Use the Survicate - Intercom native integration to identify respondents, sync survey answers, trigger Intercom conversations from feedback, and analyze chat insights in the Insights Hub.

In this article, you'll learn about:

sending email and chat surveys via Intercom,
connecting and setting up the integration,
using the Insights Hub to analyze the feedback from Intercom conversations and surveys,
and best practices to make the most of the integration.

Create your survey

You can send surveys via Intercom Emails, Chat, or Post messages. For the Intercom integration to work, your survey should collect answers from identified respondents.

Read on to learn more about how to create, configure, and send each survey type.

Intercom Email survey

1. If you'd like to survey your customers via Intercom Emails, you'll need to start by creating an Email or Shareable link survey.

Click on + Create new survey, select any creation method (a template, using AI survey creation, or adding your own questions), and the Email or Shareable link survey type:

For more in-depth instructions, check out this article.

2. In the Configure tab of the survey, select Intercom Emails as the tool to identify respondents with:

Intercom Messenger survey for Chat and Post messages

1. If you'd like to survey your customers via Intercom Chat or Post, you'll need to create an Intercom Messenger survey.

Click on + Create new survey, select any creation method, and the Intercom Messenger survey type:

For more in-depth instructions, check out this article.

2. To send a survey via Intercom Messenger, you'll need to have the Intercom integration enabled. You can do that in the Connect section of your survey. For more information, check the Enable the integration section in this guide.

❗️ Intercom Messenger surveys will only work with SDK versions 5.0.4 and higher. Please make sure your SDK version is up to date.

Enable the Intercom integration

1. To connect the Intercom integration, go to Settings ➡️ Integrations, search for and select Intercom:

2. Click the Connect button to set up the authorization.

3. Press the Authorize access button in the pop-up window to confirm the connection. If you don't see the pop-up window, you may need to allow pop-ups in your browser - please look for the settings in your browser URL bar, or use instructions for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge, or Safari.

💡 Please note that it's only possible to integrate one Survicate workspace with one Intercom workspace. If you'd like to run surveys in multiple Intercom instances, contact sales@survicate.com, or start a chat with us to purchase another Survicate workspace.

4. High five! The integration is ready to use 🚀

5. Proceed to Settings in the Integrations ➡️ Intercom tab.

As you can see, here you can enable two more settings to make the most of the integration. Check out how these features can benefit you:

Insights Hub

Decide if your Intercom conversations should be synchronized to your Insights Hub.

Thanks to this option, we can automatically import insights from your Intercom conversations to Insights Hub, making sure no feedback is lost in a process.

This connection extracts insights from Intercom conversations and categorizes them into Topics and Insights, analyzing them all together with feedback from other sources.

You can enable and disable this feature later on if you wish.

Contact data synchronization

To filter your survey responses by the information about your contacts from Intercom, enable the Contact data synchronization feature.

You'll be asked to confirm that you want to import the data from Intercom.

💡 Enabling the Contact data synchronization feature should be done only once for a workspace. Then, you will be able to filter the results of all your surveys in this workspace by Intercom data.

With this feature active, you can go to the Analyze tab and filter the survey answers by custom User attributes defined in your respondents' Intercom profiles.

The attributes synchronized from Intercom will also be visible when survey data is exported to a CSV or XLSX file.

📌At the moment, we only support synchronization from Intecom user profiles, not company profiles. Additionally, if the Intercom value is listed as "unknown" we do not pass it along to Survicate as it indicates an empty value.

📌 Filtering by custom attributes is available on some of the paid plans.

Connect your survey to Intercom

Now that the Intercom integration is connected, you can set up individual settings for each survey. Go to your survey, select the Connect tab, and choose Intercom from the list of available integrations:

Here, we'll look closer at all the possible options and features that you can set up for each survey.

Update attributes

1. Move to the Settings tab of the Intercom integration, and select Update attributes.

2. Select the question you wish to pass the responses to Intercom. To avoid flooding your Intercom user or company profiles with data, you can decide on a question level whether or not to send responses to Intercom.

You can send responses to user or company profiles. Select it by clicking the Update attributes menu:

3. Select the attribute you want to integrate with from the list or create a new one (type in the value and click + Create ...).

