Intercom

The Help Desk explained

Handle conversations on every channel—including email, phone, SMS, social, and Messenger—directly from the Help Desk.

Help Desk channels overview

Beth-Ann Sher

Paul McAuliffe

Beth

Boosting productivity with a workspace that connects your inbox, tickets, and help center

Help Desk

Configure Intercom Help Desk experience to feel at home and to suit your personal preferences.

Customize Help Desk to suit you and how you work best

Provide personalized support for your customers and a blazingly fast inbox for teammates.

Get started with Intercom Help Desk

Become super efficient with keyboard shortcuts, including Command-K

How to use Command-K with Intercom Help Desk

Get the context you need so you can support your customers faster.

Customize the Help Desk with apps

Automatically send emails from your email clients to teams or teammates in Intercom.

Automatically forward emails to the Help Desk

How to automatically detect end-users in emails you or your teammates forward to Intercom.

Detect customers in forwarded emails

Use ‘Quick Links’ to access your customer or company information in other tools, directly from the Help Desk.

Dynamically link to other tools from the Help Desk

How email threading works for Help Desk conversations.

Email threading

Quickly see your user's and lead's recently visited pages while you chat via Help Desk

Recent page views app

Ivan

Setup

High-level overview of ticket categories and use cases.

Tickets explained

Patrick Andrews

Brionn Coffey

Resolving complex issues more efficiently with tickets designed to streamline collaboration and keep the conversation going.

Tickets

Follow this step-by-step guide to get introduced to and fully set up with Intercom tickets.

Getting started with tickets

Deep-dive on specific characteristics for Customer tickets.

When to use Customer tickets

Deep-dive on specific characteristics for Back-office tickets.

When to use Back-office tickets

Deep-dive on specific characteristics for Tracker tickets.

When to use Tracker tickets

How ticket states are categorized and behave as a ticket moves through each state.

How ticket states work

Learn how to import users, companies, or tickets from Zendesk to Intercom.

Import your Zendesk ticket, user and organization data

Getting started

Deep-dive on getting started with tickets, and assigning categories to your ticket types.

How to set up ticket types

Deep-dive on ways you can create a Customer ticket, sharing options, and any limitations.

How to create a Customer ticket

Deep-dive on ways you can create a Back-office ticket, sharing options, and any limitations.

How to create a Back-office ticket

Deep-dive on ways you can create a Tracker ticket, sharing options, and any limitations.

How to create a Tracker ticket

Customize the states a ticket progresses through and how they appear to teammates and customers.

Customize ticket states

Overview of the various ways Intercom allows you to collect information from customers through ticket forms: bots, API, Help Desk, etc.

Ticket form options

Deep-dive on how and when customers are notified about tickets, and any limitations.

How customers get notified about tickets

Allow customers to independently create tickets from the Messenger.

Create tickets in the Messenger

Sze Wing Choi

Creating

Ensure tickets are routed to the correct teams with Workflows and Help Desk views.

How to find and view tickets from the Help Desk

Deep-dive on all the ways you can search and filter for tickets via the Help Desk.

Search for tickets via the Help Desk

Understand how to identify all the features of Customer tickets

How to manage Customer tickets

Understand how to identify all the features of Back-office tickets from the Inbox.

How to manage Back-office tickets in the Inbox

Understand how to identify all the features of Tracker tickets

How to manage Tracker tickets

Tickets space in the Messenger

Managing

Provide an external view of all relevant tickets to each of your customer organizations.

Tickets portal explained

Checklist of required settings before enabling the tickets portal.

Tickets portal requirements

How to enable the tickets portal for your users and companies.

Tickets portal setup

Tickets portal

Get inspired with these ticket type examples of each ticket category.

Ticket examples

Build powerful ticket automations and automate repetitive tasks by selecting the right ticket category using Workflows.

Using ticket triggers with Workflows

How to leverage Workflows to automate ticket actions and save time while providing better customer and teammate experiences.

Automate ticket actions using Workflows

Learn how to automatically convert any conversation type to a ticket.

Auto-convert conversations to tickets

Best practices

We’re constantly adding new features and improvements to tickets. Check back here for the latest releases.

What’s new in tickets?

Tickets FAQs

FAQs

How to use inbox AI features for writing replies, automating tasks, and teammate support.

AI features available in the inbox

Ryan Quinn

Domingo Widen

Maximizing productivity with an AI-enhanced inbox built for collaboration speed and efficiency.

