Intercom is a leading customer messaging platform, built to help companies inspire loyalty and develop better, deeper relationships with customers and prospects. Organizations across many industries use Intercom in a variety of ways, and most commonly software companies use Intercom to personalize the experiences of their visitors and customers within their website and product.
When you use Intercom, you collect a lot of data in order to make the most out of the platform. But over time, as that amount of data grows, it becomes more difficult to manage and use it effectively. Data errors and inconsistencies hinder your team’s ability to handle their day-to-day tasks. A lack of confidence in your data gets in the way of them being able to drive personalized engagement at scale.
Managing that data gets increasingly difficult with growth. 94% of organizations believe that their customer and prospect data may be inaccurate, and bad data may cost U.S. companies up to $3 trillion per year.
Do you find yourself struggling with duplicate records? Often, the same person will have records as both a lead and a user, or multiple user records. This breaks the single customer view and makes it impossible for teams to engage with prospects and customers with full context. Splitting a customer profile impacts them at every stage of the customer lifecycle.
Or maybe you have run into problems with tag management? Do you need to remove or add tags from a group of users, in bulk, instead of updating them one-by-one? Tags are the primary driver helping to personalize engagements and organize your Intercom database, which makes tag management and organization a serious challenge. Tags play a critical role in your ability to organize and access your information. But as you begin to use more tags, it can become difficult to use them effectively.
To collect data, you probably rely on your visitors to enter their name, email address, and other data when they interact with your Intercom bot and operators. However, this leads to input errors.
They might provide their name in all lowercase, have a typo in their email that requires a correction, or generally provide inconsistent data. Those things have a huge impact on your ability to personalize messages and engage with them moving forward in a way that feels genuine. Would you rather receive an email addressed to “jane” or “Jane”? The little details matter — especially when your competition is doing it well.
Having clean and consistent data in Intercom is necessary for making the most of the platform. Being able to confidently use the data that you capture is necessary for employing data-backed approaches and driving business results.
Understanding how customers are using your product and website, and the kinds of questions that prospects are asking drives an understanding of your market, and ultimately, direction for the company itself. It impacts the support, marketing, and sales processes that rely on that data to develop real relationships with prospects and customers.
With clean, reliable data your teams will be able to respond faster, more accurately, and with greater confidence to what your customers are telling you — either through their actions or through their words.
Insycle is a complete Intercom customer data management solution that makes it simple for companies to manage, automate, maintain, and cleanse Intercom databases. This enables support, marketing, and sales teams to execute more precisely and deliver messaging that is more consistent with each customer’s needs and concerns.
With Insycle, you can provide a better experience to customers through Intercom.
In this article, we’ll break down the most popular use cases for Insycle among Intercom teams. You’ll learn how Insycle can help your team to:
Let’s look at how Insycle complements Intercom and gives teams a better way to improve their Intercom data management processes.
Duplicate data is the thorn in the side of personalization and effective engagement. It shatters the single customer view, breaking up vital context and conversations between separate records and customer profiles.
When you have duplicate records, how can your support teams engage with customers, without a full understanding of their previous interactions and support requests? How can marketing teams provide an exceptional nurturing experience to prospects when they are receiving messages that lack context? How can a sales team answer the questions and concerns of prospects when they don’t have access to all of their conversation data? They can’t. Or at least, it certainly makes their jobs much more difficult and adds new steps to their workflow.
But to merge duplicates in Intercom, you first have to be able to identify them. You may not have any at all. But how do you know if you do? Using Insycle, you can identify duplicates in your database using any data or field, using both exact-match or similar-match technology — allowing you to catch more duplicates across the whole of your database.
So, let’s say you have two duplicate users in Intercom. You want to merge them into one record so that your support, sales, marketing, or product teams have a single customer view.
It is possible to merge leads and users manually. There are multiple ways to accomplish that. First, you could export your data into a .CSV, do your merging in Excel using complicated formulas and VLOOKUP, then import them back into Intercom. It works, but it’s time-consuming and error-prone.
The other option is to connect directly to Intercom’s API. This requires that you work with a developer whose time would almost surely be better spent on other tasks. Even then, you can only merge leads and users together, and cannot merge two separate duplicate records with the same record type.
Insycle lets you hurdle over these roadblocks and keep moving on with your day. You can simplify your deduplication processes and completely avoid a complicated .CSV exporting and importing process, or getting your development team involved in routine data maintenance tasks.
