Use this article to get up to speed with the Intercom Inbox — the tool your team uses to manage and respond to customer conversations. It covers navigation, customization, keyboard shortcuts, collaboration features, and automation. This article is for teammates; customers see a separate Messenger experience.

The Intercom Inbox is the workspace where your team manages and responds to customer conversations. It brings together all your inboxes, conversations, and customer context in one place — with tools to help you work faster, collaborate with teammates, and automate repetitive tasks.

Faster inbox performance makes every action immediate, so you can get more done in the same amount of time. With Intercom Inbox, you’ll never be waiting for the product to load. The Inbox is built for internet scale, which means no loading screens, no spinners, no waiting. Every action is immediate so your team can give your customers faster answers and increase customer satisfaction.

Click any image in a conversation to open it in the lightbox and zoom in up to 5x — useful for reading serial numbers on receipts, error messages in screenshots, or small UI elements in product photos. Pinch or scroll to zoom continuously, and drag to pan around the image. This works for both inline images and attachment uploads.

Leveraging shortcuts, you can perform your everyday actions faster without lifting your fingers off the keyboard. This might take some getting used to but it’ll soon start saving you valuable time.

We’ve made it super simple to learn and use keyboard shortcuts with Command-K ( ⌘/Ctrl K ). This opens an action menu giving you quick access to your frequent actions without needing to remember the shortcuts.

Use direct shortcuts to the most popular actions, such as composing replies, inserting content, snoozing conversations, and moving between inboxes. Find a full list of available shortcuts or access the cheat sheet straight from the Inbox by using ⌘/Ctrl K and selecting Keyboard shortcuts.

Access the Intercom Inbox table layout using shortcut key L or the toggle buttons on the bottom left for a bird’s-eye view of conversations. This is great for support or shift managers who want to get a quick overview of the inboxes and conversation status.

Every row represents a conversation and you can see the various conversation data points in the columns.

These columns are completely configurable so you can choose which information you need to see onscreen. Simply select a column to rearrange, sort or hide it.

To add more columns, scroll to the far right of the table and click the + button.

You can also take direct actions from the table such as closing and snoozing conversations, or marking them as priority.

Take action on multiple conversations at once by selecting them on the left. For example, you might notice a few conversations that are for the billing team, you could select these conversations and assign them to the correct team using shortcut key A or us ⌘/Ctrl K and select Assign to.

Look at a conversation thread or details by selecting the conversation row and a preview will pop up on the right.

To switch between the chat layout and table layout in the Intercom Inbox, press L or use the layout toggle buttons in the bottom left of the conversations panel.

To filter by conversation state, click the filter button at the top of your conversations list. You can filter to show only open, closed, or snoozed conversations and tickets.

To change your theme from your profile settings:

To change the Intercom Inbox display language:

You can also add custom conversation attributes, or customize your Inbox with apps to show the exact information you need, and perform actions in external tools without needing to leave the conversation.

Use this toggle in the Intercom Inbox to display all conversation timestamps in your customer's local time, instead of your own browser timezone. This makes it easier to coordinate support across time zones without manually converting times. This is an inbox-only setting — your customer sees no changes.

All timestamps in the Intercom Inbox conversation stream — including relative times like "2 hours ago" and the exact times shown when you hover over a timestamp — immediately re-render in the customer's local timezone. To switch back to your own browser timezone, open the ⋮ menu again and toggle Show timestamp in customer's timezone off.

Keep the following in mind when using this feature in the Intercom Inbox:

Some messages are too urgent to wait until tomorrow, or until your teammate returns from holidays. Everyone in your team is visible in the team inbox, so you can access any message for any teammate to ensure no question sits unanswered.

You'll find all new conversations in 'Unassigned' (unless they're automatically assigned using Workflows). You can pick any conversation up there and assign it to a particular teammate.

Inbox Views allow you to define a set of filters, including conversation attributes, and then show all conversations that match those filters in real time. It’s easy to switch between them and keep an eye on urgent issues, your direct reports, or whichever conversations you consider most important.

Let background automations in Workflows handle the repetitive processes, so your team can focus on what they do best.

Quickly search the Inbox by clicking the search icon on the top left to search and filter your conversations by keyword, tag, user, assignee, and date ranges. Locate relevant conversations instantly. For example, you can filter for a specific tag you’ve created to see all conversations about that topic.

The Intercom for iOS and Intercom for Android mobile apps allows you to reply to visitors or users, add notes, assign conversations and view their profile pages. With mobile profile pages, it's easy to reply with high-quality, personalized responses from anywhere. Learn how to support your customers on the go here.

See if the person you're speaking with has any other lead or user profiles in Intercom. In Intercom, a user is a contact who has logged in to your product, and a lead is an unidentified or anonymous visitor. The potential duplicates feature will warn you in the Intercom Inbox if there are any duplicate leads or users for the person you're currently speaking with, matched on the following fields:

You can view the details of each potential duplicate and their matching attributes.

If you want to look at a contact's other conversations with recent activity, you can check the Recent conversations app. You can see a list of the contact’s 3 most recent conversations shown in the Inbox’s right-hand sidebar, or you can click See more to expand the list to 20 recent conversations.

If you receive a conversation and you're not sure how to proceed with the answer, you can always check Similar conversations app to see if anything like this was already asked previously and how your teammates answered.

This feature finds conversations that contain messages that are similar to the current conversation. For example, if the current conversation contains a message "I need help with my refund" and if there are other conversations that also contains the text "I need help with my refund", then those conversations are matched.

While finding similar conversations, we adhere to the following rules: