Navigate to the Teammate Performance report.
Filter the date range to the specific week you wish to analyze.
Apply additional filters to focus on specific actions, such as Conversations, Escalations, or Replies.
Tip: Use this report to identify teammates who may need assistance with high escalation rates.
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