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Help Desk FAQs
Ivan avatar
Written by Ivan
Updated over a week ago

General

Does Intercom have keyboard shortcuts?

Yes, Intercom Help Desk has several keyboard shortcuts that let you perform common actions without using your mouse. It currently isn't possible to disable or customise the shortcuts.

Use ⌘/Ctrl K when you're viewing your inbox/a conversation to access the Command-K action menu and then scroll down to locate Keyboard shortcuts to see all available options.

To access the Command-K action menu, simply press the following keystrokes:

  • ⌘ K on Mac.

  • Ctrl K on Windows.

Direct shortcuts are supported on English (QWERTY), French (AZERTY), Brazilian Portuguese, Latin American Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, and other non-Latin language keyboards using Chrome or Edge browsers.

How do I automatically remove hyperlinks from inbound emails?

By default, hyperlinks will be shown in all inbound emails you receive on the Help Desk. To disable links from being rendered in emails from customers, go to Settings > Channels > Email > Advanced and turn on "Strip links from emails".

All HTML content will still be rendered, but none of the links will be clickable. This means that attackers will not be able to conceal links to malicious sites around an element in the email.

URLs can still be rendered in plain text. For example, an email can contain the text http://go-to-this-site.com and it will be rendered, but it will not be clickable.

Switching this toggle on:

  • Will not impact older conversations from the time of switching.

  • Will not impact links in the Messenger and other channels' conversations.

  • Will also strip out links from conversation history.

  • Will not affect teammate’s ability to add links.

Links are accessible for 14 days after the email is sent through viewing the raw email. The raw email is held for 14 days and after that time is no longer available.

How do I block Help Desk spam?

You can delete any abusive, offensive or spammy users by blocking the user who sent the message. Just select the dropdown from the top right corner of their user profile and click Block.

All of the information stored about that user, including their messages, will be archived from Intercom. The user can only be restored manually by you and any new messages from that email address will be rejected. The user will also be prevented from creating a new user account in the future.

The web integration will now return a 400 error whenever a blocked user’s data is passed to Intercom via ping.

How to unblock a user

If, however, you block a user by accident, you can easily unblock them. Just go to your People settings and select the Blocked tab.

You’ll see a list of your blocked users. Hover over a profile to select Unblock on the profile you would like to reactivate. Your user's information will now be restored.

After you unblock the user, they'll immediately return to your user list.

Tip: If they don't appear in your user list immediately, hard refresh your page.

Note: If users show up with email/name as "Unknown" this means this information was not present on their contact when they were blocked.

How spam filtering works

Intercom has built-in spam filtering. We assign all our inbound emails a score and will filter anything that we deem to be “spammy”.

If you’re missing some messages that you think may have been incorrectly filtered, you can check the Spam folder from the Help Desk.

You will find any messages filtered as spam in this folder. If any have been filtered incorrectly, you can mark the message as Not spam and send it back to the inbox it was originally intended for.

Emails within the spam inbox are deleted after 2 months.

Automatically mark auto-responders as spam

By default emails marked as auto responders go to your Spam inbox but if you need these to appear in your Help Desk, you can turn off this setting so they are routed to the Help Desk from Settings > Channels > Email > Advanced.

Blocking Leads

Blocking a lead is based on Intercom identifying the lead on a browser cookie. If this lead comes back with the same session cookie, they are blocked. If, however, they come back on a new cookie, they are considered a new lead and will not be blocked.

Why does a conversation show in a view for "team assigned" when it does not appear in the inbox I'm filtering for?

In an inbox view, we evaluate team assignee and teammate assignee separately. The inboxes however only shows the conversations under the Team Inbox if the conversation is not assigned to a teammate.

So if you filter by "team assigned", you will see all conversations assigned to that team. To have the Inbox view work the same as the Team Inbox, you would have to add the rule "Teammate Assigned is None" in addition to the "team assigned" rule.


AI features for Help Desk

What AI features are currently available for the Help Desk?

With the Intercom Help Desk teammates can use several AI-powered features to enhance their productivity and efficiency, including:

Where has the conversation "Details" sidebar gone?

Fin AI Copilot is now also accessible to teammates from the right sidebar on all conversations and tickets on the Help Desk. You can switch between the AI Copilot tab and the Details tab at the top of the panel.

Once you've switched back to Details this will stay open next time you're working on a conversation or ticket, and you can visit AI Copilot any time you need support.


Finding information

How can I locate an email I sent to a client through the Intercom Help Desk?

If you sent the email from the Help Desk, you can access it from the user's profile in Intercom. If you are unable to find it there, you can also try searching for the client's name or email address using the search function in the Help Desk.

How can I search for contacts based on their phone number from the Help Desk?

The Help Desk search bar performs a keyword search, so it searches for characters within a conversation/ticket, rather than actual customer data. If the phone number hasn't been typed out in a message or customer reply, it won't return results. However, if you have a custom data attribute for 'Phone number' in your workspace, you can filter conversations by this attribute.


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