By default, Survicate sends the content of an answer as the attribute value, but you can change the label to make it shorter or to fit your data structure—click Edit mapping to modify these values.

📌Note: For the NPS question, we send the values mapped based on the response group, like 9-10 Promoters, by default. You can enable the Send answers to Intercom as 0-10 values toggle if you'd like to receive the numeric value.

4. You can connect more questions to your integration by clicking ➕Connect another question and applying the same steps.

Once your integration is set up, you can test it without leaving Survicate by clicking the Test integration button.

Send tags

1. Move to the Settings tab of the Intercom Integration, and select Send tags.

Here, you can also choose to tag Users or Companies.

2. Select the question you wish to pass as tags to Intercom.

📌 For text answer question type and contact form it's not possible to send the response as a tag - consider using attributes instead. Sending tags are available only for specific questions: Single answer selection, Multiple answer selection, Rating scale, Smiley scale, NPS and Dropdown list.

3. Assign tags to each answer using the tags field - you can use tags already created or create new ones. You can assign multiple tags to your answers.

4. You can connect more questions to your integration by clicking ➕Connect another question and applying the same steps.

Once your integration is set up, you can test it without leaving Survicate by clicking the Test integration button.

Create new users or companies

1. To create a new contact in Intercom from Survicate, add a contact form question to your survey with a required email or company field.

2. Under the Settings tab of the Intercom integration, choose "Create new users or Companies" and select the Contact form question from which you wish to create the new company.

3. Enable the Create new users in Intercom toggle.

Start Intercom conversations

Upon a new response to a text (open answer) question, you may choose to have an Intercom conversation opened to quickly act upon users' feedback, ask a follow-up question, and drill down on insights.

1. Move to the Settings tab of the Intercom integration, and select Start Intercom conversations.

2. Select the Text question you wish the start the conversation from the list of Text questions:

Once your integration is set up, you can test it without leaving Survicate by clicking the Test integration button.

3. Now, when your respondent submits an answer to this text question, you will see their survey response opening in your Intercom Inbox as a new message.

📌Note: We only create a conversation when an existing Intercom user answers the survey - if the respondent doesn't exist in your Intercom database, no conversation will be opened. You can create Intercom users or companies from contact form submission.

Automatic Survicate events and timestamps

Apart from the above settings, Survicate generates Intercom events for every survey response by default, which will be visible in the activity section of a respondent's Intercom profile. We send the survey name, question, and answer in the event details.
By default, this option is enabled for every survey if you have the Intercom integration connected. You can disable event tracking in Intercom - more on that here.

Additionally, on each response to your survey, we update two attributes in Intercom:
1. the survicate_last_response_date attribute for user profiles

2. and the company_survicate_last_response_date attribute for company profiles:

This way, you can keep track of the timestamps of the survey responses and trigger automated outbound follow-up communication (emails or in-app messages) in Intercom.

💡 Please note that the Intercom integration can also be used for Website or in-product surveys, Mobile app surveys, and Email or Shareable link surveys that aren't sent via Intercom.

The integration will work if you are recognizing respondents from those surveys by their email addresses.

Share your survey

Email or Shareable link survey

After everything is set up in your survey, go to the Share tab and decide how to send your email survey. There are two options - you can send your survey as a link or embed the first question in the email so that respondents start answering the survey right from the email.

Survey Link

Grab a link to your survey from the Copy survey link button:
Hide the survey link behind a CTA button or hyperlink in your Intercom Email:
Enter the Subject of your email in the field just above the dark code area.
Make sure that you’re compliant with Intercom’s rules for emails.
Choose your audience that should receive the email with the survey.

Email Embed

Display the first question directly in the email's body to start the survey from the email. Respondents will be redirected to a landing page to take the rest of the survey.

Click Get email code and then Copy the HTML code:
Go to the Intercom email you want to use for the survey, click Switch to HTML editor in the bottom-left menu, and confirm switching to HTML editor:
Replace the code with the one you've copied from your Survicate survey. Once you've done this, you will be able to preview your survey on the right-hand menu.
Enter the Subject of your email in the field just above the dark code area.
Make sure that you’re compliant with Intercom’s rules for emails.
Choose your audience that will receive the survey. For example, send an NPS® survey only to users using your app for longer than a month or only to your active Customers.