With Insycle, you can:
Have you ever had trouble searching, filtering, or navigating your Intercom users and leads because your tag organization is lacking? Tags are extremely useful, yet the proliferation of tags can make them difficult to put into use.
Tags are a primary driver in Intercom. You use them to track, analyze, and filter users, leads, companies, and conversations. They are the main feature used to navigate your data. With fleshed out tagging, you can send highly personalized messages automatically, distribute owners among your support and sales reps, define rules for follow-ups, and more. They are a key data point for searching your database, analyzing your data, and executing automation in a way that resonates with your customers.
Tags are typically added to profiles manually, one-by-one. That is ideal in some circumstances. It provides a lot of control. But a situation may arise where you have hundreds or thousands of user profiles that you would like to add or remove a tag to. Manually managing all of those tags is simply not a good use of your time and is prone to errors.
Intercom allows you to add tags to conversations in bulk, using an If->Then formula. Insycle extends this functionality by letting you filter profiles, and then add or remove tags in bulk, automatically to and from users, leads, and company profiles.
As you use Intercom, you’re likely to accumulate tags across your customer profiles. You use those tags to analyze usage on your website and product. But what if you want to dig a bit deeper? How do you know which users are tagged with specific tags? How do you sift through that information to find data that leads to effective, ROI-generating action?
Maybe you don’t just want to see how many asked a question about a specific topic to your bot operator. Instead, maybe you want to easily drill-down into those individual profiles to learn more about those specific customers. Or see what other tags that group of customers shares with each other. To do this, you’ll need to download the data and use Excel or a BI tool to perform the analysis. Then, you’ll need to do the same anytime that you think of a new report that you would like to run using fresh data.
With Insycle, you can create a report of contacts or companies, grouped by tags, to understand how the tags are being used. Then, you can click and drill-down further to see the underlying users, leads, and companies that have a particular tag and if needed, update those records in bulk.
And you can take it a step further. You can add another dimension to the report. For example, you could group companies by tags and monthly spend, number of web sessions, or any numeric field to see statistics of the numeric values. For example, the average number of sessions by company, for each tag category.
Insycle helps unlock deep analysis and understanding of your customers. Imagine dreaming up an advanced Intercom report and being able to generate it in seconds using your latest data, without messy Excel files or enlisting developers to help you pull data using the API.
Using Insycle for Intercom, you can:
Your support, success, marketing, and sales teams rely on clean, reliable data to do their jobs well. It’s how they deliver that personal touch that draws customers in, endears them to your brand, and sets the stage for true long-term loyalty. Today, only 8% of companies are consolidating data across channels to deliver a single customer view and consistent experience.
Personalization is what drives success with modern customers, 80% of whom are more likely to purchase from a brand that delivers a personalized experience. Personalization is what drives human connection — the force behind great experiences and true customer loyalty. Whether your customers are speaking to a person or receiving an automated email, they expect to be understood and catered to.
What good is collecting a ton of user data if you don’t have the confidence to use it in your support, marketing, and sales campaigns?
Cleansing Intercom data can be a painstaking process. You either have to manually fix your records one-by-one (so long as you can edit the fields, which is not possible with all fields), or you have to export your data and use complicated Excel functions and VLOOKUP to fix data issues before importing it back into Intercom.
Even then, you’re likely to miss many data issues and errors. Insycle completely re-shapes the process of cleansing user, lead, tag, and company data in Intercom.
Using Insycle, you can do things like:
All of that without exporting and importing data manually.
Even better, you can monitor the health of your data over time. Insycle’s Customer Data Health Assessment begins generating as soon as you create your account. It identifies more than 30 of the most common data errors and issues in your Intercom database and continues to monitor those issues on a daily basis.
Then, it provides you with a direct link to the right tool and pre-built template for fixing those issues. Using a combination of pre-built and custom templates, you can put your Intercom data cleansing on autopilot.
Let’s consider an example.
Let’s say you wanted to make sure that all of your job titles were standardized so that you could include them in a segmented email sequence. Maybe you want to let Chief Marketing Officers know about a new product feature you are debuting. Well, there are many ways for that job title to show up in data:
Standardizing job titles not only ensures that you can use that data in personalization, but it makes the data queryable and sortable for reporting and analysis as well.