Conversations

Send a new email or chat directly from the Help Desk to existing users or leads.

Start a conversation from the Help Desk

How to send outbound WhatsApp messages via the Help Desk.

Start a WhatsApp conversation

Speed up your workflows by triggering multiple actions at once with macros.

Using macros in Intercom Help Desk

Forward email conversations from the Help Desk to share information with external collaborators.

Forwarding email conversations externally

How side conversations work and how you can use them to collaborate with external partners.

Side conversations

The real-time dashboard aims at helping Support Managers to better understand Help Desk health and team capacity in real-time.

Real-time Dashboard

How to detect the language a customer conversation via the Help Desk

Help Desk language detection

Closing out conversations once they are resolved.

Close a conversation

How teammates can reply to specific email messages in a conversation.

Reply to specific messages in a conversation

Configure if email replies should reopen closed conversations.

Replying to closed email conversations

Encourage your customers to open new conversations after issues are resolved.

Prevent replies after you close a conversation

Reply to urgent conversations via the Help Desk faster by marking them as priority.

Prioritize your most important conversations

How to build custom views and folders to monitor the conversations most important to you.

Organize your Help Desk with custom views and folders

Supported and unsupported file types in the Help Desk and Messenger.

Accessing unsupported attachment file types

Tips on using search to find existing conversations and tickets via your Help Desk

Help Desk search and filter

Add internal notes to conversations and discuss customer questions teammates before replying.

Loop teammates into conversations

Set a reminder to follow up with conversations that are on hold by snoozing them.

Snooze a conversation

Manually or automatically assign specific conversations to teammates or teams via the Help Desk.

Assign conversations to teammates and teams

How to add and remove customers from group conversations.

Manage group conversations via the Help Desk

Know who your leads are, and add qualification data about them as you chat.

Manually qualify leads as you chat

Reorder your conversations list to reply to customers who are waiting the longest first.

Prioritize responding to customers who’ve been waiting longest

Automate your sales workflow and move faster in your team inbox.

Work as a team and respond to conversations at scale

See customer and company details like when they were last active and what plan they’re on.

Get context fast with user and company profiles

How to view details about potential duplicate users from the Help Desk.

Identify duplicate users in conversations

Handling

Automatically assign conversations from team inboxes to the most available and relevant teammate.

Workload management explained

Balanced assignment deep dive

Share new inbound conversations evenly among your team with round robin assignment.

Round robin deep dive

Turn on 'Away' mode and reassign your replies when you're unavailable.

Manage teammate Help Desk status

Set the inactivity thresholds for transitioning teammates to either away or away & reassigning.

Automatic away mode

Use the real-time dashboard to monitor your most important metrics in one place.

Monitoring your team’s workload and capacity

Leanne Harte

Workload management

Automatically add tags to conversations and make it easy to report on conversation trends.

Tag conversations automatically with Workflows

How to hit and measure your response times using SLAs in Workflows.

Set SLAs for conversations and tickets

This article explains how to archive and delete Service Level Agreements for an organized workspace.

Archive or delete unused SLAs

Speed up your workflow with customizable and easily repeatable actions

Creating and managing macros

Map sender address to the same inbound email address that customers contact you on.

Mapping email replies to inbound address using custom domains

Learn how to trigger Workflows from the Help Desk to automate teammate actions.

Trigger reusable Workflows within conversations

SLAs and office hours

Matthew Pelyhes

Pranava Tandra

Automation

Personalize your responses, speak like a human and be proactive with your answers.

Our best practice guide to customer support

Define the right conversation attributes to enable the most effective workflows.

Choose the right conversation attributes for your business

Check out these example workflows and adapt them to suit your business needs.

Examples of Help Desk automation using Workflows

Learn how to create and use conversation data attributes for advanced Help Desk management.

Using conversation data in the inbox

Identify and tag the most important messages, topics and trends in your feedback.

Keep track of support requests and bugs by tagging conversations

Add articles to conversations to quickly resolve your customers' questions

Share articles to answer questions faster

Check out these examples for inspiration, and some top tips for creating and using macros

Example macros and best practices

Quickly reply to customer conversations on the move with the Intercom for iOS and Android mobile apps.

Respond to users and visitors on the go with the Intercom Conversations App

Conversation topics, conversation attributes, conversation tags. What’s the difference?

How and when to use conversation topics, attributes, and tags

Learn how to protect your workspace from phishing attacks by disabling links from being rendered in emails received from customers.