Once your email is ready, we recommend sending the survey to yourself or your colleagues to see what the survey experience will be like for your respondents and to see if all responses are captured as expected, along with user data.

Please remember that sending a preview/test email will result in anonymous responses.

To thoroughly test the experience and the integration, email an existing contact using the Set live option.

🚀 Once you've got everything ready, set your message live, and get ready to dive into your insights.

Intercom Messenger survey

You can send the survey in a couple of ways:

Add a survey to an outbound message

1. To send a survey with an automated or manual message, create your Post or Chat in Intercom and click on the➕ that appears on the left-hand side of the message and select App.

2. Choose Survicate Customer Surveys from the list and pick the survey you want to embed inside your message.

❗The survey won't be displayed fully if you send it as a snippet, only if users who receive this message click on the survey! You can choose to show the full message to make the survey more visible.

3. You can check Intercom's instructions for setting up audience rules and other targeting settings in their Help Center here.

After setting it up, you're ready to send your message!

Send a survey during a chat conversation

If you want to send a survey to users or leads you chat with, you can do that by clicking on Show shortcuts in the bottom-left corner of your message, choosing Use Survicate Customer Surveys, and picking a survey you want to send during a conversation.

Send a survey after a conversation is closed

You can also automatically trigger your Survicate's Intercom Messenger survey once the chat is closed in Intercom.

Go to your Intercom account. Navigate to the Operator > Task Bots and set up the post-conversation survey For Users and/or For Leads.

Then, turn on the conversation rating Task Bot and select Use your own app when closing conversation.. Click on Add an app and look for Survicate Customer Surveys in the list.

Choose the workspace and survey you would like to run after the conversation is closed. Once done, you will see it below:

Done! 🎉 Your survey will now be triggered in the chat automatically once the conversation is closed.

Check out this guide for more information and FAQ 🚀.

Analyze your survey results

After your survey starts collecting responses, you will see them immediately in the Analyze tab of the survey.

The Analyze tab shows you Overall results with statistics and over-time data, as well as Individual responses to look into each survey submission in detail.

What's important for surveys sent via Intercom is that you can jump to the respondent's Intercom user profile straight from Survicate.

To view it, you can access the Intercom profile from the Individual response of this user:

or click the Answers section of a Text answer question and click the View Intercom profile button in Overall results:

If you enabled the Contact data synchronization feature, you can go to the Analyze tab and filter the survey answers by custom User attributes defined in the Intercom profiles of your respondents.

You can scroll down in the Filter window to see all attributes from the Intercom profiles of your respondents, or you can start typing the name of the field you want to filter by.

You can check out our guide for an in-depth description of all the possibilities of the Analyze tab.

Feedback in the Insights Hub

💡 To obtain even more comprehensive feedback, we recommend syncing survey responses to the Insights Hub, where they will be automatically analyzed and categorized into Topics along with feedback from your other sources, such as:

insights from Intercom support chats,
online reviews,
call transcripts.

If you're using Intercom both to send out surveys and to chat with users, we highly recommend enabling the synchronization of Intercom chats to the Insights Hub.

After you connect sources to the Hub, feedback will appear there in real-time and it will be automatically segmented into Insights, and categorized into Topics:

The Hub will categorize and analyze feedback from surveys, Intercom, and other sources, to:

automatically detect customer sentiment;
identify technical issues and bugs reported by users and segment them into Topics and actionable Insights;
understand your customers' needs and wants better.

You can also ask the Research Assistant to quickly and effectively find answers to all your questions. The responses are generated based on the feedback you integrated into the Insights Hub and the answers collected with surveys in your workspace.

Best practices

🚀 We prepared ideas and examples to help you make the most of the Survicate - Intercom integration.

Feel free to try any of the below use cases!

1. Send surveys in an Intercom Series

If you're using Intercom Series, it's a great feature to:

follow up with customers who didn't reply to your survey,
message unsatisfied respondents and ask them for additional feedback.

