We all want to use tools that assist us in our work. Intercom is one of the tools that help you achieve that. As an Intercom customer myself I use it for our day-to-day operations, talking with customers or prospects, sending smart emails or campaigns and finally hyper segment our users.
The most important feature to drive these emails, campaigns and segmenting users are Intercom Events. A particular event in our app could trigger a specific email or a certain action.
As an Intercom user, I see that these raw Intercom events are getting more and more as time goes by and our user base is growing. I suppose that is the case with most of Intercom’s customers. I guess that is why Intercom is making a change where raw Intercom events that are older than 90 days will no longer be visible inside the app. I can relate to that. The events are not usable in the UI.
This change will be made active on September 26th, 2017.
I was a bit worried at first that this will break all of my workflows but Intercom utilizes user event summaries for events like “first”, “last” or “count”. It seems that according to Intercom it will not affect my segments and smart campaigns.
The reason Intercom will not keep these data over 90 days is simple. They cannot (or do not need to) keep this raw event data indefinitely, without scaling their infrastructure to support an increasing customer base. However, you need your data!
What are Intercom Events?
You may “send” to Intercom, any user activity and that counts as an event. These events can help you categorize or segment your users and create auto messages that trigger when an event occurs. For example, you may track when a user logs in, when clicks a particular button and uses a certain feature, when opts for a paid plan upgrade or follows on with conversations with your support, views a particular page and more.
There are various ways to submit events in Intercom:
- Through the Intercom JavaScript library here.
- Through Intercom’s API, here.
- Through events from tools like Mixpanel, Segment, etc.
More info on that here.
Hint: Blendo does not mind what method you use (more on that later).
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Why centralize Your raw Intercom Data
They say “eat your own dog food”, so Blendo uses Blendo… for storing our raw Intercom data along with raw Intercom Events in our data warehouse, for analytics and segmentation reasons. This way we are limited only by our data warehouse size and can get as back in history as we want.
Blendo gives you one-click data integration to many cloud services like Zendesk, Intercom, Stripe or Xero to easily sync data with your data warehouse. By bringing these disparate data sources into a central data warehouse, you can build your reporting and data analytics infrastructure in hours or minutes.
Blendo uses Blendo for data management
As I said earlier, there are three ways to generate events for Intercom. In our case, we use Intercom’s library and store all of these events in our data warehouse. Blendo is agnostic on your event generation source in this case. It could connect to Intercom to pull your Intercom events generated by any of those ways or can connect to Mixpanel or Segment to get them from there too.
With Blendo there is a way…
Keep your Intercom Historical data
Even for the simplest use case of keeping your data, having the ability to store your Intercom information easily is important. If such raw events data will be not available from inside Intercom’s platform after 90 days passed, and you need to have access to them, using a tool to easily sync your raw Intercom data and events is imperative .
Blendo will help you sync your Intercom data into databases like Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, Microsoft SQL Server or PostgreSQL.
Customer Success Analytics that matter
From as small as one chart or a customer support KPI to customer success dashboards, tracking customer retention or more advanced churn prediction magic, you need data. Data that are continuous and complete.
Once we get our data in one place — raw, updated, and synced — analyzing it with SQL or your favorite BI tool becomes much more flexible. For example answer questions like How many messages, each of our customers has exchanged with our customer support?
Or
Which Hour of day conversations were created in the last 7 days?
Customer Support
Customer success is key to every single type of business. Instead of looking to find ad-hoc tools and scripts to get your data, using a managed solution like Blendo, will also get you exceptional support.
How to store your raw Intercom Events & Data
You need first to hook up an Intercom account together with the parameters of your database connection and all data will be available in a few minutes for analysis.
Blendo connects to popular SaaS tools and consistently will sync your data into Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, Microsoft SQL Server or PostgreSQL. It will help you connect in seconds and start pulling our data from Intercom too.
For more information check more details in our knowledge base on how to connect Intercom with a data warehouse and start syncing your data.
For the kind of data and the data model you are going to get, please have a look on the Intercom data model.
Try Blendo
If you are looking for a solution to store all your valuable customer success data, look no further and check Blendo. You will thank me later 🙂
To learn more and start syncing your Intercom data with your data warehouse, visit Blendo and create an account today.
Images
- Blog Post image made with Canva
- Source Image: The Hour Before One Night, Paul Klee – The Met (Public Domain)
