Over 30,000 business use Intercom to support their customers, and even the biggest and busiest have all been where you are now (more on this below 🧐). So use the tips & tricks we've all picked up along the way to help you succeed at speed - you've got this!

We analyzed thousands of product actions implemented by our most successful customers, and created the following checklist detailing the most impactful steps thousands of customers took in their first days in Intercom.

💡 Treating your setup as a project and dividing it into achievable milestones will help you see progress and impact in a much more achievable way.

The 8 steps featured below will all take a little time, so your Day 1 might mean getting to familiarize yourself with the product, and planning out who is going to own each particular step and when they'll do them. Setting aside consistent time to do this will compound your efforts and you'll be going live before you know it 🚀

⚙️ Some of the setup steps you'll read below are technical, like installing the Messenger, forwarding support email addresses or creating Inbox rules.

✏️ Some of the steps are content creation and management (like importing or creating help center articles, or saved 'macro' replies for your team). You can always get to work on these if you're waiting on an Ops / Tech teammate to perform other setup steps to save time.

🏠 We've also linked to an Intercom Home setup step if there's one available to make sure you have exactly what you need. Intercom Home is our setup checklist inside Intercom.

👥 Click here if you'd like to invite a teammate to Intercom to complete setup with you.

The Messenger lets you talk to customers while they’re in your app or on your website, but you probably knew that already! There are several ways to install the Messenger, and while it's pretty quick, you'll need access to your codebase (or an integration like Google tag manager). Visit Intercom Home for your unique install code, or to share with a teammate who might be helping out with the technical side of implementation.

💡 We recommend installing the Messenger on a low traffic page, or with custom targeting to only display to your team to begin with. Then once you've tested, you can go live 🚀

You'll also get instructions on how to customise the Messenger to look and feel like your brand, and give your visitors and customers options to self-serve or when they can chat directly with your team.

In addition to live chat, Intercom can handle conversations from channels like email, Twitter, Instagram, mobile and more. Keeping all your support queries in one place makes your support consistent and efficient.

💡 A good first step is to route just one support email (or a test identity) to Intercom.

Visit Intercom Home here to set up email forwarding.

The true power of Intercom comes with scaled support, and one of the best ways to unblock your customers is with help articles like this one. Intercom articles add value via organic search, in the Messenger, in your Inbox and can be automatically suggested by our chat bots. With just a handful of articles you can start seeing real impact right away.

Visit this Intercom Home step to set up your first articles (or import automatically from Zendesk), and create a branded help center.

While your support team can leverage the articles you create, they can also use custom 'macros'. Macros are saved responses your team can use to efficiently handle large volumes of conversations, even including Inbox actions, like tagging, snoozing or closing conversations automatically.

Read more about macros here, and set them up here.

Custom data attributes let you collect and use whatever data is important for your business across all of Intercom. Visit this Intercom Home step to learn more, and start collecting or sending data to Intercom, or read more below.

Connect and synchronize Intercom with the rest of your tech stack to leverage information you already have, for impact you've never had before.

Visit our app store to see more. You can even create your own custom apps to really level up your team's workflow.

Whether you're sharing some of these setup steps, adding your support teammates, or bringing other teams like Marketing or Sales closer to the customer's experience, invite them securely by visiting this step on Intercom Home.

You can set custom permissions and access per person, or by particular role.

Remember, all great journeys start with the first step, so take your time and have fun.

Try think of the next small action that will move you forward to getting a simple configuration live with Intercom, then build out any complexity from there.

We work hard to make sure Intercom is not only impactful for you and your customers, but easy and enjoyable to use. I'll be sending you messages throughout your onboarding journey to help you get set up, but if you find yourself stuck, there are lots of places to help you get the most out of Intercom, depending on where you are or what you need:

We looked at our most successful customers and created an in-product checklist detailing the most impactful steps thousands of customers took in their first days in the product.
Visit Intercom Home.

(I'll also send you some setup messages from Intercom Home as part of your onboarding to help you get set up).

Wherever you are in Intercom, you'll find helpful links (like the ones in this pic) with embedded educational content to help you learn more.

Where we have all our help articles like this one, FAQs, how-tos and best practices all in one place. Great for one-shot unblockers for you and your team.

Intercom Academy is where we host all our training courses to help you get set up for success in your role. Whether you're setting up Intercom for your business, building bots for scaling support or an agent getting to grips with the Inbox, we've got you covered.

Our customer success team run regular webinars to demo Intercom, and workshop customer queries during Q & A.

Don't just listen to us, the real pros are our customers...honestly, it's kind of embarrassing 😅

We're so proud to have a creative, supportive and active community. Join the Intercom Community to learn from the best, and when the pupil becomes the master, you can share your skills with the rest.

If you'd like some extra assistance with your setup, just reach out via the Messenger and chat to our support team. We're always ready to help.