Resolve more conversations, spend less time answering emails, and increase customer satisfaction by providing your customers with instant email resolutions using Fin AI Agent. The seamless AI Agent-to-teammate handover will ensure that only more complex issues reach your support agents.
Note:
This setup requires access to Workflows on your current plan. If your plan doesn't include Workflows, you can learn how to use Fin for email here.
A custom email domain must be set up first and used as the default reply address in order for Fin to work over email.
Quick setup
Go to 
Fin AI Agent > Fin Overview and open the Set live for email tab.
Make sure you've finished adding your content to Fin AI Agent first.
Then click + Add Fin to a Workflow to start customizing your Fin experience.
Who will see Fin
First, decide which of your customers can interact with Fin AI Agent. You can allow Fin to provide answers to your users and/or leads.
Click + Add audience rule and use data attributes in Intercom to target your audience further. For example, Fin could be enabled for conversations with users on your free plan.
Use email predicates such "Email to" if you want Fin to respond to emails sent to a specific address.
If Fin cannot resolve the conversation
Then choose what happens if Fin can't resolve the conversation by assigning it to a particular teammate or team inbox.
Ask for conversation rating (CSAT)
You can also ask customers to rate the conversation at the end of their interaction with Fin. Enabling this will send a CSAT survey when a customer clicks That helped or becomes inactive.
If a CSAT survey has been configured within a workflow, it will be sent as a separate email. Learn more about Fin AI Agent CSAT.
Auto-close abandoned Fin conversations
Now choose if Fin should auto-close the conversation if the customer becomes inactive:
If Fin has answered any question,
If Fin was not able to answer any question, and/or
If the customer left before asking any questions
Then specify how long should Fin wait before a customer is considered inactive.
The conversation will be automatically closed when these conditions are met.
You can also customize what Fin says when closing the conversation to make sure the customer got what they needed and remind them they can still speak to your support team, even if the conversation is being closed.
You can add several messages here but all messages will be sent as one email when a customer goes inactive.
Review and set live
Once you're done, click Review and set live to see what this workflow looks like.
Testing your setup
From Fin AI Agent > Overview, you'll see a preview experience for Fin over email if you toggle the Email option.
Copy the address and send an email from the email address you used to sign up to Intercom with.
You won't be charged for conversations generated through this preview.
Learn more about how to test Fin AI Agent before rolling it out to customers.
Advanced customization options
It's possible to further customize your Fin experience by editing an existing email workflow where Fin is live.
Go to Fin AI Agent > Overview > Set live for email and click on a workflow to open it in the Workflows builder.
Here you can also Preview or Pause your workflow to stop Fin from getting involved in email conversations.
Click Edit to open the Workflows builder and customize the Fin experience further.
Choose which channels Fin AI Agent is enabled on
To enable Fin AI Agent on particular channels or for a specific audience, click on the workflow trigger (first block in the Workflows builder).
This allows you to adjust the trigger rule for emails, such as audience targeting using email predicates, or adjust the frequency and scheduling for when this workflow is used.
Not all Workflow steps are available over email. Check what actions are compatible with this channel. For this reason, we recommend creating a separate workflow solely for email as a channel.
To customize the Fin AI Agent experience for your customers and teammates, click on Let Fin answer from the Workflow path.
Set expectation for human support
If you don't want Fin AI Agent to hand over to a teammate, you can disable Show teammates presence to not set any expectations for human support.
This will change the Talk to a person 👤 button to a Get more help 🌐 and you can edit the message in the next path to offer alternative ways for the customer to get help. For example, provide a contact number or link to another resource.
Any messages you add to a workflow with Fin will be sent as one email. This also applies to any messages you've configured to be sent as follow-up messages when a customer goes inactive in a Fin conversation.
Control answer type
Custom Answers aren't available over email yet, but this is coming soon! This will allow you to configure whether Fin AI Agent uses Custom Answers or AI Answers or both for email conversations.
Ask for more information before handover
To gather more information from a customer before Fin hands over to a teammate, simply toggle on "Collect more information when a customer asks to speak to the team".
By prompting the customer for more context before Fin hands over to a teammate, there is another opportunity to get more and/or better information than presented the first time around. The benefit to this is two-fold:
Gives Fin a chance to answer: often customers don’t give the AI Agent a chance, asking to speak to a human before asking Fin a question.
If context is provided, even if Fin can’t provide an answer, the teammate will spend less time gathering context and will be able to troubleshoot faster.