If you wanted to figure out how many users had the “Chief Marketing Officer” title but it was split up between a handful of different job title names in the data — you’ll have a hard time making any data-backed decisions based on that information.
You could run a cleanse to update all of this information one-time, then schedule it to run on a weekly basis from there on out. Then, you’ll never have to deal with inconsistent job titles again and can eliminate that task from your data management process. Across dozens of data management tasks, you could save many hours every week.
Before your data cleansing changes go live in Insycle, you have the option to preview the changes before they’re updated in Intercom. You will not have to worry about changes in Insycle causing unexpected issues because you can preview the changes before they go live in Intercom.
Did you need to edit user's data, only to find that it can’t be altered? Or had a long list of profiles that needed to be corrected , only to find that the best way to do it was manually, one-by-one? Like fixing a typo in an email (james@gmal.com vs james@gmail.com).
In Intercom, you can edit user qualification data. However, some data can’t be edited, including critical fields like email address. To edit qualification data you have to open the lead or user profiles one-by-one and make changes directly on their profile page. You can’t update a group of contacts or companies all at once, in bulk.
That process can be time-consuming and aggravating. Your time would definitely be better spent on other, more strategic tasks.
Then, to make changes to data that is not considered editable qualification data, you’ll have to go through the process of exporting the data, and re-importing it.
Alternatively, you can ask developers to write API call code that connects to your Intercom database and fixes the data. But you don’t want to take your developer’s precious time for such a simple data management task, especially if it’s just a handful of records.
With Insycle, you have access to all of your Intercom data and can edit any field that you want, case-by-case or in bulk using a table-like visual interface, just like editing cells in Excel.
You can skip the mundane importing and exporting of .CSV files, or bothering your development team for small data updates. In Insycle, your data can be edited and updated in Intercom in seconds.
Do you have to deal with free-floating, unassociated users that need to be connected to companies within Intercom?
It’s important that these associations are in place. For one, your teams are counting on having these connections in place so that they have a full understanding of each prospect. How is a sales rep supposed to engage with a lead when they aren’t able to see other contacts within the company that have communicated with you recently?
Typically adding users to companies involves getting a developer involved to make the bulk updates through the API.
The problem with this is that it pulls your development attention from more important tasks and potentially risks decreasing morale as they are constantly pulled away from their work for routine data management tasks.
Insycle simplifies this process by allowing you to match records using any field, in bulk.
For example, you could match a person’s email domain to their company domain to create the association between the user and the company. Additionally, you can bulk add and remove companies through Insycle, either on a case-by-case basis or through rule-based automation.
You can create your own templates, and schedule those templates to run at regular intervals. Imagine never having to deal with free-floating contacts and the painful process of fixing those associations again.
With ad-hoc and automatic associations, you can make sure that your teams are always working with a full understanding of your users, leads, and customers in Intercom.
Intercom’s strength is in the breadth of data and types of data that it captures. It truly gives its users a birds-eye-view of their visitors and customers, and how they use their website and product.
As the amount of data that you capture grows, so too do the possibilities for dissecting and learning from that data. The more information you can glean from your wealth of Intercom data, the more data-backed decisions you can make.
Intercom offers several types of reports that can help you to evaluate leads, conversations, and team performance These are amazing resources that can help companies dig into their customers and operations.
But sometimes we want to sort the contact and company profiles in a different way. Insycle gives users additional options to filter, slice, and group data. More information begets better decisions.
For instance, what if you wanted to group leads by owner to examine which support or sales reps had the heaviest workloads?
Or maybe you want to group your users by engagement data, like the number of sessions that they have had on your website? Or you want to use custom user attributes to better segment the data?
Using Insycle’s “Group + Update” feature, you can group, filter, and create updateable reports of the data stored in Intercom, without any manual export. Then, you can save the reports as templates so that you can share them with your team, or even collaborate on reports together directly through Insycle.
That means no more help from development teams to pull data from CSVs or the API for reporting. You can create your own reports that update as the underlying data in Intercom updates and grows.
It also allows you to simplify the painstaking stakeholder input and approval process. Instead of generating a report and delivering it to stakeholders who then come up with their own ideas or provide feedback before it is presented to management, you can collaborate together by simply sharing a link. Insycle allows for unlimited user accounts under every plan.
