There are three ways to update your lead’s qualification data in Intercom. You can:

Manually edited data is the primary data source

Manually edited data is never overwritten by ping or Operator-collected data.

To clear qualification data you’ve manually added, just hover over this qualification data and select the re-sync option. This will allow you to start automatically collecting data again.

Ping data is the secondary data source

Ping data is never overwritten by Operator-collected data.

Operator data is considered tertiary

Operator-collected data is only added to a lead’s profile when the data attribute is empty.

Qualification data is a special set of attributes you can update in your lead and user qualification profiles as you qualify them.

You can choose which data appears in your lead and user qualification profiles. Just visit your qualification data settings in Intercom and select ‘Add data’:

There are 2 ways you can add data from here. You can:

There are two ways you can qualify your customers in Intercom. You can:

Check out our best practices on how to choose the right qualification data for your business.

If you’d like to permanently remove all data associated with a user/lead so it can’t be retrieved you can do this through the ‘Deleting people data’ tab in your settings.

Enter the user ID or email of the user you want to delete, then select the user. Once you click ‘Permanently delete’, this will remove all of their associated data.

To delete the user via REST API you'll need:

If you are deleting a single user, you can use our Delete contact endpoint developer documentation. On this page, you'll need to input your Bearer token and the Intercom User ID in their respective fields:
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Important:

This is only possible after the 7 day grace period, because the deleted users still exist in the database with those user IDs/emails. If you urgently need to create new users with the same user ID/email as those that were deleted in the 7 day grace period you can:

You can create links for user profiles simply by adding the User ID or email address of your user to the URLs below.

The Intercom ID for a User can be found in the URL when viewing their profile page in Intercom:
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If you have a regional workspace in the EU or AU regions, make sure to adapt your URLs for this.
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You can identify which data region you’re hosted in by looking at your workspace URL:

Your users might have installed a JavaScript blocking browser plugin/extension that uses the EasyList or similar list. This is especially likely if the number of users missing from Intercom is only a small and infrequently occurring percentage.

Why would an adblocking extension or plugin block Intercom?

While Intercom isn't an ad-provider, adblocking plugins (e.g. uBlock, Ghostery, Adblock, NoScript, and Firefox Privacy Browsing mode) offer options to block JavaScript that includes tracking functionality.

Since Intercom communicates conversation detail as well as offering the ability to submit attributes and events on your Users' behavior, we are included in some of these secondary lists. Though there are many lists, the majority of Intercom blockages are caused by our inclusion in the EasyList list.

What's EasyList?

EasyList is an optional supplementary subscription that completely removes all forms of tracking from the internet, including web bugs, tracking scripts and information collectors, thereby protecting your personal data.

At Intercom, we respect customer privacy where requested so we don't argue against our inclusion here, but you can certainly request that your users disable plugins like this, or add an exception for your site for better performance.

How can I keep data in Intercom synced with my system for these users?

If you believe you're missing user detail in Intercom for other reasons, feel free to get in touch to look into potential integration issues.

You can set a contact's avatar image in Intercom using the REST API by following these steps:​

1. Retrieve the contact's Intercom ID by making a call to the Search for Contacts endpoint

2. Use the Intercom ID to make a call to the Update Contact endpoint, and populate the avatar object with the URL of the contact's image you would like to use.

You can also populate the avatar object in your Messenger installation.

What is HIPAA?

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a set of industry-wide standards to safeguard protected health information (PHI) and electronic protected health information (ePHI).

Customers must be able to trust that their health data is being handled securely and their digital privacy respected. HIPAA is one of the standards they rely on for guidance and consistency.

Is Intercom compliant?

Intercom has successfully completed a HIPAA attestation examination, which means that we now help our customers fulfill their ePHI obligations as we store and process data in a manner consistent with HIPAA standards.

If your business is required to be HIPAA compliant, we can enter into a business associate agreement with your organization.

We have a HIPAA attestation report which covers both the HIPAA Security Rule and HITECH Breach Notification Rule that we can share with you. It's confidential, so if you’re not yet an Intercom user, you’ll be required to sign an NDA (Non-disclosure Agreement) before receiving it.

What’s next?

To access our HIPAA attestation report, current Intercom admins can log in to their Intercom workspace to download and view the report, along with other security and compliance documents. These can be found under Security settings.

This report is also available upon request and under NDA for those who don’t currently have access to an Intercom workspace. Get in touch through the Messenger or by emailing security@intercom.com.

To enter into a BAA (business associate agreement) with Intercom, you can reach out to our support team in the Messenger, or email us at team@intercom.io.

We increment a user's session count when one of two things happens:

If you are using our iOS SDK, we increment the iOS session count the first time a user is registered and subsequently on every UIApplicationDidBecomeActiveNotification that is triggered by a user opening your app, once they happen twenty seconds apart. Application opens within twenty seconds are not counted.

Our Android SDK is available here which has similar rules.

We increment a company's sessions count whenever a user begins a new session in the context of that company. For example, if a user logs in after 1 day with only user data, this will update the user session.
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Then within 30 minutes they ping again with user and company data. This will not increment the user sessions, so it will not increment company sessions either.

So, if while part of a company a particular user has 300 sessions and then that user leaves that company, those 300 sessions will still make up part of the total company sessions, even after they leave.

Important:

Intercom will automatically split your name attribute into first name and last name. For example:

Intercom uses real-time presence to record whether a user is currently online in your app. Real-time presence works based on periodic heartbeat requests coming from the user (via the Messenger).

The user sends those heartbeats every 30 seconds and is marked as offline when we haven't had a heartbeat in 2 minutes. Even at the lowest levels we don't always immediately detect the loss of connection as soon as the user closes the browser - it still often takes the absence of some sort of heartbeat traffic after a timeout interval to declare that the connection has dropped. Users navigating from page to page would flash on and offline constantly if we could reliably detect connections dropping and didn't smooth things out a little.

How does the user list update in real time?

Real-time user presence will update the green dot shown next to a user or lead's profile picture:

When your user list automatically refreshes, it doesn't bring in new people, it just refreshes the online status (the green dot) of who is already there. You will need to manually refresh to bring in new users, or update other values.

If you want to create filters for dates in the future, you need to use negative numbers.

For example, if you want to send an auto message to customers 3 days before their subscription ends, you would create a "subscription_ends_at" custom attribute and filter for "more than -3 days ago" and "less than 0 days ago." This will match all users whose subscription is about to end in 3 days time.

Using the Intercom ID returned in the error message you can make a GET call to the Get a contact API endpoint to return the existing User profile. For example, if the error message contains "message': 'A contact matching those details already exists with id=65a92b7ee1a4176d9ab8b357", you can makeyou can make a Get a contact request to "https://api.intercom.io/contacts/65a92b7ee1a4176d9ab8b357".