Your Inbox Rules will become Workflows, our new mission control centre for customer service automations.

Workflows makes it easy for your team to build and manage powerful automations with bots, triggers, conditions, and rules that create amazing customer and teammate experiences – all in one intuitive visual builder.

As Workflows your Inbox Rules will have new capabilities:

You can learn more about how to build rules-based automations in Workflows.

Your Workflows will work just like Inbox Rules did; executing the relevant actions once the an event triggers in Intercom.

To make your migration easier you can use the ✨Clean up rules tool before your migration date.

Using this tool will ensure we don't migrate any Inbox Rules you haven't recently used and don't need to keep.

Well, it depends on how your current Inbox Rules are configured. Below we lay out the potential scenarios:

If your Inbox Rule was paused, a new paused Workflow will be created which replicates the behaviour of the Inbox Rule.

For example, if you have a paused Inbox Rule starting with the trigger “A customer starts a new conversation”, it will be transformed into a paused Workflow under the trigger “Customer sends their first message”.

If your Inbox Rule was live, a new live Workflow will be created which replicates the behavior of the Inbox Rule — all of the operations which the Inbox Rule carried out will now apply through the Workflow.

For example, if you have a live Inbox Rule starting with the trigger “A customer sends any reply”, it will be transformed into a live Workflow under the trigger “Customer sends any message”.

If your Inbox Rule used the trigger “A customer starts a new conversation”, in Workflows it will become "Customer sends their first message". It will use an additional audience targeting attribute to ensure the conversation originated from a customer to adhere to the same behaviour as Inbox Rules.

We’re also making a minor change to what happens when an email is sent directly to a teammate’s email address. Previously, the Inbox Rule would not run assignment actions for this conversation — whereas Workflows will run all actions, including assignment. If you'd like to change this behaviour in Workflows it's simple to configure, you can reach out to our Support team through the Messenger for help.

If your Inbox Rule used the trigger “Reply to Outbound content”, it will use a different trigger when becoming a Workflow. This is because Workflows have more flexible and powerful triggers. In Workflows, this trigger becomes “Customer sends their first message” and will use an audience rule within the Workflow to determine if the message originates from Outbound content or a Workflow.

If your Inbox Rule used the trigger “A new conversation hasn’t received a reply”, the corresponding Workflow will use the “Teammate has been unresponsive” trigger, and will use an audience rule to determine if the teammate has already replied. This is because without this additional check, the Workflow would fire every time, whereas the Inbox Rule only fires if there hasn’t been a reply already.

Here’s an overview of how triggers will evolve when Inbox Rules become Workflows.

With the Inbox Rules to Workflows migration, some inbox rules with multiple triggers will be transitioned into single Workflows: this is because Workflows can only have one trigger.

When rules have multiple triggers, they will now be consolidated into Workflows depending on the triggers you’re using in Rules. The below table illustrates how multiple inbox rule triggers will be merged into single Workflow triggers. All remaining triggers will not be affected, and will become single Workflows on a one-to-one mapping.