Have you ever imported data into your Intercom database, only to find that it created a bunch of duplicates, replaced high-quality data with low-quality data, or was generally inconsistent with your current data in some way?
Of course you have. We’ve all dealt with the pains of importing data from a third-party source — maybe a webinar, in-person event, or purchased lead list — and wished that we had a simple way to roll back the import. Or, even better, easily fix and standardize that data before importing.
With frequent or large imports from other sources, this can quickly lower the quality of your Intercom database as a whole. Every platform has its own way of collecting and storing data. Field names will differ. Formatting for those fields may differ. Many will collect different types of data, which can lead to unwanted fields and clutter in your database.
You can import data into Intercom through .CSV files directly. But the data that you import is the data that ends up in your database — including all of the small data errors, issues, and duplicate records that are created in the process. Once it’s in the system, you’ll need help from a developer to edit the data through the API.
It’s always a good idea to try to get that data properly organized and formatted for the system that you are importing it to. But that often means hours in Excel, running complicated functions and editing data by-hand.
Using Insycle, you can cleanse, enrich, deduplicate, and preview your import data before it gets pushed to Intercom. Before importing, you can match CSV record imports to Intercom records using any field to avoid creating duplicate records. For example, you could match CSV import records to existing Intercom records using a Salesforce Contact ID field.
You’ll never have to put your marketing, sales, or support activities on hold waiting for recently imported data to be cleaned and standardized.
Do you have a list of users, leads, or companies that needed to be updated in bulk?
Maybe the records were imported from another source. Today, companies use more integrations than ever to keep their systems talking and their teams collaborating. And while that kind of connectivity can do great things for a company, it can also paralyze them with constant data errors and issues.
Those bulk updates to records are necessary to keep things moving forward.
But bulk updates can be time-consuming — so much so that you risk important data management tasks being placed on the back burner. You’ll need to update the data using API updates or use Excel to export and import the data. It's hard to ask developers to carve out time from their already-busy schedules.
With Insycle, you won’t have to worry about that.
Using the “Bulk Operations” tool, bulk updates and deletes have never been easier. There is no messy importing and exporting of .CSV files, because Insycle connects directly to your Intercom account. There is no need to get a developer on board.
Some examples of the different ways that you can use Insycle to group and bulk update Intercom CRM data and attributes include:
Updating Intercom data in bulk is often a bothersome but necessary task. Free your development teams to focus on your core product and get away from data tasks using the Intercom API.
Because Intercom delivers such amazingly in-depth tracking of each user and lead, a big piece of the Intercom data management puzzle is removing clutter from your database.
Clutter makes your data difficult to filter, draw conclusions from, or use in a meaningful way across your marketing, sales, and support teams. If you can’t filter and slice your data to uncover insights and draw conclusions, you can’t say that you have a truly data-backed approach.
Ignoring the clutter has a direct impact on your revenue. But dealing with the clutter can be extremely time-consuming and difficult as well. Like other data tasks we’ve covered in this article, you’ll most likely need the help of a developer to remove or merge fields. Even then, you don’t have the top-down view that lets you see that you aren’t losing importing data. You shouldn’t be left biting your nails just to consolidate some legacy data fields.
Insycle simplifies this process with its “Transform Data” tool, which makes it easy to consolidate fields and remove legacy system clutter, all while allowing you to preview changes before they go live.
You could identify two fields that are storing the same thing (like ‘Company Location,’ and ‘Office Location’) that are leftover from legacy systems, and smart merge them to avoid losing your most updated data.
Or you could migrate field types to improve data consolidation and usability.
For instance, if you had a field named “Number of Employees” and it was a text field, you could use Insycle to help migrate its values to a picklist field. Now that data can be used in your segmenting and lead scoring processes.
Ultimately consolidating fields is about making your Intercom data more sortable and usable. It may seem like a small issue, but those redundant fields will create confusion among anyone digging into your data until the issue is fixed.
Insycle helps companies gain control over their data and makes it easier for them to climb through the four phases of customer data management.
Want to take control of your Intercom data management? To try Insycle free today, just fill out the form below to get started.
After filling out the form, you’ll be directed to the login page where you can connect Intercom and Insycle. Your Intercom Data Health Assessment will begin generating automatically.
With Insycle, your support, sales, and marketing teams will be able to maintain a single customer view, improve data-backed decision making, and spend less time dealing with mundane data tasks.