If the customer doesn’t respond, Fin will end after 30 seconds and hand the conversation to a teammate.
Pass to a reusable workflow
You can also pass to a reusable workflow if you have a common triage or data collection process that you want it to follow. Use the Pass to a reusable workflow step to hand Fin AI Agent over to another workflow.
Create difference experiences for different audiences
By using branching, you can create different Fin AI Agent experiences for different audiences.
For example, for paying customers, you might want to hand over to a teammate when Fin AI Agent can't answer but for non-paying customers, you might want to direct them to your Help Center.
For greater flexibility, use the “Email to” and "Email cc" predicates if you would like to create different auto-reply messages (and other steps and actions) depending on the email address a customer sends their message to.
Add Fin AI Agent to an existing email workflow
When adding Fin to email workflows, you must use the "Customer sends their first message" trigger or choose the "Use Fin AI Agent over Email" template if you're building a new workflow.
Add Fin to your workflow by selecting the Let Fin answer step. Then you can continue to customize Fin the same as above.
If the Email channel is enabled in the trigger rule, when your customer sends you an email, Fin AI Agent will immediately answer their question.
What your customers will see
Fin AI Agent will reply to questions the same way it does on chat. The main differences are how responses are formatted and Fin can also participate in group conversations over email.
When Fin replies to an email, it will:
Indicate that it’s an AI agent.
Provide the source of the answer (if public to your audience).
Give users options for next steps, including speaking to a teammate.
Show your email signature.
If the customer's message is not clear, Fin will send a message asking to clarify what they need assistance with.
If Fin AI Agent does not have an answer, it will let the customer know and give them the option to ask another question or talk to a person. Fin will not send any error messages over email like it does for chat (i.e “Oops, something went wrong”). Instead, it will immediately route to your team.
When the customer responds, they have the following options:
Reply with additional information.
Click
That helpedbutton or send a reply confirming the answer helped, which will mark the conversation as a confirmed resolution.Click
Talk to a personbutton or reply asking for help, which will mark the conversation as “Routed to team” and trigger the handover process, if one has been set up.
If a customer clicks on a quick reply button in the email, they'll be redirected to an Intercom-hosted URL with a confirmation message.
Note:
The webpage that opens up will use the same styling colors that you have configured for your Messenger.
The quick reply buttons will expire one week after Fin AI Agent's email is sent, or if someone replies to the email thread after it was sent.
Fin AI Agent will not send any error messages over email like it does for chat (i.e “Oops, something went wrong”). Instead, it will immediately route to your team.
Customers will also receive a follow-up email confirming the action:
When a customer clicks
Talk to a person(or replies with a variation of this), the handover between Fin AI Agent and a teammate will be triggered.When a customer clicks
That helped(or replies with a variation of this), Fin AI Agent will respond and close the conversation - unless otherwise configured.
Filtering spam messages
Fin AI Agent integrates with Intercom’s built-in spam filtering to ensure Fin doesn’t reply to spam emails.
Intercom assigns all inbound emails a score and will filter anything that is deemed 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.
By default, emails marked as auto responders go to your Spam folder but if you need these to appear in your inbox, you can turn off this setting so they are routed to the inbox from Settings > Channels > Email > Advanced.
Do not use your custom domain email address to sign up to newsletters or advertisements. This will prevent Fin from getting involved in these conversations.
Monitor and report on Fin’s email conversations
View Fin's email conversations in the inbox
You can view and monitor all Fin conversations from the Fin AI Agent folder.
Create a dedicated email inbox view by adding the filters “Current channel” or “Initial channel” is “Email”.
Fin over email reporting
You can also report on Fin’s performance over email conversations using the Fin AI Agent report.
Simply use the filters to see email-only data by selecting “Channel is Email”.
If you have access to Custom Reports, you can also use channel data to create your own reports for Fin over email.
FAQs
Is multilingual Fin available over email?
Is multilingual Fin available over email?
Yes, Fin for email is also multilingual and can assist your customers in different languages. To learn more about this feature and how it works, check out the article Multilingual Fin AI Agent.
How are Fin email conversations and resolutions billed?
How are Fin email conversations and resolutions billed?
Fin AI Agent conversations over email are charged on a per resolution basis, the same as all other available channels.
How does Fin over email work with Customer tickets?
How does Fin over email work with Customer tickets?
Fin AI Agent over email will respond to Customer tickets the same as it does with conversations. This includes the email setting to auto-convert emails into tickets, where emails will be automatically converted into tickets and Fin will handle the ticket conversation as normal.
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