Intercom App

Last updated on Feb 03, 2023
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Intercom enables you to offer near real-time engagement and support to your current and target customers through a messaging like platform. Using Hevo’s Intercom connector, you can replicate all your Intercom data to your desired Destination database or data warehouse.

For creating Pipelines using this Source, Hevo provides you a fully managed BigQuery data warehouse as a possible Destination. This option remains available till the time you set up your first BigQuery Destination irrespective of any other Destinations that you may have. With the managed warehouse, you are only charged the cost that Hevo incurs for your project in Google BigQuery. The invoice is generated at the end of each month and payment is recovered as per the payment instrument you have set up. You can now create your Pipeline and directly start analyzing your Source data. Read Hevo Managed Google BigQuery.

Prerequisites

  • An active Intercom account.

Configuring Intercom as a Source

  1. Click PIPELINES in the Asset Palette.

  2. Click + CREATE in the Pipelines List View.

  3. In the Select Source Type page, select Intercom as the Source.

  4. In the Configure your Intercom Account page, click + ADD INTERCOM ACCOUNT.

    Add Intercom account

  5. In the Intercom Welcome page, sign in to your Intercom account.

  6. In the screen that appears, click the drop-down icon and select the workspace that you want Hevo to access. The list of workspace objects, for which Hevo captures the data, are displayed. You can click the expand icon for each object to see the permissions that Hevo has requested.

    Authorize Hevo

  7. Click Authorize access to allow Hevo to access the objects.

  8. In the Configure your Intercom Source page, specify a suitable Pipeline Name. The Intercom account you are logged in with is displayed.

    Test&Continue

  9. Click TEST & CONTINUE.

  10. Proceed to configuring the data ingestion and setting up the Destination.

Data Replication

The first run of the Pipeline replicates all existing data for the selected objects to the Destination.

  • Historical Data: The first run of the Pipeline replicates all data that exists for the selected objects to the Destination.

  • Incremental Data: Each subsequent run of the Pipeline subsequent to the initial one loads the changed records for the past hour. We recommend to use hourly sync, to avoid any loss of data.

Schema and Primary Keys

Data Model

Hevo replicates data for the following objects from your Intercom account. The primary key of the Destination table is the same as that of the ingested Source object.

Object Description
Admin Represents teammate accounts having access to a workspace.
Company Represents organizations using the product.
Conversation Represents how you communicate with users in Intercom. A conversation is created when a contact replies to an outbound message, or when one admin directly sends a message to a contact.
Conversation Part Represents individual entities that make up a conversation.
Contact Provides details of the contacts within Intercom and specifies whether they are a user or a lead, through the role attribute.
Segment Represents a group of contacts defined by rules that you set. When a contact is updated, it is automatically added to the segment if it matches those rules.
Tag Allows you to label your contacts and companies, and list them using that tag.
Team Represents a group of admins in Intercom.

Additional Information

Read the detailed Hevo documentation for the following related topics:

Source Considerations

  • The Intercom API retrieves only the latest 500 conversation parts belonging to each conversation.

  • The Intercom API indexes timestamp fields of the Contact object, such as created_at and updated_at, as dates. As a result, you can search for contacts based on these timestamps only by day, and not by hour, minute, or second. For example, if you search for contacts with the updated_at value greater than 1639126800, the epoch time for December 10, 2021 2:30 PM, all contacts updated from midnight of December 10, 2021 are fetched. This can mean re-ingestion of some Events, which counts towards your Events quota consumption.

  • It can take a few minutes for a newly created contact to become available for searching. Therefore, the “greater than or equal to <timestamp>” condition may not always be honored, and such contacts may not be retrieved in the API response.

    To avoid this scenario, Hevo uses a buffer of one hour while searching for the contacts.

  • The Intercom Scroll API allows only one connection per app to its Scroll over all companies endpoint. As Hevo uses this endpoint to go over the list of companies in an Intercom workspace and fetch data from them, it is subject to this limitation. If you have configured multiple Pipelines and they make concurrent requests to ingest data from the Company object in the same Intercom workspace, only the one that connects first to the Intercom app can successfully fetch data; the remaining Pipelines fail.

    Therefore, you should restrict the number of Pipelines created for the same Intercom workspace, or, configure them such that their ingestion schedules do not overlap.


See Also

Revision History

Refer to the following table for the list of key updates made to this page:

Date Release Description of Change
Dec-14-2022 NA - Added the limitation of Scroll API to the Source Considerations section.
- Updated section, Configuring Intercom as a Source to reflect the latest Hevo UI.
Dec-09-2021 NA - Renamed the Limitations section to Source Considerations.
- Added the Source considerations about supporting only day-based timestamp values for querying the Contacts object and using a time buffer for the search to ensure all eligible Events are ingested.
May-19-2021 1.63 - Updated the section, Data Model to include descriptions of objects.
- Added the section, Limitations.
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