Find out how to set up an Intercom Series with Survicate surveys here.

2. Send surveys periodically

Automate quarterly NPS® to measure how the NPS score changes over time and check which areas are your strengths and which are open for improvement.

See here how to automate quarterly NPS surveys with Intercom.

3. Collect feature requests with surveys

Send a short survey with open-text questions to your users, you can give them space to share ideas for features they'd like to see in your tool or product.

Check out this guide and gather a comprehensive list of feature requests with an outbound post💡

With open-text responses, use AI analysis and Word Cloud to quickly get through the feedback you collected and start acting on it 💪

4. Use Intercom with Survicate's Insights Hub

Analyze feedback from your Intercom conversations, Intercom Email and Intercom Messenger surveys together in the Insights Hub, and ask your Research Assistant to help you make sense of the feedback.

5. Collect feedback about your Help Center

If you have an Intercom Help Center, launch a short Intercom Messenger survey to appear when a user is reading a guide.

This way, you can establish whether the articles are easy to understand or if there's something customers can't find.

Learn here how to ask for feedback to improve your Help Center📚

6. Customize your Intercom Email survey

Customize your Intercom email by hiding answers behind Intercom buttons to make your emails look better, match the rest of your Intercom communication, and increase the response rate of your surveys.

Take a look here to create a custom survey using Intercom buttons.

FAQ

How can I run a multilingual survey with Intercom?

It is currently not possible to create a multilingual survey for Intercom Messenger. However, you can create separate surveys in different languages.

If you plan to run an email survey via Intercom, you can create a multilingual one. Check out our article on how to create surveys in multiple languages.

Can I change the background or design of the Intercom Messenger survey?

Currently, it's not possible to change the Intercom survey Messenger design. It is dependent on the Intercom settings. Yet, you can make certain design and styling adjustments within your Intercom account.

You can find more information on this in their guide.

The survey is not available in the Intercom app. What should I do?

If you see the message "There are no Survicate surveys in your account," please check the type of survey you've created. You most likely created an Email survey that can only be sent via Intercom emails. Click Create new survey and choose an Intercom survey from the list.

Can I identify responses via chat with a link survey?

Yes, you should choose to identify respondents via Intercom Emails and paste the link with relevant merge tags into the chat.

https://survey.survicate.com/0000000000/?p=intercom&first_name={{first_name}}&last_name={{last_name}}&email={{email}}&uid={{user_id}}

Please note that the feature will only work if you initiate a conversation, not when the survey is sent as a response to a conversation started by the user.

How can I analyze the results from Email and Messenger surveys together?

Each survey has its own Analyze tab, but, you can export the results in the XLSX/CSV formats and analyze them independently. Additionally, you can integrate your surveys with Google Sheets and analyze the data using this tool.

You can also analyze the results of multiple surveys in our Insights Hub or with Dashboards.

Why was my CSAT post-chat survey not sent to the customer?

Intercom manages the distribution of Survicate customer satisfaction surveys, following specific rules. A survey will be sent according to the rules if a chat conversation is closed and contains 250 characters or more. You can find more information about these guidelines in this article.

What will happen if I have the Survicate survey set up to be sent after a conversation is closed, and the conversation takes place through email instead of chat?

Please note that, in such cases, the Intercom Messenger survey will be sent to the customer as an app, which can be opened and answered in a separate browser tab.

Why should I use Survicate to run a CSAT survey when an Intercom conversation is closed?

Survicate allows you to customize the survey experience by modifying the question and answer content and setting up custom follow-up steps - literally, you can run any survey you wish, CES, NPS®, and more. You can also automate the process and ask happy customers to leave you a review or open a new chat with customers who are not happy about their recent support experience. All the answers collected will be available in the Survicate dashboard and can be sent to users' profiles in Intercom in the form of tags, attributes, and events.

📞 If you have any questions or need further assistance, feel free to reach out to our team via chat or email on support@survicate.com

Net Promoter, NPS, and the NPS - related emoticons are registered U.S. trademarks, and Net Promoter Score and Net Promoter System are service marks, of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc. and Fred Reichheld.

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